The Supreme Power That Creates, Manifests, Sustains and Guides the Universal Creation

We go through our daily lives, busy ourselves with earning a living, supporting our families, maintaining our bodies, entertaining ourselves, arguing, fighting, gossiping, and following up on hobbies or passions we are engaged in. We close ourselves into a narrow and limited existence and feel content that we are doing something important, or useful, or at least, whiling away our time between birth and death, with no further meaning. We may feel helplessly caught up in a life we do not understand, or alternatively, we may feel powerful and proud in our accomplishments in our lifetime. Few are those who look beyond this round of existence to view the wider universe and the potential significance of our lives in terms of that larger framework.

Astronomers explore the vastness of outer space with ever more powerful instruments. They report that we can ‘observe’ up to about 93 billion light years distance, but we do not know the full size of the universe beyond what can be observed. They report there are somewhere between 200 billion and 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, a wide range due to the difficulty of seeing galaxies that are faintly visible to their instruments. The galaxy in which our planet resides we call the Milky Way galaxy. It is not particularly prominent in size or number of stars compared to other galaxies astronomers have observed. Astronomers estimated that there are between 100 billion stars and 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, of which our sun is not a particularly prominent star, and it is stuck on a peripheral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Nowadays scientists are speaking about other universes, as they uncover more facts about the nature of existence.

If we reflect even briefly on the magnitude of all of this creation, and the orderly nature of how it functions, it becomes inconceivable to think that it is all about our daily struggle for existence, our enjoyments, our arguments and our little life on our little planet whirling around a little sun, in a little solar system in a little galaxy in an enormous universe filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies and trillions of stars, ostensibly having in many cases their own solar systems and planets. Can we truly say we understand the meaning of our existence? It is like a single skin cell on one foot trying to comprehend the complexity and size of the human body and make pronouncements about the meaning of it all. Could that skin cell understand that it is part of a unified being of a magnitude beyond its greatest sense?

The mind cannot encompass or comprehend either the enormity, or the complexity of the universal manifestation. When confronted with this, the only reasonable approach is to quiet the mind, and widen the consciousness to receive the force embodied in all that exists and identify with that force.

In the Rig Veda, Mandala X, Sukta 129, the Hymn of Creation: “Who knows in truth, who would tell us here below. From where was it born, whence this surging creation. The Gods stand below this surging out abroad. Who knows then from whence this took birth. That from where this creation has sprung, does that even contain it, or does it not? He who is the overlord in the supreme infinity, does he even know, or he too knows not.” [riks 6-7 translated by Nolini Kanta Gupta]

The entire creation is one supreme Being, creator, created, container and contained. We are one with the myriad of stars, galaxies, and the universe itself. All that we see around us, as the Upanishads also point out, are One with us. “Thou art That.”

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The Guru [to the Student]: Lift your eyes towards the Sun; He is there in that wonderful heart of life and light and splendour. Watch at night the innumerable constellations glittering like so many solemn watchfires of the Eternal in the limitless silence which is no void but throbs with the presence of a single calm and tremendous existence; see there Orion with his sword and belt shining as he shone to the Aryan fathers ten thousand years ago at the beginning of the Aryan era; Sirius in his splendour, Lyra sailing billions of miles away in the ocean of space. Remember that these innumerable worlds, most of them mightier than our own, are whirling with indescribable speed at the beck of that Ancient of Days whither none but He knoweth, and yet that they are a million times more ancient than your Himalaya, more steady than the roots of your hills and shall so remain until He at his will shakes them off like withered leaves from the eternal tree of the Universe. Imagine the endlessness of Time, realise the boundlessness of Space; and then remember that when these worlds were not, He was, the Same as now, and when these are not, He shall be, still the Same; perceive that beyond Lyra He is and far away in Space where the stars of the Southern Cross cannot be seen, still He is there. And then come back to the Earth and realise who this He is. He is quite near to you. See yonder old man who passes near you crouching and bent, with his stick. Do you realise that it is God who is passing? There a child runs laughing in the sunlight. Can you hear Him in that laughter? Nay, He is nearer still to you. He is in you. He is you. It is yourself that burns yonder millions of miles away in the infinite reaches of Space, that walks with confident steps on the tumbling billows of the ethereal sea; it is you who have set the stars in their places and woven the necklace of the suns not with hands but by that Yoga, that silent actionless impersonal Will which has set you here today listening to yourself in me. Look up, O child of the ancient Yoga, and be no longer a trembler and a doubter; fear not, doubt not, grieve not; for in your apparent body is One who can create and destroy worlds with a breath.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XXIII Power Supreme, pp. 170-171