Beachwalla Home Lermon Home

 

Twists & Evolutionary Gradualism

The evolution of forms generally proceeds gradually, but experiences major sanskaric and evolutionary leaps at the junctures of the major forms of species, as shown in the Theme of Creation chart:
A seemingly insoluble problem for Darwinists in the 20th century was that the fossil record provided poor evidence—and in many cases no evidence at all—of evolutionary gradualism, which Darwinism required. Darwin himself wrote, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
George Gaylord Simpson, a distinguished paleontologist at Harvard, summed it up nicely in 1944: "This is true of all thirty-two orders of mammals . . . The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed . . . 
     This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate . . . it is true of the classes, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants."
Several decades later, another distinguished Harvard paleontologist named Stephen Gould introduced the idea of punctuated equilibrium. This idea (modified over the centuries) dovetails with The Awakener's explanation of twists.
The following passage is extracted from the web version of Lord Meher. (Page 2882)
In the beginning, the soul is there, but the eyes are closed. So, I could not see myself.

Now what happens? That urge that was all along latent in me to see myself gets a lahar [whim] or motion. For example, in Knowledge, ignorance is latent. In the Infinite, the finite is latent. All the opposites of God one can conceive of were latent in God, because God is also his own opposite, since nothing exists but God. So in the "not-knowing" state of God, its opposite urge of "knowing Himself" was latent.

So, with the first lahar, the eyes were slightly opened, and they naturally fell on the objects that they confronted facing them. For some time they saw light. With the eyes opened, as the soul continued gazing at the light, it got tired, and its body got a twist. With that twist, the eyes that were slightly opened in the beginning, became slightly more open, and it could see a little more than before. Thus, as it continued getting more twists, one after the other, during the evolutionary process from stone to human, the eyes became more and more widely opened and could see more, until the soul got a big twist—the human form—when its eyes were fully opened, and it could see the sky and the stars, the world of phenomena, and so forth. This happens during the process of the descent.

Then what happened? After the human form, the soul continued seeing everything, here, there and everywhere during its eighty-four lakhs of reincarnation. During the reverse process of Realization, when it gets the seven new twists, its eyes become dazed. It begins to see downwards toward itself; first, from the legs upward, until it sees itself completely. This looking toward itself is during the process of ascent.

We will take the soul "A" and make it "Z," intellectually of course. Another new point is to be cleared, and then we will take up the chart. Everything is to be disclosed.

These seven "pinches" are twists of sanskaras, and they have seven chief forms—stone or metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal and man. Every twist of the sanskaras gives the next form. So, there are seven twists for seven forms, and there are six previous forms before the stone form. The first form the soul got was the bubble, which was in the gas state. Then there are five other minute forms, until the stone form. From stone to metal and from metal to vegetable—each has seven stages.

So, the real twisting began from the stone form, and there are seven twists up to the human form. There are one million four hundred thousand (fourteen lakhs) of species of each of the chief forms from stone to human. That is to say, in six forms (not including human) there are 6 x 14 lakhs = eight million four hundred thousand species (8,400,000) = 84 lakhs of species = 84 lakhs of bindings. There are eighty-four lakhs of bindings and seven twists. After every seventh stage (form) there is a twist.

The soul first gets the gas form—the form of a bubble. Until it gets to stone form, it passes through seven forms. That is why the rishis who knew things but could not reveal them to the world established worship of the last form of each chief form, such as the Tulsi plant for vegetable, the monkey Hanuman for animal, et cetera.

Because of the twists that the soul gets, it attains consciousness of Self. But this consciousness of Self is only partial and just for a second. The consciousness is not full and does not last long, similar to the experience of a pinch. At every pinch, or twist, this consciousness is used for knowing the Self. It is for this reason that the twists come into importance.

Now, to make this point clear, we go back again to the first state when the soul had its eyes closed. After the first opening, though it is a very slight opening at the stone state, the eye gets gradually drawn upward to the second touch and opening. The first six touches shown in the chart are soft but the seventh is strong.

Baba demonstrated this by lightly tapping his leg six times and, at the seventh, instead of a soft tap, he gave himself a pinch, giving a clear picture of the difference between the six soft touches and the seventh hard pinch.

Thus, at every twist, with a hard pinch, the eyes open wider and wider, and the soul is aroused to know itself more and more. Through these seven twists, and through eighty-four lakhs of changes through species and forms during evolution, and again through seven twists and eighty-four lakhs of rounds of births and deaths during reincarnation—known as the "shakings"—the soul, during all these twists and changes, gets loosened.