Brahma is known In Hinduism and Buddhism as the creative energy of the universe. The Divine Trinity is Brahma, The Creator, Vishnu The Preserver, and Shiva The Destroyer. In Srimad Bhagavatam Brahma States that there are countless Brahmas, and many greater than him. This translates to saying there are countless universes beyond number, and many greater than ours. In The scriptures there is such detail given to each and every aspect of creation, from the cycles of time to the elements, how each sense came to be, which deity presides over which sense, how the three gunas sattva, rajas, and tamas (goodness, passion and ignorance) become agitated and form the worlds, and much more. Here we will focus on the vast spans of time categorized in the scriptures.
In Hinduism, a day of Brahma is 12 hours long, or equal to 4.32 billion human years. This is based on the following calculations:
- Brahma’s life span is 100 years: This is 36,000 Kalpas
- One day of Brahma consists of a thousand cycles of four yugas:
Satya: 1,728,000 years
Treta-yuga: 1,296,000 years
Dvapara-yuga: 864,000 years
Kali-yuga: 432,000 years
A kalpa is divided into 14 manvantara periods, each lasting 71 Yuga Cycles (306,720,000 years). A 24-hour day-night period of Brahma is 8 billion 640 million human years long.
At the start of Brahma’s life the entire universe manifests and at the end of it, it pulls back into itself, into God and remains unmanifest for huge periods of time before manifesting again. So you can imagine on what is called the causal plane of pure idea, each moment billions of Brahmas (universes) are popping in and out of existence. Any being could attain the state of being Brahma, including you and me. It’s a very exalted position in any universe, although this is not the ultimate goal of liberation, it is true that if you do enough work on your consciousness, you too could create a universe. In Cermonial Magick, it is said that when one completes the Great Work, of crossing samsara they can create their own universe.
In Buddhism, the Buddhas are said to create pure Buddha lands. The Buddha we know of, Siddhartha Gotama said these words speaking of himself – “And there I was, Brahma, the great Brahma, the unvanquished victor, the all-seeing, the all-powerful. Thirty-six times I was Sakka, ruler of the devas and many hundreds of times I was a wheel-turning monarch, a king of righteousness.”
So how does this help YOU? First, we must realize that we have been on this wheel of birth and death, this cycle through lives, for these vast spans of time. This breaks your huge attachment to this lifetime and gets you to expand your mind a bit, to put things into perspective and to understand the nature of good and bad karma and the importance of spiritual practice and meritorious deeds for two reasons. The first being to have more favourable births with less suffering and the second is to attain Moksha – liberation from the karmic-caused cycle that propels us from life to life. This is also known as samsara – the great wandering. The Buddha also tells his monks that for the time they have been reborn over and over again, they have cried more tears than the water in the 4 great oceans and for all the times their bodies have been killed and slaughtered they have shed more blood than all of the water in the 4 great oceans. To sum it up: You are Not Who You Normally Think Yourself To Be.
When the worlds dissolve and contract back into the unmanifest, it is said in the scriptures many times that certain Loka’s, certain higher spiritual/energetic worlds stay intact and that if one attains to those they are not subject to the universal destruction of their universe. One of the leading theories in modern physics also states that the known and observable universe is continuously expanding at a rapid rate and that eventually it may slow, cool, and through a gravitational or dark/antimatter force pull back into its origin point. This cycle continues on and on in various forms forever. That is even more profound and scary to think about.. It had no beginning and it had no end.
In this cycle, our greatest safety is in cultivating wisdom, compassion and insight. We work to purify our chakras and auras, burning up old karma and creating as little new karma as possible. There are infinite methods on how to go about this, but it is essential that one makes a great effort as soon as one as Jesus says “Has the ears to hear”, or the eyes to see and understand this truth. I will leave you with these words of the Buddha, so powerful and profound which describe the result of good merit, and can be fuel for the fire of your sadhana (spiritual practice). “ For I know full we,, monks, that for a long time I experienced desirable, wished for, dear and agreeable results from often performing meritorious deeds. Having Cultivated for 7 years a mind of loving-kindness, for seven eons (uncountable billions of years) I did not return to this world. Whenever the eon contracted I reached the plane of streaming radiance, and when the eon expanded I arose in an empty divine mansion.”
Hold this in your consciousness, realize the universe is all within you and still, Be Here Now.
