8 January 2002, 12:24am IST
K M Gupta.
The upanishads’ theory about the universe in brief is: ‘‘all was atman or brahman or god, in the beginning. from it space was conceived and delivered. from the expansion and distortion of space, the world was born. the world is the vivarta or translation, vikara or disfiguration, parinama or evolution or mutation and prakshepa or projection of atman’’. according to the upanishads, the stuff with which the world is made or the ‘world matter’ mutated because, ‘‘it was ‘in heat’’’. it ‘desired’ bahu syam prajayeyeti or procreation and propagation of itself. due to the rising temperature, the world matter started tapasa cheeyate brahma or to expand, according to the mundaka upanishad. expansion climaxed in ‘explosion’ and the mouth of the expanding ‘fireball’ burst open with a tam abhyatapat or a big bang. with the big bang, the sound aum thundered and energy flowed out. as the ‘world matter’ expanded due to heat, it was moulded into a three-dimensional space. the constituent sounds a, u and m in aum are the developed three-metric dimensions of brahman. in other words, aum is space. ‘aum-space’ is the first stage of brahman’s tasmad etasyad atmanah akashah sambhootah or mutation. with aum-space and prana or energy flowing out at once, the process of the universe evolving changed gear. space and energy are twins. each runs into the other. energy is infused in space. due to the fall in the temperature after the big bang, space mutated into akashad vayu or plasma. plasma evolved into vayoragnih yadushnam tadagnih or gas. gas turned into agnerapah yad rasam tadapah or liquid. liquid turned into adbhyah prithivih yat kathinam sa prithivi or solid. thus the pancha bhutas are the five successive stages of the fall in temperature after the big bang — the five successive stages of distortion of the energy with which the world matter is made up of, or the five states of matter. vedanta describes space as the first state of matter. the ‘origin of all the births’ — the birth of the universe, is thus caused by heat or a heat birth. god created all by ‘heating himself up’, which is described in the upanishads as, sa tapastaptwa idam sarvam asrijata — yadidam kim cha. as we know, its pralaya, or death or maximum entropy, which is a ‘heat death’, in which temperature is level or uniform all over the space. the birth, death and life of the universe depend upon the generation of heat. the temperature of the ‘baby universe’ or ‘baby space’ immediately after the big bang was immense. the generation of the universe in this way is a measure of god’s ‘love’. that was the seething intensity of his ‘labour’. before heating up to the point of the big bang, the world matter was nothing and this is described in the upanishads. heat shaped the first being out or asatah and ajayata or nothing. without heat, the world matter would have remained nothing, never coming out into being. without heat, god would have been ‘deadwood’. thus, in a very real sense, heat is the creator; heat is god. taittiriya upanishad expresses it bluntly, indubitably and repeatedly as tapo brahma or heat is god. that is why our rishis and munis were doing tapas. tapas has many forms or stages. the fiercest of it is done in the midst of pancha agnis or blazing fire on all four sides, and the blazing sun over the head. tapas is the technique of raising the mind’s temperature or consciousness to the level of god’s, and thus attaining moksha. as temperature or consciousness rises, layers of the phenomenal being burn away and in the end the fire alone remains. now there is no fuel left to burn down, and hence this ‘fire’ still burning, after having burnt all the fuel, is god. this is exemplified in the bhrigu valli of taittiriya upanishad. how is it that brahman catches fire first and what was the initial matchstick? in ‘quantum fluctuation’, fields crystallise into particles by self-excitation. this self-excitation is inherent in brahman — it is the matchstick. this self-excitation is god’s godhood; without it god would forever remain ‘dead’.
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