Author Archives: Thea

Culture and Cosmos 3 – Part 3.3

 

 

A word must be said about the question of alignment and its place in the transformation the evolution of consciousness is experiencing.

            It is clear that the Yoga described in the Rigveda and which has been largely ignored by researchers, even those among Hindu pundits, was foremost a method to secure a special alignment which would allow the practitioner to ‘become the Sun’. Since several features of the luminary of our system are known, we are in a position to understand certain key elements involved in this alignment of consciousness in the ancient path. Principal of these is necessarily the Sun’s centrality. That is, its dominant position in our solar system, the king, as it were, of the planetary hierarchy. Indeed, so obvious was this feature that from ancient times societies and civilizations modelled themselves on this pattern, with the zodiac as backdrop. Consequently, the 5th sign Leo was not only ‘ruled’ by the Sun, it was also the sign of Kings, the ruler of the kingdom. In other words, this outstanding feature of centrality and lordship was not reflected in the ancient tradition by a special allocation, central to the body of knowledge transmitted in the zodiac. It was just one more sign, one more stage in the progression of 12 – if at all there was a vision of a unified flow through the signs. Indeed, this connected vision suffered irreparable damage by a linear perception which overtook the earlier seeing of wholeness.

Clearly there is a deficiency inherent in this paradigm. And it is reflected in the deficiency we observe in the human mental species. The progression of 1 to 12 with the Sun positioned at the 5th stage, as one among equals does not reflect the structure of our planetary system. But it does give a valid indication of something I have been stressing throughout my work: Humans are binary creatures, trapped in an off-centre alignment of consciousness, which in turn is reflected in the physical instrument. The binary, off-centre alignment of our bodies as humans in evolution determines the fact that each individual born into a body fashioned according to the actual human biological pattern cannot escape the inevitable, ineluctable finality of our sojourn on this planet – death. We are mortal, descendants of Martanda as he is known in the Rigveda, the ‘dead egg’. Or, in the more familiar contemporary paradigm of creation, we are daughters and sons of Eve, a mere ‘rib’ of Adam, and not the superior creation of Shiva/Shakti of the Ardhanarisvar Vedic iconography.

In ancient times on the subcontinent, this condition of the species was understood. Moreover, the path was mapped out for the ‘Aryan Warrior’ so that he or she might travel through the twelve signs, planes, stages and reach the 10th where the prize was Immortality. This was the summit of the path, the supreme achievement. The method to reach this pinnacle of Being was thoroughly worked out, veritably as a map by which the ‘journey’ could be undertaken with the certainty that moving through the darker realms which constitute the various ‘layers’ of human consciousness, the Aryan would be armed with this superior knowledge and thus find protection in this perilous adventure on the road to Swar, the Vedic ‘heaven’ or the realm of the truth-conscious Sun.

Thus, limitation to a system based on 12 was a feature of the ancient path. It describes therefore the same limitations in the human evolution, inasmuch as the zodiac is indeed a map of evolution. The 12 base, it needs to be pointed out, is the horizontal plane and dimension. However, this unidirectional base is insufficient to bring about an INTEGRAL development. And by this we mean a process that integrates both the individual and collective dimensions of the evolution of consciousness. That is, the One and the Many.

With a unidirectional base such as the one that prevailed in early Vedic times, this integral process could not be established. The reasons will be detailed in this study because having reached the point in our evolution of precisely that integral work, dissecting the innards of the former unidirectional condition will be of immense value in our present context. Moreover, it will help us understand in greater depth when certain thresholds were crossed which plunged Vedic civilization into turmoil and on an apparent path of disintegration, resulting finally in invasions and conquests in our times. We will also delve more deeply into why this apparent disintegration had to come about. In the process, the future course will be clearer, our goal more luminous and hence the successful crossing to that Swar, that borderline, will be facilitated.

The period which will occupy our attention in this analysis is the millennium prior to our present 9th Manifestation which began in 234BC. The student will note, before all else that this time demarcation covers a certain particularly important epoch in the evolution of the civilization of the subcontinent. It embraces the current 1500BC demarcation which all researchers ‘agree’ was the time of the alleged Aryan invasion of the subcontinent, or the beginning of a series of migrations of these Aryans supposedly from Central Asia or beyond, which, according to scholars of all hues, was the origin of all Vedic and Hindu culture and civilization.

Fortunately that theory is now being demolished. We may safely state that its hold over the Indian intelligentsia has come to an end. The evidence in support of this theory is, in effect, non-evidence. And in this transitional period characterized by exposure, the principal target for this act perforce has been the Aryan Invasion Theory, inasmuch as it is the Big Lie, the central ‘knot’ at the root of the falsehood holding together the construction of the Lord of Nations, devised to subjugate ad infinitum the Indian people in order to secure the definitive demise of the Vedic Dharma.

In this issue, I am including as Appendix 1 my latest article on the subject, especially because it uncovers the hysteria my previous treatment has helped to provoke in the European Indologists’ camp, particularly my discussion of the role Germany has played in this great scholastic hoax via the colonial/Nazi combine.

Also to be noted is another central point I have highlighted in many of my published works on this theme, and in private correspondence with researchers of like mind who were key players in this revision of history. This concerns the unacceptability of 1500 BC as the time of this so-called invasion or migration. I have sustained that the hitherto almost total consensus that this was the date of composition of the Rigveda, the only extant document of the early Aryans, was a key feature in the scholastic, colonial hoax because only if this date was accepted could the hoax be perpetuated. Dislodging that linchpin would bring the entire edifice down.

Indeed, this part of my work has been taken up seriously and we read periodically of symposiums and seminars being held on this very theme: the unacceptability of the 1500 BC demarcation. The latest was a two-day symposium on ancient Indian Chronology in January 1994, sponsored by the Birla Science Centre. In the estimate of scholars participating in this meeting, the date of the Rig Veda should be pushed back to approximately 3000 BC.

But the selection of 1500 BC, for whatever purposes, was not insignificant. About that time something did indeed occur in Vedic civilization which had the inevitable effect of initiating a disintegration of the old forms of the system. That is, the 12-base paradigm seems to have received a critical blow then, whose repercussions have been felt from that time to the present, almost on the order of a slow, steady earthquake extended over the ages as if a millennium were 60 seconds of its revolutionizing jolts. Indeed, it is by scrutinizing these repercussions that we are able to draw certain conclusions as to what took place and when.

In this first degree of the Age of Aquarius, by retrograde motion through the Precession of the Equinoxes, we are experiencing a settling of the soil beneath us which had been shaken so deeply by the original ‘quake’ over two millennia ago. The upheaval that hit Vedic civilization was what is universally held as the most significant contribution India is known to have made to the world of science: the discovery of the Zero.

In my yogic investigations into the transformational process alluded to in the Rigveda, I do not find evidence of the prominence of the Zero and the numerical system it gave rise to as [its?] base. I find only that of 12 and thus the prominence of the 12 zodiacal signs, and, above all, the ecliptic itself as the foundation of the knowledge. Of foremost importance in the unidirectional twelvefold [twelve-fold?] system is the fourfold division of the ecliptic – i.e., the four Cardinal Points, last of which is Capricorn; hence the prominence of the December solstice when the Light begins its increase, beckoning the Aryan Warrior to the Capricorn summit and the realization of Immortality.

The revolutionizing character of this discovery lies in this singular achievement: introduction, or unveiling, of the vertical direction. By this the dominance of the unidirectional base of 12 was dealt a first decisive blow and has never recovered since. Another direction was introduced but which would require at least two millennia to become integrated into the higher dimensions of the civilisation’s evolving consciousness and being. Its final amalgamation would depend on the next avataric appearance – precisely the 9th in the Hindu Line of Ten, insofar as the discovery of the Zero was the first prerequisite for that future appearance. Without the unveiling of the Zero, the 9th Avatar could not carry out his mission which hinged precisely on carrying the movement of consciousness across Time’s threshold, through his own death and rebirth, by virtue of which that very Zero would give forth the One. And thus the 9th Avatar, in an unbroken line of time would reappear as the 10th (10=1), as Kalki, in the 91st (9/1) year after his first appearance, 1872.

In ancient times there was only the horizontal line and hence the twelvefold  base and the prevalence of the zodiac and the ecliptic as foundation for the knowledge. This formed the structural basis of the civilisation, traces of which are alive and vibrant even today. The Hindu temple as we know it and as it continues to be constructed, according to precise Scriptural designations, is a tool to connect the society and the individual to that circumscribing space which is divided into twelve parts, and then further subdivided into four. The latter then became the foundation of the chaturvarna, the fourfold caste system. Thus, in the Rigveda we find the first indication that this fourfold order was a firm part of the civilisation, and by deduction that the base of twelve prevailed, in the following verses:

 

…When they divided up the Purush,

into how many parts did they divide him?

What did his mouth become? What his arms?

What are his legs called? What his feet?

 

His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms

became the Kshatriya, his legs

the Vaishiya who plies his trade.

The Shudra was born from his feet…

 

But this, though providing a circular seeing (see, TVN 6/3, August 1991) and thus reflective of a form of unity, was still merely unidirectional; meaning that an entire dimension was hidden from the perception of the Rishi. The entire exercise, circular and whole as it may have been, was nonetheless limited to only one cosmic plane, – the horizontal. The base was thus 1 to 12. To be unveiled, realised, integrated was the vertical and the new base, 0 to 9.

This simple seeing was the earthquake that struck Vedic civilisation around the time of the purported Aryan invasion. A settling of the shaken up terrain, I repeat, is only being completed now, in our very century. This act of settling will be completed by the turn of the millennium. But meanwhile there remains much to be done in the realm of higher knowledge so that passage to a true new order will be successfully completed, ‘right on time’.

 

Pregnant Fulness at the Origin: Time’s Zero-Womb

 

The first imperative in this act of settling is to understand that any remaking of a civilisation such as the Vedic – i.e., based on higher knowledge – had to be done respecting the essence and demands of that original ‘seed’ the Vedic culture sprang from thousands of years ago. Just as a rose cannot evolve from the seed of a tree, similarly that Vedic ‘seed’ could never give rise to anything other than a creation of its own genus. In this light, it was decreed from the outset, from the first rending of the veils, or removal through Vedic yogic techniques of the ‘lid covering the Sun’, that this integral poise would one day come about. Not just for an individual, or an elite, a group of privileged individuals, but for the entire civilisation. Indeed, the special quality of that ‘seed’ was this integration of the Unity and the Multiplicity. It translated itself into a harmonisation of the Being and the Becoming in the course of time. Thus it was inevitable that the inadequacies of the original unidirectional base would force the issue when a critical threshold of time had been reached, and thereby oblige those early Rishis to push their realisation deeper and higher yet. The result was penetration into the womb or garbha, as it is called in Sanskrit, – that is, the Zero. In that recondite dimension of Being there lay the spectacular realisation of Skambha, support of the worlds. The ‘womb’ held that sacred Child, the One, the Son.

            We have verses of the Rigveda which have come to be called the Hymn of Creation. In my view these verses must be understood as a meticulous description of the plunge into the Core, into the Zero-Womb, or what lies beyond the threshold of the material universe as a permanent condition and not just a one-time ‘big bang’. Scholars vary somewhat in their translations of these verses. Therefore, I am including as appendix 2 three translations in which certain discrepancies must be highlighted – namely those concerning the translation of the Sanskrit word abhu. Some scholars have translated this pregnant word as ‘the void’. But Raimundo Panikkar, though following suit, does mention in a footnote that the word signifies the transcendent Absolute. Indeed, it is this sort of discrepancy that throws light on the manner in which the Vedic emphasis on fullness and not emptiness as a primordial condition of being came to be distorted.

What is more than apparent from these verses, regardless of the translations, is that the Vedic seers were describing the contours of the experience which produced a penetration into what I have come to call the Zero-Womb, or the dimension before or beyond the Point, or the first manifestation of a spatial reality. They described the condition of compressed time, the womb of the Zero containing 9, 6, and 3. Out of this compression came the One ‘…who breathed without breath, by its own impulse’. Another important feature of these verses concerns the fact that the Seers saw this to be the origin of the horizontal dimension. Panikkar translates the significant passage as ‘…A crosswise line cut Being from Nonbeing’. This has been poorly rendered in Jeanine Miller’s translation as ‘Their vision’s rays stretched far’. Again we note that the former perhaps more literal translation is closer to the experience, inasmuch as the important factor to stress, as far as the purity of the Seeing is concerned, is the question of a horizontal dimension emerging from this ‘compression’. For this is indeed the dimension of manifestation of the One, born of the Zero-Womb of compressed time. On the other hand, V. Madhusudan Reddy translates this passage thus: ‘A ray stretched out that cut the Existent from the Non-Existent.’ While this too conveys the idea of an ‘above’ and a ‘below’, which the subsequent lines do indeed emphasise, I prefer the more literal translations because of their fidelity to an experience which is perforce beyond the scope of a translator. Therefore we look for a rendering which distorts as little as possible that experience. And at this point in time, when the contours of the original Seeing are known, these verses stand as a precious confirmation of the vigour of the Vedic Truth.

Another important passage, perhaps the most important of all, concerns the thrust of the movement of consciousness in discovery of this Truth. That is, it was not outward, it was not an experience that could come by a dissolution in a Beyond. Rather, it was a plunge within, and more precisely, into the heart. Thus, Miller translates the passage as, ‘Seers, searching in their heart’s wisdom, discovered the kinship of the created with the uncreated.’

Then we have Panikkar’s rendition, ‘The Seers, searching in their hearts with wisdom, discovered the connection of Being in Nonbeing.’

And finally there is Reddy’s, ‘The seers, having meditated in their hearts, discovered the connection of the Existent in the Non-Existent.’

We have three slightly different renditions, but all three indicate that the heart centre is involved in seeing this connection between the Existent and the Non-Existent, or the Manifest and the Unmanifest. Yet in their commentaries the translators are more concerned about the correct rendering of the lines immediately preceding these which state that in the beginning ‘desire’, or ‘love’ arose as the first impulse within. My point is that the more significant lines concern those which reveal that it is a plunge into the core which draws that all-important connection between this dimension and that which stands before and beyond. The ‘bridge’ is found there. It is important to emphasise this point because this is the channel, this is the key to the realisation. Not having brought out this point earlier has left a certain amount of confusion among seekers, and this has permitted a perversion of the Vedic Truth. The clarification of these simple and apparently unimportant lines helps us to discover that bridge and to reconstruct the process of creation, or the emergence of the One from the womb of the Zero. Just as the early Rishis did.

Thus in ‘seed form’ the realisation was done. That is, in the realm of the Zero, or the Being, the Unity. But what of the Becoming? How was that to be integrated, and by this we mean consolidated through the lived experience of the movement of that Zero-Unity?

It stands that since we are dealing with the vertical time direction, in contrast to the horizontal space direction, Time itself had to be the channel for the realisation. This means that Time’s movement would be the means to integrate the new dimension of itself. Thus, the evolution of that original seed-seeing could be meticulously monitored precisely via a higher understanding of time and its own transformation in the consciousness of the seeker from its poise of Destroyer to Ally. But when the great Quake struck in the latter part of the 8th Manifestation, we had no ‘becoming’ to serve as ally in the act of settling and re-ordering. Time itself was required, 2000 years or so, to be precise, or a full zodiacal Age in order to accommodate the new ingredients or energies the Quake had released which would compel, by their negative contributions, by exerting the required pressure via tension, the action of the Avatars, agents of that very Time-Spirit, to carry humanity beyond the Borderline.

Thus, the 9th Avatar’s appearance in 1872 initiated that grand march across the threshold of an Age and into the realm of the Zero, of Swar. Prior to his coming and the successful completion of that mission, the bridge connecting this human habitat to Swar was lacking. It was indeed a ‘heaven beyond’ and not of this Earth. The 9th Avatar’s mission was to create that bridge and thereby to bring that Heaven down to Earth. He completed this crossing 91 years after his birth in 1872. What is transpiring now is merely a final settling of the terrain, similar to the lengthy after-shocks of a mighty Uranian quake. These ‘shocks’ are the stirrings of the Becoming precisely so that the new order may be a faithful reproduction of that majestic Cosmic Truth, essence of the innermost Vedic ‘seed’ at the heart of the civilisation.

We could state quite accurately that the Vedic realisation which formed the basis of Hinduism and hence the prevalent culture on the subcontinent, was always incomplete. It was indeed merely the horizontal base, the heavenly circumscribing ecliptic of 12 divided into 4]. Its sole purpose of existence was to provide the future One with a ‘womb’, whence he could be born. In other words, the Rigvedic creation hymn was equally a description of the origin of a civilisation. Vedic culture is thus the expression given to the compressed seed at the Origin. The gestation we are describing has been a long one. It has been a process straddling 8 Manifestations of 6480 years each. In 234 BC we reached the 0 Aries Point and the beginning of the final Round of 25,920 years of that long evolution through the 12 Manifestations. Humanity embarked then upon the last circumambulation of the Sun in the precessional movement of the Equinoxes. Approach to that Zero Point at the end of the Age of Aries brought the dawn of the new Seeing, truly Usha, the Divine Dawn, carried by Agni as the white Horse, across the twilight of an Age, for that 0 Aries point is indeed the Cosmic Dawn.

The beginning of the degeneration of the caste system was one of the evident signs that the former 12/4 base was receiving mighty shocks. The cause of this was not corruption of the Brahmin caste but rather the corrosion of every caste. With the introduction of the new direction, the vertical, prior to integration, nothing was ‘in its place’ insofar as time was required to lay these new and more complete foundations. The veils had been drawn aside, the Zero-Womb had been disclosed by the realisers, but its labyrinthine recesses were covered as yet in the tenebrous veils of the many layers of consciousness-being which had to be integrated by means of the precious power of the Becoming. In other words, the two feminine powers, the 6 and the 3, had to take their place in the action of time, providing the energy needed both to impel the movement forward, as well as to organise all the elements/energies drawn into the process. For while the 12 base steadies itself on the fourfold pillars, the 0 base requires the triadic powers of 9, 6, and 3. These three powers had to join in the labour so that ‘right on time’ the One would emerge from that cosmic Womb, and his birth would herald the arrival of the new age of the Supermind, the descent of heaven upon Earth. India, for the past 2000 years or so, has been carrying out this great labour for the world. And the work is done.

 

The Reign of the Usurpers

 

In this long passage of Time, in the course of illuminating the dark crevices of the Zero/Womb, usurpers have emerged to fill the void with their own brand of ‘truth’, with their ‘mixtures’, as the Mother called it. Indeed, from the very outset we encounter a series of usurpations, deviations, distractions, designed to draw the Aryan Warrior off course and abort ‘the Birth that fills that void’. All of these attempts, straddling an entire Age and more vigorously encountered in this century, have failed. The work is done, the Birth completed, the void is filled.

 Nonetheless, the act of settling which I have described above, concerns a very careful and thorough act of exposure. Its purpose is precisely to drain the Usurper of energy. All the folds of the Womb had to be illumined so that the Shadow cannot continue to usurp energies which must now serve exclusively the purposes of the One.

The act of exposure, a large part of which I have been documenting in this series, carries us back to the original realisation of the Zero, sometime in the last millennium of the 8th Manifestation. This seeing was so decisive and overwhelming that thereafter it became ‘the secret’ of all the cultural expressions which the civilisation produced. We find it in music, captured in the drone or sruti, the silent Sound, or the sound-axis that renders the Silence full and not empty; we find it in architecture in the Hindu temple’s axis, shooting up from the centremost point of the garbhagriha, precisely the ‘womb-house’ or the temple’s sanctum sanctorum. Indeed, we find it in every artistic creation where an axis is required. For the perfect axial alignment requires or presupposes the realisation of the Zero and the ‘birth that fills the void’.

Yet all these experiences were still examples of a society in preparation for the fullest manifestation of the Dharma. They denote anticipation – precisely of that birth that fills the void. True to the exceptional capacity of Hindu wisemen to perceive these deeper, hidden truths, sometime during this passage the Scriptures inform us that the Buddha was also included in the list of Ten Avatars as an emanation of Vishnu, but that he was sent by the Supreme to ‘mislead’ seekers, more particularly, the asuras. And we also have Sri Aurobindo’s words to the effect that Kalki comes ‘to correct the error of the Buddha’.

What, precisely, was that error? The answer lies in the Mother’s temple – or rather, in the shadow-temple in Auroville, built in her name. What has taken shape there as the Matrimandir is an architectural rendition, attaining the highest heights of symbolic representation, of precisely the error of the Buddha. Thus we refer to it as the Shadow-Temple, inasmuch as it does indeed present the shadow of the supramental Truth: the emptiness of Nothingness.

The Map of the 12 Manifestations, reproduced below, describes the ancient Vedic foundation. It represents the twelve-fold unidirectional, horizontal base of the early civilisation. I discovered the diagram by means of the numerical properties of the name given to me during initiation in 1971, the year when the ‘sorting out’, or ‘decanting’ the Mother set on its way by her yogic power a year earlier began. Thus, when I discovered the significance of Thea and applied it in the formulation of this Map, I was unaware of these Artharvaveda verses which describe this very diagram:

           

            One is the wheel; the bands are twelve;

            three are the hubs, – who can understand it?

            Three hundred spokes and sixty in addition

            have been hammered therein and firmly riveted.

 

 

Thus, we note that the Map of the 12 Manifestations is composed of 12 bands, and 3 concentric circles (hubs); with, of course, 360 spokes/degrees ‘hammered therein’, just as the Veda declares. It provides the essential key to the appearances of the Ten Avatars of Hindu tradition.

Had I remained satisfied with the diagram as the be-all and end-all of the realisation, the integral knowledge would have been withheld. This came a year or so later, in 1973, just before the Mother’s passing. It was the discovery, or seeing, of the Gnostic Circle, providing seekers with the same twelve-fold base, onto which, or into which is lodged the vertical direction of the circle of 9, a number equal to the 0 – as the Mathematics of Unity discloses. This is the formidable new key which describes the true new order.

 

The Shadow of a ‘New Order’

 

The Earth is passing through a transitional stage which is perhaps the most precarious passage in the entire history of her long and laborious evolution. While it is a fact that a ‘new world order’ has arrived or been thrust upon us, the true position is that this newness is nowhere in evidence. What we see taking shape is simply a last and more determined attempt to secure complete and everlasting control over the future of humanity by a consciousness which began its accelerated drive for supremacy several centuries ago.

Thus, throughout the world we witness the overt manipulation of certain societies to coerce adherence to this ‘new world order’. It is necessary to analyse the nature of this imposition in these pages, for it concerns our work directly, even as it concerns the destiny of the Indian subcontinent in greater measure than any other area on the globe. The issues involved are those more pertinent to the Vedic Truth and its survival than ever India has known [than India has ever known?]. Throughout the long course of her history India has experienced many tribulations, many attacks on her essence and the continuity of her central leadership in matters of the spirit. But never before has she faced the possibility of total destruction of that essential Truth like today. Being the centre and soul of the very planet, it is fundamental to understand her struggle and weigh the conditions for success or failure. Indeed, it must first be emphasised that none are truly aware of the real struggle, of what actually lies at the heart of the turmoil, or ‘churning’. Given this lack of a clear perception, the Lord of Falsehood has easily clouded the real issues. This is nowhere more clearly discernible than in the struggle to have the Mother’s original adopted for construction of the Matrimandir in Auroville. To this day there is but a handful of people throughout the world who truly perceive the nature of the force that has secured a complete and unrelinquishing hold over the city the Mother founded in 1968, through the channel of what was meant to be its soul – the temple.

Indeed, if the Mother stated that the Matrimandir was to be the soul of Auroville, it is understandable that instruments would come forward to construct that ‘soul’, and that every attempt would be made – conscious on the part of behind-the-scene forces, and often unconscious by their frontline instruments – to assure that this soul would be faithful to the consciousness desiring to take possession of that centre. The Mother was not unaware of the struggle she was setting in motion by centering the endeavour on this temple. Master strategist that she was, she knew the benefits of such a strategy in that identical to the Churning Myth, both positive and negative forces would be gathered in one place as it were, and would thus be obliged to join their energies to accelerate the movement and thereby to hasten the denouement. Indeed, the period set aside by the Time-Spirit for this decisive work was the last three decades of the millennium. That is, we have the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s, drawn into a condensed experience in the final three decades of the millennium, starting from 1971. To be noted is that the beginning of the larger demarcation coincided with the rise of colonialism on the world scene; while the condensed period of three decades was heralded in by the beginning of the temple construction in 1971, precisely because acceleration was the demand from that year onward until the end of the millennium, and the process the Mother organised around the temple drama created that ‘controlled acceleration’.

Thus today, in the drive to impose a ‘new world order’, we witness an intensive effort on the part of the consciousness that worked through the colonial powers to secure its definitive stamp and lasting hold over the Earth’s evolution. And as prophesied in St John’s Revelation or Apocalypse approximately two thousand years ago, the focus of the struggle has indeed been a temple.

As in the early days in India when colonisation began through the East India Company – i.e., economic subjugation – today the concentrated effort of that same consciousness to maintain its hold is equally through economic slavery. The difference between these two periods is only in degree and method of implementation. Then [,?] it was a force combined with diplomatic coercion and manipulation. Today it is political coercion under the guise of ‘freedom’ – i.e., ‘free’ trade, ‘free’ market, ‘free’ economy, and so forth.

Similar to the perversion in matters of the spirit which we have witnessed in the last three centuries, accentuated in the last three decades, where this question of freedom has been the key tool to pervert, in economics and trade freedom has suffered an identical perversion. That is, in both realms what exists is an illusion of freedom and not the real thing.

Nations throughout the world are being manipulated to subjugate themselves to the presiding economic ‘deity’ by conviction that this adherence implies access to a degree of ‘freedom’ which they have never known. Similarly, they are being convinced that their participation is as equal among equals and hence in keeping with the secular democratic tradition which has gained supremacy over the past hundred years or so, particularly since 1989. But both the freedom and the equality offered are an illusion. Nations which have recently emerged from colonial subjugation are simply diving  into the fire from the frying pan, to put it prosaically.

The option that had been offered to these fledgling nations was of course no option at all. Socialism was an instrument of that same consciousness and its entirely predictable offshoot. The colonial era spawned several channels to secure complete domination. Socialism, which a number of newly independent nations opted for, was perhaps the cleverest tool of that retrograde force in that its reliance on a stifling of political, economic and social freedoms for expression and survival, assured its demise at a certain point in the development when precisely the perversion of freedom would become the principal tool of the Lord of Nations. This process culminated in 1989, the start of the very last ennead of this millennium, when the clarion call of freedom brought about the collapse of the socialist paradigm as a visible alternative.

Yet, developing nations throughout the world are in no way ‘free’. And there appears to be no solution to their subjugation inasmuch as none are aware of the level of deception. Nor can they identify the instruments and channels this force uses, much less devise means to secure true freedom from its centuries-old hold. Cultural issues of minor import are focussed on, in an exercise of missing the forest for the trees. In addition, even if this identification were possible, no valid replacement can be envisioned since perversion has been the tool; and this creates the interesting phenomenon of ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’. Thus, while freedom and equality are legitimate primary ingredients of the new world order, perversion of these principles results in a reactionary response which drives one in an opposite direction in the effort to become ‘free’ from the subjugation.

The unipolar world is thus a fallacy in terms of any one of the superpowers occupying that dominant position. For it is neither America, nor of course Russia, nor any other nation which has taken over centre-stage. It is a consciousness working through certain channels which have been prepared for the role they are presently playing some centuries ago. Nor can we say that that consciousness has wholly occupied this position. What we are witnessing is the final struggle of certain forces to secure the dominant position. Indeed, the position is still vacant, but it is rapidly on the way to being filled by the force which functioned so effectively to subjugate half the world during the colonial age.

The outer signs and symbols indicating the victory of that force cannot be ignored. Inasmuch as the denouement was arranged to hinge on a temple as central protagonist in the struggle, mainly to be an aid in identifying the quality of that usurper consciousness and its tactics, foremost is the symbolism of the shadow-temple nearing completion in Auroville. Every item of the construction points to a decisive victory on the physical plane of the force we call the Lord of Nations. Indeed, it is in a sense a conglomerate of nations which serves as a channel for that force to execute its designs on the world scene. This conglomerate also has representatives in the city and its shadow-temple. But the most important item of the symbolism is the transparent, empty crystal, centrepiece of the temple, coupled with the empty stand as its ‘support’. Everywhere in the symbolism we are faced with emptiness – an entirely indispensable ingredient in the ‘new world order’ of the Lord of Nations.

Thus, one of the most important aspects of the new creation is threatened to be rendered obsolete. This is the victory of the soul, both individual and collective. For nations, for India, the problem translates itself into a losing struggle to affirm the national soul and build a new future on the basis of its pulsations and not those emanating from the conglomerate consciousness of the Lord of Nations. Emptiness as a symbol in this essential area of the Mother’s work points to the triumph of the Usurper, of forces from beyond the parameters of the national consciousness. This too has been the fate of the Mother’s city and temple, pertinent especially to India, and through India to the rest of the world.

The problem is the central void. For only by securing this emptiness can the Usurper succeed in imposing its shadow-consciousness on the Earth. India plays a special role in this adventure. But the fact that on her soil, in the body of the Mother, the Usurper has stamped its consciousness on this most important symbol, does not bode well for the nation. Economic policies must evolve from and be an expression of the fullness of the national soul and thus be in harmony with the true needs of the people on all levels and dimensions. They must serve that One, that divine Purpose of the soul, and not take possession of the nation as an imposition from beyond and stemming from impulses and priorities which have no connection with the nation’s central pulsation. Economics cannot inspire a people. They cannot drive the collectivity to express its highest ideals and to attain its loftiest goals. They can only be an outcome of that innermost pulsation and never take its place.

But today it is expected throughout the world that the carrot of economic well-being dangled before nations struggling to affirm their national soul, via a subjugation to the dictates of that conglomerate consciousness, will suffice to silence the stirrings of these indigenous pulsations. In the present scenario what is more than clear is that nothing is in its place. Policies or areas of collective existence which should be an expression of something else have usurped the position that ‘something else’ should occupy. In other words, the law of usurpation triumphs throughout the world. This is possible because of a central emptiness.

Oriental societies constantly bemoan the emptiness in evidence which seems to be undermining the foundations of the old order and which [order which?] they identify with a western materialist consciousness. But the emptiness I write of is something far more subtle and difficult to detect and hence to remedy. It is a cosmic knot whose existence in turn left that soul-centre void and hence susceptible to the usurpation and the numerous external manifestations of this emptiness. Indeed, if we insist on locating the area on the globe where the perception of central emptiness made its first impact on the human consciousness, it was in the east and not in the west. It was, in fact, in India more than two millennia ago. And today India continues to set the pace and upon her success or failure depends the true ‘new world order’.

What is at stake is not a new world order dominated by a superpower or even a concert of powers. It is a question of the Consciousness which must be stamped on the evolution of the human species and its resultant civilisational expressions. The struggle lies there, in that essential domain. But, important to note is that in this higher destiny of the Earth there is only one plan, as it were, one pattern, one ‘order’ – and not a choice among many possibilities. This order is represented thus:

 

 

A centre or point, and a periphery. Like a flower with its circumscribing petals, there are concentric circles evolving from the Point which in turn is identified as ‘the centre that holds’.

In other words, the new order is simply the manifestation of the Cosmic Truth which is spheric in design. Its ‘forms’ are multiple, but unity is its base. Whereas, the new order sought to be imposed is linear insofar as the centre is a void and hence cannot give birth from that Point to a ‘holding power’. Consequently, that ‘new order’ imposing itself is a recipe for continued strife and more explosive expressions of unrest than the world has yet known. The reasons for this are mathematical. We shall discuss them in depth in the remaining portion of this study.

The true harmonious world order is a cosmic expression where each thing is in its place. Thus there can be no usurper, no frustration aroused, resentment or sense of diminishing. Equality is understood and implemented as an expression of that true place of each part of the collectivity. There is no higher or lower. There is equality of the instrument whose complete fulfilment lies in the discovery and occupation of its true place within the whole. If at times this condition has been experienced on Earth, it has been accidental and certainly never conscious. At least during our period of recorded history. The situation may have been different earlier, perhaps during the Vedic Age when the caste system based on the cosmic harmony prevailed in its uncontaminated, undiluted form. But the great divide resides precisely in a conscious or unconscious evolution.

Things cannot be put ‘in their proper place’ without conscious awareness, precisely because the deception, perversion and falsification are extreme and have proven so effective in securing the subjugation described above. To illustrate, there is not one of the surviving older disciples in Sri Aurobindo’s ashram in Pondicherry who has been capable of identifying the presiding consciousness in Auroville as the Usurper. All have fallen at the feet of this consciousness in possession of the project and installed as the ‘deity’ in the shadow-temple.

On numerous occasions these respected disciples have made pilgrimages to the temple, particularly after installation of the empty crystal and stand. They have described the power they felt there as ‘the Mother’, and have not cared to delve deeper into the nature of their experiences because in so doing the painful reality would emerge of a race, a species so thoroughly misaligned that Truth lies beyond its reach and the supramental Gnosis appears to be entirely unattainable. I repeat, it is a painful discovery, particularly after a long life of involvement with Sri Aurobindo’s integral  yoga. To conclude after 50 or 60 years that one has come no closer to an identification with that Light than in the initial contact with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, or gained the essential discrimination they so assiduously emphasised as a first prerequisite for attainment of a superior consciousness, is indeed a confession few are ready to make.

Yet in the light of knowledge and particularly the supramental Gnosis Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have brought down, the experiences of these older sadhaks, which have been published in various Ashram and Auroville journals, disclose the failure on the part of these respected disciples to fathom certain fundaments of the yoga and especially the nature of the context which perforce had to accompany the victory of the gnostic Light in the world.

This failure merits an in-depth discussion because of its potential for clarifying certain elements of the yoga somewhat difficult to grasp. In addition, this analysis will also serve to illumine the way ahead on this precarious path into the new future which the entire human race is embarked upon and which is meant to be opened precisely by the realisers of the supramental Gnosis. Thus, in discussing the failure to perceive the character of the presiding ‘deity’ in the shadow-temple, the path ahead may become clearer for those who are truly sincere in their aspiration to be instruments for this great change.

 

A Consciousness of Perversity

 

A simple means to illustrate the nature of the consciousness that has overtaken the shadow-temple and has thus come to exert a central influence on the affairs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as centred in that project, concerns the all-important question of a transparent or translucent globe as the focal piece of the temple. Inasmuch as this item is by far the most significant part of the temple, described by the Mother as ‘the symbol of the future realisation’, clearly there should have been the utmost care in executing her will in this key matter to the best of one’s ability. We find, however, that this was not done. And because of its central importance and the subsequent disfigurement that came to stand in place of this supreme symbol, naturally we are driven to conclude that the consciousness presiding over the city’s development is perverse indeed. This is especially so because we have the Mother’s own words to help us determine exactly what that symbol represents, what quality she wished to capture in the symbolism, and finally her definitive instructions that it should not be ‘transparent’: ‘A globe which is not transparent but rather translucent.’ (10.1.1970)

In view of these clear instructions, can there have ever been any confusion about exactly what was required?

To further emphasise the point, the Ashram fell in line completely with the deception by reinforcing the hold of the Usurper through its official publication, Bulletin of the International Centre of Education. In its February l992 edition, it published extracts from the Matrimandir Dialogues where the Mother had explained her vision in detail, clarifying many points which, however, were subsequently disfigured. Regarding the globe the editors reproduced only those early portions of her discussion with the disciple, Satprem where she speaks of a transparent globe.

For all intents and purposes, her preliminary comments with casual reference to a transparent material, in this official organ of the Ashram would confirm that the selection of a transparent crystal was fully in keeping with the Mother’s vision and wishes.

However, that was her early description of what she ‘saw’, before she drew up a plan with the Ashram engineer a day or two later. Thus, by 10.1.1970 when she met again with the disciple, with those plans in hand, she stated the following when the question of the ‘crystal’ was brought up: ‘And the globe is translucent.’

These more definitive, categorical instructions have been entirely ignored by the communities of both the Ashram and Auroville. There has, moreover, been a concerted, wilful, deliberate attempt to hide the fact from the public that the Mother specifically did not want a transparent globe. In keeping with her ‘seeing’ it had to be translucent.

A sincere aspiration to do the Mother’s will and construct the temple as faithfully as possible to her vision and not the architect’s, would reveal to the careful reader of the Dialogues exactly why she first mentioned transparent and then clarified that it was, on the contrary, translucent. The reason comes across in her own reflections on perhaps the need to put a light under the globe in order to illumine it from below, – that is, to ensure that it becomes full of light, which would be in keeping with her vision. In other words, the Mother in her discussions with the disciple Satprem and the Italian designer, Paolo, sought to explain the chamber and centrepiece as she SAW it. The globe was clearly full of light, effulgent, luminous. To be more precise, it was not empty, much less transparent. It was in her vision an element capable of retaining a luminosity projected upon it, however that was to be devised.

When working on the plan, it is obvious the engineer must have informed the Mother that the effulgence she ‘saw’ could only be attained by a translucent and not transparent globe. With the latter light would pass through and not be contained as in a vessel. Yet this is exactly what now stands as ‘the Mother’s vision’ in the shadow temple: a transparent crystal through which light passes and is not contained, giving the impression of an empty void. And, to further reveal the quality of its presiding ‘deity’, this crystal captures on its surface the images of everything in the chamber and reflects them turned upside-down.

It needs to be stressed again and again that a sincere desire to reproduce the Mother’s vision according to her own description and clear instructions would have encountered no difficulty in reaching the conclusion that a transparent crystal was not in accordance with what the Mother ‘saw’. The Ashram engineer, Udar Pinto, clarified the matter for her. And a diligent study of her dialogues on the subject would have revealed the reason for the two apparently contradictory statements.

But even if this had not been clear, the obvious choice for the centrepiece would perforce have been the last instructions – that is, on 10 January, after she had drawn up the plan herself and worked out those details with the engineer. It must be recalled in this context that the Mother specifically requested an engineer to execute her vision, not an architect. The reasons are obvious in view of the disastrous rendering of that vision by precisely the architects who initially she had foreseen would be incapable of dealing with the matter in the right spirit.

True to the perverse character of the Lord of Falsehood, presiding ‘deity’ of the shadow-temple, her comments on a transparent globe before she herself had understood the difference in terms of the final effect produced, were the only ones clutched tenaciously by the powers-that-be in both communities. Indeed, there is not one disciple in the forefront of a movement not only to restore the purity of her original vision but to rescue the city (and the Ashram) from the hold of that dark conglomerate consciousness of the Lord of Nations.

There are other essential items of her vision which were similarly disfigured when they could have been executed exactly as she saw the chamber. The ‘stand’ is foremost among these items. She specified that Sri Aurobindo’s four upright symbols supporting the globe had to be carved in stone and of a somewhat orange-gold colour. Never did she request metal. Yet the powers-that-be disregarded as well these clear instructions and have placed the empty crystal on a see-through wrought-iron stand. Wherever one looks, however one approaches the symbolism one finds only emptiness, weakness, nothingness in place of the solid fullness of a supramental creation which was the character and quality of the Mother’s original vision, and indeed of the ancient Vedic seeing.

Another important item which was severely disfigured and which is perhaps the most damaging falsification of all concerns the axis of the temple, the horizontal and vertical measurements of the inner cross-section of the chamber – indeed, the most essential measurements to reproduce faithfully in any Vedic creation. In the Mother’s words, this cross-section was to ‘form a perfect circle’ whose periphery would touch certain points of the chamber. To achieve this, before all else the room’s diameter had to be accurate: 24 metres, wall to wall.

As if foreseeing that the falsifying consciousness would target this essential point for its prize achievement, the disfiguring of which would render the temple a faithful reflection of its own misaligned consciousness, the Mother stressed the INNER wall measurement; yet these instructions were deliberately ignored. I write deliberately because I myself implored the powers who secured control over the project before anything was built in Auroville to respect the Mother’s wishes and execute the inner diameter 24 metres wall to wall. She stated, when the disciple wanted to add several metres to the room’s diameter: ‘It is understood that the wall must be at 24 metres’. (17.1.1970) Later he continues to insist and again the Mother stresses: ‘It is understood, the 24 metres end at the walls.’

My efforts in 1974-5 proved futile, as futile as the Mother’s in 1970. The presiding architect is known to have stated that even though it would take ‘only ten minutes’ to re-do the calculations and extend the room’s diameter to the prescribed 24, he had no intention of doing so. The reason for his ignorant obstinacy none have cared to investigate. Any sincere, knowledgeable person must readily conclude that the consciousness guiding the decisions and actions in both the Ashram and Auroville was a shadow of the true thing, a falsifier and not an upholder of Truth.

An example can be found in Appendix 3. This letter was addressed to one of Sri Aurobindo’s oldest remaining sadhaks, one who considers himself an authority on his teachings. It exposes the problem the Mother faced in not having any allies to help execute her vision. We seem to have inherited the problem as the letter reveals, compounded by her departure at the point when this help could have been given. (Unfortunately, we are unable to publish herein the sadhak’s letters, to which this is a reply, because he has withheld permission.)

Today the public is duped because it too stands under the influence of this Shadow. And naturally, given the fact that public funds are involved – a colossal seven crores, or 70 million rupees, – the truth is sought to be concealed. But the day will soon dawn when the truth will conquer because, true to the Mother’s call, there is one person who has seen along with her. The vision thus lives on.

 

Spinal Dislocation

 

Let us proceed with our discussion of the Gnostic Circle geography and discover how the Mother’s original plan carries a geographical correspondence in the measurements she gave for certain essential items. In particular, we must discuss the axis of the temple mentioned above, inasmuch as it is the principal factor to reproduce faithfully in any Vedic temple. To illustrate, below is a cross-section sketch of a Hindu temple taken from George Michell’s, The Hindu Temple (University of Chicago Press, 1988). This can be of any size, bearing due respect for the correct proportions in any transposition. The important feature, as I have discussed earlier, is the shaft rising from the centremost point in the garbhagriha, the womb-house, or the temple’s sanctum sanctorum.

                             

 

The Mother has carried this Vedic principle to even higher levels of truth-seeing by rendering the axis in light. She has thus materialised the Vedic symbolism of the Cow as Ray of Light, which is the dual meaning of the Sanskrit  word for cow: go, gau. But it is its connection with the geography of India via the geometry of time of this new cosmology that transports the seeing beyond anything that has so far been implemented on Indian soil. For the axis of light is, by the geometry of time, equivalent to one year of 365 days, or 365 years in the equation, one day for one year, which we discover time and again in the Vedas.

I have pointed out in various publications, in particular in The New Way, Volume 2, that the geometry of time in conjunction with the diameter of the temple’s luminous globe provides us with the understanding that the globe is the totality of the subcontinental landmass by means of an application of the Laws of Correspondence or Equivalency. These laws were of utmost importance to the Vedic seers. We find this corroborated by a contemporary French scholar, Charles Malamoud. In an interview he gave to the Unesco Courier (May 1993), he comments on the Vedic emphasis on the question of ‘correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm’…

 

‘…Such correspondences exist, but it is up to humans to discover them, to become aware of them, to formulate them – and in so doing, to confirm them. Solving the Vedic riddles I referred to earlier which are one of the aspects of Brahman, involves linking similar elements from the different levels of existence. There are not just two of these, but more often three: the level of the gods, which is that of the cosmos; the level of the individual human being (body and soul); and between the two of them, the ritual level. A ritual object, a particular moment in a ceremony, is thought to have a replica or counterpart in some specific spatial or temporal element of the universe, and also in some aspect of human activity or an organ of the human body.

‘This network of correspondences is not static. The Vedic authors, particularly in the Upanishads, give much thought to finding new, more refined and complex equivalences. Several Sanskrit words convey this idea, words that mean “connection”, “link”, even “kinship”. In Vedic India the idea of correspondences is more important than the concept of causality – whereas Buddhism insists on the sequence of cause and effect…’

 

In keeping with this Vedic tradition, the Mother has given us measurements in the centrepiece of the chamber which do indeed contain these ‘new correspondences’ which Malamoud discusses in the above interview. Once again, it is necessary to stress, this newness carries the tradition to even greater depths of perception and understanding of the universal harmonies, provided one is equipped with a key which can clarify the ‘riddle’. This contemporary key of knowledge is the Gnostic Circle.

To illustrate, by the Law of Correspondence, we have 30 degrees of latitude and 40 degrees of longitude captured in the globe of 70cms which the Mother specified as the correct diameter of the globe. This is the spatial equivalence noted by Malamoud, and it is understood that discovering a relationship of this order is not a mental operation. One does not either create such a correspondence or discover it through the mind, but rather on the basis of that special quality of ‘felt vision’ the Mother often refers to, which in the Veda is known as sruti or ‘hearing’ the Truth, combined with ‘seeing’ – for indeed the Rishis are called ‘seers’. That is, a sensorial perception of a superior order.

The temporal relation corresponds to the Festival of Light starting with the December Solstice and culminating on January 5th, tapering off to the 9th. The 5th would be the 15th degree of Capricorn, the ‘mountaintop’. It describes the soul of India.

[Insert diagram here. pg  24 . No circle as indicated in text]

 

The Gnostic Circle is the key of knowledge to render the measurements of the chamber’s shaft of light and centrepiece applicable through their connection with the calendar via the geometry of time. To illustrate the method, we may take the globe’s 70cms diameter and apply the laws of correspondence through the Gnostic Circle and we find that while its 30 and 40 degrees refer to the 30 and 40 degrees of latitude and longitude respectively, they are also representative of the two segments of the Gnostic Circle’s superimposed circles: the circle of 12 consists of segments of 30 degrees, while the circle of 9 consists of segments of 40 degrees. Further on, we shall observe how these 30 of the space (12) circle and 40 of the time (9) circle correspond accurately to the latitude and longitude in an exercise of applied cosmology.

In addition, when laid as a yardstick around the globe, with its 0 point at Greenwich, the Gnostic Circle reveals that Capricorn starts just where the Capricorn hieroglyphic Indian landmass begins. From there the sign’s 30 degrees move into and through India, with the 15th degree of the sign as indicated in the maps on page 24, – i.e., at 76° longitude east. With the zodiac thus laid on the globe, Capricorn begins at 60/61 East and continues eastward to the mouth of the Ganga in the Bay of Bengal; and then the Capricorn tail is carried over to encompass Burma, and from there swings back toward the central body. This hieroglyphic symbol represents a play of energy, and cannot be understood unless this is taken into account. The gunas, or energy qualities, move into the Body in this eastward triadic play. The tail, reversing at the Capricorn 0 point in Bengal and thereafter sweeping back into the central Body of the Mother, indicates an essential feature of the destiny of Bharat, not to be found in any other nation in the world: a contained triune play of energies to produce a centre that holds. This would be the Earth’s zero point, her centre, her soul.

In The Magical Carousel this attribute of Capricorn is detailed in the tenth chapter particularly via the sign’s connection to Time, and above all, simultaneous time – or the three times of an immobile centre or seed: compressed time in the core. The effulgent translucent globe of the Mother’s original vision captures the supreme essence of Capricorn in both time and space through the new cosmology’s geometry of time and cosmo-geography of space.

The spine of the Body or its Mt Meru axis is found at 15 degrees into its Capricorn form, thus at 76° longitude. It moves vertically through the entire portion of the subcontinent, covering the prescribed 30° of latitude from top to bottom, as indicated on page 24. The student who wishes a more detailed presentation of this configuration may consult Volume 2 of The New Way, Chapter 9. I am restating a portion of that analysis here simply to highlight the importance of executing that central axis in the Mother’s temple with extreme care inasmuch as it has this geographical correspondence with the actual Indian landmass of the Capricorn hieroglyph through the laws of correspondence and equivalence.

Indeed, having failed to execute the axis properly in the shadow-temple, it stands that in some way there has to be a reflection in the geography the axis=globe comprises – i.e., the Indian landmass. One important though tragic correspondence seems to be the recent earthquake that struck India on 30 September 1993. The area affected straddled principally parts of the state of Maharashtra, and then into Karnataka. Its intensity was such that it was felt even at Skambha.

To date seismologists are baffled by this earthquake. In their words, there is ‘no scientific explanation’ for its occurrence in that area. The epicentre was around Latur and Osmanabad in Maharashtra, a location not significant in seismological assessments of quake-prone zones on the subcontinent; in fact it is rated in the category of least probability.

I had pointed out when the ‘crystal’ was installed in the shadow-temple that due to its misalignment and emptiness, there would be repercussions in all that the globe and pedestal stand for. Particularly its geographical correspondences. One such was this very epicentre: the quake struck not on any geological fault line but rather right on the disjointed spinal column running through the body of a dismembered Mother India in terms of the  Capricorn hieroglyphic relationships; and at a critical location on that column, – that is, 18 degrees down the column and 12 degrees from the tip of the ‘V’ at the bottom of the map. Both these numbers hold the key to the time-space relationships in the Mother’s chamber. 18 is the key to the vertical descending solar ray and its correspondence to certain time cycles, equivalent to longitude which is measured vertically across the globe; 12 is the horizontal base of the Mother’s 12-petalled symbol, equivalent to latitude bands, measured horizontally.

The ‘spine’ extends from what I have called the Eye of Shiva (in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir), to the tip of the subcontinent. This axis passes right through the epicentre of the recent inexplicable earthquake (the area is indicated by a circle in the map on page 24). The correspondence with the shadow-temple lies in the same axial dislocation producing a derangement of both time and space. This is the ‘fault line’ susceptible to disturbances in a landmass that is hypersensitised to these geo-cosmological rumblings.

It is to be expected that disbelievers will attribute this clear correspondence to ‘coincidence’. But the sages and seers know. The unfortunate part is that their voices are neither heard nor heeded. For the Mother herself lamented, after her efforts to have her plan implemented in the temple construction failed, that ‘…One is not going to say it! To begin with, they will not believe me. (17.1.1970) A year later she questioned, ‘Will it have to be the lesson of catastrophe?’

 

The Perversity of ‘goodwill’ 

 

Listening to the taped recordings of the Mother’s discussion on the Matrimandir with the disciple, Satprem, is a profoundly disheartening experience, for it reveals the inability of the human being to follow the Mother in her seeing and to offer the least resistances possible to the fulfilment of her will. Indeed, what is evident as we listen is that from the beginning there was no desire at all on the part of any of the dramatis personae to serve as channels for the implementation of her vision. From the outset the disciple, for one, reveals that his sole interest is to secure the Mother’s approval for his protégé’s vision in place of hers. This is quite apparent if one listens to the entire sequence of the recordings – those made public, that is – from 31.12.1969 to 17.1.1970.

I would like to close this portion of our study with a brief summary and analysis of the contents of those recordings for readers who do not have the tapes, and also as a guide for those who do. (The complete transcripts are included in TVNs 1/5 and 1/6.)

 

31.12.1969: In this conversation the Mother makes it clear that she has not seen the temple as yet. She has an idea based on a preliminary ‘seeing’, this is clear, since she describes the chamber in this session with the disciple very close to what she did come to see, perhaps within hours of their meeting. Rather than provide us with the details we seek to reconstruct her vision accurately, this discussion centres mostly on the problems with the official architect in charge of the entire project and his reluctance to start with the centre of the township, the temple. His preference, according to the Mother, is to build the city first and then the centre.

 But the most important feature of this session is the disciple’s presentation of his protégé’s ideas. He tells the Mother about Paolo Tommasi’s ‘inspiration’ as to what needs to be done and reads out PT’s letter to her. The gist is that the centre should be built first and only after that the city. In addition, he emphasises that this ‘unification’ around the centre’ will help to bring down the vision.

The extremely interesting part to note is his repeated reference to an axis, a centre, which he feels should serve to gather the dispersed energies in Auroville for the positive completion of that task at hand. Given the role that these two played subsequently, precisely in the destruction of that (occult) axis and centre the Mother so meticulously arranged for her temple, this recording takes on historical importance and is a document of immense value, for it casts light on the difficulty a ‘sincere goodwill’  poses when not accompanied by a sincere yoga.

The important part to focus on in this tape is the insistence on PT’s vision and ideas because subsequent developments will reveal that throughout the entire exercise, spanning 18 days, he clings tenaciously to his part in the affair, his instrumentation, even after the Mother had informed them all that she had SEEN, that she no longer needed them for the purpose.

But even as early as this discussion the objective listener can easily appreciate that the Mother intuited the essential lines of the chamber and was only waiting for that decisive experience to come which would both confirm her intuition as well as provide the missing and essential details of the chamber. Indeed, immediately after this first session with Satprem, she did receive that confirmation. This came through the ‘felt vision’, or the actual discovery on the subtle plane of that chamber. She entered the temple in the subtle physical, saw, and thereafter recorded what she saw. At that point, she did not need anyone to help ‘bring down the vision’, and she stated this quite emphatically though fruitlessly.

 

3.1.1970: The disciple informs the Mother that PT waits outside her room to see her. The Mother begins enthusiastically to tell Satprem, before seeing PT, of her experience, that she has now SEEN. She tells the disciple in minute detail what she ‘saw’, ‘lived’. He suggests that she should tell PT rather than him, but the Mother prefers to talk to Satprem about it, until she has the plans drawn up.

After describing the experience of seeing in full, she declares: ‘I have had the vision of that room, so I do not need anyone to see what that should be: I KNOW. And an engineer is needed rather than an architect, because an architect…It has to be as simple as possible.

The disciple then relates that he transmitted everything the Mother had told him (31.12.1969) about the ‘large empty room’ and how touched PT was by this idea, that it coincided with his – this emptiness. The Mother makes it clear that she would rather have the plans in hand before seeing PT, but agrees to see him nonetheless since he is waiting.

When PT enters she again describes her vision but begins by stating straight-away that… ‘I have seen the interior’, and that in a few days she will have the plans and drawings because…‘the exterior, I do not know at all, but the inside I KNOW’.

Then begins another long, detailed description of every aspect of her vision, remarking from time to time that she will soon have the plans. PT appears to listen intently. She ends by stating again. ‘…So, as soon as my papers (plans) are ready, I will call you to show you.’

After PT leaves the room the Mother again broaches the subject of the harmony (or disharmony) between the competing architects, Roger Anger and PT, and how she would prefer to have PT present to handle building the centre [after all, he seemed so enthusiastic] while RA is absent, and when he returns and works on the township PT should be absent, and so on. But again she stresses her preference for an engineer, ‘…It is for this reason that I am going to have these sketches to show him (PT), done by an engineer, because it is not an architect’s job, it is a job for an engineer…very precise…very precise.’ And then regarding the importance of the right calculations, she states, ‘That is what is important, the Sun’s play on the centre (the globe). Because that becomes the symbol – the symbol of the future realisation.’

To note in this portion is the repeated insistence that she wants an engineer not an architect, and that she will soon have the plans to show. In other words, she comes across in this tape as fully sure of her vision and her ability to get precise plans done by the engineer. At which point, with plans in hand, they can proceed to execute them. Time and again, to both Satprem and PT, she declares: I HAVE SEEN, I do not need anyone.

 

10.1.1970: Satprem begins by telling the Mother he has a letter for her from PT. The Mother interjects, saying she plans to meet PT in the afternoon. Then she informs the disciple that she has the plans of the chamber. She has him unroll them and begins a long explanation of each and every detail. It is clear that everything has been meticulously worked out by her with the engineer.

Referring continuously to the plans, she discusses the centre of the room, her horizontal symbol, Sri Aurobindo’s four symbols forming a square upholding a translucent  globe (‘…as yet we do not know what material’).

Then the Mother, discusses the entry as a descent under the walls and into the room from below, with these memorable words, ‘…It is another symbol. Everything is symbolic.’

When she finishes, Satprem reads PT’s letter. It is necessary to reproduce his letter in full because more than anything else in this sordid display of ignorance and self-importance, this letter reveals the precise nature of the difficulties the Mother faced in having her vision executed. To appreciate in full the nature of the intransigent obstinacy, it must be recalled that just a week earlier PT met the Mother and she told him she had seen, she would give him the plans, she now did not need anyone, and she did not want an architect, only an engineer. Nevertheless, he wrote,

‘Very sweet Mother,
      ‘I saw R [the official architect] Sunday, he came to my room, we had

lunch together. With love, I arranged for you and R some very beautiful flowers.

You, you were with us. We spoke a lot. I felt R like a brother.

‘I told him that Auroville cannot be born like any other city (urban problems, social, economic, all that: later). The beginning must be ‘something else’. For that reason we should start with the Centre. This Centre must be our lever, our fixed point, the thing on which we can steady ourselves to leap to the other side – because it is only from the other side that one can begin to understand what Auroville should be. And this Centre should be the form which manifests in matter the content which You can transmit to us on all the planes (even the occult). We, we should be simply the open and sincere mediums through whom you can make that concrete.

‘And I told him how I felt the need to approach all that by living the experience internally, all united – people from the orient and the occident – in a vast movement of love, because it is the only cement possible to build ‘something else’.

‘And the Centre can give us that love immediately because it is love for You!

‘I told him that, practically, we can begin by a moment of silence, all gathered together, and try to make a total blank, and on that blank, with the aspiration of everyone, make the signs for the beginning descend [to descend or descent?]. But all united and all together, especially those who are spiritually more advanced, the Indians.

‘R was in full agreement. He said really we must do that.’

 

The Mother’s immediate response to his letter was revealing: ‘I am seeing P this afternoon and I will give him the plans. Because this is what I have seen.’ Then she does not dwell on his desire to unite and call down the ‘signs’ of what should be, she returns again to the details: white marble, where to get it, Sri Aurobindo’s symbols…and the translucent globe.

Most important, she specifies the correct diameter of the globe: 70cms, asking the disciple to confirm this in the plans. He does. Then the entry by descent and ascent into the room is emphasized and the fact that to gain access to the chamber certain conditions would have to be met (‘…It must be somewhat initiatic.’)

                        

17.1.1970: The disciple begins by presenting the ideas of PT and her Italian secretary, Nata, regarding the outer shape of the building. The Mother comments that she is open to suggestions since she only saw the inside. (The implication being that the interior is her creation, her domain, not the architects’.)

But from this discussion on the outer form the talk spins off to every item of her plan, until by the end of a long and gruelling attempt to defend the elements of her vision which had been systematically attacked, we realise that the Mother was in the presence of obstinate ignorance in the guise of ‘love’ and ‘goodwill’.

For example, the twelve columns are attacked as being ‘another symbol of the old creation’ (PT’s words). If it was necessary to have them for a ‘symbolic’ representation (after all the Mother had said, everything was symbolic), then one could put 12 blocks, or backrests about 50cms high. To this nonsense the Mother replies, ‘That has no meaning.’ A symbolic meaning?, the disciple questions ‘…because you spoke of the pillars as backrests.’ She insists she saw pillars. He insists that something could be put in their place as ‘symbols’. She keeps on insisting. He retorts. And on and on it goes.

The recording of much of this was not kept, only the transcripts which appear in The Mother’s Agenda, Volume 11 (1970). Reading these transcripts, it is pathetic to discover that even with the precise plans in hand, her disciples and devotees saw fit to dismantle her vision bit by bit. Nothing was sacred.

Midway through this gruelling exercise, Satprem even makes this astounding remark about PT’s ‘plan’ of the room which he brought to the Mother: ‘But when Paolo showed me his plan, I had the impression of something very beautiful…I will tell you what I felt. I felt: I am assisting at the birth of Auroville.’

The Mother wastes no time. She replies: ‘It is not true.

Satprem insists: ‘The material birth, I mean.’

Again the Mother is emphatic: ‘Yes, yes, I understand well, but it is not true.’ After this, according to the transcripts, she enters into a long concentration.

The recording commences again, after these pages and pages of the Mother’s futile attempts to protect her SEEING, when finally she states:

‘You know, I do not believe in external decisions. Quite simply, I believe in only one thing: the force of Consciousness which makes a pressure…And the Pressure goes on augmenting.’

She then explains that she cannot move about to oversee things as she used to, – in other words, to make sure things get done as she wants. Therefore she relies on the ‘pressure of the Consciousness’, … ‘All the rest, those are things men do; they do them more or less well, and then it lives, and then it dies, and then it changes and then it is deformed, and then – that is what they do…’.

Finally the discussion concludes with these words, ‘So, since there are not many who can understand, I say nothing: I watch and I wait. I LOOK…Someone gives me a paper like you have just done when you gave me that drawing [PT’s plan of the temple], I look, like that, and I see very well what in that paper comes from above, and what is a mixture and what is… Like that. But one cannot say it! – to begin, they would not believe me.’

After a moment of silence, the Mother interestingly begins discussing the terminology Sri Aurobindo used to describe the new species he envisioned, which would replace ‘the old man’. She comments that she understands why he called it ‘supramental’ and not superman. In other words, she realised she was faced with precisely that aberration: the exaltation of ‘man’, the ego of the instrument, and the deranged mental approach which has brought so much calamity to the world.

What becomes evident at the end of this disturbing exercise is that at no point along the way did the Mother enjoy the collaboration of instruments ready to execute HER vision. The transcripts and recordings reveal an obsession with their own ideas, to the point that we are justified in asking whether they even heard the Mother.

In this context, it may be of interest to report that in late 1974 or early 1975, when the first wave of opposition to the architects arose before construction of the room had reached the point of no return, I invited PT to describe his experience with the Mother to me. Since the points in question were salvation of a few important items, particularly the 24-metre inner wall room diameter, entry from below, and the twelve columns, I wanted to solicit his help and to know what it was like to have heard the Mother describe her vision immediately after it had occurred. He explained how ‘charged’ her room was, how extraordinary the experience was to listen to her.

Naturally I then asked how it was that he came back to her with all the above changes (‘…columns are another symbol of the old creation’) when her description to him had been so remarkable, so powerful. He had no reply.

The conclusion must be that these were representative instruments sent to implement a vision, but certainly not the Mother’s; that their obstinacy was total and that the Mother, given her age (92) and frailty and inability to oversee the construction herself, could not pretend to emerge victorious from this 18-day Kurukshetra battle, which closed on that most significant date, 17 January. Thus she concluded with these words ‘…But one is not going to say it. To begin, they would not believe me.’

What now stands in Auroville is not merely a ‘mixture’. It is the representation of what the Mother did not care to elaborate upon then: the contours in every detail of the Titan’s Consciousness, the shadow of the Gnostic Light, the perversion of Sri Aurobindo’s truth and the objective of his mission. Lamentably, what was recorded during those fateful 18 days was the description of the binary creation with all its flaws and ‘goodwill’. Indeed, the Mother’s ‘helpers’ displayed one of the principal characteristics of the Titanic Consciousness: self-important ego of the instrument. None heard her because they were too full of themselves.

Another reason for this scrutiny of the titanic response to the Light is that it forms an introduction to the next part of this study in which we shall analyse the limitations of the Supramental Shakti in dealing with human aberrations, even when it means the destruction of her own creation. We shall delve into this question of ‘pressure’ which the Mother refers to, in her view the only means to get the right thing done. What, then, is the nature of that special power she referred to? Has it been in evidence?

It is clear that given her age and physical condition, the Mother could not deal with her entourage as she might have done in her younger days. She relied heavily on that ‘consciousness exerting a pressure’. But in this case it would appear as if nothing had been accomplished, inasmuch as the shadow-temple has come up and appears to be an everlasting ‘symbol’ of the old creation, in the Mother’s own name. In other words, a travesty of her truth. But the Divine Strategy has been revealed in the course of the years following the Mother’s passing, though its confirmation has often been through negative and disturbing happenings. At this point there is one thing that stands beyond all doubt. Seekers are given a choice: this or that. It is an important feature of the divine Strategy in that the next stage for humanity is characterised by a conscious choice. For this there must be a clear understanding of what our options are. We cannot be expected to choose between this and that unless we know the contours of both the Titanic and the Vedic Consciousness. Hence, this exercise, unpleasant as it may be for seekers, especially those who consider that ‘spirituality’ be tainted by ‘controversy’ (and there are many in this old mindset), has been a necessary and all-important part of our study. From here, having dissected the Shadow in all thoroughness, we shall move on to the Light, to a discussion of the means at the Mother’s disposal to bring about the establishment of her Truth in the world. For this to happen the sincere seeker must be armed with a fine discrimination so that the shadow is not mistaken for that Light.

 

 

PN-B

Aeon Centre of Cosmology

at Skambha

17 January 1994

 

 

 

 

 

Movement for the Restoration of Vedic Wisdom (logo)

The Origins and Nature of Hindu Decline

The Origins and Nature of Hindu Decline – 1

28 November 2006

The successful re-timing of the Jupiter transit rituals in the temples in Tamil Nadu where they have been traditionally held caused me to marvel, once again, at the wealth of Knowledge each temple contains and how they have been used in times of great turbulence to preserve the Vedic origins of the civilisation. But I wondered, as I have many times over these past 30 years, how it is possible that such a total loss of the connecting links could come about. At this stage what is required more than anything else if some sort of RESTORATION is to come about is the ability to RE-CONNECT. At this stage this will surely be the most important contribution The Movement can make to Hindu culture.

In light of the breakthrough, I took up Varahamihira’s Brihat Samhita once more and leafed through it. I had gone through this text in M. Ramakrishna Bhat’s translation into English a number of years ago (1981); it was copiously underlined and commented by me in the margins. I also looked through Gheverghese Joseph’s more recent The Crest of the Peacock (1991) where he explores the ‘non-European Roots of Mathematics’; and several other volumes in my library. My interest was to look through these works again in the light of this breakthrough, and also the discoveries that have been made in the interim regarding the Saraswati Civilisation and the now-defunct Aryan Invasion Theory.

I have a book on my shelf, The Hindu Temple by George Mitchell, an ‘introduction to its meaning and forms’ with a wonderful series of photos and floor plans. Mitchell writes, ‘Only if the temple is constructed correctly according to a mathematical system can it be expected to function in harmony with the mathematical basis of the universe. The inverse of this belief is also held: an architectural text, the Mayamata, adds that “if the measurement of the temple is in very way perfect, there will be perfection in the universe as well.”’

But the limitations of Mitchell’s 1977 text is that he relies totally on the ‘word’ of Indologists that Hindu civilisation was a import from the West brought by Aryan nomads. He simply repeats the now discredited theories that sought to impress upon scholars, and Hindus above all, that the subcontinent was ‘empty’; it was only a vast receptive womb of nothingness that cultures from abroad could fill at their pleasure. How consciously was this idea disseminated with a specific purpose in mind, (to justify invasions and colonial rule) remains to be seen. The restoration we aim for will not be fully accomplished unless we deal with the root cause of this inculcation – and particularly WHEN it was set in place. Afterwards the decline of the civilisation was as predictable as the rise of tomorrow’s Sun.

The Hindu temple, it is held, needs this perfection the Mayamata refers to in order for the community to benefit from the wisdom the sages have handed down through various means, one of which is architecture. But these are lifeless structures if other aspects of the Knowledge do not form a part of the transmission. Therefore Myth comes to our aid, together with astrological tradition. When temple culture took over from the vedi [geometric altars] of the Vedic Age, in a remarkable manner the essence of these myths was transposed to the temple structure. But this could not be done without the astrological background as part of the process. And thus was born the epoch that gave us so much wonderful evidence of the quality of the true Vedic Roots; but unfortunately, the very need to preserve the Knowledge in stone indicated that a serious decline had begun: the Knowledge would go underground if it was to be saved.

The texts I have cited above provide the information we need to support this assessment based on the yogic experience. To a person of Knowledge it is evident that the consciousness of the Vedic Rishi was very far removed from the later propounders of the ‘knowledge’ such as Varahamihira. I enclose the word in quotation marks because from my standpoint what we find in the Brihat Samhita is not Knowledge as I use the term. The decline that had set in is made fully evident in this text which deals almost exclusively with astrology as a predictive art and makes no attempt to explore its deeper roots, those we do find throughout the Rig Veda, for example.

 

The Origins and Nature of Hindu Decline – 2
9 December 2006

In Part 1 of this analysis, I presented an example of the evolution of Hindu Society across the centuries based on the few texts available to contemporary researchers. I have focussed on jyotish, astrology, because in so doing we may follow the investigation into contemporary India and learn much about the nature of the decline, what caused it, and where it has led Hindu Society as a collective body. We acknowledge that Hinduism is a vast umbrella covering an almost infinite number of sects, and yogic and philosophical systems. But though these systems are like individual stars in this umbrella-firmament, there is one underlying and pervasive ‘ocean’ within which all these systems navigate. This Cosmic Ocean binds them within a common time-wheel, enhancing the eclectic and catholic quality of Hinduism. Rituals to the numerous Vedic Godheads or to the innumerable personal deities may vary; but the timing of the collective celebration of those rituals is what knits them together to maintain, across the ages, the continuity we experience as Hinduism. One example is the Kumbha Mela which, on a particular date and time established by the Pundits, draws millions of yogis, sants and devotees to the banks of the sacred rivers in a common worship that cuts across sectarian and denominational divides. For this reason a study of the calendar, by which the timing of these festivals is determined, can be shown to be a valuable device for locating when and perhaps why the decline set it.

Gheverghese Joseph, in Chapter 9 of his ‘The Crest of the Peacock’, substantiates the core of my analysis by noting that the development of mathematics and astronomy between approximately 500 BCE and 500 CE was limited. He writes, ‘Yet this hiatus in our knowledge [is] particularly puzzling given the wealth of evidence we have for the same period in other fields, notably medicine and chemistry, and in philosophy where outstanding work was produced… Various explanations have been offered for this apparent discontinuity [emphasis mine]. The virtual disappearance of Vedic sacrifices removed, as it were, the raison d’être for continued interest in geometry…’

We can fully agree that the disappearance of the geometrical vedi which required very great precision if the Sacrifice was to bear the desired results, impacted the development of mathematics, – and also astrology, as we shall see. It is to be noted that the ‘hiatus’ was spread over almost a thousand years, but within this period Temple Culture arose and remains with us to this day. Notwithstanding the gap the absence of texts covering these areas of knowledge attests to, one important factor to underscore became consolidated during this period: the split between astrology and astronomy. The Brihat Samhita is an astrological text from the period after the split; it provides some substantial evidence of the lack of a direct continuity with the Vedic Age.

We can approach the topic and reach the same conclusion as above simply by studying the extant scriptures of the periods under scrutiny. Readily we do note that there is a discernible chasm between the Rig Veda, for example, and the contents of the Brihat Samhita. The former was composed by Initiates whose language was of a quality that is lacking in the later text, or even in the later Upanishads. As the mathematical historian records, there was a time vacuum and during this ‘void’ the decline of Hinduism began which left the earlier hymns and prescriptions incomprehensible to later generations. However, it was precisely during this ‘blank space’ that the Puranas arose to become the secret repository of everything that was most sacred to Vedic culture; the Myths were in turn preserved in the Hindu Temples, as if each one was a treasure-book in stone.

Can we expect a mathematician or an historian to interpret this time-chasm correctly? In the early part of the last century, Sri Aurobindo wrote an insightful essay on this very theme entitled, On the Importance of Original Thinking. It was published in its complete form in the April 1981 edition of the Sri Aurobindo Archives:

   ‘We have had recently in India a great abundance of speculations on the real causes of that gradual decline and final arrest which Indian civilisation no less than European suffered during the Middle Ages. The arrest was neither so sudden as in Europe nor so complete; but its effect on our nation, like the undermining activity of a slow poison, was all the more profoundly destructive, pervasive, hard to remedy, difficult to expel. At a certain period we entered into a decline, splendid at first like a long and gorgeous sunset, afterwards more and more sombre, till darkness closed in, and if our sky was strewn with stars of a great number and brilliance, it was only a vast decay, confusion and inertia that they lighted and emphasised with their rays.We have, most of us, our chosen explanation of this dolorous phenomenon…Such explanations, like most human thoughts, have their bright side of truth as well as their obscure side of error; but they are not, in any case, the result of impartial thinking…’ (Volume 5, p. 27 – Emphasis mine).

When we discover a particular substratum that can act as an impartial graph which embraces the entire period Sri Aurobindo mentions above, onto which we can draw a line of development, errors are more likely to be eliminated. But to do so we have to extend our framework to cover an arc from the Vedic Age to the present. All researchers may agree that there was a pause in the development of mathematics and astronomy; but none will relate the decline to a loss of the ancient knowledge of astrology which we uncover by a scrutiny of the Vedic Hymns, where this lore exists as an initiatic language accepted by the entire community. It was so pervasive that no explanation of its symbolism was required. However, it took approximately an entire millennium for the link with the civilisation that composed those hymns to vanish; or at least to go securely underground.

The astrology we find in a text such as the Brihat Samhita bears no resemblance to the astrology/cosmology of the ancient Veda. Its value, however, lies in one area and one alone, albeit of immense importance: the preservation of the symbols of the zodiac for each of the 12 months of the year, a knowledge that was taken for granted in the Vedic Age; and the beginning of that year on the Equinox of March when days and nights are of equal measure. Ten months later the most important of all astrological prescriptions for the Hindu Samaj follows: the celebration of the Makar Sankranti on the December Solstice, or the shortest day of the year. There was, even into Varahamihira’s epoch, no separation between the two – shortest day and gateway to the zodiacal Makar/Capricorn were one and the same. So special was this passage that in the Rig Veda it was hailed as the month of the Warrior’s conclusive victory; indeed the culmination of the entire Vedic Journey.

When the Brihat Samhita was composed the months/signs were known as they are today, beginning with the zodiacal Aries the Ram, followed by Taurus the Bull, and so on through the twelve month/signs. But some ‘nationalist’ post-Vedic astrologers/historians have now decided that this was an import from Mesopotamia and Greece and should no longer serve us as backdrop to the Vedic Journey through the months of the year, Varahamihira notwithstanding. In so doing, they are undermining the entire cultural fabric of the civilisation which is solidly grounded in the eternal Myth these symbols contain, and which has been masterfully carried over into Hindu temple architecture.

Given the historic split between science and the sacred, this type of transmission of Knowledge can be grasped now only through the practice of a special Yoga. Therefore, in Sri Aurobindo’s The Secret of the Veda, the very same deeper psycho-spiritual sense of the hymns has been conveyed without reference having been made to astrology at all; yet through his translations the knowledgeable and competent astrologer recognises instantly the same ancient body of knowledge. This is not evidenced in the Brihat Samhita and texts of that period, when astrology and astronomy were in the process of being separated for good. Still, the time factor based on the true Vedic calendar prevailed: the Solstices and Equinoxes were the indisputable crosswise demarcations of the Sacrificial Year. But ‘forces’ were about to intervene to introduce the ‘undermining activity of a slow poison’ that was to result in the loss of even that binding tool of the Hindu Samaj, to carry it into a ‘more and more sombre’ darkness until ‘only a vast decay, confusion and inertia’ had finally overtaken even the area of knowledge that had managed to survive into Varahamihira’s time.

We proceed forward through our graph and having noted that the system of Vedic computation for the calendar was still preserved even a thousand years after the chasm between the Vedic Age and medieval India arose, M. Ramakrishna Bhat offers us one precise date as a clue to when the ‘slow poison’ hit its target in the organism. Though the objective in conveying his conclusions in the Introduction to his translation of the Brihat Samhita was meant to sustain – as I too sustain – that the zodiac in use during Varahamihira’s time and into the present was of Indian origin and went westward rather than being an import, unwittingly he provides us with the exact means to locate not only when the ‘poison’ set in but what its very precise target was. Thus, on page xiii, he introduces Al-Biruni (born in 973 CE), the astrologer-traveller who came to India ‘with the object of studying Hindu astrology and culture’. Al-Biruni translated some major works such as the Brihat Samhita into Arabic. He came with the wave of invasions from the West and his objective was indeed to study Hindu astrology, the knowledge of which he brought back to Arabia. A number of its concepts have since come down in history as his inventions, such as what is known in western astrology even today as Al-Biruni’s Lunar Stations or Mansions. These are simply the Nakshatras of the Indian system, a division of the 360-degree wheel into 27 parts based on the mean motion of the Moon, i.e., 13.20 degrees per day. Though the Nakshatras as such are not used in the western system, this division, applied differently, certainly holds a prominent place.

Bhat misses the point that should have captured his attention, but nonetheless he serves our purpose when he cites a portion from Al-Biruni’s famed travelogue, India, which fully supports my argument. Bhat’s reason for quoting Al-Biruni’s statement was only because he considers it to be a misrepresentation of Varahamihira’s astrological knowledge: ‘The Arab scholar takes our author [Varahamihira] to task for his statement on the solstices and remarks: “The solstice has kept its place, but the constellations have migrated, just the very opposite of what Varaha has fancied”. (India, II, p.7)

The above is an example of the manner in which a ‘slow poison’ was injected into the innermost organism of Hinduism so that the ‘scientific’ intrusion into the domain of the sacred would gradually undermine the confidence of the Pundits in their own sacred science by causing them to believe that what Al-Biruni injected was more ‘scientifically correct’. Rather than a poison, the effect of this type of suggestion was akin to a deadening intoxicant that caused a blanket of inertia to descend on the subcontinent. There was no need at all to demolish temples when this substance had been successfully administered, as we shall see. Al-Biruni came to India 500 years after Varahamihira’s time, whose Brihat Samhita proves that the Constellations were not to be confused with the Tropical Zodiac which never varies in time and whose 12-month segments of the year are inseparable from the solstices and equinoxes.

This is the true VEDIC astrology. It was still in force when Al-Biruni came to India in the 11th century. The ‘gorgeous sunset’ Sri Aurobindo mentions in his essay quoted earlier, pertains to this period when the true Vedic astrology/cosmology still prevailed via respect for the correct Vedic time-frame in temple worship. However, though the Divine Measure was respected, the knowledge validating its use was, like a setting sun, falling into oblivion. By the 11th century all that was needed were a few well pointed ‘poison arrows’ to bring about a ‘vast decay, confusion and inertia’, the inevitable result when Knowledge by initiatic Realisation, the very method minutely detailed in the ancient Veda, no longer exists. It would await the next Age of Vishnu, or the passage of another millennium, to be resuscitated. This Age is now upon us.

To sum up succinctly, suggestions like Al-Biruni’s that the ‘constellations have migrated’ and should no longer be synchronised with the Solstice have been so successful an underminer that all Hindu temple practices are tied to these pronouncements through the prescriptions of its Pundits who, notwithstanding the fact that they can be proven to be un-Vedic (and even unscientific), follow them unquestioningly. We even have courses in this brand of Astrology included in university curricula under the title ‘Vedic Astrology’. It is well to remember that for the ‘undermining activity of a slow poison’ of this nature to take effect, all that is required is to bring about a disconnection between Solstice and Zodiac, just as Al-Biruni suggested; for then it is Time itself that draws the inseparable apart with each passing day THROUGH THE TIMING OF TEMPLE WORSHIP, until the distance between the two bears a discrepancy of almost one full month/sign of the zodiac. Presently the mis-measure is 23 days, or a shift from the Solstice on 21-22 December to the current arbitrary 15 January. But with each passing day and month and year the distance goes on increasing through these wandering phantom ayanamshas. Finally the ‘…only a vast decay, confusion and inertia…’ remain (Sri Aurobindo, Ibid).

Hinduism is still paying for this calculated undermining. It lies at the very heart of its decline. Therefore this is the area we must focus on if we wish to bring back the soul of Vedic Wisdom to the culture, particularly through its vast network of illustrious Temples.

 

The Origins and Nature of Hindu Decline – 3
12 December 2006

‘…But our Hinduism, our old culture are precisely the possessions we have cherished with the least intelligence; throughout the whole range of our life we do things without knowing why we do them, we believe things without knowing why we believe them, we assert things without knowing what right we have to assert them, – or, at most, it is because some book or some Brahmin enjoins it, because Shankara thinks it, or because someone has so interpreted something that he asserts to be a fundamental Scripture of our religion. Nothing is our own, nothing is native to our intelligence, all is derived…’

Sri Aurobindo, On the Importance of Original Thinking,
Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Volume 5, No 1, April 1981 

Of the paragraph from Sri Aurobindo’s essay quoted in Part 2 of this analysis, three lines were withheld which we may take up now as his examples of ‘part truth/part error’ judgements. They refer to two predominant ideas in circulation during his time as to the causes of the decline of Hinduism. The first he describes as the patriot attributing the decline ‘to the ravages of foreign invasion and the benumbing influence of foreign rule…’ (Ibid). While these have played a significant role in the loss of national self-esteem, particularly regarding Hinduism, it is one of those part-truth/part-error hypotheses I set aside in Part 2 by establishing a root-cause at a much earlier date than the beginning of invasions and the foreign rule of the Moguls and the British Raj.

Sri Aurobindo then turns to the second hypothesis, by far the most widespread to this day, and the most damaging to Hindu Culture. Like the first, it too is both truth and error. Sri Aurobindo writes ‘…The disciple of European materialism finds out the enemy [of the civilisational decline], the evil, the fount and origin of all our ills in our religion and its time-honoured social self-expression…’.

Students of Sri Aurobindo’s thought will verify that he did not consider Hinduism’s ‘time-honoured social self-expression’, the caste system, as evil. In fact, throughout his writings on this subject he is more often than not found to uphold the structure, though acknowledging that a serious degeneration had set in. More recently scholars and original thinkers have reached the same conclusion, and I have certainly contributed to this shift through my own revelations regarding the cosmic backdrop of Caste citing the Rig Veda, and therefore how inextricably it is linked to the cosmic foundations of Hinduism. In pulling down caste by a wholesale demolition, we do risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In a recent interview appearing in TheNew Indian Express, the noted writer and Nobel Laureate, V.S. Naipaul, on whom we may certainly confer the title ‘original thinker’, has expressed his views on caste and reached the same conclusion.

Like the Aryan Invasion Theory which continues to be taught in schools throughout the world not as theory but as fact, so too the reason for Hinduism’s decline is laid at the doors of the caste system without further ado. And if Hinduism, accounting for approximately 80% of the population, suffers from the stranglehold of Caste, we may hypothesise that the same ‘evil’ can be extended from the predominate majority to the development of the innumerable socio-economic groups that make up the societal structure of independent India. This has indeed been the case since caste-based divisions have been largely driving the social agenda, spilling over to the minorities from religions that are supposedly unsullied by the caste ‘devil’.

It is necessary to clarify this issue because otherwise we will remain blocked at this iron-clad door, barring any further penetration deeper into the past as I have done in Part 1 and 2, in order to locate the real root-cause of the decline. When we discover that root the true nature of the caste system degeneration, along with all the rest, is made apparent. For it must be borne in mind that the ‘evil of caste’ is not at all the root-cause of Hinduism’s decline, though this has been the doctrine ‘European materialism’, to quote Sri Aurobindo, has succeeded in promulgating in scholastic circles throughout the world for the past two centuries.  Rather, the root-cause which we are sleuthing out through these pages brought an eventual degeneration in the Chaturvarna just as it affected simultaneously all other aspects of Hindu Culture.

However, laying the blame on Caste has become rewarding for ‘European materialism’. Serving a largely political agenda, it has fuelled class wars which have not subsided till today, as well as the agendas of various proselytising religions which offer salvation without caste. Meanwhile the real root-cause passes by undetected and continues to contaminate the entire organism. It uses the channel of calendar observances because that is, as pointed out in Part 2, the umbrella covering the entire Hindu Samaj regardless of caste or sect or denominational/devotional preferences. But – take note – the delinking of Solstice from Zodiac, as imposed by astronomers like Al-Biruni, was also not the root-cause we seek, but simply its ‘engine’ to carry those seeds of undermining across the centuries so that the contamination would continue ad infinitum.

We have not yet laid bare the true origin of the undermining in this discussion, though I have indicated the channel of its perpetration affecting the entire culture. As in all things Vedic, we must turn to the prescriptions of the Veda themselves if we wish to understand what went amiss in that very distant past to cause the decay we see all around us, not just in caste. The clue to discover this root-cause is indicated clearly in the botched up calendar reckoning because all is ONE.  If we penetrate deeply enough we will observe that the nature of the shift Al-Biruni and his fellow astronomers encouraged tells us all we need to know about the distant root-cause of the malaise. It was actually initiated over two millennia ago, and is still with us today. In addition, this discovery uncovers the way to rectification; precisely because, as stated, all is ONE. However, if we stop halfway at the much later effect (the degeneration of caste) rather than to continue probing until our ‘original thinking’ carries us to the cause, our purpose in reinstating the soul of Vedic Wisdom will not be served.

It is also essential to bear in mind that the origins of the Chaturvarna can be traced through the Veda directly to the Cosmic Harmony, – that very same Harmony as it was observed by the Vedic Rishi, and as it continues to exist today without any shifts and mutations, Al-Biruni notwithstanding. Disrupting that Harmony by insisting on separating Solstice and Zodiac, which affects all Hindu Society, is the method to continue stoking the engine of divisiveness that this separation fosters; unless rectified the juggernaut of division continues to gain momentum with each passing day.

The ‘oneness’ I describe can be illustrated very easily by the use of a simple diagram – the circle divided into four parts:. Each of these crosswise sections is one of the four castes, the earliest description of which is found in the Rig Veda, X 90, 12:

…When they divided up the Purush,
Into how many parts did they divide him?
What did his mouth become? What his arms?
What are his legs called? What his feet?

His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms
Became the Kshatriya, his legs
The Vaishya who plies his trade,
The Shudra was born from his feet.

How this Vedic Purush can be equated with the above diagram is learned through the ancient wisdom which reveals that the one circle reflects both time and space. Thus, that same circularyearly ecliptic orbit of the Earth around the Sun, also divided into four quarters as per the Equinoxes and the Solstices, is the very same Cosmic Purush out of whom the castes are born; simply because the signs of the zodiac in that ecliptic do indeed refer to a ‘body’, as all astrologers know.  But in the case of the Vedic Purush it is of cosmic proportions, while in the human being the proportions are microcosmic. The zodiac pertains to both, the ancient tradition informs us, and it covers the Body from head to toe, just as the Rishi has enumerated in these verses via the time-tested Vedic formulas of Correspondence and Equivalence. And via that same Cosmic Harmony this fourfold division could be extended in this embrace of Unity to the entire civilisation via the celebrations of rituals and festivals the timings of which arise from the very same ‘circle’.

While these ‘original thoughts’ may appear too complex for the average devotee to digest, it is the duty of Pundits officiating over these rituals and bearing a responsibility for their timings to be aware of these equivalences and to never lose sight of this Oneness which is the foundation of all that is truly Vedic. It is the duty of Pundits to reinstate that Vedic Soul once again into the organism that is Hinduism. In so doing the pristine truth of Caste will automatically find its place again and all the ugliness that has accumulated over the centuries to hide its universal sense and beauty and purpose will fall into the cosmic wastebin, along with all the other debris the wrong time factor has perpetrated.

 

The Origins and Nature of Hindu Decline – 4
13 December 2006

A Seer of the calibre of the Vedic Rishi perceives and extracts from ‘the seat of our self-accomplishing…where the many-horned herds of Light go travelling’ the fruit of his or her yogic attainments. The ecliptic is that River of Light where the Earth travels through time and space and, together with the other planets, creates the heavenly Harmony which the Seer not only SEES but can also HEAR. It is the visionary quality conveyed in the word Sruti, a ‘heard seeing’, if it may so be called. We encounter this faculty only in the four Vedas precisely because the Rishis honoured that ‘seat of our self-accomplishing’. They did not extend their goal to a locality beyond this River of Light even while using a star in the distant heavenly sphere as a marker-axis to keep them on course while they navigated through the yearly Sacrifice. In so doing, they replicated the movements of their planetary abode within their own consciousness-being. They became THAT. The Harmony came to them SEEN and HEARD because of this exalted experience of Oneness very few have achieved since the age came to an end in which the Rishis lived.

The point to be highlighted, for it helps us understand why the sublime verses of the Rig Veda are largely incomprehensible today, is that the Ancients never allowed themselves to drift hither and thither in the encompassing vastnesses. They were as if anchored to the ecliptic through a realisation that was the fulcrum of the Vedic Way in that very distant past: the Rishis could navigate the River of Light without drifting off course to beyond the dharma-parameters birth on Earth prescribes because of Skambha, the cosmic Pillar described as the ‘support of the worlds’ – this world and not a beyond.These reflections carry us to the heart of the decline of Hinduism, beyond the more superficial layers scholarship has cast on the subject, thus keeping its root-cause hidden for several millennia. Like Guha, Siva’s divine Son, one by one each such veil is lifted until the full form of this mighty War God is disclosed. Indeed, to carry out this penetration the courage of the Hero is demanded, such as this particular Godhead embodies. We then discover that Hinduism began its slow and steady decline not when Solstice and Zodiac were separated but when the Vedic experience that revealed their inseparability had faded into oblivion. 

The cleavage became more and more consolidated when that Unity was superseded by other considerations, other priorities. Of course the Harmony remained because it is eternal; but the axial alignment of the Yogi’s consciousness-being lost its ‘skambha’, its cosmic pillar of support. Then, like a vessel adrift in an infinite vastness, the practitioner’s Seeing Eye became dissolved in this Beyond, having lost his footing (Skambha) on Earth.

From that point onward his formulation of that Cosmic Harmony conveyed the same rootlessness. No longer was the ecliptic in his experience balanced on the four pillars of Equinoxes and Solstices as the foundational base of his Seeing. The new Seers allowed their consciousness to seek the Beyond as the goal of their journey, in contrast to the Ancient Ones so often extolled in the Rig Veda, whose Swar was an experience of this very Earth dimension.

In practical terms this meant that the zodiac projected onto the backdrop of the perpetually mutating constellations became the only map to follow, no longer the zodiac of the tropical ecliptic where the solar system travels and which remains faithful in time to its never changing four pillars, the Equinoxes and the Solstices. This projection, which eventually became frozen in the Hindu calendar, arose out of a void left by the displacement of the Vedic Earth-oriented Swar in favour of trends that were set in motion because of the demands of the Time-Spirit. Realisers could only experience what was made permissible by Mahakala. The time of renewal had arrived. This was signalled by the cosmic harmonies themselves which can be read as one reads a book; and therein we learn that from approximately 500 BCE, Skambha was lost and the realiser’s ‘lighthouse’ was projected into the constellations and no longer rooted in the Earth’s own planetary system based on her own divine Measure. The slow poison of ‘migrating constellations’ had won the day.

In his essay, Sri Aurobindo does reflect on the dangers attending ‘original thinking’ when by hastily demolishing existent structures such voids are created ‘…I must have no wish to destroy it, senseless and evil though it may be, until our new system is ready. For it fills a place the vacancy of which the Spirit that uplifts and supports our human effort would greatly abhor…’ Indeed, if Nature abhors a void, the Spirit does to an even greater degree. Thus into the void of the Spirit the new seers plunged; it became filled thereafter with seekers after the Beyond who increasingly abandoned the Mother Base, forgetting her sacred Measure and Sequences. That Beyond then became projected into the devices that convert the Seer’s vision into the measurable quantities which grant the population at large the means to live and extend the Seer’s realisation across the breath of the land. Thus, the alterations in the spiritual domain laid the ground for the mutation in the calendar of observances. If yogic realisers became obsessed with the Beyond as the goal of their quests, however camouflaged initially, the calendar had to reflect the very same obsession since the projection starts from the consciousness of the Seer. The way was then paved for the shift from the tropical zodiac to the sidereal. The latter was formalised centuries after the Vedic Way had faded into oblivion; then indeed drifting and shifting became the bywords, with an ever-increasing distance between Solstice and Zodiac now amounting to a Makar Sankranti 23 days off from its true timing.

This confusion reflecting a rudderless ship was displayed in Tamil Nadu where the recent transit of Jupiter was celebrated with the appropriate rituals on three different days and as moving into two different signs. The reason for this confusion lay in the fact that there were three different days to choose from three different almanacs. Just in case, and possibly to accommodate each faction, all three dates were celebrated!

Let us be clear: Guru has moved into Scorpio or into Sagittarius, to the 210th degree of the 360-degree circle of the year, or to its 240th. One or the other, it cannot possibly be both. The rational mind and pure heart must rebel at such aimlessness and incompetence that affects millions.

When the Vedic Skambha realisation exists and can then serve as the ‘anchor’ for the civilisation, a confusion of this nature simply cannot arise. The calendar of observances must be an expression of the cosmic Order as perceived by the highest Vedic Authority. That is, the one who has realised that Order within, through processes of Yoga given in great detail in the Rig Veda itself. In these matters there is no pretence. If no one can authoritatively say when Guru changed zodiacal signs, then we know the darkness has reached its deepest pitch. But with the inseparable Solstice/Zodiac on the shortest day of the year as one’s Anchor, such confusion can never take place. The passage occurs on one day only, not two or three or tenAnd certainly we are given cause to wonder how a restoration will ever take place if the movements of perhaps the most important planet of all, the one whose transits determine the day and time of the nothing less than the 12-yearly Kumbha Mela, are treated so shabbily.

It was indeed a gradual process of decline because increasingly birth on Earth was considered a scourge. Finally, the entire cosmos itself became contaminated with the poison, through and through, when it was experienced as an illusion which demanded to be dissolvedLiberation, salvation came to be equated with freedom from Earth birth, thereby chaining the Hindu Samaj to the sidereal sphere of fixed stars millions of light years away from our planetary home in our solar system. It was a pure and simple expression of the void foisted on Hindus by seekers after Nothingness in contrast to the Vedic Fullness. Given the radical shift to a Beyond, everything Vedic, or the old order, necessarily began to break down. Yet if Hinduism remains eternally true to its cosmic roots, then that very cosmos speaks to its heart of its sunsets as well as its dawns. And though it was a ‘gorgeous sunset’, in Sri Aurobindo’s apt description, the Sun was indeed setting, – but certainly to await a new and brighter Dawn.

Why is Makar Sankranti Important for India ~ 3

 

‘I have never doubted the truth of signs…they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs…’

Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose

The world is in turmoil, as seen by indications from various quarters of breakdowns and ultimately collapse of systems across the board. This moment of extreme polarisation ought to have been easily foreseen already in 1989 with the break-up of the Soviet Union and the implied failure of socialism as the answer to solve the many unresolved problems at the time, and which certainly seem to have increased over the intervening 30 years. These unresolved problems can all be drawn back to the ideology that feeds them – economic, socio-political, or religious. It becomes then a contest between Socialism or Capitalism, Right or Left, Christianity or Islam, and so on. At this point, the result is a world that is tearing itself to pieces as each seeks to impose its particular ideology or belief on the whole of society and on this 21st century. The outcome has been intensification across the globe of a systemic polarisation that seems to have reached a defining moment. Democracy and its processes bring the situation to light better than the more or less totalitarian or traditional regimes wherein the true condition is more often than not suppressed in the effort to postpone the inevitable.

Living in an electronics-based global society as we do the true situation cannot be hidden for long. The question to ask is how do we bring about change to a new world order in the midst of the old with its apparently unlimited powers of suppression and destruction? The true condition is mirrored dramatically in one particular area: the destructive power freely available on micro and macro scales: we can destroy ourselves and the planet as the home of an evolving species, if polarisation continues its tension-increasing course. Our evolutionary clock can be turned back to zero in the not-to-distant future given the catastrophic stockpile of nuclear weapons ready for use in the war of ideologies.

What is the solution? I call this work the New Way because it is truly new. The answer cannot come through an imposition of one ideology over another, or even a compromise. It has to be something else that can harmonise the energies seeking expression and supremacy by a process of ‘putting each thing in its place’. The problem this poses is the bane of our times: relativism. Most of the answers we seek within the context of the Old are born of relativism which can never lead to solutions based on unity – that can be defined as seeing the connection between things as a living reality; that is what is lacking. Once that consciousness has become the active force leading the evolution, the old formulas such as non-violence, all-inclusiveness, and compromises of many hues, will be seen to be just slogans and inadequate to reach the next level humanity is striving to attain.

 

The inability to grasp the interconnectedness between all things and to see them within an overarching fabric of Unity is indeed the bane of our times. It can be described in another way: the separatist consciousness. Nowhere is this more glaring than in the scientific research regarding the archetypal illness of our times, cancer. We know there are cures for the disease and that no one should be dying of cancer with the abundance of data available that make the currently accepted methods of ‘cure’ appear as sort of Stone-Age responses, fully reflective of that Old Consciousness. Cancer is archetypal not because of its prevalence but because the disease encapsulates the malady of our times – separatism, divisiveness, and the lack of that overarching unity. In my view the main feature attesting to its archetypal position is that these tumours become ‘a law unto themselves’, out of time with the rest of the body that hosts them. Once that happens the disease takes many different forms. Present-day research – outside of the USA where restrictions exist that seem geared to impeding new research and positive results – focuses on the surface phenomena rather than an effort to go deeper and uncover the root of the problem. This, it appears, would lie in the area of pre-division – that is, before the cell breaks away from the controlling mechanism that does not allow for ‘independence’.

This area is illusive because science does not acknowledge its determining influence. There are known regulator genes which seem to have lost their capacity to control the process in harmony with the physical body’s central will. How and when does this loss occur?

In addition, what is lacking at this point is a central figure who can bring it all together, who can connect the dots between these breakthroughs and finally present the conclusive cure. We are close, but we have not reached that point yet. What this brings to the forefront is that whatever solutions are to come to tackle the seemingly intractable problems we face as a global society will have to come through a consciousness of unity. When that happens, the resistance of vested interests of whatever sort in whatever field of human endeavour, however powerful, will implode by the weight of their own contradictions.

 

The new way cosmology makes it clear that a major turning point has arrived, what Sri Aurobindo called a crossroads of destiny. The culmination that has been reached was set in motion some 2000 years ago. Civilisation reached the apex of the build-up during the 20th century; whatever it produced is now being churned and ultimately either thrust into the cosmic re-cycling bin or carried over into the new manifestation. This is portrayed in Chapter 11 of The Magical Carousel by the image of a tornado sweeping across the Earth, carrying all the refuse away in its mighty forward march to the Aquarian Age. It is there in the subtle realm, as described in Chapter 11, that the new things are prepared and then manifested on Earth. These are the seeds gestated during the Makar Sankranti to then become activated and played out in Earth time according to inherent rhythms contained in the Seed; they are then imprinted in the matrix of evolution under the control of the Time-Spirit, Mahakala.

In the West this time of the year is commonly called the ‘holiday season’ and therefore somewhat honoured; not so in India where the true Capricorn Sankranti is totally ignored; further, this very fact is another reason why there is recalcitrant and almost irrational opposition to the December Solstice as the true Makar Sankranti, since some claim it would be adopting a ‘Christian’ calendar. It is precisely this desire to protect one ideology or belief system regardless of the evidence to the contrary that causes so much damage in the world. Instead of uniting around a universal calendar – which is actually in force – there is vehement opposition just to protect separateness. The calendar used throughout the world cannot be said to be Christian, or setting a Christian agenda, as the Nirayana system does for Hindus in India. The fact is the universal calendar was pagan in origin and simply reformed by Pope Gregory in certain areas during an era when the Church reigned supreme. It was in fact closer to the true cosmic position because it honours the Equinoxes and Solstices to a certain degree, which we do not find in Hindu India today. But, as I have written in the Ganga monograph, to champion this cause is to be labelled anti-Hindu, and there is no ‘authority’ to turn to; none understand what it is they are meant to measure.

 

Each nation has its role to play in the process just as each individual does. New India’s motto to describe her aspirations for society after independence from Britain is Unity in Diversity, implying that diversity gives rise or allows for unity – this would explain successive appeasement policies of the minorities by all governments which in a surface analysis would appear to constitute ‘diversity’. But the Vedic way would be diversity in unity – that is, all find their place in the One Circle to become a unified multiplicity, grounded in the One Circle that contains and embraces the multiple (diversity). However, it is understood that this identification and allocation comes about based on the soul-essence of each component. When we state that the Circle is One, each of its 360 degrees are points of light divested of darkness. Clearly that is not the case given the inability of the present socio-political ‘field’ to allow for that soul-essence to emerge.1

None of the current ideologies of whatever inclination have this capacity; rather, they seem designed to obstruct the soul, individual and collective, from emerging. This starts at the beginning of a child’s entry into Earth-time with the first breath he or she takes, and later becomes solidified by our education systems, particularly in India where the anti-Hindu bias in texts books, along with other aberrations, stands beyond question. Yet to date nothing concrete and immediate is done to correct this woeful state of affairs, and halt the undermining of India’s unique heritage. One can observe that there is currently a neat divide between the spiritual subjective experience, and what science upholds as their exclusive domain: objective truth. This is another fallout of the soul’s undermining for action in the world.

Astrology was traditionally known as the mother of all sciences, but when astrology and astronomy split to go their separate ways early in the last millennium, the separatist consciousness became the norm and accepted by one and all: only science – in this case astronomy – was proprietor of that objectivity. Hindus were at ease with this division; in fact, it seemed to suit everyone just fine, without realising that down the line this would benefit the anti-Dharmic forces nicely. The 11th century scholar-traveller Al Biruni made the point quite emphatically during his travels to India in 1030 CE, when, according to M. Ramakrishna Bhatt in the Introduction to his translation of the Varahamihira’s Brihat Samhita, he wrote that Al Biruni berated the latter for not realising that Capricorn/Makar had moved on, the sign (constellation) is no longer where it once was – i.e., joined to the solstice. He wrote in his book, ‘India’, The solstice has kept its place, but the constellations have migrated, just the very opposite of what Varaha has fancied. None cared to pursue the matter and realise that Al Biruni, like the Nirayanis today, was measuring in the wrong circle, in the sidereal constellations and not the tropical zodiac of the ecliptic divided into 12, resting on the four pillars of Equinoxes and Solstices – the Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun. Her tilt vis-à-vis the luminary is what creates the seasons. But Al Biruni’s point was taken as the ‘authoritative word’, apparently unquestioningly, because by that time the Dharma had moved away from its Vedic roots to the point that no one seems to understand the Rig Veda today; nonetheless, it was preserved for its future unveiling when it is destined to play a significant role in the re-establishment of the Dharma.

We enter this scenario, faced with a disarranged Makar Sankranti that no one cares to repair based on the prevailing belief that this is a spiritual subjective truth, the preserve of spirituality and temple worship. The devotee is not bothered in the least being called superstitious, or the astrologer a pseudo-scientist. Each cherishes his or her beliefs that nothing can shake, and to declare that the Ganga myth contains knowledge that dissolves the label of superstition leaves that devotee unmoved. After the split it became an accepted fact: Science is objective truth, all the rest is what it is – subjective, and therefore it can never be objective. However, the new way cosmology sets the cat among the pigeons because the split is not the final word.

With the descent of Supermind this separative scenario is rendered obsolete: Objective Truth runs through the Ganga myth – in fact, it is the only truly objective ‘science’ because it states exactly what the experience is: Ganga brings that cosmic truth in all its glory to Earth, she builds the bridge between Cosmos and Earth, and implants the wisdom of the Ancients in the soil of the very land she traverses in a measurable manner that must be respected as the highest science precisely because it has the capacity to extend beyond the boundaries of the physical plane across dimensions. We have no proof that science is able to accomplish this task in an evidentiary manner. But we do have proof of Ganga’s super-science in the New Way and its cosmology. January 5th and all the birthdates that form the axis of the new cosmology present the new paradigm beyond both science and spirituality, both of which are unable to carry the Earth across the abyss before which we stand.

It must be further clarified that each nation has a different, distinct dharma; therefore the manner in which the play of circumstances will be arranged for that Dharma to express itself will be unique to each one. For example, in India’s case the psycho-spiritual element cannot be ignored based on a defence of so-called secularism because it is the very life force that courses through the civilisation, from ancient times until today. An appeal to secularism is meaningless in India’s case though it is the necessary bed-rock of any scientific, materialistic society. But the ‘crossroads of destiny’ affects India no less than the rest of the world. These pages have described the manner in which India can bring her dharmic essence to the forefront because the realisation of her destiny lies in bringing about the consciously lived experience of interconnectedness, of oneness. However, we must carry the analysis a step further to discover that this is not merely a connection between countries and some sort of all-embracing openness or spirit of compromise for India, and certainly not resolved by appeasements based on irrelevant concerns about secularism; rather, it is the cosmic connection as discussed in this series – that is, bringing the Earth into harmony with the entire cosmic manifestation in a conscious way hitherto known only to the Vedic Rishis. Since then, to impede the realisation that would benefit the entire Earth, the strategy has been to attack that very connection – successfully, I might add. It stands broken today but can be easily repaired. All that is needed is to bring back into harmony the two Zero Points via the Equinoxes and Solstices, the correct measure of which would vindicate Ganga’s own dharmic essence.

I have dwelt on India to formulate the New Way because of her centreship. She is as if a pebble cast into a pond from which point ripples expand. The nature of the Centre is what determines the ripples that fan out from that point. If it is harmonious and based on Gnosis, those ripples will express the highest harmonics, the music of the spheres. Her ability to play this role for the Earth largely resides in the fact that all the problems of the world at this moment of intense polarisation are found compacted in India – ideologies of every hue. Some will survive the Tornado, others will stand exposed and their energies will be swept away and re-cycled.

In all things a centre is required, be it in the new physics for the discovery of the Theory of Everything (which continues to elude the scientific community), or in any other field. This is the hierarchical mechanism which is not class- but knowledge-based, for the simple reason that in putting each thing in its place, all things express their swadharma, or essential being, in an equal playing field. The New Way thrives on this rightness. Consequently, instruments appear at the precise moment when the play of circumstances has matured to the point where it can accommodate an individual nexus with the capacity to bring into manifest being from the subtle plane of the Immortal Ones the higher truths upon which the new world is to be founded. Throughout history this has been so, it will continue in an even more refined and obvious manner in the future. One example is the role of 5th January in the measure of Ganga, the date/degree of her descent onto Mt Kailash. It is precisely the birthdate of the one who by destiny was to reveal Ganga’s truth to the world and construct the bridge between Cosmos and Earth. Can science as we know it explain how such arrangements can come about?

When the Bridge is forged and fully operative, the special ‘brews’ of the Zeitgeist in Aquarius can easily descend and take root on Earth. This may seem impossible, given the current state of affairs – but that is precisely why the Third Principle takes birth (‘descends’, as in the myth) because the event having taken place and the measure revealed for the first time, in itself indicates that the Victory is certain because it is already done in the realm of Ideals, Swar or the solar world.

We are not accustomed to accept the reality of subtle planes as an integral part of Earth life – and for this very reason the Rig Veda continues to baffle scholars and elude the correct interpretation. This marriage of Cosmos and Earth was an accepted part of community life in the Vedic Age; that we cannot decipher the hymns properly reveals how foreign a marriage of this sort is in contemporary society, with Spirit and Matter so thoroughly divided into airtight separate compartments, in India as in the rest of the world.

‘…The gnosis dwells in the unity and knows by it all the nature of the diversities; it starts from the unity and sees diversity only of a unity, not diversities constituting the one, but a unity constituting its own multitudes….’

Sri Aurobindo
The Synthesis of Yoga
Vijnana or Gnosis


1 It is important to note at this point that the Mother set in motion a plan for Pavilions in the city she was creating, precisely to represent that soul-essence of each nation – and certainly not meant to be merely lifeless museums. This was an entirely new concept, in harmony with the seed-essence of the city-consciousness she proposed to bring into the township, centred on her original plan of the Inner Chamber.

Failure to construct the plan of the Chamber, the Pavilions could never take shape as originally envisioned; this is another consequence of the rejection by the powers-that-be in the Ashram and Auroville of her Chamber, which itself embodies India’s limpid soul essence, ancient and new, that is struggling to express itself since Independence to reach those Kailashian heights Ganga brings to Earth. In fact, the Mother’s plan reveals the way to harmonise the old and the new without the usual conflicts.

Why is Makar Sankranti Important for India ~ 2

Ganga on Makar

Why is Makar Sankranti Important for India ~ 2

Thea, Director
Aeon Centre of Cosmology
22.5.2016

Makar Sankranti, or the entry into zodiacal Capricorn, is the only such gateway celebrated as a national holiday in India – yet, none really know why the start of Capricorn’s 30-day period should merit a national celebration. Nor do we know why this makar (crocodile) is Ganga’s vahana. Indian tradition gives pride of place to the vahanas of the Gods and Goddesses, and in most cases the connection between carrier and rider is rather clear; not so in Ganga’s case.

In view of the subdued reception my Ganga Monograph received, even among my close associates, I have decided to go deeper into its value and why I hold it as perhaps the most important evidence of the applicability of the new Cosmology, and hence the destruction done to the Dharma by the current Nirayana system of computation. What I present here will finally expose the indefensibility of continuing to use the Nirayana/Sidereal system for establishing the timings of rituals, festivals, temple functions, and individual horoscopes. Lamentably, the fiat of the Nirayana pundits controls what is of utmost importance for Hindus throughout the world: the cosmic connection. A prime example is their timing of the Makar Sankranti that separates it by 23 days from the December solstice, the true temporal gateway into the tenth zodiacal sign Capricorn, the precise timing of which is indispensable for that real and not fictitious cosmic connection.

Hindus pride themselves on the belief that this connection exists and makes Hinduism unique in a certain important sense. In fact, if we carry the probing deeper, it is recognised that the countless Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu Pantheon are simply personifications of those cosmic energies – all of which makes sense provided, however, that the cosmic connection is real. Presently it is not.

It all hinges on a simple factor: the correct location in time of the Makar Sankranti, which implies the correct timings of the other solstice and the equinoxes; in other words, a time measure balanced on the four pillars that the Earth experiences as the seasons in her annual revolution around the Sun. The Nirayana system has eliminated this seasonal structure entirely – with certain consequences: for one, a disconnect with Nature and her self-evident harmonies; and the much more important disconnect involving veda and dharma, both intrinsic to India fulfilling her mission for the world. This is what I will explain in the present analysis as a compliment to the Ganga monograph. The latter highlights the discrepancy that currently exists in two areas regarding Ganga – time and space; but while the spatial factor is honoured – because the physical location of her mouths, for example, cannot be fudged – the time factor is totally askew. Therefore, in terms of participation of the human element, through which evolution expresses its progress on Earth, there is a huge dissonance: time and space do not harmonise. This would indicate that Ganga’s own dharma is forsaken right in the land where it is meant to be fulfilled. Esoteric tradition would represent this disharmony in symbol form thus ✝ – the off-centred cross. Indeed, all the woes that burden the human condition from the more subtle layers down to the physical that impede it from expressing the higher potential and purpose it is meant to serve, can be explained by this off-centredness – everything from wars and the seemingly insatiable appetite of the human being for destruction and death, down to the plight of the near-starving millions, including the inability of the human body itself to carry the consciousness it houses to a higher level as it is presently structured, given its serious limitations that allow for disease and death.

Ganga, the physical river itself, tells a different story; or rather, she reveals just how to heal what is amiss and to attain the Kailashian heights her soul embodies and carries to Earth. The operation is simple enough. As explained in the monograph, the myth of her descent to Earth is factual. There is only higher knowledge therein and nothing of superstition; but to appreciate the higher reality the myth contains, we have to play by the rules of the game. We cannot invent and impose new rules on the Dharma such as the Nirayana/Sidereal system does to secure the cosmic connection, and in the same breath pretend to honour the ancient Vedic Way; and adding to the confusion, by claiming to have the support of modern science for the imposition of this distortion. The science of astronomy as we know it today cannot carry out the simple operation that Ganga does: to connect the heavens to the Earth. Firstly, it sees neither sense nor purpose in doing so. Indeed, it has de-mystified the cosmic surround and in the place of the luminous truth-conscious supramental Light, it sees only darkness: dark energy and dark matter. This happens when the Earth stands cut off from that harmony of the cosmic surround.

There is only one nation on Earth that can legitimately make (or re-make) that connection. It is India. The reason is mathematical, or rather cosmic, but not speculative; it is real, factual. In hailing the support of modern astronomy to justify the loss of the cosmic connection, Nirayana pundits disclose that the only loss is what their reliance on contemporary science reveals: they no longer appreciate the recondite, higher dimensions of reality and are blocked at the first rung of perception without hope of any penetration of a higher light.

The Makar Sankranti, or entry into zodiacal Capricorn, holds the key – i.e., the December Solstice, or the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, better known as Uttarayana in India and celebrated in ancient civilisations and their scriptures as the highest and best segment of the year.

Herein lies the key: the Makar/Capricorn Sankranti is special and has been honoured as such by sacred Traditions throughout the world precisely because it is the highest northernmost peak of the zodiacal ecliptic plane, its very own Mt Kailash; and given its function of determining the point in time when the Earth appears to stand still (the Latin solstitium, from sol ‘sun’ and sistere ‘to stand still’) and the light begins to increase; that is, the days grow longer after the contraction that began at the September Equinox. Our year is thus a play of contraction and expansion, resting on the pillars of Equinoxes and Solstices for this play of energies. We imagine that winter is just the opposite. It seems to be the season when the light struggles to hold its own. But in point of fact, the marvel it offers is its hibernation capacity. The measure of Ganga helps us understand this miracle of Nature: her spatial stretch over the Indian landmass when viewed on the backdrop of the cosmic harmony she brings to Earth is precisely the segment of the year during which that Seed of supramental Light is gestated in the temporal/spatial expanse of Bharat Mata, as if in her very womb. For is it not Ganga herself who carries the ‘seed’ of Shiva for the birth of his victorious Son? Indeed, that ‘light’ is the beacon of Victory, even as her Son rides the Peacock, the national Bird of Victory. Her divine Measure extends from Mt Kailash to the mouths of Ganga where she flows into the sea, bringing thereby her grace to the entire world. This is her spatial measure; her time measure is 21-22 December (her mouths in the Bay of Bengal) to 5th January (Mt Kailash, the peak she alights upon in her descent to Earth.)

Though the Makar Sankranti or Capricorn gateway is the same for the whole globe, it is only India that can make the real and not imaginary cosmic connection because she is the embodiment of Makar/Capricorn as the symbol-map reveals – which means, according to what the new cosmology reveals, that she is the soul-centre of the Earth from where any connection with the surrounding heavenly harmony can be made. What holds for the macrocosm holds for the micro: the individual incarnation makes that connection with the cosmos through that same soul channel as well.

Capricorn glyph on India

Capricorn/Makar hieroglyph
on the map of Akhand Bharat

The Vedic formula/aphorism upon which the sacred connection can be made is simple: The circle is one. This is easy enough to grasp even for a layperson. Every circle, large or small, macro or microcosmic contains the same 360 degrees – no more, no less. Our Earth year extends beyond these 360, in calendar time only, by 5 days. The marvel of the new cosmology is the unique revelation of joining the calendar to the surrounding cosmic harmony – that is, the way we transpose that 360 measure to our Earth experience in a factual manner. The 5 days over the 360 have been considered as ‘out of the calendar’, and were hence an especially sacred period in ancient cultures. According to Ganga’s measure on the Indian landmass, that would be equivalent to 5th January. Those 5 days are measured into her body and, as stated in the Ganga monograph, they are explained in the myth as the day (5th January) when she alights on Mt Kailash/Shiva and disappears from the surface as he mitigates her flow. These five days are the time of seeding, both for the individual and for society as a whole; in this case, they are especially important because Ganga carries that seed of the Sanatana Dharma to the rest of the world when she surfaces again on the calendar equivalent of 3rd January, her Source in time. That ‘seed’ is where time and space are harmonised and then carried to the sea to benefit the entire world, symbolised in this case by the equal-bodied centred cross, ✚ (or else the Swastika which is based on the same equilateral cross 卐).

This brief explanation should clarify what the real function of the Capricorn Sankranti is. This solstice, honoured in all the ancient traditions, is when the Zero Points of both circles – cosmic and earthly – join. We may recognise that all circles are one because of their content of 360 degrees, no matter the diameter, but to join them, to hitch our Sun’s chariot to the greater Sun and move along the Milky Way where ‘those herds of light go travelling’, as it is described in the Rig Veda, we must find access to the zero entry point or the start of the wheel; if not, our perception of reality must be relativistic and not based on the absolutism of the supramental Truth Consciousness. This entry point each year, without any adjustment or correction required, is Mahavishuva, the Equinox falling on 21-22 March. However, when the connection is made, it is not carried along only on the annual journey of the Sun, but integrated into the larger cycles of the Astrological Ages – again, a synchronisation that cannot be realistically achieved without locating the true Zero Point. The March equinox is zodiacal Aries, or Agni, leader of the hosts. The tenth thereafter is Makar/Capricorn, indeed the 10th day/sign of the Vedic Victory.

The focus of the Ganga monograph was principally to draw attention to the zodiacal script, the twelve signs which were revealed at the dawn of time to serve as guide to the initiate’s journey through the Earth year. The importance of those months and years is made amply clear in Rig Veda II. 24-5, the former being the annual revolution in twelve months, and the latter referring to the passage of the Ages in 25,920 years:

‘…Certain eternal worlds are these which have come into being,
their doors are shut to you (or, opened) by the months and the years;
without effort one (world) moves in the other,
and it is these Brahmanaspati has made manifest to knowledge…’

(Sri Aurobindo’s translation from his ‘The Secret of the Veda’)

This Script, the ‘key’ with which Brahmanaspati opens the doors to Knowledge, is virtually non-existent in India today except in the hidden meaning of iconographic symbolism such as Ganga’s vahana, or else Agni’s Ram, and many more. The key simply does not fit the lock; or better, there is no key and the lock it would fit into long ago passed us by – by 23 days, to be precise. We have the Nirayana pundits to thank for this colossal loss. Without the Rishi’s revelation of this sacred Script in the form of the zodiac, there is no sense or meaning in the passage of the year: Capricorn can mean anything and everything – or nothing at all, which is presently the case, though the entire nation celebrates this particular Sankranti and no other.

Why? None can explain her Makar connection and the connection to the other signs/months of which Capricorn is the tenth on the Journey and attached inextricably to the solstice of December 21-22 each year, and certainly not the 15th of January, the currently celebrated timing, with no relationship in contemporary India to the surrounding cosmic harmony. When Capricorn loses its meaning and relevance, and thus its correct temporal position in the Earth year, it can fall anywhere, it can be shifted by even 23 days, as is presently the case. And so, we on Earth and especially in India fail to make use of the opening the Sankranti offers to hitch our Sun’s chariot to the cosmic surround and join the ‘herds of light’ of the Rig Veda at the exact moment of the Solstice so that the connection to Swar, the solar realm of the Immortal Ones, can offer a perfect two-way thoroughfare – here to there – but, above all, there to here.

More importantly, starting at the December solstice and over the following 15 days, the physical Earth experiences perihelion, her closest approach to the Sun in her elliptical orbit, thereby offering a concrete expression of the sacred joining this approach indicates, which affects the entire globe and not just one or the other of its hemispheres. It is only when this marriage takes place in full awareness that the Divine Life Sri Aurobindo foresaw for the Earth can become a reality and the Sanatana Dharma’s rightness in all things can freely manifest.

(To be concluded)

Zodiac-Seasons

A Calendar that Unifies Questions and answers on reforming the Hindu Calendar

Q&A with Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet
Director, Aeon Centre of Cosmology
Tamil Nadu, India
March 2009

Q. I have before me a letter written by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953 to the Calendar Reform Committee. He wrote, ‘Now that we have attained independence, it is obviously desirable that there should be a certain uniformity in the calendar for our civic, social and other purposes and this should be based on a scientific approach to the problem…’ It’s been many years since this message was written, nothing has happened. What is your interest in bringing up this issue again?

A. It is not exactly that nothing happened. That Committee did indeed agree on a calendar for the nation; but in what concerns ‘other purposes’ the result was unfortunate. In the same letter Pandit Nehru remarks that there are some 30 calendars in use and that this causes a certain confusion. It was made worse confounded by the fact that there is no agreement on the actual starting point of the calendar year among Hindus, unlike for civic purposes with the government having adopted the calendar in use throughout the world.

I must clarify an important objection raised by certain champions of Hindu culture in this regard. They claim that this civic calendar is Christian and that therefore it should not be adopted by Hindus. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The universal calendar was adopted by Christians when Christianity came to occupy a position of power in the early part of the first millennium, simply because that solar calendar based on the Earth’s orbit of the Sun along the ecliptic was the only calendar used by the ancient world. In fact, rightfully speaking it should be labelled Vedic, – the Vedic Calendar.

Q. What do you base this statement on?

A. Similar to all ancient cultures in the Vedic Age, sages used the actual rhythms of the Earth as the basis for their calendar. For example, the balancing factor was the four Cardinal Poles – which never changes; as it was then, so it is today. There are verses in the Rig and Atharva Vedas which make this clear:

Twelve spokes, one wheel, navels three.
Who can comprehend this?
On it are placed together
Three hundred and sixty like pegs.
They shake not in the least.
(Rig Veda 1.154.48)

One is the wheel; the bands are twelve;
three are the hubs – who can understand it?
Three hundred spokes and sixty in addition
have been hammered therein and firmly riveted…
  (Atharva Veda X, 8)

The most important portion of the above is ‘one is the wheel’(AV); and further, ‘they shake not in the least’(RV). The Rishi stating that the circle is one makes it clear that all measuring must be done on the backdrop of this single circle. That is the ecliptic within which the Earth and planets travel. Even the Nakshatras are to be measured in this single circle of 360 degrees and which we further divide into four quarters – two of which are the Equinoxes, and two the Solstices. The Nakshatras are simply one of the many divisions of that single circle (the ecliptic); they are based on the mean motion of the Moon: 13.20 degrees per day. These have been labelled the Mansions of the Moon when Al Biruni brought this knowledge from India to Arabia; and from there it passed on to Europe. This designation is still used in astrology today.

Basic astronomy gives very precise timings for Equinoxes and Solstices, as do certain ancient texts such as the Brihad Samhita. Two timings were especially important: the Equinox of March, and the Solstice of December. The former is the true beginning of the Vedic year – 21/22 March. That is the 0 degree of the ecliptic when days and nights are equal. The second, the December Solstice (Makar Sankranti) is even more important for Hindus and continues to be celebrated throughout the nation, though its current timing is woefully incorrect.

The Rishis emphasised only these two timings because getting them right would mean that all the rest would be accurate as well, – the Navaratri, for example, and all the other celebrations of Hindus. It may be claimed that being festivals based on the phases of the Moon different calculations and a different circle would be needed. This is not so. Just as the Veda states, the circle is one. Within that even the lunar phases are inserted, with the required intercalary addition to compensate for any discrepancy. However we study the matter we note that the degrees of this single circle are 360 ‘pegs’ set therein, and which we divide into 12 parts.

When the Rishi states, ‘they shake not in the least’, he or she is referring to the most important injunction of all. For the fact is the current Hindu calendar in use does indeed ‘shake’ insofar as its starting point, or ayanamsha, is not fixed, as would be the case for the universal calendar. It shifts constantly, with each passing minute and second in fact, unlike the true Vedic Calendar which does not shake ‘in the least’, even with the passage of thousands of years.

Q. Pandit Nehru encouraged scientists to lead the way in calendar reform, but you say that science itself has been the problem. What do you mean?

A. It is not the duty of scientists to interpret Vedic injunctions. This is not their domain. It is the duty of men and women versed in the language of cosmic harmonies based on direct yogic experiences, of the Vedic type, I must add. Clearly in the Committee for Calendar Reform in 1953, there was no such person. In my experience I have not come across anyone who has undergone a sadhana for this express purpose. The result is what we have today – a calendar that cannot unify 80% of the energies of the nation.

A scientist would not make any sense out of the Rig Veda verses I have quoted. He would not take them seriously since in the first place he does not believe that the ancients had knowledge of such matters. Remember that these verses were composed before astronomy became a separate discipline. In those days throughout the world it was simply astrology, jyotish, albeit quite different than the astrology practised today. That was ‘science’ and it was based on astronomical data which was easily verifiable by calculating the Equinox and Solstice. The tropical zodiac in use then is the same we use today. Its division into 12 parts is important to note, as the Vedic verses affirm. Those 12 parts/months must begin when day and night are equal based on the four balancing pillars of the ecliptic – the Cardinal Poles. Science will focus on the astronomy involved; it cannot be expected to deal with aspects of Yogic/Vedic knowledge. This is the domain of those who have undergone a certain discipline that reveals the higher issues involved. Since this discipline is very demanding, the Rishi asks, ‘Who can understand this?’ It would appear simple to understand, but the truth is otherwise – if not, the Vedic calendar would not have been discarded in favour of what is currently in use: the Nirayana system based on the constellations and not the tropical zodiac of the ecliptic, as in Vedic times. The result is the calendar confusion that plagues the Hindu Samaj today.

Q. The tropical zodiac with its four Cardinal Poles of Equinoxes and Solstices is the true Vedic measure of time. What do you base this statement on?

A. In the Veda there is no reference to a circle that is disconnected from the Earth’s rhythms. This same prescription is used in temple building to this day, based on the sacred scriptures. A Hindu temple is oriented to these Cardinal directions, similar to the Great Pyramid at Giza. Regarding the latter, it is astonishing to note the accuracy with which such a massive structure was built. This was many millennia ago, yet the Cardinal directions remain the same, then as now because, as the Rishi stated, ‘…the circle is one, it does not shake in the least’.

So, the Cardinal directions were fundamental. Spatially the temple is accurately aligned; however, when time has to be incorporated this is done based on the scientist’s understanding of the way measuring is to be done. The result is that time and space do not find their necessary harmony in Hindu Temples; and this is compounded year after year, day after day by that same system employed for all observances. While the spatial alignment may be correct, the time factor is another matter. Herein stands the difficulty. To rectify the situation bold measures must now be taken. If not, the ‘slippage of time’, as I call it, will continue; and with it the Dharma as well: we move farther and farther away from those Vedic roots.

Q. Most would disagree. The prevailing belief is that time is relative; therefore, how can what is ‘eternal’ (the Sanatana Dharma) be linked to what is ‘relative’ and impermanent?

A. Let me quote another verse from the Rig Veda. It is pertinent to your comment:

Certain eternal worlds…are these which have come into being,
their doors are shut to you (or opened) by the months and the years;
without effort one (world) moves in the other, and it is these that
Brahmanaspati makes manifest to knowledge.
RV, II.24.5.

Naturally these lines are difficult for the layman to understand, but, I repeat, not for one who has undertaken the Vedic ‘journey’ just as it is described in the Veda, based on the revolution of the Earth around the Sun, along the ecliptic within the tropical zodiac; above all the zodiac because that is where we find the secret language. The central protagonist of the Veda is the Year – the sacrifice lasting 12 months.

The Rishi is explicit in these verses: the doors of the months remain closed or are opened by the knowledge Brihaspati (Jupiter, known as the Guru in astrological lore) confers. Most important is mention of ‘eternal worlds’, and one moving into another ‘without effort’. Entrance into these ‘worlds’ is secured by the correct knowledge: that is, the right KEY that unlocks the doors (months). For this to occur the right time harmony of our solar system has to be the key to open those otherwise closed doors.

Today there is no such key available to worshippers; thus we witness the faithful flocking to temples according to the day and time prescribed by pundits in their various almanacs – each one advocating a different time, it is to be noted. But, lamentably, based on these mis-measures there is no door before them to open! Time has slipped by, though none, not even the pundits are aware. Translated into practical terms, the result is that there is no unifying element for those COLLECTIVE energies. The individual devotee may well receive the blessings of the deity because of his or her fervour and belief, but that will not ‘unlock the door’ no matter how much devotion is poured out to the Goddess. Brihaspati cannot ‘make manifest’ the higher knowledge that can truly replenish, and restore a unifying PURPOSE in the Hindu Samaj. As it is, the Sanatan Dharma is losing ground to other less mature, less profound faiths.

If this unifying measure were to come into being, the weaknesses presently afflicting the community would be overcome. There would be a renaissance of immense significance and vigour.

Q. Where exactly has science gone wrong in this matter?

A. I can be very specific: the grave error for which reason we cannot experience a ‘circle that shakes not’ is because science disregarded the Earth’s own contribution to the harmony of the System.The ecliptic journey of 12 months through the tropical zodiac was displaced in favour of a projection well beyond our solar system to the constellations. Out there, hundreds of light years away from our planetary base science determined the start of the year. Moreover, it determined for the Hindu Samaj that this was the true measure to follow, requiring, however, a rectification from time to time based on certain calculations so that the ayanamsha or zero starting point of that distant constellation of stars would be ‘scientifically correct’. No thought was given to 1) this ayanamsha is almost impossible to determine with precision, hence resulting in serious differences among the pundits, and 2) that ayanamsha is therefore NOT STABLE as seen from the Earth, making therefore a mockery of the Rishi’s express statement: It shakes not!

Q. You mentioned the Makar (Capricorn) Sankranti as being ‘woefully incorrect’. Can you explain? In what specific way is it ‘incorrect’?

A. By its very name this ‘gateway’ (Sankranti) is connected to the zodiacal sign Capricorn (Makar). The question is, which Capricorn? Using the current Nirayana system, the sign Capricorn referred to is Capricorn of the constellations. This is quite different than what is meant when the system the Rishis espoused is employed for calculating this most important of all Hindu observances. I say most important because the entire destiny of India, old and new, is encapsulated in that special sign of the 12.

I reproduce below the symbol-map of India with the Capricorn hieroglyph superimposed on it. This is of course Akhand Bharat and predates contemporary boundaries drawn on this particular segment of the Earth’s geography. Indeed the origins of the glyph are unknown since it extends very far back in time probably to prehistory. I have written extensively on this subject, with this symbol-map as background, because the relevance of the sign can be verified geographically with great precision. However, even without this ‘proof’ all astrologers throughout the world consider Capricorn to be the astrological ruler of India.

Capricorn glyph on India

From: The New Way, Volume 1, p.154, Aeon Books

But there is more. There is a time factor involved along with the spatial measure. We use the Earth’s longitude to ‘locate’ the sign Capricorn. This, most interestingly, gives us the precise ‘location’ of Capricorn on the globe. Most astonishing of all, it coincides with the beginning of the Indian landmass as indicated in the map-symbol. The point I am making is to demonstrate the singular importance of Capricorn (Makar) for India. I repeat, the full destiny of the nation can be understood by a penetrating analysis of what this sign really signifies; it is the most secret and sacred of all. But we have the Rig Veda itself that confirms its importance. Though penned thousands of years ago, the Rishis located the victory of the Aryan Warrior to be in this very sign of the twelve, the 10th month (calculated from the first, the March Equinox). Note that it was not in just any period, any month: it was the tenth. And that is the sign Capricorn.

If we use the constellations to locate this section of the circle, the result is what we have today: the sign Makar does not begin when it should for Hindus. It is 23 days AFTER the onset of the sign. Capricorn in all ancient civilisations, foremost of all the Vedic, begins (the sankranti or gateway) at the exact time of the December Solstice, the shortest day of the year. For this very reason Bhisma chose this date to leave this plane. There is a very deep purpose in this timing to coincide with the shortest day. I have written extensively on this subject and need not repeat myself here. Suffice to state that by positing this gateway 23 days after it actually occurs, that ‘door’ has passed us by. The result is that the most important of all Vedic injunctions – the 9 becomes the 10 – cannot be realised. It is as simple as that.

This is of course relevant to the individual, but even more so for the Hindu Samaj. Collectively this shortest day should be observed if the passage ‘the 9 becomes the 10’ is to bear any impact for the entire nation. Certainly Bhisma would have had a hard time making this passage based the current Nirayana system!

My point is that when the symbol-map is revealed, as it was in 1974, we know that the most important period of India’s history for thousands of years has come to the forefront. It is now, in our very times, that everything Capricorn signifies in the nation’s destiny can reach fulfilment. But as it stands, this cannot happen; and we see the results all around us. It can happen only when the correct ‘key’ is inserted and the tenth month does indeed stand before us, both individually and collectively. Therefore I have put so much energy into revealing these deep aspect’s of India’s destiny – aspects which have been set in motion thousands of years ago. I do so in order to drive home the point that we do run the risk of missing the moment. Therefore I invite pundits to discuss this matter and reach a conclusion. I am ready to present my arguments. I am ready to listen to theirs. Thereafter, let the community decide.

© Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet 2009

PNB, The New Way, front cover image, Agni in the Core of the Mother's Chamber as constructed in TNW

Musings on the Relativity/Quantum Paradox and the New Way Cosmology Paradigm Thea’s Journal, Mysore, 4.2.2016 03:59

It is not that the new paradigm is the new science and can be proven to reconcile the two: it may and it may not. The issue is another. The new paradigm is consistent within the context of the new cosmology. Once again we are confronted with a complete system, a whole corpus of knowledge. Within that the paradigm holds and makes sense.

It is like the Mother’s chamber: it too describes a complete system and each part explains the others; they support each other. This is the nature of a consciousness of Unity, out of which such elements arise or evolve. In this sense we could say that each individual who has attained such a state of awareness could not do otherwise: the field of his or her consciousness would always produce whole systems in any area upon which the gaze is turned.

The saga of the Inner Chamber is meant to provide an example of just such a development. Therefore the Mother could declare that the architects’ changes ‘make no sense’. They could never understand what she meant. It would be a foreign tongue because they had no barometer or poise/axial alignment that would put the experience ‘in its rightful place’ – i.e. ‘make sense’.

The two taken together – the Mother’s vision and the architects’ changes – describe the dilemma of our world and the reason why science is caught between a rock and a hard place: it cannot reconcile the small and the vast. That is, the unity factor is missing – the only basis on which to build a Theory of Everything (TOE).

My paradigm is that TOE within the new way universe. It answers the questions left unreconciled by unity: ‘It could tell us where the laws of nature come from, and whether the cosmos is built on uncertainty or whether it is fundamentally deterministic, with every element linked to a cause’. (from Will quantum mechanics swallow Relativity, Corey S. Powell, 29.10.2015).

My sense is that the entire question is wrongly formulated so no answers will ever come to these researchers (Craig Hogan and Lee Smolin, whose work is discussed in the article by Powell). Finally he sums up thusly: ‘And our current way of thinking about quantum mechanics is simply a complete failure when you try to think about cosmology or the whole universe. We don’t even know what time is. Both Hogan and Smolin endorse this sentiment, although they disagree about what to do in response. Carroll favours a bottom-up explanation in which time emerges from small-scale quantum reactions, but declares himself “entirely agnostic” about Smolin’s competing suggestion that time is more universal and fundamental. In the case of time, then, the jury is still out.’ (ibid)

He continues: ‘Although precedence can play out at the atomic scale, its influences would be system-wide, cosmic. It ties back to Smolin’s idea that small-scale, reductionist thinking seems like the wrong way to solve big puzzles. Getting the two classes of physics theories to work together, though important, is not enough, either. What he wants to know – what we all want to know – is why the universe is the way it is? Why does time move forward and not backward? How did we end up here, with these laws and this universe, not some others?

The present lack of any meaningful answer to those questions reveals that “there is something deeply wrong with our understanding of quantum field theory” Smolin says. Like Hogan, he is less concerned about the outcome of any one experiment than he is with the larger program of seeking fundamental truths. For Smolin that means being able to tell a complete, coherent story about the universe…’(ibid).

The point is clear: the new paradigm answers these questions – like why time moves forward: sequential extension after the 0/1 reversal to horizontal direction, after the triadic compaction which when crossing that threshold becomes gravity in our universe, the stable constant of our world. But the seeker must study the entire New Way if he or she is to understand this work. One has to come to terms with Transcendence, Cosmic and Individual principles as the foundation of human existence (the compacted triads). In other words, at the end of the labour lies the prize of a consciousness of unity, applicable in all directions – the veritable Theory of Everything precisely because what is perceived in such a consciousness of Unity will always be able to answer everything. The answers may appear different or unrelated but the sage knows the poise of consciousness whence the vision arises: and that knits it all together seamlessly, without paradoxes, without irreconcilables.

So simple, really.

Indocentrism amidst the detritus of a dying Eurocentrism From Thea’s Journal, Skambha, 10.1.2016

We (ACC) have something truly important to offer: the only existing Indocentric cosmology that is its own science: it proves itself.

We have to have (or perhaps host) a conference on what this means – above all, what the difference is between Eurocentrism and Indocentrism. No one knows. No one realises how important it is to elaborate this difference. A conference exclusively on this – and tangentially what the Sanatana Dharma really is.

Europe made itself the centre of the known world through conquests. In the process it destroyed every indigenous culture it encountered along the way. This served the Piscean Wave well and its spread of anti-paganism. It was the era of the rise of the Shadow; therefore, to further its secret agenda the might of Europe, one state after another, had to be the tool to carry out this secret agenda, unknown in its full import and the goal set before it because that knowledge belonged to the subtle realm where ‘forces’ operate at the behest of these Shadows to subvert and to destroy the field that is the Earth plane where the true eternal Dharma can flourish. It was and is a mathematical procedure, quite easy to understand and follow once certain broad lines in its agenda are made clear. That agenda was to rid the Earth of any trace of paganism which was and is so very necessary for the Sanatana Dharma to take root. This is why there had to be a place on Earth of sufficient civilisational maturity where paganism could survive. This was India.

It also proves why the religious forces that arose during the Piscean era (234 BCE to 1926 CE) focussed their attention on India. For Britain it was indeed the Jewel in the Crown, as it was also for the Mughal invaders. India was and remains the heart of the struggle: to extirpate from the Earth field the last remaining pocket of paganism, the only field appropriate for the Sanatana Dharma to survive and flourish.

Today, since the anti-Dharmic forces are facing their last threat, they are arising and consolidating their strength in full force; and they will have all the assistance they need to complete this task from those who wish to bring Eurocentrism back on board before it is too late.

In this operation it is the Old World that is in the forefront; the New World can still be redeemed since it too was a victim of the same Shadow – but this redemption requires a specific strategy based on Knowledge.

Thus we come to the core of the exposition: Indocentrism is the opposite of Eurocentrism in both the means to an end and the goal itself. It is founded on Knowledge not might. It creates and does not destroy; it does not need to tear down in order to rise. Its strategy and purpose is to create the proper field for the Sanatana Dharma to flourish. The responsibility that India bears is formidable; but for now it acts in semi-ignorance. It senses its importance but this is not based on science – the science of the Sacred. Therefore its response to situations, to attacks, is lukewarm and ambiguous. It is easily distracted by irrelevant political and social considerations that have little or nothing to do with the Dharma and its cause; because of this it is made to cower down time and again.

This must stop. Only the Science of the Sacred can save the day – factual not imaginary.

Thea
Director, ACC
Palani Hills, South India
10.1.2016
Capricorn glyph on India

A Collection of Thea’s Articles on Makar Sankranti

Capricorn glyph on India

The following collection of previously published articles by Thea is compiled to help bring to light why Makar Sankranti [entrance into the sign of Capricorn/Makar] is important for the unity and integrity of India, which is the subject of ACC’s first forum discussion of 2016.

Why is Makar Sankranti important for the unity and integrity of India?
Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3

 

Caste, Calendar and Cosmos – their interconnection and relevance for contemporary society   Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3

 

The Importance of Makar Sankranti in Hindu Calendar Reform – A treatment in three parts presented at the First National Conference on Hindu Calendar Reform, Tirumala, 24-26 December 2010   Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3 plus A Delegate’s Report & Video from the conference.

 

The Partition of India, its cause, its purpose – Part Seven
This article demonstrates the connection between the mis-measure of Makar Sankranti and the Partition of India.

 

The Capricorn Factor, First published in The Vishaal Newsletter, Volume 2, Issue 4, October 1987

 

Thea also recommends The Magical Carousel and Commentaries, and her recent limited edition monographGanga – soul of Indian culture – Her descent to Earth. These materials are available for purchase via ACC in Tamil Nadu, India (patriciaheidt@gmail.com) and via Aeon Group in the USA (Aeongroup@msn.com).

Why is Makar Sankranti important for the unity and integrity of India?

Capricorn glyph on India

Why is Makar Sankranti important
for the unity and integrity of India?

Thea
Director, ACC at Skambha
1.1.2016

[This is the intro to ACC’s first Forum Discussion of 2016, setting the tone for 2016]

Those who have studied my published works, including the numerous articles posted online, know that the core of the message I bring is the role Capricorn/Makar plays in the destiny of India. In fact, I can state most emphatically that without an in-depth knowledge of this tenth zodiacal sign, the role India is to play in the future, and the role played in the past and present can never be grasped in its truest and fullest dimensions. Being unaware of India’s connection with Capricorn, politicians and analysts of various ideological persuasions attempt to saddle her with a lesser destiny, ignoring as they all do the unique position to which Capricorn entitles India. No other nation on Earth has a zodiacal connection of this depth, nor is the day when the Sun is seen to enter a particular zodiacal sign celebrated as a national holiday such as Capricorn/Makar in India.

Astrologers throughout the world unanimously consider Capricorn to be India’s zodiacal ruler; but none, it is safe to say, appreciate exactly how her destiny can be known so thoroughly by analysis of this particular sign; I repeat, the beginning of which is celebrated nationally. Moreover, no other nation displays a physical connection with the sign’s very hieroglyph as India does. In other words Capricorn, India’s ruler, is ‘located’ on Earth in her very physical dimensions, as seen in the superimposition of the glyph on the map of what is known as Akhand Bharat – that is, India as she stood before partition in 1947, or as indicated by the cultural breath that from very ancient times covered the entire area indicated by the Capricorn hieroglyph. This means that all the nations contemporary politics of divide-and-rule has created, respond to one force of destiny. They are inextricably tied together by the power of Mahakala, the Time-Spirit.

This correspondence raises many questions. Foremost would be the origin of the glyph, both in time and space. There is no consensus on when it was first designated as the 10th, nor by whom: the zodiac as we know it today has been with us since time immemorial. Given the quality of the knowledge Capricorn contains, especially its relation to the destiny of India, I am fairly certain that the revelation of the zodiac, whole and entire, was through a Rishi in a pre-Vedic Age – i.e. much farther back in time than what scholars assume to be the Vedic era. For all practical purposes, it is a knowledge long lost, as if it arose on one of the now lost continents, Lemuria or Atlantis of remotest antiquity, submerged or otherwise destroyed without leaving hardly a trace. The actual records we have of that epoch are the four Vedas, still a vibrant foundation of the Sanatana Dharma, particularly the Rig Veda, the world’s oldest surviving scripture (if it can be so called). Though penned centuries after the actual Vedic Age at its peak, the verses are clearly descriptive of another age, a consciousness unknown to us today. One of the main reasons for this disconnect is precisely the loss of the knowledge captured in Capricorn, heart and soul of India’s destiny; indeed, the loss of the use of the zodiac itself in the corridors of astrology.

Capricorn became irrelevant when some centuries ago the tenth sign was disconnected from the December Solstice at the behest of astronomers who were out to prove astrology was pseudo science and that only astronomy could rescue the ancient art from the tag of superstition – a label astronomers themselves had cast over astrology. The noted American astrologer, Julie Loar, summed up the problem succinctly: Over time our ability to measure objects and their motions overtook the way we gave them meaning. Astronomy became a science, and astrology became a quaint anachronism to those who merely view and measure the sky through instruments (Atlantis Rising Magazine, ‘Signs or Stars – Will the Real Zodiac Please Stand Up?’ p. 73, emphasis mine).

Ironically, the astrology practised in the West is closer to the ancient art. Today there is no real astrology practiced in India, much less is there anyone who understands the conspiracy foisted on the civilisation and what it means for her unity and integrity (both territorially and as a cohesive atmosphere covering the entire area delineated by the hieroglyph) to have disconnected Makar from the Solstice. The result is that astronomers dictate terms to the pundits; it is their voice alone that matters in a nation that has been hounded by the label of superstition for the past 2000 years and which it seeks to overcome even at the cost of forsaking what it once cherished above all else. This attack intensified right through the Age of Pisces and the rise of the exclusivist orthodox religions that have dominated world affairs ever since. As pointed out by Julie Loar, they merely ‘view and measure the sky through instruments’; or, as I have written time and again, astrologers in India have lost sight of what they are measuring. That is, where has the zodiac gone that embraces the innermost dimensions of human consciousness above all else and that alone can give meaning to the awe-inspiring harmonious workings of the universe? Astronomers do not resonate with harmony; they cannot perceive correspondences and equivalencies of the Vedic order beyond the surface phenomena, and since these form the woof and warp of astrology, it would be best if they leave the ancient system of knowledge to those who have been initiated into the sacred art.

An astronomer can never fathom the inner meaning and essence of the zodiac; much less understand the critical role Capricorn plays for the fulfilment of India’s destiny. However we do not need to search far and wide for evidence of a cloak and dagger plot to derail the civilisation from the purpose she must serve in the comity of nations. The facts are evident: the way to derail the Sanatana Dharma as the fount of a vibrant and eternal foundation in the cultural fabric of the civilisation was to secure this disconnect through astronomy. For a nation obsessed with the ‘scientific temper’, this was easily done. That the new popes of the Dharma stand up united in arms against any attempt to repair the damage astronomers have afflicted is proof enough of its importance and why a correction now is of the utmost importance, given the crossroads of destiny India faces.

On these auspicious first five day of this significant 9-power year, 2016, Aeon Forum sets in motion a discussion inviting all to participate who would like to be appraised of the importance of this topic, avoiding any polemic as to which of the two zodiacs is correct or not, sidereal or tropical, for the simple reason that there is only one zodiac – and that is the sacred zodiac handed down to us by Rishis of a long-lost era. The usurpation by astronomers of the tropical zodiacal signs and symbols was part of the strategy to rid the world of meaning and purpose in the evolution we are part of on planet Earth – that is, to render our lives purposeless and our sojourn on Earth entirely meaningless. This is the collective void we harbour, no where more evident than in India today for 80% of her population saddled with this falsehood. The purpose of this discussion is not to entertain disparate views that serve to add to the reigning chaos, but to further an understanding of the role Capricorn plays in India’s destiny, because of which I have declared that she is the soul-centre of the Earth. It is all written in Capricorn. Let us proceed together to see how. Let us explore the issue with the serious intent it merits, reaching levels rarely touched except by the most intrepid initiates of the ancient lore. Mahakala, the spirit of Time, is the most powerful of all the cosmic forces. To choose to enter his secret-most Chamber is to cross a threshold permitted to very few.

Reflections on Sri Aurobindo’s contribution to the evolution of consciousness

SAS-for-pedistal
Men, countries, continents!
The choice is imperative: Truth or the abyss.
The Mother
(New Year message, 1967)
Question: Why imperative?
The Mother: Because we are at one of those moments Sri Aurobindo calls ‘Hour of God’, and evolution has taken an accelerated and intensified movement. (The Mother, 22.2.1967)

The new cosmology is a revolutionary formulation that could only be accomplished in this 9th Manifestation because it requires the descent of the Solar Line in Earth time to concretise the formulation; the tag of ‘theoretical’ – common to all contemporary scientific cosmologies until proven otherwise – is absent in this applicable cosmology that is perceived and formulated through its own manifestation as it unfolds in Earth time.

At the heart of all cosmology stands Time – and yet it is the cosmic property humanity knows so little of; we experience it only as the various methods of organising our individual and collective lives; or else as the drainer of the energy we accumulate from birth onward, until at the mid-point of our lives reversal takes place and we start unwinding. Then Time becomes the implacable consumer of the energy we had spent the first half accumulating. To date nothing has been able to conclusively arrest this irreversible process of Life leading to Death, increase then decrease, expansion then contraction.

Don Juan, the Nagual Teacher of Carlos Castaneda’s experience, described the phenomenon as an Eagle voraciously consuming the energy that human beings release at death. The process he set before himself and his pupils was to ‘cheat the Eagle’ by not becoming his ‘food’. It was what might be called a ‘conscious death’. His teaching was remarkably accurate for the individual; he never applied it to the entire cosmic manifestation, much less to the existence of the Earth and the evolutionary process she houses. (See The Fire From Within, Carlos Castaneda, 1984.)

The New Way, on the other hand, recognises the published works on don Juan’s teachings as perhaps the most relevant contribution to the transformation in the store of New Age literature; but the only problem is that today systems cannot be satisfying unless they are comprehensive. This, in fact, is the scourge of contemporary society: compartmentalisation accompanied by incompletion. Whatever science has produced is the result of incomplete processes; in such a case a destructive winding down is inevitable. Mind, which is itself divisive, cannot conceive of unity: what is created in such an atmosphere invariably has a downside – nuclear power, for instance.

Salvation today is described by one simple word: completion. This is the grace the new cosmology offers to seekers. It is the only system that is founded precisely on whole processes. In the new cosmology this is expressed by the Solar Line and through their lives it becomes the lived experience for the Earth because they render Time an Ally and no longer the Destroyer that Time must necessarily be if it is to bring in ‘food for the Eagle’.

The descent of the complete Solar Line radically alters beliefs that have imprisoned the human consciousness for the better part of the past 2000 years, and they still cast a gloom over our planet. The problem is that we were always faced with incompletion, particularly glaring in the last century, making it the most dangerous in the current period of recorded history. The danger became acute during the very last stage of the supramental process. This was the process of carrying the Transcendent to the Immanence of himself in 1963. For this reason the Mother stated that the most difficult years were 1963 and 1964, (The Mother’s Agenda, 1961) and if we could get past that the victory was assured. The reason for this categorical statement is because the final descent to complete the Line had to be without severing the thread of Time over that very period. The 9th Avatar’s most important labour was the 9th becoming the 10th in an unbroken line of time. In the Rig Veda it is noted that this passage is difficult; and if we consider the One Circle as described in the Veda covering twelve stages/signs/ages/manifestations, the 9th does indeed stand before the 10th opening to the last of the four quarters, which until now could only be accessed through death.

mental-quad-swar

The Rishis certainly bridged the abyss to Swar in their individual yogas, but did that have an effect on the rest of society? Insofar as it might have, this will help us understand why its hymns are not understood by scholars and yogic practitioners alike. Our contemporary society is truly a world apart. If we could be transported back in time to the Vedic Age, it would certainly be like visiting another planet in another solar system.

Since this passage, 9 to 10, has been successfully accomplished, this is what establishes the inevitability of the Supramental Manifestation: it is based on the oneness of Transcendent and Immanent, the passage from the highest heights of the Supramental Plane and the compression of that vastness into the Seed of Itself. This functions then as a magnetic centre that irrevocably draws that future closer because of attraction based on the affinity of oneness, given the proper alignment, like magnets of north and south poles. In the Gnostic Circle there is a visual image of that north/south polarity in the connection between the 0/9 Point/Orbit and its opposite the 4.5 Orbit of the Asteroid Belt because of the continuity in time. Is this the power that caused the shattering in the orbit between Mars and Jupiter with its massive attractive force? Or the impact of the reverse, repulsion that could pull things apart before a certain maturity had been reached in the evolving system or planet or process – much the same as what the evolution of consciousness on Earth passes through when faced with the inability to withstand pressure. This is the difficulty of the 9 becoming the 10 expressed in the Rig Veda; without the completed process, the individual or society that seeks to move ahead boldly and cross the threshold to materialise ‘heaven on Earth’, forces collapse (due to an inadequate balance) and the Eagle of Death receives his food; we fall back into the 8th sign, Scorpio, known as the sign of Death in the zodiac and our journey in Earth time ends there: we never move into the last quarter of the 12.

Naturally nothing of this is acceptable to contemporary science (or spirituality) because it is an entirely new understanding of the evolutionary process, at least within the present precessional cycle of 25,920 years; we have no previous models to turn to. But if there is a disruption in the operation before establishing a balance or new alignment, then the magnetism is so overpowering that there is a risk of collapse into a black hole, as it were; or conversely, a shattering due to an opposite polarity. What is described is an aspect of Time entirely ignored by both science and spirituality, hence the Mother advocated the Third Thing beyond them both (1962). And this came to be known as the New Way with its revolutionising language and cosmology.

It was in 1963 that the Transcendent entered Earth time as the Immanent Seed – that is, as the infinitesimal magnetic point lodged in the centre of the circle’s centre, to describe it geometrically. The danger arises in that when this occurs the process is complete and can then never be reversed. What this indicates for the mentally-poised civilisation of today is that there is now only one possible pathway to the Future; and that Future is the blueprint Sri Aurobindo mapped out in his Yoga, by which means the Transcendent draws the Present to itself irresistibly. Nothing can stand in its way. The necessity for his re-entry in Earth time via a connected thread was the only way to secure that the new future would be indelibly stamped or imprinted in the evolutionary matrix, with the required magnetism to draw that future into manifestation in our material plane.

Cosmologists like Stephan Hawking realise the perilous moment we have reached, perhaps due to the destructive weaponry we are stock-piling coupled with the deterioration of the environment. His solution was migration to Mars (as if the transported mental human being would not wreck havoc there as well!). However, as erudite as they may be, physicists and cosmologists ignore the true reality of creation and can assess the future only on the basis of incomplete paradigms. But just as the old creation is doomed and resistances are swept away, so too is the inevitability of the new world a reality – in fact, it is the only reality. It can be said that anything born within the framework of incompletion (everything we have known during our period of recorded history) is unreal. Therefore, only those phantom formations are doomed. Ultimately, the Eagle is going to be cheated as never before, and not just by an individual or a select group, as in don Juan’s school.

****

 

Over the decades of involvement with this Work, one thing has become very clear: unless a process of yoga includes four stages, it cannot be Supramental; hence Sri Aurobindo stated that the Square was the geometric symbol of the Supermind. What Supermind adds to the symbolism is application through the executing agency of Time. This was made clear in March of 1976 when I was able to integrate the 4th Power; or better, to unveil it. Until then the work I had produced was certainly new, but it was not the full manifestation. This is illustrated by my published works – fortunately I have a record of the progress by the content of the publications, each one of which reveals where the Yoga stood at that point in time. The breakthrough in 1976 established the full operational extent of Supermind’s organisation for Earth use.

In 1976 I had no clear idea of what that unveiling meant because I was only focussed on the Mother’s chamber; everything was centred on that, and that alone – and rightfully because whatever discoveries I might make could be found or verified in the chamber’s plan and measurements. By early 1976 I had written and published The Gnostic Circle after dividing the book into four sections – 9, 6 3, 0. The telling part was the 0. There was no 1, which would have meant the integration of the fourth (9/6/3/0-1). That had not happened in 1974-5, and this was disclosed in the 0 section by mention of the ‘cradle’: it was, as it were, empty[1]. Only in March of 1976 would the cradle be filled with the One. Yet the third section does mention the Birth as well as the Child and connected to the Earth’s realisation; indeed, the cradle’s filling was through the Third [2]. And even in the Puranas it is stated that the fourth planet Mars was formed from the sweat generated by the Earth during her tapasya. As for the Solar Line, the knowledge was always complete; it just had to unfold organically in Earth time. Therefore I refer to it as an unveiling rather than a discovery. This was all planned and documented carefully so that we could receive the help required, when required, and were able to move ahead consciously. For finally, that is the goal: to be conscious instruments by evolving in Earth time what is involved and compacted in the Seed.

I have stated many times that the Gnostic Circle is the alphabet with which we could construct the new language (of the New Way); or to formulate a new synthetic language based on the Sacred Formula as the vowels of the alphabet, it could be said. The New Way would never have been seen and formulated without the Gnostic Circle alphabet, much less without the integrating power of the Fourth Principle; the latter supramentalised the entire process by its fourfoldness. In The Gnostic Circle it is very clear: we move inward to the Point, the seed of compacted Transcendence. The entire key to supramentalisation lies in that compaction and the birth of the One who fills the Void, individually and collectively: the Circle is one for all.

At this stage it all becomes very interesting because we can fill in the blanks. The 11th August last, leading up to Sri Aurobindo’s 143rd birth anniversary, was truly an inspiring moment. I saw something and could formulate it more concretely because it was unfolding in Earth time: the real value of the Transcendent’s contribution, carrying me deeper into its mysteries; for none can dispute that in almost all theological schools the greatest mystery is the seeming paradox of Transcendence and Immanence, in a sense similar to the paradox of the wave and the point of quantum physics. In this excerpt Sri Aurobindo is expressing the role his Solar Line has played.

The time has come at last to unveil the mysteries, whether Vedic, Orphic, Alchemical or [Christian] and to recover the truth of the Spirit. The ascent of man into heaven is not the key but rather the descent of the Spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of his earthly nature. For that and not some post mortem salvation is the real new birth for which humanity awaits. Sri Aurobindo

Of course the Transcendent Principle was not new to me, nor its number-power 9 as part of the descending formula. What happened was a deeper understanding of the nature of the 9’s factual contribution, and how immensely important it has been. Sri Aurobindo is the Avatar, as Sri Ram and Sri Krishna were, of Vishnu’s Line of Ten. The difference between his appearance and the 7th and 8th before him is that there was no question of Supermind then: it was Mind (7th) and Overmind (8th); thereafter, as he explained, the 9th following the 7th and 8th, is logically the Supramental Avatar.

Some believe he never stated he was an avatar. Well, if not him who then? Who else had even conceived of the supramental Truth-Consciousness? In his published Letters on Yoga, Section VII entitled ‘The Purpose of Avatarhood’, he explains not only avatarhood in general, but his own role, while clarifying many misgivings. And this draws me back to my seeing on August 11th. For the first time I really understood the imperative necessity of the Avatar heading the rest of his Line, and to bring about the conclusive victory all four stages have to have yogic representations with Earth time correspondences. Sri Aurobindo’s time correspondence was the Future (Transcendence); the Mother’s was the Past (Cosmic); the Third’s is the Present (Soul). The 6 and 3 are responsible for constructing the Bridge across the cosmic planes and to the Earth as a joint labour. However, they would have nothing with which to construct, but for what the 9 supplies. In other words, thefuture is the first imprinting; thereafter follow the stages that bring the New Heaven (the new future) to the Earth plane.

It is the new future Sri Aurobindo mapped out in all his works, the outcome of his colossal Yoga. The central focus was, as we know, to bring about the shift so that the ‘easy way out’ could be blocked; this finds leverage in a tendency in the human consciousness which had to be dealt with. When that work is done less effort is needed to resist the tendency because that ‘escape route’ would be sealed for good; the tendency would then clearly be seen as a relic of a former immature stage in evolution on the road to maturity. However, alone he could not complete the task, as he well understood.

Sri Aurobindo as the Transcendent (9) established a new future for us, as if it were a blueprint, on the basis of which we build that vision by and through the reversed direction. Thus, the Mother dealt with the cosmic planes by putting order therein, which centrally means that she got rid of accumulated debris floating about in those planes as carry-overs from the Past, each item still seeking fulfilment. This is the baggage we carry, slowing down our progress; it is described by one word: Inertia [3]. It is what I call the cosmic waste bin, which translates into the clutter of the Known that drains the present of the energy needed to scale new heights; this drainage of energy does not permit the new blueprint to become established. In order for that to happen a passageway had to be created through those planes to create a channel, as it were, for the magnetic pull between Future and Present to be safely executed. This is the theme of Volume 3 of TNW, which is valid for the individual as well as for the entire species in evolution.

Consequently, the Mother stated that the Chamber of her vision in the Solar World was not for meditation but to learn concentration. In the actual human species power is never concentrated – rather, the atavistic drive is used to drain energy out of the system, thereby keeping the species imprisoned in the fortress of the Known to further Nature’s status quo.

In the Overmental creation you have the clutter of every possibility – the 8th Avatar’s term. The Mahabharata War gives a perfect example of the waste – so much destruction, unavoidable given the stage of evolution. At the end of the day we wonder if anything at all was gained. Was there truly a victor?

We have to ask ourselves the same question as we view the stockpiled weapons of mass destruction: they have indeed served as deterrent because those holding their finger on the trigger are rational beings who know that utilising those weapons would send us all down a slippery slope that no one can stop. But as things stand today, with these weapons in the hands of groups that value martyrdom and heaven as the be-all-end-all of life, for how long can common sense and reason prevail? Given the otherworldly goal of all religious and spiritual paths, we are engaged in the fulfilment of a collective death wish. One wonders if psychologists have taken into account the baggage we carry from the Piscean Age, in their deliberations on the imprints they uncovered in the collective subconscious.

This is where the Yoga of the Third enters. At that level the Void is closed, the hole is sealed for ever. Nothing of the sort would have been possible without the pioneering Yogas of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He mapped out the new Future, all the details of which can be read in his major works. It stands as the blueprint, but only that; without that New Heaven (for this is what the prophecy means: the Transcendent Father facing the Earth, not looking the other way [4]), there would have been nothing for the Mother to work with. She had to draw that vastness through the planes cluttered with the debris of Overmind, the thousands of possibilities or potentials seeking expression in Matter – i.e. solidity and permanency: each one seeking to create a world in its image with permanency given to incomplete systems, contrary to the goal of Vishnu’s Emanations. Without the New Future Sri Aurobindo supplied, the Mother would have been doomed to labour within a closed circuit (the restricted circuitry of Nature, requiring millennia to reach a higher stage). This would be expressed in the Ouroborus symbol, the serpent biting its tail. It is valid to indicate the unity of 0 and 9 of the number scale where mouth and tail meet, and the circularity of the eternal rather than linearity. But it is closed and does not indicate the threefold gunas of the Shakti. It is a masculine symbol of the Mental Plane where the Feminine is absent. …‘All these [other paths of yoga] could not be taken as they were, for the integral yoga needs to develop its own forms and processes’ (Letters on Yoga, Section II, Integral Yoga and other Paths).

ouroborus-the-mothers-symbol

The greater possibility is indicated in the Rig Veda verses regarding that One Circle by mention of thethree hubs. This is perfectly expressed in the static form of the Mother’s symbol above: but those three hubs, when set in motion by the spiralling dynamism of the Becoming (Time as the executing force), are the means of escape from the closed circuit of the Past. For this the integration of the Feminine stands beyond question. The Mother’s Yoga helped us to travel lightly and actually allows for the present acceleration. Her dynamism drew the Transcendent from a static Peace into the dynamism of Itself and cleared the way through the debris of the Overmental planes for an open pathway down upon which the things of the New Heaven could reach the Earth when the Third completed her construction process by making Time an Ally and no longer the Destroyer. These are facts not fiction; this is the New Way, non-speculative, documented – and, above all, it is its own authority. It does not rely on any imprimatur from either pundits or priests of the old ways; or else from the new high priests of science and their incomplete paradigms.

The birth of the One is fundamental, not only to render the Yoga supramental but more especially for the victory he symbolises, that the debris of the cosmic planes has been successfully minimalised. Therefore in the new cosmology his contribution in the Gnostic Circle opposite the 0/9, is the 4.5 Orbit precisely where baggage is meant to be shed if the initiate can successfully scale the heights that lie ahead. Until the descent of the complete Solar Line, covering all the planes, that area, the pit of the circle, was the escape route because the old structure, individual and collective, could not withstand the pressure and contain the new energies of higher frequencies from the solar realm, hitherto closed to humanity – i.e. the hole in the old structure that had to be plugged, sealed up forever. Only then can the new creation establish firm roots here. Only then can the destiny of the Earth’s evolving species be realised in Time and thereby enjoy permanency. The danger lies in an imbalance – moving too fast or too slow. The Solar Line holds the safeguarding regulator of Time as ally.

The Fourth is known as the War God (Mars) in the myths, as the redeemer in other legends; but always it is this fourth. Simply put, he is the symbol of the victory of the two Goddesses, Demeter and Kore; he is their Triptolemos, the victor of ‘the three wars’. The shaft of wheat Demeter carries is the prophecy of the redemption of the Earth, of the abundance the Great Mother can bestow.

The birth of the Son, the Male Child of many traditions, has survived across the ages in the deepest recesses of the soul. In Ancient Greece it was re-energised time and again in all who participated in the annual Eleusinian Mystery rites. That grand celebration of the Fourth, open to all, was brought to an end in the 4th century by the Church Fathers, the objective of which was to eliminate a sacred rite centred on the Goddesses, only to carry it over to the birth of the Son Jesus – alas, crucified, unlike the victorious Triptolemos; with the Goddesses eliminated, crucifixion was the unavoidable finale.

triptolemos

There is a charming story from the Puranas regarding the two sons of Shiva and Parvati, Ganesh and Kartikeya. It calls up the image of the Fourth moving victoriously through the cosmos amidst the clutter that exists. Kartikeya is the 4th Principle, the Son victorious; his vahana (mount) is the Peacock, India’s national bird, precisely the symbol of victory. The story goes that there was a competition between the two sons: who could traverse the universe the fastest. Kartikeya set out on his vahana, sure of success, but when he had completed the round and returned to his divine Parent’s abode, he found Ganesh there already! The clever Ganesh had simply gone around his Parents seated in their thrones, reasoning that because they embody all that is he had actually covered the whole universe. Kartikeya was so incensed by this ‘trickery’ that he left their northern abode and went to the hills in the South – where indeed he is the favoured deity.

A curious contemporary detail to add is that the Peacock was declared the national bird in 1963 – unknowingly celebrating Sri Aurobindo’s own victory in that year as the Fourth, Kartikeya’s own principle in the descending formula. We have then two pertinent dates in the nation’s calendar that indirectly celebrate the 9th Avatar’s mission: Independence Day, 15th August (his birthday); the declaration of the Peacock as national bird in the very year that he did complete his mission involving the fourth victorious War God, Mars. But more astonishingly in what concerns his return as that Son of the formula is the date of the nation’s constitution: it is the very day of the 365 of our Earth year of that return. To add another detail, which encourages us to take a fresh look at the Puranas as repositories of more than just myths but are actually accurate prophecies of things to come, in the Shiva Purana section on the birth of Skanda-Kartikeya there are even certain prominent details of the horoscope of that birth centuries into the future.

This is how myths are born and how they record recurrent history read in the cosmic harmonies, regardless of the views of our contemporary historians. They are etched in the soul of each individual and in the collective soul. Naturally it would be difficult, if not impossible, for historians to understand how this display of harmony cutting across time and space is achieved; and failing to understand, academia dismisses it all as ‘coincidence’. In my world of Seeing this is a clear example of the action of the Supramental Shakti and her command over Simultaneous Time in a present that always IS.

To save our planet the contribution of the Goddesses is essential. While we cling to the old world and its imprisoning patriarchies, we simply continue to orbit that closed circuit of the past with no opening to the new future. Nothing can arrest the descent of the New Heaven, but the resistance of the old can result in a massive destruction – which, however, is entirely avoidable. The 4.5 Orbit is intrinsically connected to nuclear energy, to date the most destructive weaponry known to humankind. The Mother gave a warning and a hope:

The future of the Earth depends on a change of consciousness. The only hope for the future is in a change of man’s consciousness and the change is bound to come. But it is left to men to decide if they will collaborate for this change or if it will have to be enforced upon them by the power of crashing circumstances. So, wake up and collaborate!

The Mother, August 1964

Sri Aurobindo’s mission was incomplete without his return as the Immanence of his former Transcendence. As the Fourth Power he became the magnetic point drawing the things of the present forward irresistibly, compellingly. Clinging to the old, with its escapisms, compels the newly-energised magnetism to draw the Earth as if into a black hole by the massive baggage brought down the pathway through the cosmic planes, adding to the gravitational contraction and forcing collapse. This involves the energy the Russian physicist Kosyrev found to be locked in Time, the most powerful of all energy sources, he claimed. In the New Way cosmology once the Void is filled and no energy is drained from the system, centering and the new alignment allow for a single-bodied pathway to the Future that exists. It is that existing Future (the blueprint, somewhat on the order of a morphogenetic field as postulated by Rupert Sheldrake) that draws the Present to itself. This is the basis of all creation in matter: the magnetic point (the centre of the Centre itself) is compelled to reach that future regardless of what might stand in its way, similar to the action of two powerful magnets irresistibly drawn to each other. They will join and whatever lies between will be crushed, just as the Mother stated. The Future mapped out by the Avatar exists within the mysteries of simultaneous time, and that is the power compelling us to be the instruments for its manifestation on this material plane.

We are at one of these ‘Hours of God’, when the old bases get shaken, and there is great confusion; but it is a wonderful opportunity for those who want to leap forward, the possibility of progress is exceptional.

Will you be one of those who take advantage of it?

The Mother (ibid)

Summary

We start with the fact that very little is known of the true structure of human consciousness – or of consciousness itself. Most scientists still refuse to accept that such a thing exists. That structure houses four broad planes of consciousness: physical, vital, mental, and finally the fourth and most rarified, which, after completion of the combined yogas of the Solar Line, is known as Supramental rather than Spiritual. This quarter of the circle below is, in fact, where the full impact of the transformation is felt in our 9th Manifestation (see Keys of Knowledge, The 12 Manifestations).

The tropical zodiac & the same Vedic One Circle divided into four quarters

The tropical zodiac & the same Vedic One Circle divided into four quarters

As of 234 BCE, we are passing through that final section hitherto considered beyond the material world and accessible only through death – i.e., once the physical had been shed and fed to the Eagle.

The Solar Line’s primary objective has been to open the last quarter to the evolving species that until now has been limping along on three legs rather than four – that is, only now do we have all four integrated to constitute wholeness and the stability of complete processes. Only then can Time cease to be the mystery that harvests food for the Eagle; rather, it is Time itself that experiences a higher function, a reversal to be the ally of the species.

Wholeness, integration of the sort described above creates numerous difficulties because of its newness. For example, our Map of the 12 Manifestations is an updating of the Hindu formula of four major Yugas or Ages – Satya, Treta, Dwapara, and finally our own, Kali Yuga or the Dark Age. The Kali Yuga is stated to have begun in 3102 BCE at the demise of the 8th Avatar in the 8th Manifestation prior to ours and to last for a blessed 432,000 years thereafter (the traditional time measure given for Kali Yuga). In other words, we have approximately 427,663 years ahead of us of the deep ignorance for which Kaliyuga is known.

This conceptualisation was a product of the Dark Age during passage through Pisces in the precession of the equinoxes, from which we are now emerging. I have treated the subject in The Gnostic Circle, Chapter 6, ‘The Indian Yugas’; it need not detain us here. My point is only to use this as an example of the enormous shift the lived experience of wholeness can signify for both individuals and the civilisations we create. In the light of completion when the full circle stands open to our lived experience, the old formulas become obsolete. Moreover, the real danger lies in seeking solutions in paradigms of the past based on conceptualisations that were accommodations required by a three-legged lameness; indeed, often the four yugas are described as four legs of the Cow. When a new light dawns, only that can dispel the darkness and carry us to embrace wholeness: The sacred Cow today stands firmly on four legs.

The critical problem Hindus face with regard to the Yugas is the weight of the Known; anything that presents a challenge to that fortress is either distorted or dismissed a priori for lack of an ‘authoritative’ support in the Scriptures – somewhat incongruous because being new where can we look for that authority? It must necessarily be above all other systems, and therefore obliged to be its own authority. This describes the current impasse: the old paradigms and beliefs can no longer be accommodated, try as we might, but we cannot seem to let them go.

Given this state of affairs, it is evident that only pioneering spirits can face the challenges before us; those with ‘the soul of a hero’, as the Mother stated in 1972. The situation is especially problematic in traditional societies like the Indian; or in facing the new orthodoxies of contemporary science.
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Endnotes:
1. The 0/4th section: The Centre, the womb, the cradle, the upholder.
2. The 3rd section: The Individual, the Child, the birth, the Earth’s realisation.
3. There are Akashic Records that can be ‘read’, as the psychic Edgar Cayce had done. This would be the debris. Those unfulfilled fragments he and other psychics ‘saw’ can be valid in the Old Creation, before the Mother’s act of ordering and clearing the cosmic planes of floating elements (of the past). The cosmic womb contains that past. This is where prophets of the old creation pluck their visions; and this is why when Supermind manifests they may no longer be reliable. In the old creation any one of those fragments could materialise – or none; it all depends on the availability of receptive vessels on Earth. The precision of the New Way was lacking. In fact, it was never demanded of a spirituality that had no use for the things of this world.
4. ‘Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’