The Jains hold that the world, souls and time are uncreated, unbeginning and unending. The Buddhist scripture Saddharma Pundarika mentions that there are so many worlds beyond this one that no one “should be able to imagine, weigh, count or determine their number.” Certain karmas will cause souls to again seek life in the body, others will follow and become more and more attached to the body, developing passion, selfishness and other evils. The Chinese have, in the story of the first man, Pangu, a close parallel to the Hindu Purusha.īuddha taught that this world will come to an end, but that in time a new world will evolve again. Sikhism follows Hindu traditions of origins. Manu, son of the first being, performed tapas,very difficult austerities, to create ten great sages who then created seven other Manus, who are progenitors of the human race in each age. Manu Dharma ShastraI.11-119, for example, describes the creation of heaven and earth, of the soul, and of individual creatures. Further elaborations of the creation are told in the Puranas, Dharma Shastrasand other Hindu scriptures. Three-fourths of the Purusha remains “ascended high” and only “one fourth took birth again down here,” as the hymn explains, meaning what we see is only one-fourth of reality, the remaining being in divine form. It is this individuated consciousness that is offered and divided by the Gods to create all of the physical universe, men, animals and plants. The Purusha is a divine emanation of God, and can be understood in at least one sense as the individuation of consciousness, the personal aspect of God. Hinduism has several creation accounts, of which the central is found in the Rig Veda of the Cosmic Man, Purusha, who was sacrificed by the Gods to create man. All other peoples of the world came from us.” “ We have lived and kept the Earth as it was on the First Day. “We have come directly out of the Dreamtime of the great Creative Ancestors. “We have been here since the time before time began,” explains an Aboriginal elder. They believe a jivaor guruwari,a “seed power,” is deposited in the Earth, “a symbolic footprint of the metaphysical beings whose actions created our world,” states Australian author Robert Lawlor. They speak of the “Dreamtime” of the distant past when the Gods walked on the Earth and created people, sacred places, animals and the ways of human society. The Australian Aborigines are likely the oldest tribe on our planet, with a known continuity of cultural history going back over 50,000 years. On the fourth page, we briefly present the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy, and explore the intriguing possibility that man did not originate on Earth at all, but came here from another planet. This page introduces their poignant quotations from legends and ancient texts. Hinduism and other religions hold that there is more to existence than this mere physical reality, and that a transcendent intelligence inheres and instructs the development of this universe, including the observed processes of evolution. We need not accept at face value this Godless judgment on our origins. Today we seem to be on the verge of completely losing our sense of divine origin and purpose as more and more people accept the verdict of Darwinian science–that we are the chance result of billions of years of evolution from single-celled creatures, to sea-born creatures, to reptiles, birds, mammals, to apes and finally to man. Several, drawn from the world’s oldest and newest cultures and religions, are summarized or retold on this and the next two pages. While there is little agreement about our origins, there is much to muse over and meditate about.Įvery culture on Earth has pondered the question, “How did we get here?” Profound, divine answers have been formulated through the ages. Were we put here by a Creator? Did we evolve from simpler forms of life? Could we have migrated here from another planet or arrived on a comet? In this month’s four-page center section we explore the varied chronicles of those earliest days as recorded in the major cultures and faiths. How did humankind come to inhabit a blue marble spinning in black space?
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