A disciple once asked Holy Mother Sarada Devi whether everything in the world came into being at the same time. Mother’s answer was unequivocal: “Yes, everything came at once, not gradually.”
Whatever made the disciple ask the question to Mother, he must have been stunned by her answer. It seemed as if Mother had never heard of the Theory of Evolution. She was neither a scholar nor a scientist, certainly not in the sense we think of scholars and scientists. But she was (as Sri Ramakrishna said) Sarasvatī, the Goddess of Knowledge. Can there be anything at all that she wouldn’t know?
So what do we make of the disciple’s question and of Mother’s answer?
When we think about the formation of the universe, there are theories aplenty. Religions have their own views on how this world was created. Science has its own theories about how the world came to be. A question related to time divides all these theories, religious or scientific, into two broad categories.
This is the question: Did the world evolve over time or did it show up all at once?
Much can be said in favor of things taking time to evolve, as it is a common experience in life. Everything takes time. No seed evolves into a tree instantaneously, no baby becomes an adult all at once. Why should the universe be an exception? Why would it not evolve gradually over time? Science and religion seem to be on the same side here. They both agree that it takes time for the world to evolve (or to be created), be it a few million years or six days. Science may differ with religion regarding the need for a divine being to create the world, but it agrees that time was a factor in the process.
On the other side is the idea, counterintuitive perhaps, that time is most definitely not involved. The universe as we know it came about not gradually but all at once. To think of the process in terms of time is to assume that time is eternal and independent of the universe. But is it? Did time exist when nothing else existed? What is time really? Is it anything more than the gap that separates two events? If there are no “events,” as is the case when nothing exists, where is time? The idea of time depends on our experience of things happening one after another. When nothing is happening and there is nowhere for anything to happen, time simply cannot exist even as an idea.
Is it possible to imagine a scenario when time does not exist? No need to imagine that. We know it from our own daily experience. Whenever we are in deep sleep, not even dreaming, nothing is happening then—and we are not aware of time at all. The idea of time doesn’t exist in deep sleep. If the experience of deep sleep teaches us that it is possible for time to disappear altogether, the experience of dream offers us another precious teaching.
Dreams teach us that it is possible for everything to spring forth all at once. Our dream world does not begin its existence with the Big Bang or with anything even remotely resembling any of the evolution theories. Everything manifests all at once. The most ancient galaxies and mountains and rivers are of the same age as a newborn baby in a dream, because they all came into being at the same time. The moment we fall asleep, the waking world disappears right away, not gradually, and the moment a dream begins, the dream world comes into view right away, not gradually.
Here is an interesting phenomenon—and this is important: the dream world manifests instantly but it brings with it the idea that it has evolved over time. In other words, in dreams we see that some things are older than other things. We have no doubt that the older people in our dreams have been around longer than those who are younger than them. The idea and presence of “time” are as much a product of the dream world as the rest of the things that we see in our dreams. The dream time does not exist independent of the dream world. It begins when the dream begins, it ends when the dream ends. The dream time is a part of the dream world.
All of this may be true about dreams, but how does this apply to the waking state? It applies to the waking experience simply because it is impossible to know with any degree of certainty that we are not dreaming at this very moment. After all, seldom do we know a dream to be a dream while we are dreaming. The dream world feels as real as the waking world. Even if someone were to come to me in my dream and tell me the plain truth, “You are dreaming,” my reaction will be to roll my eyes and say, “Are you kidding me?” Such is the power of māyā! While we cannot prove that we are dreaming this very moment, we cannot disprove it either. No one can.
Look at it this way. What makes a dream a “dream”? Why is a dream thought to be different from our waking experience? To us the waking world seems to reflect reality whereas the dream world seems divorced from reality, even bizarre, hence unreal. How can we be certain that what we think of as real is really real? We cannot trust our senses, seeing how often we are fooled. We never see things in their entirety. We know how limited a range our senses have. Even cats see more than we do and a dog’s sense of smell is several thousand times more powerful than ours. So who do we turn to confirm the nature of reality?
If we trust the wisdom of the Vedas—whose authenticity has been confirmed through direct experience in every generation—whatever truly exists is eternal, undivided, pure, free, and blissful. This is the really real, and this is radically different from the pseudo-realities projected in both the waking and the dream states. Since what we experience in the waking world is as much a fiction as in the dream world or even in deep sleep, we may have to revise our understanding of what a “dream” is.
Isn’t dream really a state when we “see what is not real” (a-yathārtha-darśana)? It is possible therefore to say that there are not really three states—waking, dream, and deep sleep—but rather three dreams: the waking-dream, the dream-dream, and the deep sleep-dream. Look at the Aitareya Upaniṣad (1.3.12):
तत्र त्रय: स्वप्ना: ।
Tatra trayaḥ svapnāḥ.
“There are three kinds of dreams.”
With this understanding, we realize that the real “waking state” is the state of the Buddha (lit. “the awakened”). Only when we see things as they really are can we say that we have really woken up. When we become the Buddha, we experience our own existence as infinite and eternal, pure and perfect. Until then, we keep going in and out of an unending tsunami of dreams, assigning them different names, such as waking, dream, deep sleep, birth, death, rebirth, karma, heaven, hell—and to this list we can add whatever else we fancy.
Holy Mother’s answer gives us a choice beyond the restrictive binary option provided by the evolution vs creation debate. It is possible to think of the world as having emerged all at once like a dream, without necessarily getting into conflict with the existing notions of creation and evolution. Once the dream time kicks in, it is possible that some may see the world as the result of millions of years of evolution. Some others may see the same world as the creation of a divine being, perhaps in “six days,” or in whichever way one may interpret the phrase. Both evolution and creation are easy to imagine in the domain of time.
A dream is indeed the creation of the dreamer. Sleep is a prerequisite for a dream—and sleep necessitates forgetfulness of one’s waking identity. It is possible to imagine Brahman, the free and immortal divine being, sleeping as it were and becoming a mortal human being in the dream. This suffering dream persona of Brahman then tries to figure out who created the world, without realizing that the creator may have been Brahman’s own sleeping self. Once that realization comes, the road to a real waking up opens up easily.
Was the world created gradually or at once? This is not as interesting a question as the exciting possibility that the world was never really created. It is imagined in a dream by Brahman, the only reality (sat), which manifests in my heart as awareness of my own existence. The only way to end the dream is for me to abandon my dream-self, wake up, and become my true self again.
When I want to do it and how I want to do it is up to me. If I am determined and earnest, I can do it here and now, and be free for ever. If I am skeptical or wishy-washy, I can postpone it indefinitely and choose to continue being a helpless toy in the hands of nature.