Postulating a Theory on Evolution

Some of you already know about my struggle with religion in my quest to find the truth. I had rebelled against the faith I was born into because I felt at that time that there were many shortcomings in the practice of this religion. Life definitely has come full circle for me when now I realize that the shortcomings were actually in me, due to my restricted knowledge & lack of understanding. So this time around I came with my eyes fully open.

The funny thing about truth is there is no 2 ways about it. For something to be totally true, every aspect of it has to be true & in conformity to what you can perceive. Hence, my statement earlier as to why this is so important to me to work this one out.

The Hindu scriptures clearly states that every soul goes through a cycle of 84 lakh birth-death cycles to finally attain the human form. Starting from microscopic creatures, to plant life (Oh yes! Many of you did not know it, did you? Our scriptures clearly say that plants fall under the living category & we all go through that phase to reach here. There was a time, where the ancients used only dead wood or collected wood fallen down from the trees and cut those trees that are already dying. And every time a tree was cut, there was a ritual wherein the woodcutter asks for permission & begs forgiveness for his act ), to birds, animals & then finally man. And having come here, the time is to be actually invested to get out of the whole cycle which is termed as ‘Nirvana’ or ‘Attaining Salvation’. However, we spend most of our time in frivolous pastimes wasting this opportunity & then start again somewhere in the cycle based on our deeds. Now, for this to be true, there has to be an explanation for what we are seeing in nature. This got me thinking as to how using this framework, one can explain how certain species become extinct, never to come back. For eg. - you have the Dodo bird that has been extinct for a long time now. Not a single bird is left thus giving rise to the phrase ‘As dead as a Dodo’.

While I tried to reason this out for a long time, only recently have I come up with a plausible answer (that is if any of this is plausible at all – you know there is a school of thought that says that actually there is no creation & that we are all part of a cosmic dream. Remember the movie – The Matrix). Well it goes something like this -

Man is a very selfish creature. In his unending quest to quench his greed, he has been looting & destroying the wealth of nature as if the world is his fiefdom & everything in it is just to please his every whim & fancy. Every society of man has been progressively growing more & more evil in its outlook to fellow human beings as well as other inhabitants of this planet. In such a scenario, it is only obvious that we will have to start from the lowest order again. And in our materialistic quest we have destroyed innumerable plant & animal species. Now with every death, the soul progresses. So would these plant & animal life. Hence, while in one hand we have an increase in human population around the world, there has been also an explosion in the many germs & microscopic lifeform which forms the lowest order in the migratory cycle of the soul.

The fact that entire species have become extinct forever, such that it will never appear again makes me think about one more important aspect about life on this planet. I think that we are very close to the time for the universe to end. The ‘Pralaya’ that the scriptures talk about. We may have only a few hundred years or a few thousand maybe left at the most. A few hundred or thousand years on a cosmic scale is nothing against the backdrop of a universe that is billions of years old. It is as small as a micro second in comparison. And then creation will happen all over again. It is an unending cycle & only the creator knows how many times this universe has been created & destroyed, only to be created again. For that is ordained.