13 March 2015 - QA 2

Gurudev, the theory of creation in the scriptures seems to contradict the theory of evolution according to Charles Darwin. Could you talk about which one to believe?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Which theory of creation that you are thinking is contradictory? Actually the whole world is just appearance. It appears to be so. You should read Yoga Vashishtha. You will get more idea about it.

When you keep a spoon inside the water, half of the spoon appears to be bent. If you ask me when did the spoon bend, what do I say? It didn’t bend, it appears so. When does it start to appear like that? It appears like that anytime!

Similarly, this idea of something got created at one point of time itself is erroneous, because the whole Universe is an appearance in Consciousness. When did the mirage get created? What do you say? It never got created, it appears to be like that!
Like a tennis ball for example. Where is the beginning of a tennis ball? It never begins in the first place. Can a ball begin somewhere or end somewhere? Every point is the beginning and every point is an end. That’s why this Universe is called ‘Anaadi’ (beginningless) and ‘Ananta’ (endless).

Usually our thinking is linear - everything should begin and everything should end somewhere. But when you go into higher knowledge, it is about appearance rather than beginning or ending. This is the beauty of Vedanta philosophy, this is how it is different from all other theories that we think of the world.

See if you go to Hawaii which is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, miles and miles all around there is nothing. Now if someone starts researching - how did a coconut plant come there? Someone will say, ‘Oh from Malaysia, maybe a coconut fell in the water, it travelled all the way to the Hawaiian Island and then it became a tree’. There is no proof for this, but yes, all the fauna and flora are present in Hawaiian Islands. There are many trees, and people were also there.
So, to me it seems very absurd when people say that the first human being was born in Africa and then he travelled to Constantinople, and from there Aryans came and invaded India, and so on. All these theories are rubbish because we want to see one point from where the tennis ball began.

If you see from a quantum physicist’s or from a real rational scientific view point, you will find that in the whole creation things have happened in many places simultaneously. Nature can make a coconut plant grow in Kerala and in Hawaii at the same time! It doesn’t have to export a coconut from Kerala all the way to Hawaii or vice-versa!
Now they have found that there is water on the surface of Moon and Mars. Somebody will come up with a theory that at some point of time the Moon became a part of the Earth and then water from came there, because we try to think linear.
We have to think spherical, then things will make much more sense.