[Advaita-l] The riddle of evolution

[Shrinivas Gadkari]

Namaste, 

Quite some time ago (in 2002) I had posted an essay summarizing 
my views on creation and evolution. The following message has a 
copy of the original essay. 
http://www.advaita-vedanta.org/archives/advaita-l/2009-October/022703.html 

With more than a decade of continued contemplation, I feel the 
question about why it took so long for humans to evolve 
or why evolution was such a stretched out process is not 
well answered. (In fact today I do not agree with many of 
the details in this essay. May revisit this at some other 
time.) 

In this post will only focus on this question: 
What was the primary purpose of evolution of species from 
the view point advocated in the essay? 

Proposed answer: The primary problem the ancient perfected 
masters of yoga (the sAdhyA-s) were trying to solve during 
creation of life on Earth is: how to establish a universal 
mechanism wherein the balance between the different tattvas 
would be automatically maintained, and imbalances corrected. 
Their solution was to create and firmly establish a 
correspondence/ link/ correlation/ dependency between the 
manifestation of each tattva at the level of macrocosm and 
microcosm. That is, establish a correspondence between 
adidaiva (macrocosm) and adhyatma (microcosm) aspects of 
every tattva. And for this purpose specific species were 
created, and the ancient yogis (the gods) incarnated in these 
bodies. The bodies of these species were specialized to 
experience some specific tattvas in an amplified manner and 
thus enable incarnating yogis to rapidly establish the 
adhyatma-adidaiva correspondence for these specific tattvas. 
Once the correspondence was established, the purpose of creation 
of the specific species was achieved. Then new species with 
bolides tailored for amplified experience of some other tattvas 
were brought into existence. "the gods"/ yogis then incarnated 
in these new bodies for their next assignment. The species 
whose purpose of creation had been served were slowly phased out. 
In this manner species after species was brought into existence 
and then phased out.Finally when the desired level of correspondence 
between adhyatma and adidaiva for all the important tattvas had 
been established the time was considered ripe for fully competent, 
"universal puruSa" to manifest. This is the process of "waking up" 
of the "virATa puruSa" described in Chapter 3.26 of Bhagavatam, 
and in, my opinion, puruSa sUkta. 

With the "waking up" of virATa puruSa, the universal mechanism for 
correcting imbalances in tattvas for fully activated. In this 
process the incarnating yogis/ "gods" themselves attained 
greatness ("mahimA") and came closer to the ancient perfected 
masters of yoga ("sAdhyA-s"). 

Now refer to the last mantra of puruSa sUka: 
yajnena yajnam ayjanta devaH, tAni dharmANI prathamAni Asana 
te ha nAkam mahimAna sacanta yatra pUrve sAdhyA santi devAH 

1. yajnena : efforts of ancient yogis incarnating in bodies of different 
species to establish the adidaiva adyAtma correspondence 

2. yajnam : viraTA puruSa 

3. prathama Asana of dharmA : universal mechanism for correcting 
imbalances in tattvas 


Hari Om. 

Regards, 
Shrinivas Gadkari