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ShopCreation of the Universe – The Untold Story of the Big Bang
Sadhguru looks at what the Yogic lore says about the creation of the universe, and about how we are residing in the result of the 84th Big Bang.
The Origin of the Universe – Sounds of the Creation
Sadhguru: Today, modern science proves that the whole existence is just vibration. This is not my invention, it is a scientific fact. Where there is a vibration, there is bound to be a sound. You are not just a vibration, you are a sound. This is what modern science is telling you. And somewhere, way back, someone told you that first there was a word and the word is God.A word is a sound. Right now if I say “yes,” you are attaching a certain meaning to it because you know the English language. If you did not know the English language, as far as you are concerned, I am just making a sound. If I speak in a language that you do not know, you would naturally think I am making some crazy sounds. You would not know whether I am really speaking a language or making up some nonsense. So word is just a sound.
In that context they said that word is God, because anyone who has looked at the existence closely can see that what you call as creation and what you call as the creator cannot be separated. If you separate it, creation will cease to exist. This creation process cannot go on even for a moment unless it is constantly supported by the source of creation, because creation is not a done thing, it is an ongoing process. Without the involvement of the source of creation, how would the creation be an ongoing process? It is constantly involved. It cannot be separated. It is because of this that they said, “First there was a word.” That means when creation began to manifest from the un-manifest, the first thing that happened was sound. Even the scientists agree that it was a big bang. A bang means a sound.
Rudra the Roarer and the Yogic Lore of the Big Bang
Let me tell you how yoga explains creation from within. This is a dialectical culture. I can make it all ABC if you want, but let’s enjoy the culture. There is a certain beauty to the terminology. Because it is speaking about a dimension which is not in our logical perception, it is best to speak in dialectical ways. The story goes like this:
Shiva is sleeping. When we say “Shiva” here, we are not talking about a person or the yogi. “Shiva” here refers to “that which is not”; that which is nascent. “That which is not” can only sleep. And he has always been referred to as the “Dark One.”
As Shiva sleeps, Shakti comes looking for him. She wants him to come awake because she wants to dance and play with him, she wants to woo him. Initially, he does not wake up. After some time, he does. Anyone who is in deep slumber, if you wake him up, he will get a little angry. If you were in deep sleep and someone came and nudged you, it would not matter how beautiful that person was, you would get angry. So he gets angry, roars and rises. That is why his first form and his first name is Rudra. The word “Rudra” means one who roars. The first and only God who existed in Indian culture was Rudra. Rudra literally means one who roars – a Roarer. They called him Rudra because at the beginning of creation it is a roar. The scientists call it a bang. And scientists are also saying, as there was a Big Bang, it is possible that one day a Big Crunch will happen, which is a reverse process of the Big Bang, which will bring everything down here and now.
Some scientists are saying there were a series of bangs, not just one bang. Science has always believed that everything has a beginning and an end. But now physicists are talking about an endless universe. It is a popular theory going on right now among the scientific community that the universe may be endless.
The Endless Universe
Paul Steinhardt, who is the Director of the Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University has written a book called, “Endless Universe.” I happened to meet Paul Steinhardt and when I was in conversation with him, I asked him, “Is it possible that it was not a bang but a roar, a continuous roar?”
He thought about it, he looked at many things and then said, “It is possible. Maybe it was not just a bang, it was a roar. It didn’t happen in one instant but roared for a certain length of time and slowly creation began to happen.” I asked him, “How many times do you think he could have roared?” He said, “We cannot say because we have no way of knowing how many times, but obviously he roared more than one time.” Then I said, “Someday if your research takes you there, keep this as a guide point. He has roared eighty-four times.” He asked, “How do you know? On what basis are you saying this?” I said, “By looking into my system, I am saying that creation has roared eighty-four times and it will roar further, many more times.” It will roar for a maximum of 112 times. When it roars for the last time, there will be no beginning and end, it will be a perpetual creation.
That is too far but I told him, “You hold this eighty-four as some kind of a guidepost and you have machines and mathematics, you have learnt many things, you work on this and someday if you arrive at a number, you will arrive at this number eighty-four.” “How is this possible?” he asked. I said, “If you take a tree that has been cut, people look into the rings of the tree and describe how in the last thousand years, a drought happened, excessive rain happened or a fire happened. Similarly, if you cut into this human system with your awareness, the very history of this creation is written into it. The creation has roared eighty-four times.”
This is the eighty-fourth cycle and this will continue to happen till it reaches 112. Only a total of 112 can happen. Another two are non-physical. The 112 creations will be physical in nature. The last two will be perpetual creations. That is, after the 112, the next time creation will happen in a semi-physical condition, not in a physical condition. That will be number 113. After that, number 114 is a completely non-physical creation, a no-thing, which is right now un-manifest. A no-thing will manifest itself in the subtlest possible way. That is what Yoga says. Shiva has roared eighty-four times and he will roar 112 times. After that he will not roar anymore. He will step out. That means the nothingness will be a universe. It will not be physical existence.
Based on this, because you live and exist in the eighty-fourth creation and you have eighty-four chakras of a certain nature, Yoga developed eighty-four basic asanas or postures. There are 112 different types of meditation, but eighty-four basic asanas, because these eighty-four relate to past memory. The rest is the future.
Out of the eighty-four creations, eighty-three have happened and this one – the eighty-fourth – is still happening. Now, as creation is ongoing, dissolution also is ongoing. The dissolution process started for some creations and they started dissolving. Out of these eighty-four creations, twenty are still in different levels of dissolution while the others are completely obliterated. You can only look at them in your awareness by looking at this creation because in some way, it contains the residue or the experience of all that.
The Karma of Creation
Just as you carry your experience of life into everything that you do, the process of creation also has been carrying the experience of every past creation into the next one, though they may be completely different. Let us say that you used to play soccer in school twenty-five years ago. Now it suddenly happened that you are forty-five years of age and a burglar entered your house. You will kick the burglar like a soccer ball, not like a karate kick or a Kalaripayattu kick or something else. Because your soccer game that you have completely forgotten, is still there somewhere in your system and it pops up.
You might have played soccer just for three months, but somewhere the residue of that experience is still ingrained in you and it finds expression somewhere else in a completely unrelated space. This is the way you are growing all the time. This is what we are calling as karma.
What we are talking about is the individual karma but there is also a universal karma. There is a karma of the creation itself because creation itself is a karma. The act of creation, is it not an act? Act means karma. The residue of that karma is always moving into the next phase and the next level of creation.
Like this, totally eighty-three creations have happened and the eighty-fourth is on. Many of the older ones have managed to completely dissolve. They only exist in terms of an experiential imprint in the next one but they do not have a living status. But the twenty previous ones still have different levels of living status. Some have become very, very wispy, some are a little stronger, some are even stronger, some are almost as real as this one. But they are in the process of dissolution, which means that an active process of creation is not happening for them.
84 Creations
When you were a child, let us say that in a year you were producing a hundred billion cells. When you become thirty-five, it dropped a little bit. When you become forty-five, it dropped a bit more. When you become fifty-five, it dropped further; when you become seventy-five, it dropped even further. A time comes when what is dying is more than what you are able to replace. This is how old age is happening. Exactly the same process is happening with creation.
The dissolution is always happening. Even in this creation, dissolution is always happening, but new creation is happening, so it is vibrantly on. When new creation dwindled and stopped over a period of time, only dissolution started happening and then after some time only memory imprints are left, no living imprint remains. In this sense, only twenty-one creations still have some kind of an existence. The remaining sixty-three creations are completely gone. You cannot see them anywhere but you can see them as memory imprints within your own system because that imprint and that experience is still here.
This creation is the real thing. Everything else is active in receding order. In the current creation, there are two – one is the physicality which carries the memory of everything, another is the source of creation, which is the basis of the future. When you allow your past to become the future we look at you and say, “It is her karma.” That means she is allowing her past to be her future. There is no fresh possibility in her. When we look at someone and say, “Karma”, we are just saying that they are allowing their past to become their future. There really is no future for them, it will repeat itself.
Walking the Spiritual Path
When you say, “I am walking on a spiritual path,” on one level, the statement that you are making is that you do not want your past to repeat as future, you want your life to go forward. You do not want to be part of the cycle. When we say, “It is his karma,” that is what we are saying, “He is not going to get anywhere,” because though he is going in a circle, he thinks it is a new journey. But it is a new journey only because he has very short memory.
Everyone is in a state of dementia. They do not remember what is before their mother’s womb. So every time they go through it, it looks new. It is like you go on a treadmill. It feels like you are going somewhere, but you are not going anywhere – that is karma.
So this dimension that you are looking at right now is in two levels – one has happened, another is happening. Eighty-three of them have happened. If you want to talk in numbers, the eighty-third one has happened, but in a residual way it is still happening. This is just like your birth happened but it is still happening. Your death has also happened, but still happening. Your death is a foregone conclusion, it has already happened. The moment you were born, the first step towards your death happened, but it is still happening. You are waiting for it to become complete or you want it to be delayed, but it is happening and it has already happened.
There is another dimension within you for which birth has not happened nor will death happen. Only if you touch that dimension, you have something called as a future, otherwise you just have karma. Karma means you are repeating your past as future. You may be changing the color, you may be changing the style of how you do it, but it is still the same stuff, nothing different. You are still doing the same stuff that the caveman was doing.
Sadhana to Cleanse the Memory of 84 Creations
This memory is an anchor. You throw in an anchor and you are trying to move your boat – at the most it can only go in circles. With spiritual sadhana, we are trying to pull in the anchor or cut the rope which holds us to the anchor so that when we power up, the boat will move.
The whole spiritual sadhana is based on this, that you want to become free. Free does not mean that you have to forget, but you have to become free from the memory which rules you. The memory is not just in your mind. Every cell in your body carries memory. This much is very clear to us, through genetic science and other things, that you are carrying the memory of your forefathers and you are still behaving like them.
There are many aspects in the body which clearly say that the memory of these eighty-four creations are still there in your body. It is there in every atom in the existence. You want to cleanse it from the memory, because this memory gives you a sense of belonging, but at the same time this memory binds you; it does not let you go. When you do sadhana, you are trying to cut everything because without cutting your anchor you are not going to move ahead. It is that memory which has given integrity and stability to your body and the structure of who are right now. This body could not be created without this memory. Without the memory of a single-celled animal being within you, without all that information being carried through the evolutionary process, this body cannot be structured and held together.
Memory is not your enemy, it is just that you do not know how to hold it. You are into it, that is the problem. Now you want to get out of it. You want to make use of the memory but you do not want to be used by your memory – that is spiritual sadhana. You want to have a future which is different from your past.
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