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Online Satsang with Jeffrey Carr
October 5, 2019 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Jeffrey Carr, Senior AMS Teacher
Satsang & Reading from: ‘Which Came First?’ by Gururaj Ananda Yogi
Saturday, October 5th, 2019, 5:30 pm East Coast Time
To be broadcast live on YouTube from the AMS – NY Chapter Fall Retreat
at the new Ashram for Unfoldment in New York
Excerpt from ‘Which Came First?’
Gururaj: There is an age-old question that has never been answered: what came first, the chicken or the egg? Now the argument has always been that if the egg was first, then who laid the egg? And if the chicken was first, then where did the egg come from to create the chicken? The answer is this, that the egg came first and not the chicken. The reason is that through the entire process of evolution from when we had that Big Bang, as you know of from the Big Bang theory, the power and the energy that was generated made the eggs. And there was not only one egg that was made, but as those energies shot out, many eggs were created. This is because, in the process of evolution, there has to be a life force. A similar question might be, who came first, the man or the woman? They came simultaneously into being through the very same process.
In the egg there was life from the beginning. But the difference is that it was an unlaid egg. It created itself. In other words, it was the (product of a) causeless cause, like everything else in the universe. Right from the primal amoeba, many forms of life started developing, because there always has been life. If you want to put it this way, there has never been a time, since beginning-less time, that life has not been. Life has always been ever existent. That theory about Adam and Eve—that God made Adam, and then from his eleventh rib Eve was made—that is perhaps very symbolic, but there’s no truth in it. Why relegate a woman to that lowly position of being made from a rib? All of life came about simultaneously, first in the form of energy and then with that energy combining itself with other energies in the universe to form different combinations that in turn produce different products.
So, how old is the egg? The egg is as old as the primal energy, which is ageless. And in the development of the egg, the egg hatched and so the chicken came about. And yet in the chicken there was a male and a female counterpart, even in the primal egg. For example, in a man or a woman, there is some woman in a man, and there is a man existing in the woman. But the man naturally being a man, those qualities were more dominant; and in a woman, her particular qualities were more dominant, so that she became a woman. But always remember that the egg came first and not the chicken.
In everything we see around us, we have life. Nothing exists without life, for life itself is existence. There can never be death. Death is just but a transformation of your physical being, that is returning to its original elements; water to water, fire to fire and so on. The five basic elements that constitute the entire universe will go back into their original states. That is what the Eastern scriptures call the “night of Brahma”. The night of Brahma is when a total balance takes place, and the active forces reach such a high level of vibration that it all seems just still. Just as a top spinning at a very high speed will seem still to you, but it is still spinning. It is there.
The three qualities of sattva, rajas and tamas will always be there. But all the conflicts in the universe around us, or in ourselves, are because those three elements are not in balance. Not being in perfect balance, they war against each other, which we know as conflicts within us. But this is necessary for evolution. The contraction and expansion are both equally necessary; one cannot exist without the other. In your egg, you will find the white and you will find the yellow. In its own process within itself, the yellow is influencing the white and the white is influencing the yellow. There is a very subtle motion that is forever there, and everything else cannot exist at all without motion. Motion is that which makes the world go around. So, if we accept motion, which we have to accept, we must accept the conflicts as well. It is only conflict that can produce motion, and motion in turn produces conflict. It is like the egg producing the hen and then the hen producing the egg. It is a cycle, which goes on and on and on. We find the egg still exists in the chicken, the acorn exists in the oak tree, and the entire oak tree exists in the acorn. If the tree did not exist in the acorn, there would be no tree at all.
The goal of life is that we go back to the original source that we are. The Big Bang took place many millions and millions of years ago, when everything was sucked up into the black hole, so that it could not exude any light. And before the black hole there were white holes as well, and they still exist. The universe itself also runs in cycles. It goes into a stage called “pralaya” (or dissolution) only to explode again. At this very moment, there are thousands of stars even bigger than the sun that are exploding. And all the little bits that explode from a star create new worlds, new solar systems, new galaxies. It is always an on–going process. If it was not on– going, then you could say the universe will be destroyed. But there is no destruction at all. If you reach the finest point of matter, that is even finer than the atom itself, it is there, was there and forever will be there. Just so, your egg and the chicken will also be there forever. (cont.)