I wish to place before you as a Key perhaps the most important of all, the basis for all the rest; or we could say that contains all the rest: the Circle and its various divisions. Here I will discuss mainly one: the circle divided into four quarters. This is the basis of our new language (which the Mother expressed the need for when trying to explain to Satprem the simultaneity of Being and Becoming on 18.4.1961). but unless this is seen in the context of the 12-stage zodiac, the Circle is devoid of Knowledge: it just IS but it does not speak to us in a new way, a new language.
To give an example we have the third quarter, the Mental – but at the same time it is the Kshatriya, the third of the four castes. (Further, it is the location of the 6, the Cosmic Divine – but that is another story). This third quarter is where Death is located in the human progression. The question of evolution or the Becoming enters here. The progression through the same twelve, small or larger demarcations of Time, is always the same ‘language’. In other words, be it an individual or a cosmic dimension, the process is one.
To sum up, Death is located in the Mental Quarter. This indicates the current stage of human development progressing on to the next stage above Mind. I have written time and again that exclusivist religions of the Piscean Age made this ‘death’ a fixed and static point – the end of the road; beyond is a blank which could be filled with whatever nonsense was required to imprison the human consciousness. In the parlance of the New Way one can present this visually as the absence (to our conscious experience) of the fourth quarter. The visual aid is that the supramentalisation of the species is precisely the opening up before human evolution of that ‘missing’ quarter. That is Swar, the solar world. When Sri Aurobindo writes of bringing the Life Divine to Earth, of establishing it here, it is another way of saying ‘opening up the last quarter’.
This is why the Time Factor is so important. To integrate that quarter into one’s lived experience Time must be the ally (see the Gnostic Circle). When we are born we bring with us compact time, the compact Zero of the sacred triads. That Zero (our births) gives forth the One/1, and thereafter it is sequential time (the Becoming). But in the Supermind the experience is simultaneous: one comes rooted in compact Being and moves through, or is the instrument of that Being as it expresses Itself, or to experience Itself sequentially in the Becoming (of Itself). Therefore it is said that the purpose of material creation is that the Supreme knows himself – i.e. he uses the eye of consciousness in the individual (as lodged in one’s soul) to see himself in the Becoming (know himself in the experience of Becoming through extension). It is always that Being supporting the extension – therefore it has to be simultaneous, otherwise the material dimension would collapse into a void, become a black hole that simply does not SEE, where the light of consciousness is trapped).Material creation is therefore a vision that unfolds, no better way to express it.
The Circle tells you all this and much more because finally it is Number, when seen as the essence of the Circle, which then offers applicability via the calendar which is, again, nothing other than the circle divided into 12, the Mother’s symbol.
Thea, I have never thought about NUMBER being the essence of the Circle. I’ve understood the need to understand number in terms of the circle … as divisions of the whole, which cannot be properly seen in linear terms. But the idea that number is the ‘essence’ of the Circle takes me a bit deeper into this KEY and how it is/must be applied if one wants to fathom and enter into the Supramental or 4th quadrant of the evolutionary cycle journey. One must come to understand the sacred structure or geometry of the play … to better understand the nature and essence of WHAT is at play, i.e. the Divine Self. Any more thoughts from you Thea regarding number as the essence of the circle would be welcome. It is such a profound (compressed/dense/full) statement and I suspect it may take some unpacking for some readers. It’s so simple a teaching yet the mind is so twisted up in the complexities and multiple choices of life that I imagine it is not in a position to appreciate it much. Most spiritually minded people today would agree that we are all One, but the idea that Number is so essential to knowing THAT oneness is quite foreign. There are people who are interested in numerology, and in India there is appreciation for at least the number 9 … but they are only scratching the surface of what needs to be understood about number and its link with Divinity, with the Life Divine … which you have brought forth in your work.
To make it clear how Number is the essence of the 0, at least according to my realisation, please see TenthDay1, the chapter where I write to the Mother about the remarkable breakthroughs I was making in the first days of September. It was that realisaiton that brought out Number as the essence of the Circle.
I SAW the circle as 9, always by the use of mathematics of unity – the circle consisting of 360 degrees, reducing to the full tone 9, the ’seed reduction’. Now, the problem with all of this is that people assume these equations to be arbitrary, and this is enhanced by the notion that it all has nothing to do with spirituality, which is BEYOND ALL THAT MOVES, and hence can be measured. The problem is that they do not see or understand WHO is arranging all these ‘arbitrary’ things. If it is truly ALL ONE, then the actual numbr system must be a part of that Oneness, which is the Supreme Consciousness in manifestation.
Here we enter the Supermind. Those experiences of September 1972 emblazoned Number in my consciousness which WAS/IS the Supreme in extension of himself. This is when you enter the Supermind because it is the reconciliation of that paradox: simultaneity of Being and Becoming. I have written about this connected to the Mother’s experience as another post in ‘The Supramental Yoga’ today. The discourses we are carrying on in this website is taking the next step collectively, incorporating the next circle. I am clearly in a teaching phase; using the Mother’s expriences and adding mine is really a wonderful way to explain exactly what the Supramental Manifestaiton is about.
To make it clearer, the September 1972 realisation was a sequence to the experience of the red Sun in May of that year. These were all of the Supermind, but I did not realise it at the time. However, the May experience was STATIC – that’s the key difference. In September it all started TO MOVE. That very tail coming out of the supramental sun was set in motion – enter Number and Geometry. The Circle is the manifestation. Therefore it is MEASURED, MEASUREABLE.
Let’s keep going. This is getting very exciting!
As you know, I had answered at length the above questions you pose; for some reason it was lost in cyber space and could not be retrieved. I doubt I can reproduce what seemed to flow so nicely – but perhaps it was lost because it was not right – time and space. Who can say…
In my experience there is no separation in these matters. This is because of certain experiences I had in the Ashram when the Mother was present. They cemented in my consciousness the Oneness of it all. The first breakthrough came in May of 1972 when I had the vision of the Supramental Sun – though at the time I did not see it as ‘supra-mental’. I recorded this in 10th Day 1, if you recall. The vision was remarkable and left its physical effects as well; which made it all the more indelible. The ‘tail’ that extended from the red-orange Sun was made of many geometric figures to form this square tail. (All of these elements of the vision-dream are symbols of the Supermind, according to Sri Aurobindo, the Sun, the Square, the colour of the Sun.) It was like a Velasquez painting – Las Meninas, for example: a moment of eternity captured in all its intensity.
That was only the beginning, and it left me ripe for the next which answers your questions specifically. The next experiences, covering the first 9 days of September 1972, set in motion the static vision of May; dynamism was added, and with it came Number and all the rest. Symbols were emblazoned in my consciousness almost as living beings.
It was then that I experienced in its fullest intensity the 9 as the essence of the Circle. It was all rather simplistic: the tool was the mathematics of unity, or reduction to a seed digit, those whole tones I often write about. Every circle, any circle in whatever context consists of 360 degrees (the circle-globe of the Earth as well; this is reduced to 9 which in turn is the number of the Divine Mother – because the Circle is the entire universal manifestation: Everything is contained in the Circle; all forms come out of the Circle. It is THAT, all that IS.
Relating all this today makes it rather dry and inconsequential, but in the experience it was revolutionary because everything CAME ALIVE. Not mentally by essentially. Along with this was the perfection of the Manifestation, of everything that IS at each moment. It was a sort of Brahman Consciousness which is coveted by yogis of many paths. But there was a huge difference which I was not aware of at the time.
The difference with my realisation and others that are apparently the same, was that this was on the backdrop of the Supramental Canvas, we could say and therefore rooted in matter, where the others are always attained by rising above into the Self beyond the material manifestation. And it was a controlled, organic development that followed the static vision of entry into the supramental plane. Clearly what happened in May 1972 was a penetration UP THERE. What happened in the following September was fully DOWN HERE. That is where movement comes in: the flow of time as recorded on our planet. Thus that Circle had its divisions as in the Mother’s symbol.
(As I write I am aware that we cannot really separate the Supermind from matter, from the material dimension, or this universe of 9. It makes no sense outside – what might that be? – of the universal manifestation and hence of all that moves.)
The reason spiritually-minded people do not appreciate this is because essentially they ALL deny Movement. In TNW1 There is a chapter entitled The Truth of that which Moves. This is the essence of my contribution. It is to bring forth that truth based on the lived experience within the boundaries of our Time and Space. It is no good to have the experience UP THERE, as I had had in May 1972. The issue is to live it here; the vision itself was telling me that: the square tail consisting of countless geometric forms swept down to Earth and passed right in front of the balcony where I was standing. I then took a morsel of the solar stuff that was woven through the symbols and thereby set off a physical repercussion (which lasted for all the years I was in the Ashram). It seemed that the body itself had to be made ready to take the next step. I had to have the physical vessel somehow prepared for receiving what was to come, or for going further and deeper into these truths and their application.
You recall what Sri Aurobindo wrote? – to become the thing symbolised. What happened when movement was added was that becoming – which is the core of my work.
I don’t think this third phase of the Supramental Manifestation can be successively completed unless this question of the truth of that which moves is cemented in the evolutionary mind of humanity. This is where we part ways with all former spirituality; this is when it becomes something else, that third thing.
This all boils down to Measure. UP THERE (wherever – out of the material manifestation) there is nothing to measure. Only when movement enters (the universal manifestation) can we introduce measure. But in my May vision, there were geometric forms – i.e. that step once removed from the physical, truly penetrating to the dimension of essence via geometry.
As an aside, it is amusing that Swallor de Lubicz (sp?) and his followers claim that women cannot engage in geometry WHICH IS TOO ABSTRACT FOR THEM. Obviously the geometry of time changes all that – veritably the domain of Woman. Geometry abstract? My lord, what a false perception!)
The interesting part is that if we probe deeply we realise that it is only in this 9th Manifestation that any true appreciation of the essence of the universal manifestation can come about. For that a number of elements have to converge – the number system, the full geography of the Earth, and so on. I have written time and again that this 9th is the time of Birth – and that until now everything was simply the foetus in gestation, hence NOT BORN. This is a tremendous statement, if you think about it, because that ‘everything’ is truly EVERYTHING. (I will discuss this later together with an entry in the Mother’s Agenda). It is now that all these ‘abstracts’ are materialised.
To conclude, I was in such a state of rapture in the throes of the September experiences, seeing the perfection of each moment that I almost did not want to breathe for fear of disturbing that perfection of each moment, of everything that is. That would have been the be-all end-all for anyone else, on any of the known paths; and yet shortly thereafter I was pulled out of that state and made to realise how it was just the beginning of the New Way. That silence was the Zero-Womb, the Seed; from that the true glories of the Supermind would evolve. My writings from that time, starting with Symbols and the Question of Unity reflected this newness. The truly gratifying part came after, with the evolution from that Seed of what followed. That was just the beginning. For everyone else on a spiritual path, it would be the culmination.
To conclude, I have written about essence and form. Put this way, the circle is itself FORM in the sense that it IS the universe (‘the symbol is the thing symbolised’), or as Plato put it so nicely, God geometrises. Within every single ‘form’ there is essence. When dealing with geometric ‘forms’ that are a step removed from dense materiality, we could say, that essence will also take the form of something ‘less material’ like Number; hence 9. But to ‘see’ that there has to be the realisation I had in September 1972 when it all CAME ALIVE.
That is what this third phase of the Work is about: it is the Vital, it is Life and the movement that makes all living things possible, that makes the universe itself possible.
Thea
22.4.2015
Thea, Apparently your first comment was lost so that you could write more on the subject!
I opened The Tenth Day of Victory, Vol. 1 to look for the passages you have pointed to, and opened directly to Chapter 30 where you describe your realizations regarding the 9 and the circle and such. The description of your 18 May 1972 vision of the Supramental Sun and substance is in Chapter 25 (pp. 181-184).
These Chapters are contained within Part 5 of the book which begins with a quote from Sri Aurobindo’s ‘The Synthesis of Yoga’ on Vijnana or Gnosis which is relevant to a current forum discussion on science and the 9/6/3/0-1 formula I believe (as well as other discussions on health and the supramental yoga in general). I have expanded the quote a bit to include the preceding paragraph in addition to the one you’ve included in TTDV1:
‘It is possible to cultivate and extend the use of the intuitive mind in proportion as we rely less predominantly upon the reasoning intelligence. We may train our mentality not to seize, as it does now, upon every separate flash of intuitive illumination for its own inferior purposes, not to precipitate our thought at once into a crystallising intellectual action around it; we can train it to think in a stream of successive and connected intuitions, to pour light upon light in a brilliant and triumphant series. We shall succeed in this difficult change in proportion as we purify the interfering intelligence,—if we can reduce in it the element of material thought enslaved to the external appearances of things, the element of vital thought enslaved to the wishes, desires, impulses of the lower nature, the element of intellectual thought enslaved to our preferred, already settled or congenial ideas, conceptions, opinions, fixed operations of intelligence, if, having reduced to a minimum those elements, we can replace them by an intuitive vision and sense of things, an intuitive insight into appearances, an intuitive will, an intuitive ideation. This is hard enough for our consciousness naturally bound by the triple tie of mentality, vitality, corporeality to its own imperfection and ignorance, the upper, middle and lower cord in the Vedic parable of the soul’s bondage, cords of the mixed truth and falsehood of appearances by which Shunahshepa was bound to the post of sacrifice.
‘But even if this difficult thing were perfectly accomplished, still the intuition would not be the gnosis; it would only be its thin prolongation into mind or its sharp edge of first entrance. The difference, not easy to define except by symbols, may be expressed if we take the Vedic image in which the Sun represents the gnosis and the sky, mid-air and earth the mentality, vitality, physicality of man and of the universe. Living on the earth, climbing into the mid-air or even winging in the sky, the mental being, the manomaya Purusha, would still live in the rays of the sun and not in its bodily light. And in those rays he would see things not as they are, but as reflected in his organ of vision,
deformed by its faults or limited in their truth by its restrictions. But the vijñānamaya Purusha lives in the Sun itself, in the very body and blaze of the true light;1 he knows this light to be his own self-luminous being and he sees besides all that dwells in the rays of the sun, sees the whole truth of the lower triplicity and each thing that is in it. He sees it not by reflection in a mental organ of vision, but with the Sun of gnosis itself as his eye,—for the Sun, says the Veda, is the eye of the gods. The mental being, even in the intuitive mind, can perceive the truth only by a brilliant reflection or limited communication and subject to the restrictions and the inferior capacity of the mental vision; but the supramental being sees it by the gnosis itself, from the very centre and outwelling fount of the truth, in its very form and by its own spontaneous and self-illumining process. For the Vijnana is a direct and divine as opposed to an indirect and human knowledge.’
______
Here’s a bit of your account of your vision/realisation of the ‘golden-red Sun’:
‘Truly the vision of the golden-red Sun had been the most accurate prophecy of an impending realisation I had ever had. In every way that vision was realised. And, as I wrote to the Mother, symbols were no longer simply abstract figures. They lived. There was no separation between what they ’stood for’ and the actual figure. I had penetrated into the realm in which these separations do not exist. I had entered a state of consciousness in which unity is the foundation. But more than that, I had finally reached the Source of every symbol, of everything in creation in fact. And that Source was the Divine Mother. She was that Circle, that ’symbol’, denoting the All in its essential unity: all symbols emerged from the Circle. I was only one more step and that All could be reduced to Number. The number of the circle was 9. The 9 was the Divine Mother.
But there was the Zero, the Point. This followed the realisation of the 9 and the Circle. With the Zero the Knowledge was complete. And out of That came the whole of creation. This Silence was a fullness and no void. The void was the illusion. Only fullness was Reality.’ – TTDV1, Ch. 30, pp 206-207
‘… I had entered that Zero, that ’seed’, through the Absolute’s aspect of dynamics, which in terms of the knowledge as it was taking shape for me, meant the 9. The 9 was the Divine Mother’s principle of movement, while the 0 was her aspect of rest. But rest and motion were decidedly two sides of one coin, and the full reality could never be experienced unless one had attained a poise in which these two were a simultaneous experience. I was moving inward, from the outer 9 to the 0, the centre of the Sun as it were.’ – TTDV1, Ch. 30, pp 209-210
It is astounding what an epic challenge it has been and continues to be to convey this realisation to the world. Or rather, it is astounding to see how the body of Gnosis has grown so vast, and yet does not register to the mind … as if in another world (that 4th quadrant of the evolutionary circle) that the ‘lower triplicity’ (the physical, vital, mental consciousness) cannot see.
I trust Time will help orchestrate the revelation (for more of humanity) of what Gnosis IS and MUST BE. I trust that even this discussion is part of that orchestration/orchestra. There are so many layers of realisation … so many layers of ignorance to be peeled back and dispensed with. I am so grateful for the keys of Gnosis which you have presented which make it possible to know and ‘get into’ the rhythm of creation, preservation, dissolution. The process of letting go of our old and obsolete structures is MUCH less painful the more aware we are of what needs to be dispensed with, and the more appreciative we are of ALL that collaborates to do the needful.
The Earth is that circle you describe so well -rotating each 24 hours on its axis and revolving every 365 days around the sun. And from that glorious Earth-circle comes the new language – the language of Form, as you call it: our number system 0 – 9, and our calendar of time and space. It gives to all of us – members of the gnostic society – a universal way of seeing and speaking about spirituality…. and perhaps even more, a way to experience the Divine here – now…
The vision/symbol of that red-gold-orange tail coming from the Sun, filled with geometric symbols is wonder-full!
Dear Theaji,
No doubt, your supra mental experiences are wonderful. The experience of the golden red sun is equally thrilling.
I have one question. When you experienced the golden red sun, did you see that sun moving or at stand still. Did time not stop then?
“The number of the circle was 9 but there was the zero too as her rest position.” This is also very good discovery. I appreciate and agree with it too. Hope you do not mind me explaining about these my way of interpretation in terms of our Kala chakra.
thank you,
Hari Malla