Is Creation Real???

Strange! Wonder of wonders … this question sounds so bizarre simply because were it not for the Creation how would one account for the questioner’s existence? How did the person who is asking this question come about? What’s the source of his existence? So is there an argument at all? What’s there to talk? What’s there to discuss? All’s peaceful again. Based simply on the reality that there is somebody who is questioning the Creation, Creation has to be admitted as an abiding reality. However, time and again, perceptions have proven to be false. It had been believed for quite some time that the Earth was stationary and what appeared as day and night to us was caused by sun’s movement around earth. Of course, this was later disproved when the reality of earth’s revolution on its axis and around the sun was discovered. But until it had not been, this seemed to be a perfectly valid explanation of day and night.

Sometimes I imagine the following scenario. I imagine a Clothesline. And then I imagine clothes hanging from the Clothesline. Everything’s normal so far – except that I see that in the places where the clothes are hanging from, I see the clothesline itself having become those clothes – the cloth is not made up of a separate material but is of the same material as the Clothesline. So everywhere you see – you don’t see clothes made up of different kinds of materials hanging over the clothesline but a continuum of clothesline itself with the latter taking the form of clothing in various places. By itself there’s no intrinsic change anywhere in the nature of the Clothesline – it continues to be just what it is – a clothesline – but takes different kinds of shapes along the way to become the different kinds of clothes hanging over it and giving the appearance of a separate entity when in reality it’s one and the same all along. The hanging clothes can only be apparently said to be different from the clothesline on account of their having a different form alone. Essentially however these “special” clothes are not separate from the clothesline at all.

Similarly, countless examples can be given where a thing is only apparently different from that from which it draws its existence. Take the pot-space for example – how’s the space that’s confined in the pot different from the space outside the pot? Are they different? Does the pot space, bounded by the periphery of the pot, have an existence that’s distinct from that outside the periphery of the pot? Now if the pot-space were to assert “Oh! I am not the same as the one existing outside” – how would you take that assertion? How real does it sound to you? When the pot is broken – does the space inside the pot get broken or merge or become one with the infinite space outside of the pot --- which amongst these options seems true to you? To me all options are true and none of them is true. Nothing really happens to the pot-space when the pot is broken --- only the sense of limitation that the pot-space had owing to it being confined by the periphery of the pot no longer exists. Nothing else changes dramatically about the nature of the pot-space itself. It continues to be what it always had been. Similarly when the Brahman gets confined in the periphery of the body – which actually includes the body-mind-sense complex – nothing really changes from the point of view of the Brahman itself. It stays what it always was. Indeed even the body is nothing but a form of Brahman itself even as the clothes we saw on the Clothesline earlier. The body comes and goes. Its thoughts come and go. Nothing happens to the Brahman, even as nothing happens to the intrinsic nature of gold itself when it becomes a Chain. So, will this apparent appearance of the Brahman moving in and out of the confines of the body as the body goes from one birth to the other keep on repeating ad-nauseum? Is there a connection between the Brahman and the body? What do we make of this body? Reverting to the pot space example – apparently, the pot itself isn’t made of the space it’s surrounding. But then, analyzing the nature of the elements comprising the pot we had seen in a related article that we actually really don’t quite know the exact composition of the pot, except that it is an arrangement of molecules in a certain order. But then again even the composition of the molecule really could not be ascertained for sure and in the end we had realized that we cannot really fathom what exactly makes the pot except to just relate it back to the Brahman itself – the best conceptualization of which would be something similar to Space – because the Brahman is actually devoid of any particular form as such. Thus in some ways the pot –space and the pot are actually one and the same…there’s no difference whatsoever at a fundamental level at least...only on a gross level, the pot does manifest in a shape distinct from the space it contains. Otherwise it’s all one and the same even as the body is not distinct from the Brahman even if the former is perishable, not-constant and so forth. Even if an apparent “duality” exists, it is in name and form only - the essence is the one Brahman and Brahman alone.

In other words, Creation is confusing the reality of Appearances with the Reality itself.