Note from Guru Kurt: After enlightenment, I was astounded to find myself in possession of knowledge I did not suspect that I had. I led an absolutely ordinary life, apart from my sadhana (which was intense), before this time. Indeed, I had given up on enlightenment and gone back to the world when the lightening bolt struck from the Self within. Why my enlightenment was delayed is something of a mystery, but after it occurred I could see the entire universe revolving, slowly, within my own body, and I understood, intuitively, how everything came to be as it is. There was no big bang! The cosmologists have it all wrong. The original creation of the galaxies may have occurred within a period of a few thousand years; perhaps this is what they are thinking was less than a second. What is more, their math is not accurate, but only approximations that have subtle and hidden flaws. You cannot draw a correct conclusion from a wrong premise, and their assumptions are often in error. The cosmos was created just as the Hindu scriptures describe it; this I have seen, with my own eyes, in a vision granted to me by the Father Himself.
A Creationist Not Stumped
I wish to answer your first question to stump creationists,
as I am able. Realize that the Bible was a revelation by God to primitive
society, a society that was violent, mostly illiterate, and prone to dark
superstition. It was never intended to be the final say in the story of
creation, merely an artist’s rendition designed to accomplish two things:
impress people that the source of the world was a mighty divine being, and
provide a framework within which society could develop the advanced traits that
our modern society does have: education, health care, and general safety with
the freedom to express divergent points of view. I will not be basing my reply
on the Bible. I hope that you find this interesting, although you may not find
it so.
(1) Give a comprehensive statement of creationism.
Before the creation of the universe, God alone existed. This God is the one called Brahman in the Hindu scriptures, Allah in the Koran, and the Father in the Bible. He has revealed himself variously to different races and cultures, in the manner that was best suited to each society. All that existed in this before-time was God, who was composed of spirit, and his energy or power. There was nothing else, and today there is still nothing else, except the appearance of a vast universe composed of matter and spiritual beings (beings possessing souls, such as man) of various descriptions. This is what is meant by the Hindu term maya, or illusion. The Upanishads state that God, or Brahman, has brought the entire universe out of himself as a spider spins its web, and while a mere poetic analogy this is in effect what has occurred. Let me tell you how.
God exists outside of time. He is the source of all being, and time does not affect him. Still, one may state that he was alone for a long time by our way of thinking. He gradually conceived of the idea of a universe, and spent another very long period planning it. He designed all the properties of matter, all that physicists are now discovering about the constituents of atoms such as quarks and leptons. He planned the method of composing atoms of protons, neutrons, and electrons in all their various orbitals, orbitals which could be used to form bonds between atoms to make compounds. When the planning stage was finished, he did a remarkable thing. He separated his thinking region, for he is an immense spiritual being and spirit is a real, living material, from a vast non-thinking region.
From this non-thinking region of Brahman’s spirit, he brought forth the universe. Understand that this requires God’s action on the subatomic scale, and it requires an incredible expenditure of energy, as Einstein discovered. His spirit is folded in very intricate and delicate ways to create matter, and this is the reason particle physicists are having trouble finding the ultimate particle. It also explains why they find subatomic particles connected to each other in strange ways: they are indeed connected. The vast amount of energy is required in part because atoms must also have the property of almost infinite separation. The dual nature of light, as particle and wave, is also due to the fact that it is a spiritual phenomenon. Having created matter, God also maintains it with, as the physicists say, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Of course, the power that maintains the immense number of atoms in the universe must be unimaginably vast. For this reason is He called the Almighty.
I said that God created and maintains matter. However, the theory of entropy is also true. The universe is going to run out of energy some day. When this occurs, it is called the night of Brahman. He destroys the entire thing in a mighty unraveling of his spirit. The souls, along with all the properties they have accumulated, are however saved. He values the spirits that he has created, and treats them as his eternal sons and daughters. He then sleeps, as alluded to in Hindu scriptures. As Brahman rests the portion of His spirit that has formed the universe in question, he draws it in to Himself. All creatures are held during this time in compacted, or seed form. Do not doubt this. This is the real means of eternal life for all created beings in the universe. As declared heroically in all the world’s scriptures, the soul is truly immortal and deathless.
Brahman has a limitless supply of energy, and once he has rested he creates a new universe in the same manner in which the old was created. Our universe is not the first universe, but one in a long chain of universes stretching back into unfathomable time. If the truth must be told, it is also not the only universe. There are many universes, for Brahman is vast indeed. The creation is begun by spreading spirit out in the form of the universe that we see today, with collected masses where the galaxies will be. Each galaxy contains the spirit it will need to form matter throughout its lifetime. This process takes a relatively short period of time. Then the matter is formed from this spirit in a process that takes significantly longer.
The creation of matter still occurs today. One may witness it in any of the recent Hubble telescope images showing giant dust clouds where stars are being born. What is more, the heavy elements that are found on planet earth did not have their origin in supernovae, as cosmologists suppose. They were created directly, in such a cloud. Then, through God’s divine power our sun and all the planets were coalesced from this cloud. Earth was especially made to have all the water, metals and other elements that it would require throughout the long period of evolution. The force you call gravity, that holds the planets in orbit and keeps people from flying off the earth, is a divine force. It is divine power that holds the massive arms of the Milky Way galaxy in constant rotation. Astronomers are searching for dark matter that they will never find, for it is the awesome strength of God that keeps galaxies intact.
As I alluded above, Brahman not only made matter, he also made souls, independent and eternal spiritual beings. Since they were also created from his non-thinking spirit, they were separate from his center of consciousness. Brahman is not responsible for the thoughts of his creatures. They are truly free to do as they choose, which is obvious from even a cursory study of human society. Each soul begins its life at a specific point in time, as a tiny independent packet of self-conscious spirit. It is first placed in a prokaryotic body. At this point the soul is not capable of thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, or smelling. These traits develop in the long process of evolution and are never lost, even at the end of a solar cycle, or lifetime of the sun.
Brahman has the power of incarnating as a single cell on earth’s surface. This is one of the key interfaces between spirit and matter. Without this power, the appearance of life on a planet would be haphazard and unlikely. The first cell created was a chemolithotroph that lived near the ocean’s hot vents. The process of creating matter is too violent to be accomplished on a large scale on the surface of a fully formed planet, so as the paleontologists tell us, for a billion years or more the cyanobacteria filled the oceans, and oxygenated the atmosphere. Since this is not the first earth for the creatures that live here, a portion of the prokaryotes on the primitive earth were those that formerly had evolved to men and women in the last cycle. Their traits had been compressed when the former sun died, and stored in latent form.
We experienced the world fully as prokaryotes in those early days, and did not miss the joys we knew as humans and higher (for evolution is not finished yet), in the last solar cycle. One may reason about it in the following manner. I am happy as a human, but I can understand in some way the joy that a monkey must feel in hopping about from limb to limb, eating fruit and chattering all day. Similarly, the monkey is able to look backwards to the creature below him, and understand it’s joy in some way. One may trace this all the way back to the single-cell state, which appears to us to be totally lacking in joy, but the bacterium does not miss what it has not yet experienced.
Evolution is driven by the creative power of God, who engages in special acts of creation within cells, in the zygote within the womb in the case of human beings and other mammals. He actually creates long stretches of DNA, and He does it species-wide so that all change at a similar rate. Genetic recombination certainly occurs and is the source of much variety, as Darwin and others have correctly observed. Sex is an invention of God for this very purpose. He also allows different populations to develop to fit into specific niches. God conceives in his mind the entire form of each protein that the cell needs, including the reactive or catalytic regions, necessary cofactors and the ability to change conformation. Proteins are specifically designed to perform the functions that they do. They never arise by chance.
God is thus directly responsible for the huge variety of life on the planet, for all the amazing traits and different modes of life, from the chrysalis of the butterfly and the gentle beauty of a wildflower, to the strength of the elephant and the extraordinary cognitive power of man. He is the Cosmic artist. One may ask that if man has come through evolution in a process of soul transmigration, why couldn’t he think as well when a chimpanzee as he now can? The answer is that this is a real world, and in order to be embodied there must be an interface in the physical world for the spirit. The spirit is limited by this interface in what it can express. The more advanced the interface, the more of its latencies emerge or flower outward into expression.
The thoughts of man that are reflected in the brain’s activity correspond to the inward movements of the soul. It is the soul that thinks, feels emotions, and encounters the world through the senses, storing sense impressions and other memories. The brain of man allows him to also idealize about the world in a way that animals cannot do. For instance, a man may form an idea of a generalized “garbage collector.” When he sees an actual garbage collector, it fits into this category and he understands that this person collects trash. Animals cannot do this. This is what Socrates meant by the ideal world, an abstraction from physical reality that involves ideas alone, and is the quintessential property of the human soul.
It is not true that consciousness arises from biochemical reactions. The entire material world was created to house the eternal spirit, including all the material bodies that we live in throughout the process of evolution. The current earth looks much the same as the last earth, and if the truth must be told, like the living planets that exist near virtually every sun in the galaxy. The birds, the amphibians, the reptiles, the mammals, the plants – all are there. God is responsible for everything, and this is the essential story of creation. All of us may be thought of as having arisen from the almighty primordial spirit that is Brahman, although through his grace he has granted us permanent status in his kingdom.
The story is not yet complete, for evolution has a goal. Souls, as they are created and journey up the ladder of evolution, become attached to the matter that they see around them and encounter every day. They never look within to see their radiant, eternal nature. The bound state of the soul is profound, and it requires trillions of lifetimes to break free. When this finally occurs, one enters the state of nirvana or enlightenment described in the scriptures of the East. One discovers the glorious, self-effulgent nature of one’s own soul, and finds oneself immersed in joy that never ends. It is the desire of Brahman to help souls move along toward this goal, and in the human context the soul is able to begin conscious efforts to achieve it. He has created souls, which are real spiritual beings that do experience some transitory happiness as they travel through the states of evolution. There is however a serious admixture of sorrow and pain. A soul attaining enlightenment is forever free from all misery, living in and enjoying eternal freedom.
I hope this in part answers your question. I was not stumped. I have not, and will not dispute any scientific finding that has significant evidence behind it. I merely point out that God and science meet in reality. You will find that the Upanishads still contain fully valid, although poetic, statements about the reality I have described in more modern terms. The Bible was written to have an immediate impact on men’s minds of the vast power of God. This is why it says creation happened in seven days, and does not go into detail about the spiritual basis of the entire universe. It is truly remarkable to me that in today’s sophisticated society, with all the scientific progress that has been made, there are still people who regard the Bible as a literal and not a figurative account of creation. To believe that everything is in fact spirit is also difficult. However, it is not inconsistent with any scientific finding, and is the only possible basis for a universe that is eternal. Top