On Science, Evolution, and Mahapralaya – Part 2 (Final)
Shri continued:
Along with these and many other such theories accompanied by their proofs, marvels and wonders will take place. A great miracle will occur, and the whole world will be in a stir. For now is the end of an eon that culminates in a Pralaya* (pralayno vakhat, etle ant, najhdik iivato jay chhet); during this period certain movements will occur. In the past there have taken place innumerable such Pralayas over crores of years, and the different Avatars who have made their appearance at different times in the past are like drops in the Ocean of Paramanand (Truth). Though each Avatar, coming after ages as a separate drop, remained aloof from the others, each knew, “I am infinite, I am anant.” Thus involutions$ and evolutions follow each other, all arising out of Chaitanya, attaining to the highest state after countless ages. Again, after the appearance of innumerable such “atoms,” which is to say, Avatars, all of them one with the Ocean, Mahapralaya occurs, and then another Mahapralaya, and then another, and so on and on. But the meaning of it all is that the different Avatars coming over the ages, and even the succession of Mahapralayas, are all really One and the Same, that is, all drops in the one Ocean of Truth, all rays from the same Fountain of Light.
* In Hindu cosmology (particularly in the Puranas) “Pralaya” usually means the periodic destruction that occurs at the end of a kalpa a “day of Brahma,” which lasts for four billion, three hundred and twenty million (4,320,000,000) earth years. Pralaya can also refer to the dissolution that occurs after a complete life of Brahma which happens every 311 trillion, forty billion years. “Mahapralaya” is sometimes used to designate this second type of Pralaya; by this meaning one Mahapralaya takes place after a great many Pralayas. “Pralaya” and “Mahapralaya” can also designate the periods of time in which the universe lies dormant and latent (asleep, as it were) after such dissolutions.
$ During this period Baba used the word “involution” not to refer to the process of spiritual return and advancement trough the six planes that culminates in God-realization, a meaning the word came to carry from the time of the publication of God Speaks, but to the withdrawal of consciousness during the return to sound sleep. Involution in this sense applies on both the cosmic and individual scales; and its counter and opposite is “evolution,” which means the expansion of consciousness from sound sleep to full wakefulness. These two words are used in exactly this way in finite Intelligence. p. 15.
– “Meher Baba’s Tiffin lectures”, p328
28-November-1926; Lonavala