"The Longest Story Ever Told"
We do not know why this is so, we cannot explain why it should be so, except that there is a yearning of that innate divinity seeking to manifest more and more. The spontaneous arrangement of the atoms in an ordered structure, we call the crystal. Different types and variations of crystals and minerals take birth – another world is created.
And again these minerals come together, live together and a still newer harmony is created, a new level of organisation appears as for the first time they begin to cooperate as one unit built from diverse components. And the protozoa is born, the first form of life as we recognise it. But then evolution does not stop there, the consciousness hidden within aspires towards still higher states of self-expression. The protozoa grows in complexity. It becomes better organised, more complex, more diverse. And then suddenly there is another great transition: groups of cells come together and choose to live together as one unit. Rudimentary forms of plants appear. With the coming of plants, a new level of consciousness appears: the consciousness of sensation. Until now the consciousness was limited within itself, if at all there was any; but now for the first time the consciousness can sense what is happening outside itself and even react to it in the more developed plants. The plant-consciousness grows even further in complexity expressing itself in myriad shapes, myriad sizes, forms, colours, and different grades of organisation.
The thrust of the evolutionary aspiration continues and brings forth a new level of consciousness and form. Free at last from being tied down to earth, the fish swims in water. Evolution then steps on to land. And the tortoise appears and still other animals follow: a whole new range of evolutionary expression. With the coming of animals, a higher level of consciousness is manifested, a consciousness of awareness and emotion; not just sensation, not just blind automatic reaction to circumstances outside but an awareness and emotion of pain and joy, suffering and happiness.
At each new level of manifestation we find that the variety and expression of the form and consciousness are wider in range and quality than ever before. And in the animal you see the evolutionary movement literally explode.
First we have the physical animal, worried only about the physical life, food, eating, sleeping, and surviving in its own territory. And then comes the vital animal, which stakes its claims and starts dominating over others, controlling, grabbing, building its own territory and kingdom. When more refined it is a royal animal. And there are still higher forms of animals which have some rudimentary function of a sensory mind, something close to thinking but not yet thought. We see in some of the more developed animals many near-human qualities. In the monkey for example there is an urge, an aspiration for that mental consciousness which it feels is somewhere beyond it but which it cannot attain because its physical nature is not capable of holding it.
Mother used to say that she enjoyed looking at pictures of monkeys because she saw in them the constant aspiration to break out of that limitation, a seeking for the mental consciousness, which she did not find even in human beings! That is why she liked to see monkeys.
The monkey cannot hold that higher consciousness of mind because its physical equipment is not capable of holding it. In the same way, the lower forms of animals cannot hold the vital consciousness because their physical nature is not capable of it. For example, a snail’s nervous system is not capable of any type of powerful emotions, it would simply burn itself out.
There is something very interesting which we observe here. The external form and organisation is decided by the consciousness which seeks to manifest through it. It is not, as Darwin would have us believe, that because the form evolved and the nervous system became more complex that there was mind. Quite on the contrary, it is that consciousness, that innate divinity seeking to manifest itself in higher forms, that guides the process of evolution, the growth of cells, the choice of the forms of animals so that the animal can hold its next stage of higher consciousness. The consciousness creates the form suitable for it.
