Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

After staying briefly in Jagannatha Puri, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu embarked on a six-year journey throughout southern India. In one village he met a brahmana named Vasudeva, who suffered from a severe case of leprosy. He embraced Vasudeva, and immediately the leprosy disappeared ( Chaitanya Charitamrita, madhya-lila 7.141).

Upon returning to Jagannatha Puri, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu took part in the famous annual Rathayatra festival. In this festival, the temple deities are mounted on huge wooden chariots with towering colorful canopies, and are taken on a procession through the city. Millions of pilgrims attend the festival and thousands assist in pulling the giant chariots with long ropes. The imposing nature of the scene has come down to us in the term “juggernaut,” which has come to mean an unstoppable force. Juggernaut is a corruption of jagannatha (“lord of the universe”). During one festival, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu divided his followers into seven groups. Each group, equipped with hand cymbals and drums, loudly danced and chanted. Looking at the scene, Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya and the King of Orissa could see that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had expanded himself into seven forms, and was chanting and dancing in each of the seven groups simultaneously ( Chaitanya Charitamrita, madhya-lila 13.52).

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu then visited the sacred town of Vrindavan, the site of Krishna’s appearance in this world five thousand years ago. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is an incarnation of Krishna, who is recognized in the Shrimad Bhagavatam and Bhagavad Gita as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the source of all incarnations. In Vrindavan, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu learned of some reports of a new appearance of Krishna, who was repeating some of his original pastimes. Crowds of people came to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu saying, “Krishna has again manifested Himself on the waters of Kaliya Lake. He dances on the hoods of the serpent Kaliya, and the jewels on those hoods are blazing. Everyone has seen Lord Krishna Himself. There is no doubt about it” ( Chaitanya Charitamrita, madhya-lila 18.94–95). For three days, people repeated this to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. On the third day, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s personal assistant said that he wanted to go and see Krishna. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu sharply replied: “You are a learned scholar, but you have become a fool, being influenced by the statements of other fools. . . . Foolish people who are mistaken are simply causing agitation and making a tumult. Do not become mad. Simply sit down here, and tomorrow night you will go see Krishna.” The next morning, some respectable, intelligent, experienced gentlemen came to see Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and he asked them about the events at the Kaliya Lake. They replied, “At night in Kaliya Lake a fisherman lights a torch in his boat and catches many fish. From a distance, people mistakenly think that they are seeing Krishna dancing on the body of the Kaliya serpent. These fools think that the boat is the Kaliya serpent and the torchlight the jewels on his hoods. People also mistake the fisherman for Krishna.” The gentlemen then said, “Actually Lord Krishna has returned to Vrindavana. That is the truth, and it is also true that people have seen Him. But where they are seeing Krishna is their mistake.” The gentlemen were indirectly indicating that they knew Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was actually an avatar. The special feature of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was that he for the most part concealed his identity as an incarnation of Godhead, so that he could instead teach about how to understand and worship God. For this reason he is sometimes called the channa , or hidden, avatar .

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu spent the last eighteen years of his life in the sacred city of Jagannatha Puri. For the final twelve of these years, he was absorbed in spiritual trance and lived in seclusion in a room in one of the houses near the famous temple complex. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami stated in Chaitanya Charitamrita ( madhya-lila 2.8) that although the doors to the house were locked, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu would sometimes be found at night lying unconscious at the main gate to the Jagannatha Puri temple. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu disappeared in 1534, merging into the deity of Krishna on the altar of the Tota Gopinatha temple.

The Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti)

Although supported by credible observational reports, avatars and Marian apparitions are a religious manifestation of the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence, an idea central to my human devolution concept. The idea of extraterrestrial intelligence involved in the origin of the human species can also be approached from another angle—from the angle of modern science.The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a genuine part of modern materialistic science, which assumes that any extraterrestrial intelligence would be connected with a biological form made of ordinary chemical elements. But, as we shall see, if followed carefully to its natural conclusion, there is an eventual convergence between the kind of extraterrestrial intelligence posited by some modern scientists and the kind posited by various religious traditions, which are more extradimensional than simply extraterrestrial.

In the nineteenth century several scientists proposed making huge mirrors or landscaped signs on the earth that would be visible from great distances in outer space, as a means of signaling our presence to extraterrestrial intelligences. These intelligences would then initiate communication with us. Swift (1990, p. 6) noted:“Mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss suggested planting broad bands of forests in Siberia in the shape of a right-angled triangle. Inside the triangle wheat would be planted to provide a uniform color. An elaboration of this basic scheme would have in cluded squares on each side of the triangle, to form the classic illustration of the Pythagorean theorem. . . . Joseph von Littrow, a Viennese astronomer, is said to have suggested that canals be dug in the Sahara Desert to form geometric figures twenty miles on a side.” This is quite interesting, in connection with modern reports of crop circles. Perhaps alien intelligences have decided that placing landscaped signs on the earth is a good way to communicate with us.

The foundations for modern SETI programs began in 1959, when Cornell University physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Phillip Morrison advocated a systematic search for signals from outer space. They proposed that the signals would most likely be radio signals. Starting in 1960, Frank Drake, who had independently arrived at the same conclusion, began using radio telescopes at the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, to actually search for such signals. His Project Ozma targeted two close stars resembling our sun. Then in

1961, Drake, Cocconi, Morrison, and other scientists, including Carl Sagan, attended a conference on SETI organized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences at Green Bank (Swift 1990, p. 8). Sponsorship by America’s top national science organization removed extraterrestrial intelligence from the fringes of science and placed it within the mainstream. But for the first years of SETI, there was not much funding, and most radio telescope searches focused on only a few stars and a few radio frequencies. In the 1980s searches increased in scope, expanding to full sky surveys on millions of frequencies. These searches were endorsed by scientific committees and supported by modest U.S. government funding of 1.5 million dollars a year. The government of the Soviet Union was also funding SETI research, to an even greater extent than the American government. The Soviet effort was organized by the Section on the Search for Cosmic Signals of Artificial Origin within the Soviet Council on Radio Astronomy (Swift 1990, pp. 16–17).