What Sri Aurobindo stated matches the theorems produced in the West

For me the mysterious power that created this universe preceded it and will outlast it. And it has the power to do so again and again. The Hindu sage Aurobindo, who lived during the same era in which the basic cosmology of western science was being revolutionized by Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg, explained the birth and death of countless universes in terms of a divine cycle of introversion and extroversion. During the introverted stage, the divine sinks into its own essential nature, and the universe rests as potential form. During the extroverted stage, e.g. the Big Bang and its aftermath, it displays itself in a magisterial panoply of material forms in evolutionary flux.

Aurobindo merely restates what ancient Hindu sages had intuited, but he does it with an elegance that matches the theorems simultaneously being produced in the West (See the Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo). The point of Hindu cosmology, given to us by the same culture which first conceptualized zero and the idea of infinity, is that divine creation is not constrained by the limits that Western science carries like an escathalogical seed, a terminator meme within its elegant, but severely bounded theories.

As the wave swollen by feverish carbon burning begins to break upon us, ending a magnificent geological era in which our species arose and upon which all our earthly hopes rest, my Gaian hope is for complex life to continue to evolve in earth's remaining time. We know that the earth will outlast us and endure until her time, too, ripens. But it took a universe and time to evolve the magnificent Cenozoic. What kind of progeny will an aging earth have who has been blasted by a thankless, reckless child? My hope centers upon Gaia, and if I am faithful to what I know, living with integrity, then I will live as if to sustain the fabric of the Cenozoic, even as it tatters and collapses.

Beyond this field of dharma, Kali Yuga, the end-time of Earth's Cenozoic era, my deepest hope and faith are in the unquenchable and infinite possibilities of the Source of this universe, which even now prepares its rest from the battlefield of cosmic striving. Entropy is a universal law, yet it is matched by limitless Creation, implicit in the very fabric of possibility, even beyond space-time. But if it is humans that you love, and other mammals, and the wildflowers of spring, and the fishes and frogs, and the birds and magnificent forest remnants of this earthly time, then look upon those faces and forms you love best, with the gaze of a dying man hungry for every moment of consciousness, and commit them to soul-memory.

And if the soul transmigrates not only between lives in this bounded universe, but between universes, perduring through the long sleep of Brahma in between, then she will remember, however inchoate the form in the consciousness of another being totally unlike us, and our images will be everlasting in a way the seed of our species can never be. Rest well, oh Brahma. May your great works continue to prosper, in universe after universe. And you, my loves, my children and grandchildren, live the best life you can, as if this world would always remain in pristine, balanced perfection. As the itinerant rabbi in Palestine said 2000 years ago, the Father's Kingdom spreads out upon the earth, if we would only see. Next installment, BEGINNER'S MIND: [Remember the man who reached for the strawberry?] THE STRAWBERRY AT THE END OF THE WORLD. posted by robert at 9:31 AM Tuesday, April 25, 2006 PRECOGNITION OF SPECIES DEATH