Evolution is neither a local nor a linear process even though it may appear so to our limited vision of things. There is a deep bond, an interconnectedness of the entire creation and we cannot touch one point without simultaneously touching the others, although indirectly. All is a single plan, a single chain, a lesson that we are being made to learn with much struggle and pain.
Yet we continue to live as if we areseparate single units with no relation to all the rest. It is this sense of separateness that is the grand illusion that we must dispel. It is this that is the mother of all evils and ills that we experience. It is not the world that is an illusion; it is our ignorant perception and consequent ignorant dealing with it that is the problem.
Neither is evolution a linear movement in one straight ascending line. There are many complex elements that constitute even the simplest of all things here. When one element moves along a certain path, there is a pull and pressure along all the others. Some of these may be willing to follow the evolutionary lead, others may not be ready or willing to move, still others may resist the advance. The result is a progressive disequilibrium. To readjust the scale, nature goes back to an earlier stage so as to prepare those who are not yet ready. Though this may seem like a relapse or a backward movement, it is in fact only a preparation for a greater upsurge, a more definitive leap, a more complete evolutionary jump.
What happens thus in an individual taking the path of concentrated evolution through yoga happens also at the collective level, albeit at a much larger scale. This is what seems to be happening in times as these. Humanity is going back to work upon something it has forgotten in its haste to advance. Let us hope it will keep in its memory the hard lessons learnt and will not need to relapse again and again into one of these nightmares that haunt its life, nor fall into deep somnolence mistaking it for peace, nor create a multiplication of comforts for progress.
