By Keith Gunn*

Evolutionary biologists have criticized God Speaks in various publications from time to time, because the progression the soul is described as making in GS is not parallel to their current understanding of the sequence of the evolution of the various species.

I don’t recall the specifics, but the essence of the argument is, “How could the soul have evolved from fish to worm, as GS asserts, when worms preceded fish in the evolutionary sequence?” In other words, at a certain time in the evolution of the earth, there were worms but there weren’t any fish.

God Speaks describes the path an evolving soul is currently making on its way to the human form. It doesn’t describe how the soul may have progressed at another, unthinkably ancient time…

To my mind, this misses the point by quite a bit. God Speaks describes the path an evolving soul is currently making on its way to the human form. It doesn’t describe how the soul may have progressed at another, unthinkably ancient, time when different species with different experiences were present on the earth. So this criticism doesn’t, to my mind, have any bearing on the state of creation today, which is all GS seems to me to be describing.

Beloved Baba once said that in the age of the dinosaurs there was a three-headed beast of huge size, but it isn’t there now, and its sanskaras are not apparently necessary for souls passing through the various forms at this current time. Some adjustment has been made since the age of the dinosaurs, since the dinosaurs had sanskaras and souls, and at some time in the past it was necessary for souls to pass through that state, but it obviously isn’t now necessary.

Indeed Bhau asserts in “The Nothing and the Everything” that the earth may not have been the location of Avataric advents in some (sufficiently ancient) time. The idea is that a given planet is used by God as the place to host the Avatar and the place where souls gain their advancement and ultimately God Realization. But when that planet is no more, or exceeds some threshold of pollution or self destruction (at, for example, the end of a Kali Yuga) another planet takes its place and God incarnates there, and we all flock there to work on our spiritual progress.

So, it follows that the Earth wasn’t used as the host of the Avatar until a certain point in its evolution, which might have been quite a bit after the evolution of the species had completed in more or less the current form.

There is another argument that we are busily destroying species; so perhaps this implies that in some future day the evolution of souls will be blocked at a certain point, when (say) some human-engineered virus kills off all chickens or dogs or monkeys, leaving souls “backed up” waiting for the chance to experience monkey/chicken/ dog sanskaras.

To me this is just sophistry, but people play these kinds of mind games all the time and nothing (happily) comes of it. “God proposes and disposes,” as Baba is quoted as having said.

( *Excerpts from an E-mail sent by the US based author on Feb 20, 2009 by way of comments on a column ‘Meher Baba Speaks’ that focused on issues related to God Speaks)