In the eyes of the Vedic people, everything in the world was infused with divinity, and they saw the gods themselves as belonging to the everyday world of men. Their gods were not entities outside the world, but personifications of the forces of nature. And since nearly everything in nature was personified as a god, or was seen as an attribute of some god or goddess, Aryans lived, in a real sense, in the thick of divine activity.
Vedic Aryans saw the gods not as creators of the universe, but as part of the creation. However, in later Vedic times Prajapati (the Lord of Beings, here identified as Brahma) came to be designated as the creator, but not so much an active creator as the being from whom creation emanated. ‘Prajapati moves in the womb,’ says the Yajur-veda. ‘Being unborn, he is born in many shapes ... In him all the worlds stand.’ As Keith comments, ‘The idea of world creation is always in the Vedic literature regarded in the light of sending out of something already there rather than of mere bringing into being.’ There was really no creation, only evolution — the universe evolved out of its own latent potential.
Abraham Eraly, Gem in the Lotus. The Seeding of Indian Civilisation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
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