THE EVOLUTION OF MAN
The scientists have said that the earth was formed about four and a half billion years ago. If this figure is correct then we must assume that the human spirit has indeed been here for a long time. The human spirit germ incarnated on earth midway in the cycle in the development of the earth. The human spirit has therefore been here longer than most of us suspect. This indeed would correlate with the long periods it would have taken for us to evolve into what we are today. The gradual slow development, the slow process of raising the animal body to the state it is today, the development of language through the descent of the larynx, the gradual evolution of culture are all processes which must have taken an enormous amount of time.
Development of the complex society which we have today, would have taken just about the same time that it took the animistic to produce the most highly developed animal, because with the entrance of man another evolutionary process began altogether which was to take the world of matter to a new level. It was the beginning of the evolution of the spirit core of man into the state it is today. Surely this could not have been achieved in just a few million years. We underestimate the geological age of the human species. The first human spirits therefore, must have incarnated millions of years ago. Only this incarnation occurred at different places.
The five billion peoples on earth today did not start out on their development at the same time and consequently did not incarnate at the same time but the very first who did must have done so many millions of years ago. There must have been spirit germs who incarnated into bodies which were already on the way to becoming human, since the incarnation and entrance into animal bodies at the mid-cycle only takes place once in any particular part of the universe. Therefore there must have been spirit germs whose first incarnation was into bodies already on the way to becoming human.
This is probably the only time in history when we have five billion peoples living on earth at the same time. Every one of us would have taken his turn to become what he is today. After the incarnation of a sufficient number of spirit germs the animals became extinct and the incarnated spirit germs now formed the basis for the entrance of fellow spirit germs. The evidence in support of this supposition is that once sufficient numbers of spirit germs have incarnated, Creation's Law of Attraction of Homogenous Species will take effect and that subsequently incarnating spirit germs would automatically be attracted to incarnate with other spirit germs so that these through affinity could mutually continue to develop thereby automatically forming human colonies which continued to expand more and more.
Therefore the human colony expanded and the human population saw a steady increase in its numbers. The newly incarnating germs however would have to learn from those who had been here before them. In fact the difference in the level of development was not so great because the human spirit for a long time had to remain inwardly like children. The human spirit therefore, gradually advanced inwardly and he was always brought in touch with those more advanced than himself or with spiritual teachers so that he could be carefully guided to rise from one step to the other. As the human spirit advanced inwardly so did it advance outwardly in the physical aspect. We must remember that he inherited an animal body and the duty is his to automatically through gradual development convert this body into a human one.
The enormous development of the frontal brain alone would have taken many millions of years. The different racial characteristics which are clearly discernible could not have developed to the state it is today just in a few thousand years. We have languages which could not have developed in just two and a half million years which is the current estimate of the first entrance of man on earth. We have notions, ideas, concepts, culture which development cannot be accounted for through the prevalent human geological time scale. Before we go further into the evolution of the human spirit it is appropriate for us at this juncture to examine the beginning of the evolutionary process itself before the advent of the human spirit beginning with the simplest life forms.
Evolutionary Beginnings
Hot arguments have raged for decades between religionists and scientists over the roles of the evolutionary process and of creation in the coming into being of man on earth. These events were indeed very difficult to reconcile. On the one hand it is very difficult to accept the one sided assertions of the scientists in declaring that man is nothing but the physical body. Fortunately, many people feel it distinctly within themselves that they could not have been derived from any animal. On the other hand, it is difficult to account for the vast diversity of creatures on earth without taking into consideration the vast evidence before us that speaks for the truth of evolution of the body. Both religionists and the scientists are wrong however, because they still do not know what constitute the core of man. If they did there would not have been room for these arguments.
There are two distinct processes in the coming into being of man on earth and the most accurate description of the event is to be seen in the creation story of the Jews described in the Bible. We have the formation of man from dust which refers to the formation of the physical body through the evolutionary process, then we have the breathing of the Breath of Life into him which refers to the entrance of the immortal spirit spark which is given in picture form as the Breath of the Creator. This explains the incarnation or the entrance of the spirit germs into the already prepared physical body made from dust. This making from dust is a pictorial rendering of the slow evolutionary process up to the point where the most perfect body was formed which served as the basis for the entrance of the human spirit.
Evolution or Creation? Why have we had so much trouble explaining the coming into being of the earth and all the creatures on it? The religious maintain that it is through a process of creation whereby everything was created suddenly through the Creator's Omnipotence, whereas the scientists say that the theory of evolution must be the process because of the observation he has made in nature. Who is correct? In other to fully understand the entire process, the words of the Bible do not have to be changed, only we have to be able to examine these words in a different light.
We must realise that the explanation given in the Bible about the coming into being of all that we see before us was given according to the level of understanding of the people at that time. It was given in a picture form and rendered the process more or less in an approximate manner. In fact any spiritual explanation directed at a particular people has to be moulded in such a way as to take into consideration the power of comprehension of the target population otherwise they would fail to understand the message and the usefulness of the message in acting as a bridge for the further spiritual progress of the target group would be lost. Therefore the story in the Bible was moulded in such a way as to make it easier for the people of that time to gain an approximate knowledge of the event.
Since we all agree that there is room for an expansion of knowledge, we must therefore try not to stick too rigidly to an explanation given to a people who lived 3500 years ago but try to modify it to fit more into the present level of understanding. The concepts and modes of expression of the present day man is certainly different from what existed 3500 years ago and just because of this fact these stories have to be understood using today's modes of expression. We must adapt the story we have in the Bible and try to see how it can fit with our present level of development. That story indeed suited us at that stage of development, but today because of what we had become through the sagacity of our intellects we must have more, we must have all the answers. There must be no more room for unanswered questions.
The human spirit has reached a stage in its spiritual development where he must have everything explained to him. We must be able to explain the pictures. It is just not enough for us to still remain clinging rigidly to these pictures of the events. We must put life into these pictures, we must do more with them, we must try to understand them, not just accepting them rigidly without understanding and then trying to explain all events in creation just through these pictures. In doing this we refuse to accept an expansion to our knowledge which is something provided for in Creation. These pictures do not explain all the events in Creation because it was given to a people who did not have the capacity at that time to grasp the explanations of all the events in Creation. These pictures will have to be built upon through a further revelation of knowledge to accommodate all the events, which explanations after 3500 years we are now in a position to understand through our increased spiritual maturity.
According to the book "In the Light of Truth" the Grail Message by Abd-ru-shin, "What God created, as expressly stated in the story of Creation naturally remained immediately connected with Him and could only be situated in His near vicinity." Therefore the Creation referred to in the Bible is to be looked for in the immediate vicinity of God because it was the first to arise from Him and must therefore logically speaking be found closely associated to Him. It is difficult to reconcile a situation where the Creator would just without any transition have created this earth considering that the latter is just one of the trillions of stars in the entire gross material universe. To now assume that the Creator would create just only the earth, then how do we account for the coming into being of the other celestial bodies? How do we account for what we know today of the continual process of the formation of planets, the dissolution of stars; how do we account for all these events in the physical universe?
Since what God created remained in His immediate vicinity it must therefore resemble His Perfection most nearly and to now declare that this perfect creation of God was this earth must make thinking men doubt the truth of such assertions. It must already be clear to many people that the Creator must have made many Creations, not just what we can see with our physical eyes. Since there can be no gap between the Creator and this lower lying part, then it must be obvious that this gap is filled with other parts of the mighty Creation. There is no vacuum in the entire Creation right from God down to this lowest realm. Since we all realise that we here on earth are so far away from the vicinity of the Creator, it must become clear to us that all the distance from Him down to this place must be occupied and filled up with other parts of His Creation. To assume that God created the entire Creation in just six earthly days must indeed be a ridiculous conclusion because we are using the concept of time and space which exist on earth as a yardstick for the entire Creation when the earth itself is just a small star in the entire system and even the concept of time between the earth and the moon are entirely different, not to talk of the different conceptions of time of all the different planets.
This observation alone is enough to destroy our present conceptions about how the earth and for that matter the entire universe was created. This also proves that the entire creation story in the Bible is nothing but an allegorical rendering of events which must not be taken literally. To also assume that the Creation which first came into existence was on this earth is also far from logical because this is far from resembling the perfection of the Creator and it is also so far away from Him that it just could not have been the first creation. If we still insist on saying that the first creation was enacted on earth, how do we explain the driving away from Paradise if this Paradise was on this earth. If the first creation was enacted on this earth then it stands to reason that Paradise must be on this earth. If we had been driven away from Paradise which was on earth, then how come we still find ourselves on earth? The garden of Eden is said to be in the middle east. Do people not live in the Middle East today?
Just like the fist Creation was not to be found on earth, the men referred to in the Bible too were not the human beings on earth today. Since they were the first to emanate from God they had to resemble His Perfection most nearly. Surely these cannot be the human beings on earth today as we are far from being close to the Perfection which is God's. These were the ones created in the image of God. They are the images of the Creator. Man is nothing but a consequence of the further Creation just like his earth is nothing but a consequence of the further expansion of Creation. Man is therefore nothing but a precipitate thereof of these first perfect beings.
In examining the story of Creation further as it was given in the Bible, it was said that man was made in the image of God and that he was made from dust and the Creator breathed into him the Breath of Life and man became a living being. According to Abd-ru-shin, "The less perfect a thing is the further removed it is from Perfection. Hence the spiritual beings who were created out of Perfection cannot be the human beings on earth, but must have their place closest to this Perfection, and therefore represent the most ideal examples for humanity!" These are the Primordial Beings. They are the images of the Creator but man on earth develops himself only as a copy of these images of the Creator. In other words we are likenesses of the images of God which of course makes a lot of sense because our earth too is to become a likeness of Paradise, in short perfect like the latter through a gradual process of transformation. In Genesis 2:1 we read: "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them." This word host would refer to these other creatures of which human beings are not a part.
We human beings too through a gradual process of transformation are to become copies of the Primordial Beings. Just like we human beings through a gradual process of development are to become perfect, the earth too and indeed the entire world of matter is to become perfect. It will gradually come to resemble more and more God's perfect first Creation. We human beings too will gradually come to resemble the perfect creatures of God through the same process of development. It is really a wonderful parallel. In being here in the world of matter and in gradually becoming perfect in it we automatically carry our environment with us.
We are not the only ones that evolve to become perfect, our environment too, the earth and the world of matter in general also evolve in the same way. We read in Genesis 2:7 "And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." We re told that man was made from dust and then he received the Breath of Life. But what is the meaning of this statement that man was made from dust. These are obviously two events; one is the making from dust and the other is the Breath. Everybody seems to agree that the dust refers to the physical body, but how this physical body came to be is what is more difficult to understand.
We have the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible but we must realise that the events referred to in the Bible are basically spiritual events not at all referring to the earth. These are basically accounts of great spiritual happenings that took place far away from the earth. Therefore the story concerning Adam and Eve was one which described the coming into being of the spiritual-ethereal being in the Ethereal realm i.e. the shaping of the male and female forms which took place when the spirit germs left their home and descended in to the Ethereal realm. The nature of their activities, when they descended into the Ethereal realm determined their shapes either female or male. If the activity is a positive one i.e. forceful then it assumes the male shape and if it a negative one i.e. reserved, it assumes the female form. The nature of the activity thereby determines the shape or the form.
The two sexes therefore appeared in the Ethereal realm and they incarnated together on earth. Surely it cannot occur to us that man could have entered the earth as the only sex, and that woman only appeared later. How then did she appear, maybe she was moulded just like Adam and then placed on the earth. They were moulded as adults and then placed on earth to multiply. If we insist on having this explanation then it is only Adam that has the immortal spark, since he was supposed to be the only one that God breathed into. Not even Eve has this immortal spark, not even Eve is living since it was said that after Adam had been breathed into he became a living being but we do not have the account of the breathing into Eve.
If we insist on referring to a physical Adam who was given life through the Breath of Life, then none of us today is really living. How did we receive our own breaths of life. Maybe we inherited it from Adam. Conventional interpretations have said that we all inherit our physical bodies from Adam, but how do they explain the coming into being of the soul? Does God breath into every growing foetus in the womb? Or into every child as it is born? We are bound only to reach absurd conclusions if we continue to insist on literal explanations and also on placing every happening on earth. It is really absurd to imagine that the Creator in His Perfection would just as if by magic create the trillions of stars that we see in our part of our universe or that He would personally breath into the more than 5 billion human beings we have on earth today individually either at the time of their births or in the womb. The Creator is far greater and more perfect than we imagine and far more natural since all these our other suppositions must be taken as unnatural. If we insist on conventional explanations we will never reach an end in our search for the truth, but always would have to debase the Creator if we are to reach a conclusion which conclusion will never harbour the truth.
The forming of man from dust signifies nothing more than the formation of the physical body of man through the evolutionary process. We must remember that it is expressly said that man became a living being only after been breathed into which would confirm the explanation that the physical body in itself is lifeless and that man is not this physical body. He did not become a living being until he has received the Breath of Life. This automatically destroys the scientists' supposition that man and everything that he is, is the physical body. This passage in the Bible is the proof that man is not the physical body, but that the latter is nothing but a covering given to him for his wanderings. Man was made from dust, this dust was made into the shape of man, otherwise it would not be said that man was made from dust. But this shape was lifeless, it was not animated , in itself it does not have life. Since it is agreed all over that the dust could only be referring to the physical body and since we know that the brain is also a part of the physical body, we must conclude that this brain also has no life of its own.
Since this physical body is made from the dust; from the material of the earth together also with the brain, then it must be obvious that this brain in its working can only understand the things of the earth and can never understand matters that goes beyond its origin. Since we know that the spiritual lies far above the earth from which the brain has its origin, then it is clear that the brain will never be able to understand spiritual matters since this is alien to its nature and it did not derive its origin from this. Therefore trying to understand God and all that is associated with Him with the use of the brain or the intellect is bound to fail because we are using a tool that is not in any means endowed with the capacity to do this.
So we have the dust on the one hand which refers to the physical body which is lifeless and therefore has no ability to move on its own because one of the fundamental evidences of life is the presence of motion, and then the Breath of Life on the other hand. What however is this Breath of Life? This was what made man a living creature. In many circles it is already known that what really makes man a human being is the presence within him of something which many people call a soul but which is better called the spirit. This knowledge has penetrated to many people. We were told that man did not become a living being until he received this Breath which bears life within it for him. This Breath is said to have come from the Creator. It is His Breath and since it is from Him it must be immortal. This is the allegorical rendering of something that entered man in the form of a Breath and since it is from God, then it is immortal. Since this Breath entered into man then the essence of this Breath must be spirit.
This is the pictorial rendering of the coming together of two events in the coming into being of man on earth. First what makes him living, which is the Breath, the spirit which is from God, and the other the physical body or the material bodies in general because evolutionary formation of the material bodies must be assumed to have taken place in all material spheres only the time scale involved were different. Through this picture given in the Bible, it is obvious that it is difficult to conceive man in material creation without a body. This picture in its essence does not refer to the earth specifically but to material creation in general where the body is formed from the essence of the particular realm and then the coming together of this body with the immortal spark which now lends life and movement to this body. Therefore on earth we have the one process of the formation of the physical body from dust, which is the gradual evolutionary process that eventually led to the formation of the physical body and then the other process of the entry into the physical body of the immortal spark that came from God.
From the highest level in material creation we have this same process of the coming together of the spirit and the body and it is impossible to find man without this combination in material creation. On earth, the entrance of the spirit into the physical body occurs through a process called incarnation. Therefore it can be seen that the scientists though they had made the correct observations as regards the physical body, raise part of the happening to represent the whole since they do not believe in the existence of spirit but are awaiting the day when they will able to prove its existence in the laboratory. The religionist also has not imagined anything at all, he only blindly asserts that God is great and that with Him everything is possible not knowing that with this statement something quite different is meant from what he imagines. He is the one who continually debases the Creator in attributing illogical and arbitrary things to Him. Let us however discuss the evolutionary process on earth as it is known to have occurred.
The driving force of the initial evolutionary process were the animistic beings. The souls which provided the driving force for the evolutionary process in the myriad of species that appeared belonged to the Animistic realm and the movements in the environments in the elements of water, air, earth and fire were also controlled and directed through the animistic forces. Through all these interplay of forces only the Animistic could be found on earth, moving it , shaping it, and giving the life that at that time existed. All the species of plants and animals especially of animals which needed a core were provided through the animistic beings whose cores, through successive millions of years provided the basis for the various changes in the body of animals and in the adaptations to their environments through the evolutionary process. One must realise that none of these events was an accident or a freak of Nature, but strictly ordered and planned according to a definite scheme. If one is familiar with the Laws of Creation, one must realise that every process in Creation already has a determined natural pattern which always repeat themselves in a firmly established way.
Everything automatically follows a firmly established laid down blueprint directed from On High. There would be no logic in assuming that the whole evolutionary process happened by chance. Chance itself does not guarantee order and the way the evolutionary process proceeded showed the most delicate order and direction. The gradual multiplication of cells from the single, the organisation and the branching off of species, the adaptations of these species to their various environments all showed a grace and beauty that could not have been a result of chance or accident. The evidence is there that it simply could not have been the result of chance or accident. We can see it if we want. Everything in Creation follows a firmly established pattern which must make us realise that there must be very definite laws guiding the order.
If there were no laws perfect and immutable, we would long since have noticed a deviation from the natural process. We would long since have seen the sun rising from the west and setting in the east, we would long since have reaped rice where we sowed maize. There is no chaos in Nature. The observation of our natural world proves it. If there is therefore no chaos in Nature, as we can easily observe, then there could not have been chaos or accident when it was being formed because accidents begets accidents and chaos begets chaos whereas order begets order as we can see in the natural world before us. The creation of the earth however, or better said the formation of the earth could only have been a deliberate happening directed by servants of the Most High forming it according to laid down laws.
We have been told that the earth was formed about four and a half billion years ago and fossil evidence have shown that bacteria already existed a billion years after this. The theory is that the atmosphere of the early earth consisted of gases such as methane, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde and cyanoacetylene. Under certain conditions which could only have been deliberate, the building blocks of biological life began to form. In fact it has been found that interstellar dust clouds, where new stars are formed contain large numbers of organic molecules which include those mentioned above and more such as water and ammonia. Reacting together under suitable and carefully controlled conditions, they gave rise to the first building blocks such as amino acids and nucleic acids.
The former are building blocks for proteins which make up a good portion of the body and play such vital roles such as in defence and as enzymes that catalyse important biological processes in the body. The latter are building blocks for molecules or substances that serve as the basis of inheritance called nucleic acids. They are substances that bear information concerning inheritance within. What remained then was the coming together of these single molecules of amino acids and nucleic acids to form polypeptides and proteins on the one hand and nucleotides respectively in the process know as polymerisation. These processes continued until the formation of the nuclei and the surrounding milieu called the cytosol. Then followed the formation of the cell membrane to protect the contents of the cell so that it does not continually lose especially genetic material. Thus over time we have the formation of the simplest organisms which are mainly bacteria and blue-green algae. All these reactions occurred in the primitive sea because only this could provide the environment necessary for these.
Therefore through a series of well orchestrated reactions we have after the first few millions of years the formation of the very first life forms which are bacteria and the blue-green algae. The evolutionary process have traditionally been divided into eras which were meant to describe the step by step appearance of the various organisms. Thus we have
- The Precambrian era;
- The Palaeozoic era;
- The Mesozoic era;
- The Cenozoic era.
The Precambrian era, which was the earliest period was characterised by the appearance of the simplest organisms, the so called archaebacteria and the blue-green algae. Later in this era there began to appear numerous invertebrates such as the coelenterates e. g. numerous shellfish and corals. Because of the photosynthetic activity of the numerous blue-green algae, there began to appear to some extent small amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere which initially was not present as its presence would have prevented the formation of the early molecules as these required a reducing atmosphere.
This era was incredibly long and scientists have put it between the time that the earth was formed which was over four billion years and about 570 million years ago. In summary what characterised this era was the appearance of simple life forms such as the bacteria, the blue-green algae which are the simplest plants, the first appearance of the so called eucaryotic cell which are more advanced cells characterised by membrane-bound structures within it such as mitochondria which are organelles responsible for cell respiration and as such more complex in its organisation in contrast to the prokaryotic cell which is more simple and which characterise bacteria and blue-green algae. These cells have no membrane-bound structures within.
The Palaeozoic era followed which was said to have lasted about 300 million years and is roughly divided into six periods: the Cambrian, the Ordovician, the Silurian, the Devonian, the Carboniferous and the Permian. This era was generally characterised by the appearance of the early snails, other molluscs, sea weeds, lichens, corals, primitive fish, the first air breathing scorpion and the first vascular plants. We also have primitive sharks, insects, primitive reptiles and the many other marine animals.
These are very long periods of time which would have allowed for the development of a wide variety of organisms. The concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere increased dramatically during this era and this permitted for the first time the appearance of the first air breathing organisms. We must realise that oxygen appeared only gradually in the primitive atmosphere through the photosynthetic activity of the sea weeds which were macroscopic algae. With the appearance of terrestrial plants the concentration of oxygen could only increase further. These terrestrial plants included mosses, liverworts, club-mosses, ferns and horsetails. More advanced plants included conifers, cycads, monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous flowering plants. The invasion of land by first the amphibians could only occur after sufficient oxygen had formed. The plants therefore, provided the opportunity and the basis for the invasion of land by vertebrates.
One must notice here the gradual progression, the step by step manner in which the development took place with no gap missing. First, life in the oceans with plant life and small simple organisms, then the formation of oxygen through the photosynthetic activity of plants which make use of what was abundant in the environment: carbon dioxide and water to form sugars for themselves releasing oxygen as a by-product into the water and into the atmosphere as a result. The invasion of land by organisms which needed to do so. Those which did not need to do this remained in water. This allowed more and more organisms to appear, the opportunity was thus created for the enormous diversification of life. Therefore, not only the sea could bear life forms, also the land could through the appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere. This happening, which was a turning point allowed more organisms to appear and later on after millions of years formed the basis for the appearance of man who was destined to be an air breathing creature.
The next era is called the Mesozoic and was characterised by the appearance of more and more sophisticated life forms. Larger animals appeared on land and the most dominant were the dinosaurs. This era lasted about 140 million years and is generally divided into three periods: the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. Plant life included the conifers, the palms and many marine algae. This is usually called the age of the reptiles. We have lizards, crocodiles, snakes, some insects, sea urchins. The first birds began to appear and we also have the first mammals such as the marsupials. The last era is the Cenozoic which is divided into two periods: the Tertiary and the Quaternary. It is mainly characterised by the appearance of many diverse types of mammals and as it is said the first appearance of man. In this era we have the appearance of the carnivores, various types of herbivores, the large birds and the first large aquatic animals like the whale. We also have the mammoths, the elephants and the big cats.
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