Did God create the world?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner (Q): Did God create the world?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Your world is with you at the center. Brahm is just the substratum. It has been referred to in various ways in Vedantic literature; sometimes it’s called the Substratum, sometimes the Background, sometimes the Space, the Ether in which everything is happening, sometimes the Watcher, sometimes the Progenitor, sometimes the Mega-controller who operates only at the meta-level. But the idea behind all these expressions has one thing in common — Brahm has no interest in any participation at the micro-level.

At the micro-level, it’s your own doing. It’s the play of your own tendencies. Your own tendencies make you see a problem where there is none. You imagine, and then you do a lot to get rid of that problem; and then obviously, to do a lot, you create the entire space in which a lot of doing can happen, no? If you want to play a game, you cannot just play it, right?

You want to play golf or tennis or cricket, right? You cannot just randomly and suddenly initiate the game. If you’re a serious player as we all are, then you in fact require to build an entire stadium. Why? Just because you wanted to play one game; that’s what desire does. Because it has to do what it has to do, therefore, it has to create an entire universe; that’s the reason why our universe exists, so that we may do just a few things.

Even if you have to play a ten-over match, you need to create an entire infrastructure for it, no? Our life is that ten over match; amounting to nothing, nothing much at all, but what do we do? We build an entire… Like somebody deciding to fly to a place just 200 kilometers away; the place might be just 200 kilometers away, but if you have decided to fly, then what all do you need to build? What do you need to build?

Imagine; you actually need to launch satellites, you need rockets; you need rockets that go beyond the atmosphere of the Earth. You would be flying well within the limits of the atmosphere. Needless to talk of all the infrastructure that you need to build on the ground — the airports and such little things, just because you wanted to experience one flight. So, just because we want to live that…