“God created the world, the earth and the heaven,” says the scripture. He created everything: plants, and beasts, and human beings, and angels, and what not. This is a biblical fiat of the creational process. Every system of thought has endeavoured to understand how things evolved. Unless we know the linkage of the relationship between cause and effect in this process, it will be difficult for us to know exactly where our location is in this cosmic mechanism.

How far have we travelled in the process of evolution? How much of the track have we covered, and how much remains? We will be able to know only if we know the entire root, and not by seeing, only through blinkers, the little point on which we are standing at a particular given moment of time. There is a very complete description of the creative process in the Upanishads—for instance, the Aitareya Upanishad—and we have this elaborate description in the Puranas in a different way altogether.

In a small book which I happened to write some years back called A Short History of Religious and Philosophic Thought in India, I have tried to mention in some detail the process of creation as it is described in the Upanishads and the Puranas. Those of you who have access to that book may read that chapter on the Upanishads where the creative process is described in some measure. There has been a gradual descent from the larger Universal to lesser and lesser delimited forms of Universals, so that the limited form of the Universal may be called a sort of individuality.

A Universal is that which is self-complete, which regards itself as complete in itself. A self-sufficient form of existence is a kind of universality, by which word we have to understand a state of being, outside which nothing is. The Universal is that, external to which, nothing can be. There has been a gradual coming down of this consciousness of the Universal through the process of evolution, or creation. And, it is not a sudden action—at least, it does not appear to have been a sudden action, to the extent we can know things.

According to the theological systems of Vedanta philosophy and yoga, the Cosmic Being—God, the Absolute Supreme Being, the Almighty—willed, as it were, to manifest this cosmos. According to Genesis in the Bible, God created the heaven and the earth by a mere fiat of will. And, also according to the Eastern system of thinking, it is, in essence, a fiat. There is a larger background of it, into whose details we need not go now. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and some of the Puranas, this will of Ishvara to become the manifold universe is described. Ishvara is a Sanskrit term for God. God willed the creation.

Out of which material did God create the world? As God is the Supreme Universal, and since we have understood the Universal to be That outside which nothing can be, there was nothing outside God; therefore, we cannot imagine a material out of which God could have fashioned this universe. It is often said by certain theologians that God created the world out of nothing. This is perhaps the biblical notion. Though there is some point in this view, it is difficult to understand because we cannot conceive of nothingness—because if God created the world out of nothing, the world would be nothing, a conclusion which would be frightening to everyone. It may be that from one angle of vision the world is nothing, but the human mind cannot accept it without a frightening shock. So, we cannot accept—at least, we are not in a position to accept—that the world is created out of nothing, because that would mean that we, also, are nothings. It is a strange conclusion which will inject intolerable bitterness into our minds, and great insurmountable sorrow.

Hence, the other view, which does not in any way contradict this view, holds that God willed the world, the universe, this cosmos, this creation, by a multiplication of His own Supreme Being. The one became two, says modern science. According to the astronomical discoveries of recent days, the whole universe seems to have been one single atom. And in Indian epic descriptions, we call them as all-included in a single point called Brahmanda, or the cosmic egg, as it is literally translated. It is not an egg, but we call it an egg because it was a whole, and it is a convenient way of thinking of the whole as an egg—Brahmanda, the Cosmic Centre.

Astronomers tell us that there was only one atom in the whole cosmos. It was a cosmic atom which split into two with a bang caused by something which the scientists cannot understand, and no one is supposed to understand. And the scriptures say it was the will of God that burst this atom. But, this atom cannot be regarded as a substance materially existent outside God’s being—though certain philosophers, like the Samkhya in India, thought that there would be no other alternative for explaining the objectivity of the cosmos than positing a material thing called prakriti, or the original matter. But this is going to land us in great problems, because we have already seen how hard it is to know the difference of relationship between consciousness and matter, the knower and the known. We cannot know the relation between matter, out of which the world is made, and the knower of this matter. The doctrine of the Upanishads is a different thing altogether. It does not entangle itself in these theories. It has a simple doctrine of God becoming the many. This is a highly solacing thing, at least for the little mind of man—because, after all, we seem to be in the kingdom of God. Though it is a kingdom, it is a kingdom of God, which is ruled by God—the Kingdom of Heaven.

The delimitation of the universality of God, as described in the cosmological doctrines of the Upanishads, is a graduated coming down into lower and lower forms of Universals, until the lowest form of Universality has reached us, the little individuals. We are seated here. That is why we feel, in each one of ourselves, a completeness. We do not feel that any one of us is a fraction, or a cut-off piece from the whole. Everyone is highly egoistic and proud, and feels “I am everything”. This is the tyrant speaking, the despot who feels that he is complete in himself, because it is the association of Universality that speaks in this manner.

Though there has been a coming down to the lowest form of Universals, the characteristic of the Universal does not totally die. That’s why even the smallest animal, even the worm, feels that it is complete in itself. It is difficult to believe that even an ant feels that it is only a fraction of things; it is a whole thing by itself, and its own body is very beloved to it. Everyone loves oneself as the whole. We do not love ourselves as little chips cut off from something else. That is why we are so proud, so egoistic, so self-assertive and so arrogant in our behaviour, oftentimes. This little arrogance of the proud man is the Universal getting into the hands of the devil, which is finitude. When the devil begins to handle the Universal, it becomes the pride of man. This descent of the Universal, gradually, as described in the scriptures, is a very interesting process to learn.

Today, I shall confine myself only to the specific way in which the Vedanta philosophy, not contradicting the Samkhya doctrine, specifies this process. According to the Samkhya, the original thing was the Cosmic Intelligence, called mahat, which became self-conscious as ahamkara. These are Sanskrit terms, about which we need not bother much.

According to the language of the Vedanta philosophy, the Supreme God, known as Ishvara, became Hiranyagarbha, and Hiranyagarbha became Virat. The Universal concretises itself little by little, without losing its ultimate universality of being. The stages of Ishvara, Hiranyagarbha and Virat mentioned in the Vedanta doctrine are the stages of the supreme Universal getting into stages of greater and greater perceptibility without losing the universality of Self-consciousness, a condition the human mind cannot grasp. Universal Self-consciousness is Ishvara-consciousness, Hiranyagarbha-consciousness or Virat-consciousness.

Teachers of the Vedanta tell us that Ishvara is something like cosmic sleep—not comparable to the ignorant sleep of the individual, but the omniscient sleep of all-knowingness. It is sleep in the sense that there is no objectivity or externality of consciousness. The state of Ishvara is comparable to sleep not because there is unknowingness like the sleep of the individual, but all-knowingness which excludes externality of perception. The state of Ishvara is like sleep in the sense that there is no externality or objectivity of perception; but, it totally differs from the individual sleep in the sense that there is omniscience, all-knowingness, and not the idiotic ignorance of man. Ishvara becomes Hiranyagarbha.

Teachers of the Vedanta tell us that the coming down of Ishvara to the Hiranyagarbha state and then to the state of Virat is something like the process of painting on a canvas. The canvas is stiffened with starch for the purpose of drawing outlines on it by artists. The canvas is the background on which the outlines are drawn. Hiranyagarbha is the outline of the cosmos, but Virat is the fully-coloured picture of the cosmos on the background of this screen which is the Supreme Absolute, Brahman, appearing as Ishvara, Hiranyagarbha and Virat.

These are transcendental states, not finite or empirical states. No man can reach these states. No one can see the Virat or the Hiranyagarbha or the Ishvara—or Brahman, much less. When in the Bhagavadgita we are told that no human being can have the vision of this Cosmic Universality by any effort whatsoever, what is intended is that humanity involved in personality, individuality and body consciousness cannot, through the instrumentality of its reason and understanding, etc., hope to have this cosmic vision of Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishvara. Man cannot see God, for the reason that there is no means of knowing God, since all means are involved in God’s being. Such is the wondrous description we have of the original condition of the creative process from Brahman to Ishvara, Ishvara to Hiranyagarbha, and Hiranyagarbha to Virat. This is a divine kingdom, the Garden of Eden, the Brahmaloka spoken of in the scriptures in India. These are all tantalising epic narrations for us. We do not know what could be the delight of living in the Garden of Eden, or the happiness of living in Brahmaloka, or having the vision of the Virat. No one knows what it is. It cannot be known, and it is not supposed to be known.

There is a further descent into the grosser form of space and time. Science can reach only up to this level, up to space-time, and not beyond. There is no Virat, Hiranyagarbha, Ishvara, Brahman, for scientists. Actually, there is no God either, because the question of God, or the Supreme Being, does not arise as long as we are confined to seeing things through space and time, as space and time. So, all science—physics and chemistry—is spatio-temporal, and limited only up to that point, and not before or after. The highest reaches of science, therefore, end in space-time. And, here we may go hand in hand with our scientist brothers, who tell us that the whole world is nothing but space-time.

What is space-time? It is a total forgetfulness of the Universal Consciousness, an entering into an emptiness, as it were, which is really not an emptiness. We look at space as if it is a nothing, while it is everything, because it is based on a reality of which it is the appearance. Space-time, or space and time, as we would like to call them, become the forces of which everything is made.

Today, science tells us that everything is force—not a thing or a substance. There is only energy in the cosmos. There is electrical energy, electromagnetic force, pervading the whole physical universe; and, even space-time is nothing but electromagnetic force envisaged by human senses as a fivefold object of hearing sounds, seeing colours, touching tangible things, tasting and smelling.

The world is known by us in these five ways: hearing, touching, seeing, tasting and smelling. Minus hearing, touching, seeing, tasting and smelling, there is no world; so, the world is a world of sensations. We do not know whether the world is there or not, independent of these sensations. If we are deprived of these sensations, we cannot know whether anything is at all. These sensations, or the originals, objectively, of these sensations, are called tanmatras in Sanskrit—shabda, sparsa, rupa, rasa, gandha—which become hard, concretised, objectivised, as the physical world of earth, water, fire, air and ether. And, we are in a physical world.