The Origin of the World

One of the capacities present within Buddha jnana (the deep, penetrating knowledge of a Buddha) is the ability to look back through the atomic nucleus of a cell and see previous existences, even back to the very beginning of the world. Through this, one can see, almost as if watching it happen, how the soil of the earth first formed, how the essence of soil came to be, how the earth existed for a time in a state like melted chocolate, how life arose on top of that, and how, in the earliest period, human beings existed in a form more like trees, or like shadows. All of this can be seen through the nuclear matter of a cell. From this we can infer that an immense quantity of information has always been contained within the nuclei of these cells. This is an experience that comes through a vision of knowledge, not through ordinary observation.

From an Empty Desert to Living Beings

What appeared first was a background like a desert. After that, plants and vegetation began to appear. Creatures killing and eating one another became visible. Human beings were very few. At that point things began to be felt in greater detail, and the vision moved further back to see what lay even before that.

At that stage, the human race appeared in an ape-like form: faces long and elongated, bodies covered in fur, with no visible tails. Going back further still, what appeared was a fertile-looking earth. Before that stage there was something like a black, plate-like mass, and it was within that mass that life appeared to arise. It is difficult to say with certainty whether water existed as water in the way we know it; that is simply how it was perceived at the time.

In that early period, human beings had a form more like trees: not simply having branches and leaves, but bodies like large, still shadows, cast as if from black rubber, with long, unmoving limbs. They exchanged information not through speech but through the brain. These forms were felt as humans, though they showed no outward response. In time, these forms gained the capacity for small movements, and their level of communication increased. All of these characteristics arose from that original mass.

Before Matter: Contraction, Expansion, and the Forming of Worlds

Going back beyond even this era, what existed was something like an empty expanse, similar to the vastness of space.

Further back still, there was a state of pressure and depressurisation, much like the way water is drawn toward a hand placed in it. But here the scale was vast: a process of expansion and contraction, in which the dust particles scattered throughout the universe drew together.

This is something like what happens where a sun is formed: intense pressure builds at that point, and the elementary particles needed are drawn together there. Energy channels itself toward particular locations and condenses at each of those points; the condensation and the coming into orbit happen together: they are not two separate events but one. The material sphere and its orbit are, in truth, the same thing. The components and combinations relevant to life were drawn to one place, to one planet, while different components were drawn to other planets. For life to arise on another planet, these same components would need to be established there, in the way that a cup of hot water, taken into an air-conditioned room, cools because of the exchange with its new surroundings; such a transformation, together with its source of energy, may take time to occur.