Evolution
“My Daddy is not a monkey,” he stated in a curiously accented voice. “Is your Daddy a monkey?”
“No,” I replied politely, hiding my astonishment at the ignorance of this line of reasoning.
A friend, who had brought this elder from his church to explain to me once and for all the “truth” about the theory of evolution, was smiling happily. The elder was a kindly old man who seemed sincerely concerned for my welfare. There seemed no point in arguing as he lacked the educational background to understand the concepts involved and was closed to the idea of evolution anyway.
Even as a child I never understood this conflict between science and religion. I felt then that evolution appeared to be part of the mechanism through which creation takes place. What was all the fuss about?
Material science is the endeavor to understand the objective universe around us. Spirituality is the endeavor to bridge the finite with the infinite within. The meeting point, the common ground, between material science and spirituality is the human mind. As we struggle into both the subtler realms of the objective universe and the subtler subjective realms of consciousness, the distance between these two endeavors steadily decreases.
From the point of view of yoga, the entire universe is an internal creation of the Supreme Being and is therefore based in consciousness. The evolution of human consciousness is possible because the unexpressed potentiality of this consciousness already exists in all matter.
Stated another way, evolution is the gradually expanding expression of consciousness in progressive life forms. At the stage of a human being it is possible to actively assist and complete this evolutionary process through the intentional effort of merging the individual consciousness with infinite consciousness.
This effort of merger is what yoga is all about. Meditation is not a belief system; there is no doctrine that must be accepted in order to practice. Meditation is a tool for the exploration of the subjective realm of life, your own consciousness.