Observers of the world scene seem to regard 1990 as the beginning of a new era. However, the events we have witnessed in 1989 confirm the indubitable accuracy of the Gnostic Circle and the New Way cosmology, for we cannot deny that 1989 was really the year of change, and this fully conforms not only to the character of the year’s number-power (9) but also to the special quality of this particular 9-power year in the century, closing as it does the Neptune ennead and the 1980s.

The first portion of my Neptune article in the last issue of VISHAAL was dispatched for printing on 7 November 1989; that is, at the very start of the events which finally brought the Berlin Wall down over the days to follow. Since then the progress has been fast and furious, and we see the political face of Eastern Europe entirely altered.

In the prophecy of Pope John XXIII which I quoted in the very beginning of the article, there were a number of correspondences with my work, as I pointed out. But true to the nature of Neptune, most of them were veiled references to a work carried out perhaps hidden from the public eye. Thus, the prophecy speaks of a ‘Patrizia, daughter of God’, whose death amid dubious circumstances by the Berlin Wall would cause her to be accused of a ‘life of vice’ when in effect she was a ‘saint’. The recent events have, of course, disproved the prophecy in that there has been no Patrizia found dead by the Wall, either sinner or saint, and who could be considered responsible for its dismantling as the prophecy seems to indicate. Nonetheless, it is curious that during this very period here in India, this Patrizia at Skambha, the third and ‘daughter’ of the Solar Line, has indeed been accused by certain hostile elements seeking to ‘finish her off’ (in their own words) and dismantle her work in India of a ‘life of vice’. At this stage the tables have been turned and as the Wall came tumbling down so has this attack in India collapsed, to the point where ‘Patrizia’ is now viewed more as a saint than a sinner! Such is the unstable, volatile perception of the human being.

There is no need to dwell any further on this prophecy given its limitations. Rather, I would like to move into the remaining portion of the Neptune piece left unpublished in the last issue due to lack of space. As well, I am presenting in this issue an article devoted to the mechanism involved in these dramatic changes. In it I draw connections that reveal the manner in which persons of Knowledge may deal with ‘knots’ in the evolutionary web in a nuclear space as it were, and how once this work is successfully accomplished we can predict with greater precision than ever before the effects this activity will have in the larger Earth-field. In The Gnostic Circle I have written about the decade of the 80s with special reference to 1985 and thereafter to its end. We shall see through the analysis in this article the accuracy of that written prediction. (Indeed, it was in that very year that Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party and started his revolutionary work.)

We have seen an astonishing display of faithfulness to the lines of the new cosmology in the events which have dominated the news throughout the world. We have seen ‘iron walls’ brought down not only with a swiftness that has left us breathless but in a relatively peaceful manner. We have witnessed a new power at work, and this is the point I wish to emphasize and for which reason in this issue I shall reproduce portions of The New Way where I discuss this new power and the mode of its workings, especially portions from Volume 3 – phototypeset in 1984 but as yet unpublished – and descriptions of the process I have come to call the Yoga of the Chamber. Prior to the Yoga of the Chamber (1980-89) the radical and total change in the hitherto iron-clad political structures of the Eastern European nations would have been impossible to achieve without prolonged and bloody upheavals. But apart from the bloodshed in Rumania, the rest of the eastern bloc experienced this major leap in their political destinies with an ease which has baffled the rest of the world. This ‘ease’ was foreseen in 1983 when I began having the first experiences of realignment and compression until finally the centre was forged and the ‘point’ came into being to ‘fill the Void’. It was at that time that precisely the question of how to deal with violence became a central issue in the Yoga. What was then ‘seen’ and confirmed experientially was the method that we would later observe operating in the world to deal with energies which must somehow find their accommodation in the new dispensation.

However, the transformation we have witnessed has not affected Asia, in particular China. The reason is clear: in Asia we are closer to the Centre. This portion of the globe stands posited on the ‘spirit’ end of the matter/spirit axis. The West is poised in the periphery, properly speaking, which relates to the outer form and the denser physical. It responds to energies and impulses on that end of the spectrum. An action in the nuclear space of the Centre can be seen to have a greater impact on that periphery because it is far more MECHANICAL in its response and is readily activated by the application of certain formulas. Whereas in the East it is essence that counts and must be moved, and primarily matters of the Spirit. It is in this more subtle dimension that the work is done. The ‘symbol’ for this act of unification is the unification of the Indian subcontinent. When that is achieved the conditions in Asia will also change, in particular in India.

In 1975 and 1976 I had written that the place of origin of the central Globe of the Mother’s Chamber would be significant in relation to Sri Aurobindo’s work at this third level of manifestation. In 1980-81 I wrote to the then prime minister of India that if the globe was installed in the temple being built in Auroville on the basis of its distorted measurements and axis, this would indicate a dismembering of India. At the time I wrote this there was no turmoil in either Punjab or Sri Lanka. Nor had the secessionist movement in Kashmir reached its present pitch. (For further light on this issue, see The New Way, Volume 2, Chapter 12.) Now, in a very real sense my words seem to be highly prophetic, for the ‘globe’ is arriving – from Germany – and before very long it will be installed on the basis of a very distorted seeing and measure.

Let me point out the correlation so as not to be accused of vagueness. The Globe in the real Chamber, apart from being ‘symbolic’ of the Third in the Solar Line, is also the ‘soul of India’ (the reader may consult The Gnostic Circle and The New Way for further clarification of this point). At the same time it is the very body of India. The Globe represents the Soul and consequently the nation’s Dharma, but as a result of a perfection of seeing whereby through its precise measurement and alignment the Mother was able to reveal that soul-power’s true outer form. Thus the measure of the Globe is 70 cms, according to the exact specifications she gave. On the basis of the Laws of Correspondence the Globe thus comprises the FULL AND TRUE BODY OF A UNITED INDIA; or the nation’s perfect ‘form’ to express that dharmic essence, being a combination of 30 + 40 (=70). How this comes about is described in the works cited above in detail.

In view of the distortions in axis, measurements and design it was therefore not difficult to predict that installing the globe on this basis in the temple in Auroville would coincide with unfortunate happenings in the areas symbolised by this supremely important element. In addition, having its origin in Germany rather than India itself adds another dimension to the problem which I need not elaborate at this point.

We may summarise the above by stating that the new and final decade of this millennium and the heightened influence of Pluto operating in the world via the commencement of its period in 1989, will see events in Asia and particularly in India take turns entirely true to the above and the nature of the Plutonian power. This 9^th planet is the higher octave of Mars, which is in turn ‘exalted’ in Capricorn, the sign-ruler of India. Therefore Pluto has affinity with this 10^th sign, by which the abyss and the heights come within its ambit of action. This means that only when Pluto’s action becomes a prominent and integrated part of the scheme can we begin to reach those depths which elude all the other influences and unite them with those of the heights. The transformation becomes total and complete with Pluto’s integration.

On the world stage this means that forces which were closed to the new light will begin to feel its impact, i.e., the forces operating in the dimension of the world of religion and spirituality. We observe that these areas remain essentially unmoved on a global level by the action of the new Power. Religions continue to be the most divisive forces in the world. There has indeed been a stirring in those deep and murky waters over the past two decades, but unless Pluto’s full impact is felt the reduced level of the Power merely serves to arouse fundamentalist responses rather than any real and lasting transformation. It is therefore in this sphere that Pluto’s action will be felt most in the new ennead.

This, we may say, corresponds to the vertical Axis – heights and depths. There is another: the horizontal. It involves the periphery in relation to the point of the circle. It is in Pluto’s period that the periphery (of the circle) is joined to the Centre. And it is then that the work can be said to be completed.

By the swing of Pluto into Neptune’s 8^th orbit we understand that what we have been witnessing in the world, since 1979 when Pluto first moved into Neptune’s domain, right in a year of 8 power (1979=8)  and at the beginning of the latter’s own ennead (1980-89), will continue into the new cycle. The powers of Neptune (8) and Pluto (9) will continue to intermix and the events of today will be seen as a coherent and connected movement throughout the 90s. Until – in another exquisite display of Gnostic Time – Pluto moves out of Neptune’s space in 1999, precisely drawing to a close the Plutonian century of the 1900s and its own ennead/decade, along with the entire millennium. The millennium thus closes with the greater boundaries of our solar system explored both scientifically and by the penetration of the yogic light and force.

I had written about the 8^th month of 1988 (TVN 3/5) and the increase from that point on of Neptune’s action, reaching a culmination in 1989 when its period draws to a close, and that events in the world would move quickly thereafter. This same formula obtains for all the planets. Thus the next such culmination via a convergence of number and planetary power occurs precisely in 1999 when Pluto returns to its own orbit, and more specifically in the 9^th month of that very special year when with the arrival of the 9^th day of the 9^th month of the 99^th year of the century there will be a formidable impact of the power of the 9. This is likely to centre on the process of unification of the Indian subcontinent, and the nuclear foundation for the true new world order will have been fully and invincibly cemented. A new world will arise and a new era will have truly begun.

But let us not be carried too far ahead and too fast in our seeing, for the most intense part of the process lies just ahead. India will be the focus of the Supramental Shakti’s action during this period, in ways perhaps hidden for a time, but not the whole time. The dimension to be ‘ordered’ is the most essential one wherein perversions have come about which have distorted the manifestation of Essence. This truly spiritual force has come to be confused with religions and their divisive powers at work in the world. It is this that must undergo a radical change similar to the dramatic change which has overtaken the Communist Bloc. And it is in India alone that this can be done.

To make this clearer all we need do is observe conditions as they are in India today: there is a minority government in power, precariously perched between two extremes to which it owes its continuation in office (I had also written in 1976 that ‘alignments’ between powers in the coming events would be unexpectedly altered and cease to follow the old patterns; left or right, one ‘bloc’ or another would lose all meaning). We see that a ‘temple’ stands central to the future unfolding of events and that this has become the rallying ‘symbol’ for both Hindus and Muslims. We see that this ‘temple’ is believed to be the birthplace of the 7^th Avatar, Sri Ram. The issue at stake is unequivocal, and dangerous. We observe a weak Centre and a Periphery riddled with holes and threatening to fly wildly apart at any moment, at the three angles of the triangle that contains the Indian landmass. Yet the real issue is missed.

Indeed, at the heart of it all lies a temple episode and its physical construction; while similarly at the heart of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s work there is also a ‘temple’ dispute, equally related to the Avatar, and of the same Line as Ram and Krishna, the 7^th and 8^th of the Evolutionary Avatars. This parallel ought to be food for thought for the sincere and perceptive seeker.

But allow me to draw other parallels. It was on 9 November 1989 that the foundation bricks were laid in Ayodha in the first stage of the rebuilding of Ram’s temple, a site presently occupied by a mosque. It was on that very same day that the Berlin Wall first broke open. It was in exactly this same period 9 years earlier that the Government of India stepped into Auroville in a preliminary take-over, thus entwining itself in the temple dispute central to the collapsing condition of the city-project (see the Supplement to the June 1988 VISHAAL). There are a number of happenings on or very close to this date which bear a relevance to the Yoga of the Chamber and the events mentioned above. It all centres on the critical work of our Age: the transformation of Scorpio, or the transmutation of the blocked energies of the species in evolution, in the zodiacal month of Scorpio in which all these events have transpired. That is, we are dealing with the ‘light’ or the energy closed in the ‘cave’, in the deepest part of matter and the deepest recesses of consciousness-being. We are dealing with the ‘dark mass’, the residue of time-energy which causes our race and our world to be balanced on a binary polarity and hence OFF CENTRE. That is, we are dealing with the residue of the past which impedes the emergence of the true centre. This is the crux of the work of transformation. This has been the focus of the Yoga of the Chamber in Neptune’s ennead. But the planet representative of those ‘nether regions’ is none other than Pluto (now transiting through Scorpio), whose fullest impact will be felt in the cycle which was introduced in 1989.

At issue indeed has been a ‘construction’ and of a ‘temple’, similar to the Ayodha dispute. Consequently the issue has been the ‘dharma’ as in Ayodha. BUT ‘dharma’ has a specific meaning and its seat lies much deeper than in the dimensions of the religious consciousness. Such issues are not decided by mass movements but by movements in the sphere where ORDER (dharma) really exists as a determining agent. It is only the cosmology of the New Way that can adequately explain these profound matters.

Therefore, let us continue in this issue with the final portion of the Neptune series, bearing the above in mind as we complete our ‘space probe’, not in the physical proper but in and through the corridors of Time.

Skambha, 1 January 1990

                                                                             PN-B

Prominent thinkers the world over realise that the old order has come to an end. We witness the crumbling of iron barriers between nations, hitherto believed to be unshakable and resistant to any attempt at change. However, the question remains, What is to emerge in place of the old?

     I have shown in minute detail how the Measure of 9 and its inherent formula 9/6/3-0/1, has been active in the Indian subcontinent. But in India too in spite of this remarkable display of the power of gnostic time, the old order persists and we find no spirit in the nation bold enough to introduce the new. Consequently, we hear unending laments from the political opposition about the ‘dynastic rule’ of the Nehru family. I, for one, have often referred to the need to discard or drastically modify the actual parliamentary system of government precisely because its continued use OBLIGES this ‘dynasty’ to perpetuate itself. But the Opposition (as well as the ruling party) silences or disregards any voice that calls for a change in the system, often to the extent of accusing the innovator of wishing to introduce a dictatorship via, for example, the adoption of a presidential form of government. (How a presidential system can be equated with dictatorship is difficult to understand.) The result is that due to this resistance a thoroughly inadequate political structure must somehow serve as the vehicle for the Measure of 9 to hold the nation together.

India inherited its present system from the British. Many of the ills the nation suffers from can be traced to this factor: a ‘foreign’ system has been imposed upon a country which has not been allowed to breathe its independent breath and follow its own rhythms and expressions. This is easily appreciated in an assessment of the Indian model of parliamentary democracy compared to the British image of which it is meant to be a somewhat modified version.

To begin with, in Great Britain we have a true dynasty, a real and healthy monarchy. The monarch in England is not elected of course; he or she is a part of a lineage which cuts through time and is therefore independent of the uncertainties of political fortunes. Consequently, the enviable qualities of stability and continuity arise. They are not fictitious; they are real components of the national heritage.

However, this is not the Indian reality. Every effort has been made to create this situation in India via the office of President, which is meant to provide the same qualities of stability and continuity by being out of the political struggle of the various parties, whose members are elected to parliament approximately every five years on a representative basis. In this way the President stands outside of the political arena; and this, coupled with the fact that his election to office by members of Parliament ordinarily follows a different cycle than the parliamentary polls, is meant to provide that stability and continuity which the British system enjoys via its monarch.

However, we know that this is not the case. The British monarch and the Indian president have little in common because the former is not a construed but a real component based on a quasi organic, evolutionary fact. In contrast, the office of the Indian president is a fabricated imposition in an effort to mimic the British system by introducing a form of government which is supposed to produce the same results but without those legitimate components underlying the arrangement. Continuity and stability are characteristics which cannot be imagined or mentally devised. They come into being by virtue of a series of circumstances which organically confer these conditions in a process of natural development. They are not accommodations but come into being in harmony with certain essential ingredients found in the national psyche. When these conditions exist then stability and continuity become pillars for nation building.

Since this has been lacking in India the line of prime ministers – contrary to Great Britain – has had to serve as the element of continuity.  Indeed, the most politically uncertain period India has known since independence was certainly the 2½ years of Opposition rule, from 1977 to end 1979, when there was no member of the ‘Nehru Dynasty’ in office.

Thus in opposing change to some other form of government which would better accommodate this legitimate need for a vehicle capable of providing continuity and stability, the Opposition is condemning itself to continuous defeat at the polls, inasmuch as the Nehru Lunar Line is the means to hold the country together, given the inadequate system India has adopted for her political expression. This is an example of the failure to recognise and appreciate the true character of a nation and the measure of its individual pulsation.

A development of this nature was seen as inevitable, from the cosmological point of view. The most revealing hint of it was the date of Independence itself. Though significantly falling on Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, I have often pointed out that the number-power of the day was 8, just one short of the complete cycle of 9. This fact reveals that full independence from the British had not been attained on some levels. More was yet to come to bring the movement to the 9, or the completed process. Sri Aurobindo himself, in his message to the nation at the time of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, commented on this very fact: Independence had occurred on his birthday and was a confirmation of his work, but the partitioned condition of the nation had to be healed to make the movement worthy of his highest aims.

The prominent position of the 8 also reveals that there is a residue of a sort which does not easily allow the movement to complete itself. This is explicitly the problem India now faces.

We see that British rule left this residue in the new Indian nation in the form of a political and administrative system which has in its general character no REAL connection with the national spirit. It was an imposition from outside, the result of colonial rule. The bureaucracy, for example, was devised to serve that rule rather than self-rule. Out of this, bearing no harmony with the true pulse of the nation, laws and methods of governing were imposed which to this day hinder rather than further the free and forward-moving thrust the country needs to faithfully fulfil its noble destiny along the lines arising from its own individual web of destiny. One specific aspect of this residue is the increasing chasm between the bureaucracy and the public, as if the public were the enemy of the administration rather than the elements to be served. The explanation for this lamentable situation is simply the fact that indeed the ‘natives’ were the enemy of the Raj and the administration was arranged in such a way as to permit that native populace to be effectively ruled by suppression of its any aspiration and effort at upliftment. The situation in India today, with the almost complete lack of openness (at a time when even the Soviet Union has opened its society) and the nefarious secrecy which characterise the Indian system are the inevitable outcome of the residue the country inherited and which she refuses to shake off.

However, this situation in a very profound sense mirrors the condition of our entire civilisation – east and west. The new must arise amidst the old; but for the true new way, it must somehow come into being uncontaminated by the old. Throughout the world nations and individuals face the same dilemma. We are born into a particular structure or environment. We must evolve within that, bearing the limitations which our heritage may foist upon us. Yet in the midst of these very ‘fields’, and no other, new structures must nonetheless arise.

India is no exception; indeed, her task is perhaps more complex than that of any other nation. But in spite of this limitation she has played out for over a century the patterns of her higher destiny which the new cosmology describes so thoroughly, regardless of any existing limitation. Nonetheless, it is precisely these limitations, this ‘residue’ which is burdening the nation at this critical crossroads of her destiny.

We do not place in doubt that India’s higher destiny is being fulfilled despite the inadequacy of the system within which this superior pattern must draw its lines. We cannot doubt insofar as the facts prove the victorious existence of this higher pattern which, like it or not, has been the pattern the nation has been made to adhere to. However, the 8 makes its presence felt constantly by a certain ‘baggage’ which the country totes on its back. Thus that extraneous element acts as a corrosive agent. It contaminates everything. It is like a parasite draining the host tree of its most vital substance. And as the tree grows, so does the parasite grow. Until a threshold is reached. Then either the tree develops sufficient strength to throw off the parasite, or the latter succeeds in destroying the tree which permitted its growth in the first place.

By examining certain original components such as the health and the condition of the soil and other environmental factors, the emergence of a parasite can more or less be predicted. Thus, given the conditions prevailing at the time of the independence movement (for I consider that we must study the matter from approximately 1857, the year of the Sepoy Rebellion and not just the actual year of Independence), the growth of this ‘parasite’ was easily predicted. Its forecasting required no special occult powers or clairvoyant capacities.

India stands at a crossroads of her destiny. The parasite this nation/tree bears is flourishing and threatens to destroy its host altogether. Indeed, the stronger the host grows the more nourishment and vital sap are made available to the parasitic appendage. At some point a drastic measure must be taken, for when the critical threshold is reached, to continue feeding the host tree simply means giving more and more power to the parasite to destroy the host or the element that sustains it and gives it its life. This becomes a self-defeating exercise. In the day-to-day functioning of a nation, a development of this sort is perceived in a number of ways, but the common characteristic of them all is the constant presence of a sense of waste, of pouring resources into what appears to be a black hole in the national field of consciousness-being, a bottomless pit, as it were. Over-population, of course, is an easy tool for this insatiable and destructive drainage. But there are many more, over-population being simply the most obvious.

This is a mathematical occurrence. The development follows organic lines, albeit of an order which the ordinary intelligence cannot perceive or accept, because these laws involve the play of forces, of energies which constitute the ‘body’ of a nation – any nation. Physical, to be sure, but a ‘body’ also animated by a vital force and held together by a ‘purpose’ which is lodged deep within the nation’s innermost psychic essence. A leader can be considered outstanding to the extent to which he or she is able to reach and draw out the nectar of that ‘purpose’ from the deep recesses of the nation’s soul.

Considering this play of forces – a unique combination for each nation – the pattern of India’s higher destiny has evolved. And according to this pattern, and no other, the nation’s political life has taken shape, particularly in these 42 years of its independent life. But the structure within which this superior model has had to express itself has been inadequate.

Put more simply, there is an essence and a form to all things in this material universe. In a world of disharmony such as ours, ruled by the Ignorance and the Falsehood (and I purposefully use these terms capitalised to lay emphasis on their cosmic origin and hence the evolutionary limitations imposed upon a species which must grow according to a certain cosmic tempo and a largely predetermined pattern), a cleavage exists between the two. Essence is always pure and true, but in a material universe, that same essence must be provided with the proper FORMS to express itself uncontaminated, undistorted and, above all else, not subjected to any imposition from external quarters which bear scant relation to that unique essence of being. Indeed, the single most indicative factor which allows us to identify the consciousness that reigns on Earth as one of Ignorance and Falsehood is that to one who sees, to one who has the capacity to penetrate beneath outer layers and see the soul-essence, it is apparent that along its evolutionary way, in the course of the development of these ‘limbs’ or forms, externals have oppressed that essence and it therefore does not find any fitting vehicle to express itself according to the truth of its essential being.

*

When we say that the nation has lost its ‘dharma’, and that it must re-establish this ‘dharma’, we mean something quite different than the spiritual leaders who, by the dozens, repeat ad nauseum this call. The point is precisely this: these fervent and well-meaning pleas receive no response, particularly from those quarters which appear to bear the greater responsibility for the decay, for the decline of the Dharma. Indeed, they are ‘crusted over’, so to speak. They are impenetrable. Thus, no amount of preaching will render them pliable, plastic and open to the light of the true Dharma.

     The problem is, once again, mathematical. There is a cleavage, a chasm between the psychic essence of the nation – or the seat of its inherent Dharma – and the external dimensions where the FORMS to express that Dharma in a material universe must evolve. The origin of the seeds for this cleavage date back hundreds of years, millennia in fact. To be precise, they initially surfaced about the time of Gautam the Buddha, over 2000 years ago. It was approximately then that the seeds were planted in the spiritual consciousness of the nation to UNDERMINE that Dharma. Over the ages those ‘seeds’, similar to the parasite in our analogy, have born their entirely predictable fruit.

But who in the nation can see the connection? Who can travel back through the corridors of Time and ferret out those turning points when the environment and the terrain were fertile for the insemination of those nefarious seeds of undermining which were destined to foist upon the nation, two thousand years into the far future, the contaminated ‘forms’ of a political system which is clearly and unmistakably the result of those ancient ‘seeds’?

Sri Aurobindo has equally clearly stated that ‘Kalki must come to correct the error of the Buddha’. Yet none, even his closest disciples, know with the exactitude demanded of the Supramental Manifestation which he heralded, just what his words mean. They too are the victims of the great Undermining, similar to the consciousness of the entire nation with its manifold avenues of expression – political, cultural, social, economic, and, above all, spiritual.

But the undermining was clear. It was unmistakable and the results were predictable, the seeds of ‘otherworldliness’ were sown over 2000 years ago. This simple fact, a ‘truth’ totally alien to the Indian Vedic spirit and soul, produced a schism in the energy field of the nation. The energies within that field then gradually became ranged on either side of the ever-widening chasm: spirit and matter. Simultaneously, an indelible line was drawn between Essence and Form. The two went off in tangents and apparently, at this stage of the development, they shall never again be able to meet.

Once more I must ask, Who in the nation can perceive this development with courage and boldness of spirit and can trace its origin back through the thick folds of Time? For even those who might perceive have not the impulse and intrepidity to formulate their perceptions boldly and to help the nation heal the chasm once and for all.

We witness the result of the incapacity: the spiritual leader’s voice becomes weaker and weaker and evermore distanced from the field in which this play of energies evolves. While that field becomes evermore choked by the rapidly increasing encumbrances of the parasites which this abandonment has produced: the most vigorous and creative energies of the nation have been posited ‘elsewhere’, in a beyond which now, on an increasing scale, has become defined as some far away paradise, a heaven or a plane of consciousness entirely apart and separate from this ailing planet Earth. Yet who, then, or which energies are to renew the national environment and restore its health if not those which are more finely tuned?

This is what is meant by ‘reestablishing the Dharma’. It has little or nothing to do with our moralistic notions, all of which are leaves and branches on the parasitic appendage and have no essential relation to the Tree. The Dharma responds to mathematics not sentiments.

*

The cleavage between essence and form plagues the entire world. A simple and rather obvious example is the campaign the Prince of Wales has felt himself obliged to carry on in the field of architecture, where his complaints tally with ours regarding essence and form, albeit his being concerned more with function and aesthetics. The questions are nonetheless related as he seeks to impress upon the community of architects that a form must not only be functional but it must also be in harmony with the total environment and aesthetically proper.

            And speaking of architecture, the corrosive fumes which exude from the chasm have even polluted the Mother’s own sublime architectural work, the effects of which were immediately evident in precisely the area we are describing: form and its inadequacy to express the inner truth.

I have revealed in the course of my work the mathematics of the problem: the Mother ‘saw’ a form – the inner chamber of her Temple. She saw this form because she identified  in consciousness with the spirit and deeper soul-essence of that particular form. She ferreted out its ‘purpose’, which then provided the mathematical formula for its exterior expression in a material universe. In a word, there was no cleavage, no distorting chasm. The vision cast up before her consciousness the exact ‘form’ which could faithfully and impeccably express that spirit/soul/purpose in our world of material forms. This was a unique achievement, unknown to our modern civilisation. But given this ‘intrusion’ by her truth-conscious penetration into our world lorded over by the Ignorance and the Falsehood, the presentation and preservation of that Vision have experienced untold difficulties. Finally, the ‘old measure’ prevailed and the cleavage became once again consolidated as essence and form became irrevocably separated in a physical building which, once again, imposes a distortion on essence.

However, in this case there is one consoling factor: the chamber’s essence-truth was able to survive and the dharma of that particular creation was saved. Not in the physical building in Auroville but in The New Way. It matters little at this stage that on the physical plane the chasm still imposes its falsehood because the inner truth has nonetheless created its pure channel (form) of expression in The New Way and the new cosmology – for these are equally ‘forms’. It is this that the world must come to realise.

The human being sees only the dense physical. One’s vision is closed to the deeper strata and the more subtle play of energies in dimensions hidden from the physical eye. This is precisely the result of the cleavage, the predictable effects of those Seeds of Undermining sown 2000 years ago. Consequently, I can state that there is no one in the nation who can perceive with mathematical precision the connection between the present inadequate political system in India and the ‘error of the Buddha’ which Sri Aurobindo stated must be ‘corrected by Kalki’.

To make confusion worse confounded, those very seeds of undermining have made it impossible to know who or what this ‘Kalki’ really is, and, by consequence, what that ‘dharma’ is which this Kalki is supposed to reestablish. For even the line of Ten Avatars, of which Kalki is said to be the 10^th and last, has become contaminated. The Buddha himself has been lodged therein…and thus those ‘seeds’ found a secure niche in the psycho-spiritual evolving consciousness of the Indian nation.

The confusion and unknowing are great indeed. The ‘crusts’ provided by the folds of Time make the truth almost impossible to expose. Especially when the parasitic appendage has grown hardy and agile in its ability to survive the attempts by the host subject to cast off its draining serpentine form.

The only way to illumine this condition thoroughly is to make the connections I have outlined here, from the distant past to this chaotic present; and thereby to see clearly the root of the problem, a fearless penetration which alone can UPROOT the parasite. And to perceive how all structures (forms) which we rely upon to express essence – any essence – are distortions or products of those original undermining seeds which have the power to thwart the expression of the pure and full Dharma.

This is the situation prevailing in the political structure (form) of the nation. But, similar to the Mother’s vision which did survive in The New Way, the hidden pattern of India’s destiny has survived via the factual and undeniable existence of the Solar and Lunar Lines, the helical arrangement by which the nation is held together in spite of any attempts to undermine its essential unity.

However, and this is the most important point to highlight, the consequences of that undermining and the ‘form’ it has foisted upon the nation are apparent to all and daily the corrosive power extracts its pound of flesh. The obvious effects are a prevailing, increasing chaos and the insatiable voracity of a corrupted ‘system’ which is the most visible and effective tool of those original seeds of undermining. At this point the separation between Essence (dharma) and Form (the ‘system’) is complete. The latter IS India now – or at least this is the appearance; and indeed, it is the tactic or finality of the agents of the Falsehood: to strengthen and foster the growth of the parasite to such a degree that its ‘form’ (the system) appears to be the tree itself. That is, the one has so completely overtaken the other (while draining it of its sap of life and revitalising power) that none can see the original form which still hosts the parasite, or supports and fosters its growth.

This is the graphic image of the destruction of the Dharma, and how, at the very same time, it is the Dharma itself that SUPPORTS the degenerative form. The latter feeds off the Dharma, making the distortion and the disfiguration all the more difficult to detect. For indeed, who knows where to look for the origin of the decay? The Tree is covered entirely and stands totally occulted. At the same time, when the critical threshold is reached this intertwined existence serves to render correction of the problem impossible – for to attack the parasite which has so completely overtaken the host body would mean to destroy the Tree itself. This is the compulsion behind drastic revolution – especially those which turn violent, ruthless and bloody. The Chinese revolution, for example, brought a thorough and drastic cut with the past: China of ancient times is gone; the present China is something of a soulless structure wherein ‘form’ has become top-heavy as it were, and has smothered the soul of the nation to a large degree.

India has not yet reached that point. Indeed, the cosmological model arranged for the nation is the only thing that has prevented such a drastic occurrence. But again I must repeat, a crossroads has now been reached. Clear seeing based on real knowledge, the knowledge of these eternal truths, must be allowed to evolve new forms to express the soul of the nation without permitting that parasite to stamp out the country’s psychic imprints which have survived in its cultural body through unimaginably powerful onslaughts which would surely have destroyed the psychic fibre of a nation with a less potent force of destiny.

It is naive to believe that having survived this long the nation is out of danger. The truth is another: the time has come for bold measures to be taken in order to remake those inherited structures, the result of those ancient seeds of undermining, and to thus re-establish the Dharma on the basis of outer forms which are in harmony with the inner essence.

Today there is no such harmony. Hence the ‘system’ is thoroughly corrupted, contaminated, corroded – the ‘system’ which is supposed to be the very tool for implementation of essence, of policy and programmes and whatnot; as well as the corrective mechanism to lop off any growth on the tree of essence which might threaten its healthy and uncontaminated survival. When such a point arrives it is the signal that a major crossroads stands before us. The time for change – deep and thorough – has come.

*

We are saddled with false conceptions often dating back thousands of years. One is that the ‘spiritual truth’ is untouched by the corrosive substances of a material world – to the extent that that world became known as ‘maya’ and equated with ‘illusion’, when Shankara put the final nail in the coffin of the eternal dharma. Sri Aurobindo insistently pointed out this false conception and sought to redeem Maya by revealing its ancient Vedic sense to the world: measure, knowledge, the formative power of the Absolute. I have carried this work ahead and ‘materialised’ this effort somewhat by providing the seeker with the actual Divine Maya or Measure – that Golden Rod of ancient traditions whereby the enlightened ‘measure’ comes into being which eliminates the distortions or the disfiguring veils dividing Essence and Form. The ‘illusion of maya’ is that abysmal chasm with its exuding toxic fumes and not the material universe. Therein obscuring waves arise which cast the two worlds farther and farther apart, to the point where there seems to be no meeting ground at all, no possibility of the emergence of a connecting bridge…the effects of which are a totally separative existence and the loss of a ‘one world’ perception, the plague of our times. Pursuits of the spirit become one thing, the material another. The inadequate tools for governing which India is saddled with are the direct result of that abysmal chasm.

            In practical terms, what does this mean? How does it become reflected in the life of a nation? In India this has resulted in a totally ego-centric, egoistic consciousness replacing the wide and all-embracing vision of ancient times, those prior to the schism. The individual is out for his own personal gains; the state and community mean nothing to him at all. Increasingly we witness that corrosive elements cannot be corrected or eliminated. They are a ‘world unto themselves’. They abide in their own ‘universe’ or ‘space’. They are out of the reach of the usual channels (‘unaccountable’ is the common term), because they are the channels: the parasite is finally the tree.

New channels are sought to rectify the position; but they too arise from within the ranks of the already contaminated body/system, hence they themselves bear the corrosive seeds within and become additional means to further the contamination they are supposed to eradicate. We attempt to reform, we seek to introduce a new ‘raj’ in which local bodies are given more power, closer to the people and therefore more directly accountable to them. But the people respond with indifference and wisely point out that these bodies are also limbs of that parasite-ridden tree, parts of that ‘system’, the whole of which is contaminated, saddled with inadequate ‘forms’. Thus the well-intentioned move has no guarantee of success or that it will alter matters in any significant way. On the contrary. Many believe it will only spread the rot more deeply down and into the system and reach those (grass)roots of the Tree more easily. In other words, it is not truth or rightness that is spread through the system but rather the corrosive seeds. It is then that whatever slogan is adopted rings hollow. The ‘form’ is devoid of any resounding essence.

This is again mathematical. Inadequate forms will invariably, inevitably, predictably distort or corrode even the finest essence (intention). Thus, to bring about any REAL change, and consequent benefit to the people, one must go to the source; or rather, construct that ‘bridge’ and heal this age-old slowly but steadily growing chasm. This can be done only by persons of Knowledge.

And thus we stumble upon another ancient truth of the Indian polity: The Brahmin stood above kings, the man or woman of God-realisation was the highest and first ‘citizen’ of the nation and the one who inspired and advised kings, who guided the course of the kingdom and even, in certain instances, guided it through the turmoil of war. But in very ancient times, before those corrosive seeds of undermining were planted, the matter/spirit split did not exist. It exists today. Hence, where is the sage who lives in a unified consciousness which permits this superior guidance? We do not mean by ‘unified consciousness’ a union with God elsewhere, ‘up there’, away from this material plane and thus removed from the realities of existence in a universe of matter and subject to, as well as a participant in, the cosmic play of forces. By unified consciousness we mean one who ACCEPTS the world as the Body of the Lord, as the truth-essence in matter, and therefore a consciousness which is able to perceive the unbroken link between essence and form where lesser mortals fail. In a word, we mean a consciousness which has no difficulty whatsoever in perceiving the exact and unadulterated form or system or structure which is the only real channel for that essence to express itself in the world, on this planet Earth, at this precise crossroads in Time.

The present-day abounding crop of godmen, all of them, are incapable of providing this impeccable guidance because the current attitude is one of denial of the physical reality as being intrinsically real and true and equal to the subtle essence, not to speak of religions and religious leaders who gave up the struggle to establish a ‘heaven on Earth’ long ago. None see the truth of Form. Each and every one bears in his consciousness and in his very God-realisation, the seeds of that infamous Undermining of ages gone by, which the passage of Time has covered over in thick crusts and layer upon layer of now depleted and de-energised consciousness-soil.

Time is thus the agent of Maya, of that deceptive act of veiling. Time it is therefore who must be the instrument of UNVEILING. Time it was who nurtured, who gestated those seeds to produce the distorted forms which burden our civilisation today. Time it must be therefore who gestates and gives birth to new Seeds, the golden seeds of Truth-Consciousness which produce undistorted, uncontaminated forms of Itself. Time it is therefore who has provided us with the ‘formula’ for this superior operation: 9/6/3-0/1. People of Knowledge know this Formula and use it, and it alone, to build the uncontaminated structure of a new world.

 ‘Skambha’

27 October 1989

PNB

A cacophony has no appreciable theme or melody we can follow. Notes fall into one another helplessly, they jostle with each other in what strikes our ear as a discordant chaos, a disturbing disorder. Our 20^th Century civilisation seems to express this same condition: chaos, senseless, incoherent breakdown. Therefore, if we study the development of music in the world and its progression from a certain order towards a disorder of a sorts, perhaps we can find an illuminating pattern, and perhaps one that we can connect to a greater harmonic movement and purpose.

The ancients referred to the cosmology they formulated in those distant ages of history as the Harmony or the Music of the Spheres. In very remote times music was the means to convey a truth of the cosmos in sound. It was therefore sacred to the core. But today we have lost touch with that sacred element, though vestiges do remain of this superior perception and expression. They provide us with a clue to the ancient psyche and the spirit that then moved across the Earth.

In the development of music in the world – the western world primarily – we observe an unmistakable pattern. Over the centuries we see (or rather, we hear) a progression from simplicity (of theme, instrument and execution) to a greater and greater complexity; and then a collapse into the chaos of cacophony. We move from the cosmic order and the sacred to the mundane and the profane. It appears as if humankind, in losing connection with the harmony of the spheres, became a helpless victim to the narrow boundaries of a limited and disconnected experience of life. And as is true of all cultural development, this was reflected in the progression of music from the sacred to the profane and from simplicity and order to complexity and finally cacophony. Embellishment, ornamentation and mechanisation were the avenues for this process.

Contemporary western classical music reflects the affliction of an increasing disorder. There is no longer that one theme, that appreciable melody; or at least it has become so effectively camouflaged that its detection is nearly impossible for the untrained ear. And this leaves the listener with a sense of insecurity. The loss of the theme or the element of a certain continuity in the contemporary composition creates a situation in the listener very similar to what the human being experiences in present-day society: one is lost in the unknown, boundaries and limits are being exceeded. In this transition, while the known and secure structures are crumbling, as yet the clear lines of the future ‘theme’ are not ‘audible’. And though we may wish to, we cannot turn back the musical clock. We must move ahead on time’s irreversible, forward-pointing arrow into a tomorrow which may disclose a new structure, a new musical expression.

Clearly this breakdown has for its purpose the establishment of an awareness and consequent cultural expression which is more global, which exceeds regional and continental divides, and which, though varied and rich in its diversity, will ultimately produce an orderly pattern wherein all the parts may join to give expression to a single Theme. It is even possible that this new expression though an important concern of many of the best creative spirits of this new Age, is being sought wrongly. That is, it may not be a question of ‘fusion’, as the blending of eastern and western music is called, but rather a flowering of a new apparatus of perception and appreciation; and this may have little to do with the actual composition and more with a heightened awareness and the ability to ‘hear with new ears’, whatever the piece and its ethnic idiosyncrasies.

To appreciate this we must observe the development of music in this millennium, and more especially in this century. For example, there was a simplicity in medieval musical expression. The theme was bare, sparsely embellished or adorned. The instruments used to convey this innocence of spirit were equally simple, rudimentary and unsophisticated. The executing bodies were small and the experience was intimate, while the melodies expressed the down-to-earth concerns of the population: a world of simple, basic values and clear, attainable goals.

In the domain of the sacred, as one example, there was the emergence of the compellingly virile Gregorian Chants in the 6^th century, which rose to a peak in the 8^th and 9^th centuries, and then gave way to new vogues and the beginning of polyphonic music in the 11^th and 12^th centuries. In the realm of the profane, we see, or rather hear across the centuries, the rise of the wonderfully melodic and rich inspirations of the baroque masters. We associate ‘baroque’ with excessive embellishment, an elaboration carried to extremes, where essence is smothered in the folds of outer form and finish. In a sense this did take place; in 18^th and 19^th century music the theme was embellished to a higher degree of sophistication and elaboration than ever before. Music also moved farther and farther away from the sacred, for even though many compositions continued to centre on religious subjects, sponsoring was done by royalty and catered to the profane. Ultimately the tools and channels to express this greater elaboration were inadequate: new instruments had to be devised.

The western world then moved into the Industrial Revolution and power became the order of the day. Small ensembles and delicate instruments were unable to give faithful expression to the new spirit that was moving through Europe, and via Europe through the rest of the world. For example, we witness the invention of the piano to replace the subtle sounds of the harpsichord and spinet. Similarly, a number of new instruments were devised, each capable of increasing volume and the body of sound in order to project adequately the new spirit of expansion that Europe was experiencing in all aspects of life.

The fuller-bodied orchestra came into being, the number of instrumentalists increased, as if to reflect a mass-production consciousness. Even notation of musical scores became elaborate and detailed, as well as more codified and reflective of an increasing mechanisation. The interpreter was provided with stringent guidelines, a more standardised code which became necessary with the distance emerging between composer and interpreter; and finally the establishment of the commercial intermediary – the publisher. This heightened the necessity for a system which would secure a faithful reproduction by way of a symbolism and notation that could stand on its own and not demand the presence of the composer, with very little room left for free flights of the interpretive spirit, – unlike the scores of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

There was a very great change overtaking the world. The Industrial Revolution had opened the way for vigorous collective efforts and a rising mass consciousness; at the same time, it opened the gates to POWER. The focus was no longer on the embellishment of the theme, as it was in the baroque period. Rather, it was to find more and more powerful means to express and to convey the theme, and to expand the range of execution and audition to mirror the physical expansion of civilisation through colonial conquests which were engulfing the entire globe.

This development was very clear in the West: the limited range of the medieval group; the increased number of the Baroque ensemble; and finally the contemporary orchestra of over a hundred instrumentalists. At the same time, we note the predominant position grand opera began to occupy – grand indeed because it, more than any other 19 Century art form reflected this largess and increased sense of power. Opera was also a means to express a spirit of unification which was then surfacing, especially in Italy, the land of its origin and most ardent exponent. Opera followed the same development from simplicity to heightened sophistication and expression of power. This was reflected in the early baroque operas of Gioachino Rossini compared to his later masterpieces. The arc of his long life of genial contribution to the world of opera displays this development.

Grand opera was a musical expression in which a number of art forms could be accommodated. It gathered those forms around a single theme (the libretto), just as Italy itself was attempting a unification of its culturally diverse city-states. It was a popular art form, for plebeian tastes as well as for the more elitist. Attesting to this fact we have the charming anecdote of Giuseppe Verdi’s futile attempt to keep secret one of the main arias of his opera, ‘Rigoletto’, which was to premier in Venice. But the problem was where to rehearse the piece with the tenor so that none could overhear and diffuse the melody before the maiden performance. Verdi thought he had found the solution: he took his tenor for a gondola ride. Well away from curious ears and protected by the watery canals distancing them from the populace, he rehearsed the aria. The reward for his efforts came very soon thereafter: All of Venice was singing ‘La donna e mobile’… Verdi had not calculated the eavesdropping presence of the gondoliere, rowing the gondola, who easily memorised the catchy melody which then spread like wildfire through the ardent opera-loving populace.

As a mark of the spirit of unification which grand opera symbolised and the vibrant part it played in the movement, there is the fact that the famed chorus from Verdi’s opera, ‘Nabucco’, became virtually the hymn of national unification, on the lips of men, women and children, cutting across all classes.

The West more faithfully than the East provides a clear vision of the spirit then moving across the continents. The reason why this is so is reflected in the development itself – an increase in power and material strength which characterises the nature of occidental civilisation. It was a predominance of one aspect of collective consciousness isolated from the whole. This excess or imbalance finally produced the strange sounds of the contemporary composition: a disorder as a reaction to a smothering of the individual’s creative spirit, while being subjugated to the outer layers of being – the mental and the vital.

It is the story of our industrial/scientific/technological age. It is the story of the instrument or tool assuming an increasing importance until the point is reached where the tool predominates and imposes a top-heaviness, as it were, which eventually smothers the theme in an excess created by the preponderance of mechanical devices. Power overpowers; balance is lost; harmony eventually suffers and gives way to cacophony. Everything is broken down and none of the old structures remain. Even the system of notation proves inadequate and each contemporary musical score becomes a unique creation. Every composer must introduce innovations, new methods of notation because the former systems cannot express in symbol the new sounds he attempts to create. At this point the chaos is complete because when the composer cannot educate the interpreter directly, the latter has no examples to turn to and a musical anarchy threatens. The secure guidelines the instrumentalist had known for centuries are inadequate to provide a safe framework of interpretation. For the cry is FREEDOM – all the way down the line. But the response to this call is greater disorder when structures begin to crumble…

‘…The European mind gives the first place to the principle of growth by struggle; it is by struggle that it arrives at some kind of concert. But this concert is itself hardly more than an organisation for growth by competition, aggression and further battle. It is a peace that is constantly breaking, even within itself, into a fresh strife of principles, ideas, interests, races, classes. It is an organisation precarious at its base and in its centre because it is founded on half-truths that deteriorate into whole falsehoods; but it is still or has been till now vigorous in constant achievements and able to grow powerfully and to devour and assimilate…’

                                                            Sri Aurobindo

                                                            The Foundations of Indian Culture

                                                            CE, Vol. 14, pp. 37-38

                                                                        *

In the East, and particularly in India, the development of music has been quite different than in the West, though the effects of a cross-pollination and an infiltration via invasions and colonial conquests have also taken their toll. However, the structure of Indian classical music is rooted perceptibly and everlastingly in the cosmic harmony. This is the foundation of the Indian raga (pronounced raag), which are ‘scales’, 72 in number. In remote ages the musical genius of India drew its inspiration from the celestial harmonies. And, like all other areas of Indian cultural life, somehow this original inspiration has been kept alive in an unbroken tradition from then until now. Indeed, it was so formidable an inspiration, so permanently true, that it has survived the ravages of time admirably well.

The reason for this explains another difference between western and eastern approaches to art, and to life in general. The West founds its life and culture on a more external element. There the personality is developed to the utmost, rather than essence or the spirit. Witness, for example, the predominant schools of western psychology in contrast to Indian philosophical and yogic systems of self-development and discovery of a far greater inner depth. This trend displayed itself very vividly in the aforementioned increase in the externals of music: the instrument predominates until finally the movement blossoms into a highly sophisticated display of contemporary technology. Electronics invade a realm once thought to be the sacred and inviolable domain of the individual rather than the machine.

This trend has not been witnessed in India to any marked degree. The instruments remain largely what they were centuries ago; the size of the ensembles as well. The experience is still confined to a certain balance between instrumentalist and instrument in a natural equilibrium, a harmony of essence and form. The one does not overpower the other and artificial means are not utilised for this purpose.

But then there is that all-important, underlying premise of Indian music: the harmony of the spheres. Yet how does a cosmic reality express itself in music? We know for a fact that something of this nature lies at the basis of the Indian expression, insofar as the ragas are to be played only at certain times of the day and in certain seasons. But beyond this the layman knows nothing of the real import and connection. Let us therefore seek to unravel this cosmic puzzle at the basis of this exquisite, ancient and sacred musical experience.

In Indian music the very first sound one hears is the drone of the sruti; then the raga commences, the scale or mode or theme that is pure and sacred and permanent, but which permits an individualised expression, an improvisation which reflects a controlled freedom. There is the tala (pronounced taal) of the tabla or mridangam which is the motor of the raga, its pulse or heartbeat. All of this is combined to provide a structure which is a superb vehicle for rendering our solar system AUDIBLE to the human ear, for granting to the listener the purest and most profound experience of the cosmic harmony still available today.

Similar to the Sanatan Dharma – the ‘theme’ that runs through all of India’s spiritual and cultural expressions – her music also affords an ‘eternal truth’. And like all things in our age of transition and change, this too must be ‘made new’. Yet it cannot be done as a truly creative process unless the renewal takes place on the basis of a well-founded, direct knowledge of this inherent truth at the core of her musical experience…

‘Indian culture proceeded on the principle of a concert that strove to find its base in a unity and reached out again towards some greater oneness. Its aim was a lasting organisation that would minimise or even eliminate the principle of struggle. But it ended by achieving peace and stable arrangement through exclusion, fragmentation and immobility of status; it drew a magic circle of safety and shut itself up in it for good. In the end it lost its force of aggression, weakened its power of assimilation and decayed within its barriers. A static and limited concert, not always enlarging itself, not plastic becomes in our human state of imperfection a prison or a sleeping-chamber. Concert cannot be anything but imperfect and provisional in its form and can only preserve its vitality and fulfil its ultimate aim if it constantly adapts, expands, progresses. Its lesser unities must widen towards a broader and more comprehensive and above all a more real and spiritual oneness…’

Ibid, pg. 38

          A general malady of our times is a loss of this knowledge, precisely because in periods of transition the atmosphere becomes confused and the cacophony increases to the point where none can hear or remember or recognise the original theme and structure nor its purpose. To counteract the collapse rigid postures are assumed. The ‘purist’ emerges to preserve and perhaps fossilise the expression. Or else there is the attempt to modernise, to ‘change with the times’, to expand, to exceed. But more often than not these exercises result in degeneration and a loss of the original and eternal truth.

      A struggle between stability and change has been ensuing in the world of Indian music for at least a century, if not more. The original structure is being taxed to extremes by external influences from quarters which never had this cosmic experience as a solid foundation for the expression. Particularly in our times, when the boundaries between East and West are vanishing, there is an intermingling in another attempt to express the spirit of unity and oneness which seeks to take possession of the world. Occidental and oriental musicians interact, the disparate sounds and strange tunings of their culturally-diverse instruments intermingle in an effort to find an expression which will convey this blending of one world and another, one consciousness and another. But the purist is not satisfied – in fact, he is often horrified. Nor has there emerged any sample of such an intermingling which can pretend to compete with the eternal character of the purist’s simple raga executed according to the stringent commands of the Shastras, or scriptures.

Yet there is something at the basis of Indian musical expression that remains untouched by these experiments and stands unshaken. The reason is that the ancients heard the harmony of the spheres, and in an impeccable manner they translated that eternal reality into sound. Thus, for as long as the harmony of the spheres remains what it is, this structure of Indian classical music will persist. It is as eternal as that macrocosmic Harmony from which it has evolved. The impulse to change will never impinge upon that eternal Truth; while at the same time that stable foundation is the secure basis for all innovation and change, similar to the multiple variations open to the basic 72 ragas – a controlled freedom which, by the miracle of a balance between stability and change, escapes the process of simplicity leading to complexity and then to breakdown and cacophony…

     ‘The objection to any large change – for a large and bold change is needed and no peddling will serve our purpose – can be given a plausible turn only if we rest it on the contention that the forms of a culture are the right rhythm of its spirit and in breaking the rhythm we may expel the spirit and dissipate the harmony for ever. Yes, but though the Spirit is eternal in its essence and in the fundamental principles of its harmony immutable, the actual rhythm of its self-expression in form is ever mutable. Immutable in its being and in the powers of its being but richly mutable in life, that is the very nature of the spirit’s manifested existence. And we have to see too whether the actual rhythm of the moment is still a harmony or whether it has not become in the hands of an inferior and ignorant orchestra a discord and no longer expresses rightly or sufficiently the ancient spirit…’

Ibid, pp. 21-22

We shall explore in greater depth this immutable cosmic foundation of Indian music, which will provide a certain guideline to the auditory experience so that the listener will henceforth hear this music not as just a pleasing string of notes or a display of virtuosity, but as if listening to ‘the sounds of the solar system’. To this end, some essential features of Indian music will be highlighted; in particular the most important element – the drone or the ‘stable constant’ of the sruti.

Before all else, it is necessary to analyse briefly the spiritual and mystical character of East and West, insofar as they provide a clue to the development we are observing, particularly a characteristic of the occidental religious experience which has permeated many other aspects of western life. It reflects a division, a split, if you will, which has become fully crystallised in present-day society in a spirit/matter divide. Yet, how does this simple statement become reflected in the musical expression of East and West, – the former having a basis of unity, ever and always, and therefore freed from a dualism which necessarily results in a fragmentation of values and beliefs?

This characteristic is reflected in the tala or metre of Indian music, a function allotted to the percussion instruments such as the tabla and the mridangam. There are percussion instruments in the West of course, but their vibrant participation is not allowed when a certain ‘class threshold’ is crossed. In popular western music the percussion instrument, or else the bass, is perhaps the most important element in a band, providing a hard beat that determines the category of music being played. In all areas of popular music the beat provided by the rhythm instruments is clear, vibrant, essential. But as we move up the music ladder, as we near the upper echelons at the threshold of the classical expression, the beat provided by the percussion instrument becomes less and less prominent. Finally, when we are fully in the domain of the classical, percussion is almost non-existent. Metre is of course preserved and plays its unavoidable role, but it is carried out in a subdued manner; the full beat or throb of the percussion instrument or the bass is gone and the split is complete: the music of the masses is one thing, that of the elite another…and the twain shall never meet.

In India, on the other hand, there is no such division. The hard, clear beat of the percussion instrument never leaves us, no matter how high up the elitist scale we move. Once in the realm of the classical, that vital beat or throb disappears in the West, while in India it remains but is simply more refined…

‘A true happiness in this world is the right terrestrial aim of man, and true happiness lies in the finding and maintenance of a natural harmony of spirit, mind and body. A culture is to be valued to the extent to which it has discovered the right key of this harmony and organised its expressive motives and movements. And a civilisation must be judged by the manner in which all its principles, ideas, forms, ways of living work to bring that harmony out, manage its rhythmic play and secure its continuance or the development of its motives…’

Ibid, p. 2

If we take music as a reflection of a society and civilisation and its individual components, the factor of the split described above becomes an important clue to the problems we face as we seek to evolve a more integral approach to life. The human being is composed of various ‘layers’ of consciousness-being. These can be roughly grouped into four: the physical, the vital-emotional, the mental, and the spiritual. These different parts find their correspondence in the various elements of a musical structure and the resultant compositions. Thus, the underlying foundation of Indian culture is a vision of oneness and unity, integrating these various layers, but within which we find an almost maddening diversity. Nonetheless, that underlying unity is everpresent. [ever present/ever-present?]

The tala or metre of the percussion instruments is thus representative of a certain vital-physical layer. It is like a great pumping heart. To eliminate this factor entirely, in terms of the audio experience, is akin to a major severance in consciousness. That urgent vital breath coursing through the ‘being’ becomes suppressed and ceases to play the prominent role it did in music farther down the scale. In popular music it is permitted its full play; in the classical it is held at bay and almost entirely subdued. This condition is observed even more clearly in schools such as Rudolf Steiner’s, in, for example, his Eurhythmic dance exercises. The idea is to let the body play the musical score, or visually draw the lines the various instruments weave. In observing these exercises one sees that the entire movement is confined to the upper half of the body, in particular the arms (in the cosmic harmony, ruled by Gemini, and hence connected to the mind); the lower section of the body is far more inert, a striking display of the division we are discussing.

Classical ballet is another example and provides as well a visual impact of a disconnection between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’. This has become greatly emphasised with the introduction in this century (from Italy) of ‘pointe’ or the toe posture, displaying an increasing tendency to rise, to go up and away from what has become equated with a lower hemisphere and a lesser expression.

Thus we have a lower and a higher expression, clearly demarcated. We have a higher consciousness and a greater refinement, and this expresses itself in the classical structure of western music (and dance). And we have the less refined. But the important point is that the rhythm instrument is not carried over into that higher world.

In India the situation is entirely different. The percussion instrument is always prominent; but as one rises in the scale its contribution simply becomes more and more refined; there is a greater sophistication but never is it entirely eliminated or is its rightful role denied: to pump that vital breath through the structure like a powerful heart beating out the various rhythms set by the cosmic mood.

The tala is unmistakable in all the gradations of music in India – in folk music, in the devotional ‘bhajans’ (in the West this would be unthinkable), in film songs and indigenous popular music of all sorts. In a word, in all the various expressions of the Indian musical psyche. In its classical expression (up the elitist scale) the tala or metre is equally clear and unmistakable via the same percussion instruments used in the lesser expression – but it is simply a question of a greater degree of sophistication. There is not the same clear-cut divide between plebeian and patrician tastes as in western music.

The Christian colonialists had difficulty with Indian devotional music, coming as they did from a culture which starkly divides its music into sacred and profane, and in the former all trace of rhythmic pulsation is absent. Not so in the Indian temple. There the beat is even more dynamic – as if worship arouses that flaming pulsation of energy. Gradations do exist, but all parts of the being are respected and given their due.

Of late in the West this necessity seems to have been understood; or perhaps it is a means to draw more worshipers into the fold, particularly the youth. Consequently, we witness churches hosting pop concerts or pop music used in ritual or as an accompaniment for devotional services. The point is missed however. While gradations exist, one type of music cannot express all moods or serve all purposes. Integration or involvement of the full being is indeed required, however, which has been absent in the West due to the split of matter and spirit.

The West makes a stark differentiation: ‘power’ is only expressed in the lesser forms of music, or else not at all. In the ‘higher’ this same ‘power’ or vital force (shakti) recedes into the background and becomes inaudible. That throbbing pulse, that vital heartbeat is covered over entirely, as if it were non-existent.

To express this power the percussion instrument in Indian music of whatever level remains largely the same and its function is always the same. In a word, the instrument does not become disconnected from the function it must express…

‘…If we define civilisation as a harmony of spirit, mind and body, where has that harmony been entire or altogether real? Where have there not been glaring deficiencies and painful discords? Where has the whole secret of the harmony been altogether grasped in all its parts or the complete music of life evolved into the triumphant ease of a satisfying, durable and steadily mounting concord?…’.

Ibid, p. 31

*

We cannot fail to see the split expressed in all aspects of life, in all areas of existence. It is a global condition, while the music of India stands as a reminder to us that there is another way, another integral and unified way of living and being. “Power’ is not the preserve of the ‘lesser’ evolved.

Can we see this also as an expression of political trends and the cry ‘power to the people’, a development which has set our civilisation apart from all others in this period of recorded history? But what are the symptoms in a society that expresses itself in this way (musically)? There is a division between ruler and ruled, and finally the two go off in tangents. The resultant condition of chaos and cacophony requires then highly destructive impacts to bridge the gap, to heal the schism. Revolutions are necessary and severe societal unrest is inevitable. To achieve an integration and to bridge the divide, tremendous periods of instability ensue. It is a civilisation characterised by periods of relative calm and progress, and periods of despairing breakdown, because the foundation is a dualism which results in tension, competition and struggle, and an overpowering of one part of the being – the mental or the vital – which has not been given its due in the fuller harmony.

Continuing to use trends in music for this overview, we observe that, as indicated by the essence and structure of her music, India can avoid a development of this nature, insofar as there is always a solid foundation carried forward into the present: it is an eternal foundation whose underlying theme is forever unity, rather than duality…

‘…There is this permanent spirit in things and there is this persistent…law of our nature; but there is too a less binding system of laws of successive formulations, – rhythms of the spirit, forms, turns, habits of the nature, and these endure the mutations of the ages… The race must obey this double principle of persistence and mutation or bear the penalty of a decay and deterioration that may taint even its living centre…’

Ibid, pp. 32-33

*

The same element of change rooted in stability as an abiding characteristic of the Indian spirit, can be observed in other areas, in even the most commonplace expressions which we live with daily and take for granted without feeling the need to analyse for any deeper significance. For example, there is the question of attire. Over the centuries the increased complexity and embellishment witnessed in the development of music can also be observed in fashion trends. In fact, fashion as a vehicle for expressing the psyche of a society provides a very clear display of the differences between the western and Indian understanding of life. The guiding rule of western fashion is change for change’s sake. This too has become expressive of the chaos of our times.

But even in earlier ages when this chaos was not evident, fashion mirrored the same development we have observed in music. For example, the spirit infusing the Baroque period reflected an excessive ornamentation and clutter which leaves one wondering how the human body was expected to carry this excess. Court attire during the period of the baroque was exactly reflected in this preponderance of form and embellishment which increased with the passage of time until finally entirely new forms had to emerge to sustain this increase.

In terms of fashion, as in all other things, the West is externally poised, its consciousness is riveted in the periphery of being, or the dimension where CHANGE is the keyword. Hence change is also the keyword of western fashion, to the point where from one year to the next the ‘well-dressed’ woman is expected to renew her entire wardrobe.

Likewise, trends in popular western music cannot be analysed adequately unless they are taken in conjunction with the attire of the performers. Witness the revolution in dress (and music) of the 1960s. From the musical world this revolutionary form of dress was carried over into the rest of society through the youth. Music also became a more living, spontaneous act, with young people in western society unveiling remarkable musical talent and invention. The same ‘freedom’ expressed in music became the hallmark of fashion. But this initial liberation, if you will, pressed on until the momentum wore itself out and plunged into chaos. By the 1980s this chaos was complete with ‘punk’ fashion and the frightful get-ups of rock bands and their adoring fans.

In India the principle of unity is carried over into the domain of fashion – in the traditional sari, for example. This costume has survived the ravages of time and modernisation similar to the country’s music. And interestingly, it expresses the same truth of her destiny and being: unity in diversity – or a unified multiplicity. Thus, the FORM (the sari) is one and enduring, but within that form an infinite possibility of expression and variation exists.

To the westerner confinement to a single form of dress is unthinkable. It would seem appallingly boring and would be construed as an attempt to stifle the creativity of the individual, for which the selection of attire provides an important vehicle of expression. For the occidental, selection of attire is the avenue for a daily expression of one’s individuality and creativity. But in India the sari (and other traditional dresses, both for women and men) is not felt in any way as a constraint on that freedom and creative drive. It is simply, once again, a CONTROLLED freedom, a creativity maintained within certain limits or boundaries; yet within these boundaries freedom of expression is limitless.

This same situation prevails in Indian music. Again, it can be traced to the foundation of Indian cultural and spiritual-philosophical expression. The cosmos we inhabit, the solar system we are a part of, the ‘laws’ which bind our system to the harmony we can measure with the passage of time, are the very same which bind the executors of the Indian classical music to a certain ‘system’ wherein one may experience this ‘controlled freedom’.

In the classical composition this is expressed by the improvisations on the basic raga (and the consequent absence of the musical score). That raga in turn, expresses a ‘mood’, a ras (‘taste’, ‘essence’, ‘pleasure’) of being. These moods have a measure – 72, or 9 x 8; or 9 times the octave. They come into being according to the various ‘moods’ expressed in our solar system; that is, the positions of the planets with respect to the Sun they orbit. Most important of all are the moods which come into being by the ‘faces’ the Earth presents to the Sun – arising from her axial rotation – which she executes as she moves around the great luminary whom her ‘moods’ extol.

Thus, these ‘moods’ or interrelated positions of the planets vis-à-vis the Sun are the modes of expression of the universal Consciousness. They describe the multifarious essence of the cosmic manifestation. And because of the formula ‘as above, so below’, these modes are the vital-emotional state of the human being also, inhabitant of this planet Earth. Hence, each raga has a stricture: it can be played only in the morning, or noon, or at sunset or sunrise, and so on; or else, only in particular seasons.

One accepts this. The public accepts that at one time, in a distant past, the formulators or ‘hearers’ (of the sruti, the ‘inspired word’) of these ragas had the capacity to capture this essentiality and describe it musically; and that that essence did indeed correspond to an interplay of orbits and a scheme of cosmic harmonics. But we have lost touch with the consciousness that could perceive (visually and audibly) in such a manner. Thus, when we demand innovation, the incorporation of new ragas, the extension of the scales, the freedom to introduce new formulations expressing new moods and modes, we imply that the innovator lives in that same consciousness. That is, if he is to remain faithful to the original truth-essence of Indian music (and none seem ready to do away with it entirely), then any renovation must bear an intrinsic respect for the Laws of this system that are eternal. Implied in this is a profound knowledge by identity of that cosmic harmony. This describes the experience out of which the entire structure of Indian music arose, created by those venerable Seers who were able to ‘hear’ this grand music of the spheres.

We can safely assume that there is no musician today in a position to affirm that he or she lives in this state of consciousness. Herein lies the difficulty. If India had never experienced this Truth, then this constraint would not exist – as it does not exist for the West. She would be ‘free’ – free to invent unfettered by ‘laws’. At the same time, she would be subjected to that inevitable plunge into cacophonous chaos and imbalanced individualism. However, once having ‘seen’, once having ‘heard’ the sruti, or the inspired Tone or cosmic Note, there is only one course open to the innovator or renovator: he or she must move forward into the future in the discovery of the channels of innovation or renewal which that initial Seeing and Hearing themselves provide…

‘It may well be that both tendencies, the mental and the vital and physical stress of Europe and the spiritual and psychic impulse of India, are needed for the completeness of the human movement. But if the spiritual idea points the final way to a triumphant harmony of manifested life, then it is all-important for India not to lose hold of the truth, not to give up the highest she knows and barter it away for a perhaps more readily practicable but still lower ideal alien to her true and constant nature…’

Ibid, p. 20

*

To facilitate the development of the musical experience along the lines of a truth-essence, perhaps it would be helpful to listen to a raga, bearing in mind more carefully its true and deeper meaning, and the meaning and function of all the elements in the composition which afford us this exquisite experience of hearing ‘the sounds of the solar system’. We have a scientific basis for this explanation – since today certain aspects of this truth-essence are being ‘measured’. For example, we can now confirm scientifically that the Sun is similar to the heart in a human body, a truth ancient tradition has held since the beginning of time. The Sun does indeed have a measurable ‘pulse’: in our Earth-day of 24 hours the Sun pulses exactly once every 2 hours and 40 minutes, or nine time a day. This pulsation or heartbeat vibrates through the entire System (to the extent that it can even be measured here on Earth); and each planet responds to that great pulsation in an individualised way, a way which takes into consideration its own ‘pulsation’ and is a blending of the two. The Earth, for example, responds with her pulse. Thus, while in the mid 1970s the Sun’s pulse was discovered, in 1983 University of Rome physicists, while seeking to make a discovery regarding gravitation, stumbled upon something entirely unexpected: the Earth, they discovered, has a ‘pulse’ and it beats once every 12 hours (or every 11 hours, 57 minutes, and 57.3 seconds – or her sidereal day); an exact measurement just like the Sun’s exact 9 pulsations in 24 hours.

Thus the luminary registers a measure of 9. (This tallies perfectly with the cosmology of the New Way, wherein I have shown that the 0 and the 9 are equal, and the 0 is the numerical equivalent of the Sun.) In Indian music the number of talas or rhythmic patterns provided by the percussion instruments also numbers 9. We observe that this pattern is transferred to the scales or ragas which number 9 x 8 – thus, the 8 notes of the octave are multiplied by the pulsations of the Sun in 24 hours.

We begin to understand the connection. We ‘hear’ something different when the tabla sounds its first beats. It is as if that pulse were awakening, arousing, expanding in ripples and waves through the System, through this great Body of Sound…

But where is this System? In a structure merely of interacting and intermingling sounds, how can we recreate something so physical as the solar system and convey that experience to the listener? Above all, we expect the TRUTH of that system to be created, if at all it is to stand everlastingly and immortally. Yet this is precisely what the ancients did, and this is why Indian music is indestructible, just as the Sanatan Dharma is eternal and indestructible. They captured the truth-essence of the Sun, the planets, their positions or moods; and they conveyed THAT in sound.  They understood the FUNCTION of those bodies and their interrelation and captured that function in ‘laws’, in the structure of Indian classical music. They experienced the Earth as a living being, as a goddess and felt her rhythm of 12, the division of her 24-hour day and the 12 months of the year which the seasons bring alive. Thus, the ragas are designed to convey these relationships and measures.

We all agree that the Sun is the supreme ‘heart’ of our System, the luminous body which gives us our life. Thus, the most important feature of a composition which seeks to recreate that cosmic truth must necessarily be the Sun.

In Indian classical music the Sun’s function is conveyed by the relentless drone, that one Tone of no beginning and no end. It is the support of the entire composition. It is the Stable Constant, the everpresent Presence, upholder of the divine Play of the multiple. Above all, it is the Silence, eternal and infinite. The drone is the ‘sound of silence’. It is the foundation of unity which is the underlying Theme of the system. Unity does not cease when multiplicity comes into being – just as the drone of the sruti never ceases, regardless of the manifold diversity of the play it upholds. Similarly, silence ever IS, it does not cease with the emergence of sound. Rather, it upholds sound – or sound rises up from the Silence. Sound is simply the extension of Silence, the motion-play of that all-pervading Essence.

Thus, the composition begins with this ‘sun-tone’, this OM, or the cosmic note of no beginning and no end. In The Magical Carousel, which describes the cosmic truth in a similar fashion, using the vehicle of myth and fairy tale, we have the same solar essence conveyed and its connection to the primordial Sound. The main protagonists of the story set out for Saturn, but fate and circumstance intervene and they find their spacecraft heading for the Sun ‘like a moth drawn to light’. Once they are plunged into the Sun the first experience is silence, and then…

‘…the children find themselves immersed in the vibrations of a musical note of whose beginning and end they are unaware. It vibrates so strongly around and within them that they hold each other tightly and close their eyes so as not to see what happens.

‘The vibrations are shattering. They almost seem to explode the entire universe until finally there is silence again.’ (p.4)

The raga begins. The theme commences to develop by which to construct the System and convey its ras and ananda, its delight of being. We hear the first notes of the shenai (truly this instrument is the voice of the Earth), or else the sarod, or the sitar, or the human voice, initially one with the Silent-Sound, as the raga begins to rise from the Silence, as it lifts up and out of this original Essence. Thus we have the sun-tone of the Sun-Core, and we have the first response of the Earth in the early notes of the raga, still plunged in the immobile Silence of the Sun, still at one with her Lord, intimate essence of her very own being. And gradually, as the System grows the ‘mood’ expresses itself: sound lifts up from the eternal Silence and the play begins, at first simple and pure – the plain theme or mood.

The early sounds are like tiny waves or ripples on the infinite bed of Silence. They increase until finally the mood is expressed in full, the essential raga is complete. But it never leaves the Silence, just as the Sun is always the centre of the system and its ever present source of light and life. Thus, the sruti  is relentless, impertinent in its all-pervasiveness, its inescapable IS-ness, like the Silence in the universe, the vault of an irresistible fullness.

This Silence is no void. It is the creative Womb and upholder of every conceivable Harmony.

Silence IS, the mood is set, and the raga develops. The theme rises and falls. It lifts up from the Silent-Sound and then dips into it again and again, like the rise and fall of a breath. From time to time it returns and rests itself in the Source it never really left, the Source-Tone that upholds the play, as if to replenish itself, as if to draw sustenance from this great womb of eternal Being. At first all is contained in the intimacy of this tender love play – for after all, what are the other meanings of the word? Raga also means love, passion, attachment, and thus clinging, as indeed the raga clings to that Silence as to a pillar around which to wrap its limbs consumed with an increasing desire.

Thus the creative urge swells and must extend the mode to the whole System…and the ‘pulsations’ of the Sun become faintly audible. The heartbeat, the throbbing desire begins to weave itself into and through the individualised pulsations of the bodies it upholds. The tala of this impulse is given through the percussion instrument, through the mridangam or the tabla. Power is injected and expands the first ripples into waves that move out from the Centre-Sun with spherical, mathematical precision, just as the physical Sun’s pulsation of 9 is the astonishingly precise miracle of the cosmic harmony.

The experience of Being and Becoming reaches new heights as the improvisation begins and gains increasing momentum and the creative process touches peaks of ecstasy. The embellishments on the original raga gain complexity and richness in seeking new modes to express the raga’s passionate desire to please the Sun-Lord, to give expression to the fullness of his Silence, to manifest, to materialise this IS-ness.

The raga is the means to materialise or give body to that eternal Silence which never ceases to BE and is impetuous in its insistency, in its inescapable eternity.

The power of the manifestation increases, the pulsations of the various bodies, taking their original beat from the Sun-Drone, display as well a multiple complexity of experience. The various patterns the tabla player executes are taken from the cosmic interplay of pulsations – the Sun’s pulse embracing the Earth’s, as one such rhythm, and the Earth’s coloured by her position in this orbital dance, in this miracle of interrelation and supreme Harmony.

The greatness of the Indian musical genius lies in the invention of the background drone of the sruti. For how else to convey the most essential feature of the cosmic truth? How else to convey the underlying premise of unity pervading all Indian philosophical thought and wisdom and consequent cultural expression? How else to convey the role of the Sun, the OM of our system, the Zero of number-power? How else to give sound-form to the Silence?

And, as could be expected, it is this relentless, impertinent, inescapable drone or the unceasing vibrations of the strings of the tamboura which most disturb the westerner as he listens to a performance of Indian music. It appears to be a senseless ‘noise’ and totally useless to the overall composition – as if the musicians required this note to tune their instruments at the beginning of the performance but then forgot to turn it off! Yet we must marvel at the audacity of those ancient sages in their total unconcern for the disapproval or lamentations of the uninitiated and their boldness in giving rise to the formidable edifice of the music of ancient Bharat on the foundations of the cosmic truth…

‘…India’s nature, her mission, the work that she has to do, her part in the Earth’s destiny, the peculiar power for which she stands is written there in her past history and is the secret purpose behind her present sufferings and ordeal. A reshaping of the forms of our spirit will have to take place; but it is the spirit itself behind past forms that we have to disengage and preserve and to give to it new and powerful thought-significances, culture values, a new instrumentation, greater figures. And so long as we recognise these essential things and are faithful to their spirit, it will not hurt us to make even the most drastic mental or physical adaptations and the most extreme cultural and social changes. But these changes themselves must be cast in the spirit and mould of India and not any other, not in the spirit of America or Europe, not in the mould of Japan or Russia. We must recognise the great gulf between what we are and what we may and ought to strive to be. But this we must do not in any spirit of discouragement or denial of ourselves and the truth of our spirit, but in order to measure the advance we have to make. For we have to find its true lines and to find in ourselves the aspiration and inspiration, the fire and the force to conceive them and to execute…’

‘The Foundations of Indian Culture’, CE, Vol. 14, p. 35.

*

The point is this: We live in a time of compelling change. We are in a period of great transition. We are experiencing a formidable expansion in consciousness, similar to the newly-expanded vistas of our solar system. This enlargement MUST find its expression in all areas of our existence. Above all, in all our cultural manifestations.

India too must live this expansion and follow the thrust of the time-spirit, open herself to change and allow her creative genius to uncover these wider horizons. But unlike the West, India’s foundation is the eternal truth, the sanatan dharma. Drawing from that source she must experience increase, poised on that edifice of truth she must reach new plateaux.

If we take these comparative observations of western and eastern trends in music as indications of decay and decadence, or else stagnation and inertia, we are missing the point. What we are discussing is CHANGE and the possibility of an unshakable stability upholding change. This is the message India’s classical composition offers. Change and stability, waves of sound arising from an everpresent  Silence, facets of a simultaneous reality, the one not denying but rather enriching the other. And this is the cosmic Truth, the cosmic Harmony this musical genius creates with impeccable dedication and faithfulness. This creative thrust will uncover new dimensions of that Harmony which so profoundly inspired the sages of old who first formulated this extraordinary expression of objective art, perhaps the only such expression in music still securely and vibrantly preserved in the world today.

‘A fiery dancer awakens

to the beat of a rhythmic breath

heaving through density of matter.

In a frenzy to please

she writhes and twists around her lord,

enveloping him in the flames of love’s dance.

Sucked into the profundities of her secret self,

he plays his love song on a golden flute.

A breath in rise and fall kindles the flame,

and aflamed the torch reels

through Time’s endless vault.’

(PNB, Gstaad, August 197l)

Skambha,  August 1989

(to be continued)

…I am finding the book immensely interesting. Not for the newness it reveals, but for the ‘oldness’ which affords us another concrete example of the contrast between this work and others seeking along the same lines. But in this case the connections are remarkable and immensely interesting. They are direct, unlike with Castaneda where it is only through the similarity of the teaching but no personal contact. In this case there has been a contact. It is only logical that it should be so since we are dealing with a creation IN THE PRESENT, which Schwaller de Lubicz intuited had to be, but sought the keys to it in the past. This is the most important difference in our work. Whatever I have discovered, whatever Knowledge has come – and I use the word capitalised, as de Lubicz does – has been through the yogic experience in the present.

 Another important difference lies in the fact that I received the Knowledge FIRST – or at least the basic formula – whereas in cases such as with de Lubicz, there was a quest and a formulation BEFORE anything real or lasting came. Consequently, his earlier publications before the important breakthrough into Pharaonic Egyptian mysteries were disowned by the author. This has not been the case in my work. And it is this that establishes a completely different basis from the outset. There is the realisation and Knowledge is its spontaneous handmaiden.

Language is also a part of the difference. Schwaller de Lubicz admits that before his contact with Pharaonic Egypt he did not have ‘the right language’ to present his thought. On page 74, AVB quotes de Lubicz as saying, ‘…It took me a long time to find the language for what I had to say, and only with Pharonic Egypt did I find my cipher, my symbolique. A symbolique must show itself, it cannot be invented, and it cannot be conventional, like the artificial languages of symbolic logic…’

I have to admit that this was never a problem for me. I believe the reason lies in the fact that I was a virgin field for the Knowledge. I had no special academic preparation and hence the mind was uncluttered. What came, came strictly on the basis of the LIVED EXPERIENCE. There was no groping, no pulling down…nothing of the sort. It was a spontaneous flowering, and it accompanied the breakthroughs in my own Yoga. That is, Knowledge flowed as a result of those breakthroughs and not otherwise. And it was always a thing of the present, while from the beginning it brought its own language. This too required no lengthy seeking.

This brings me to another point: de Lubicz sought for the keys in the past. One can understand why: the present offered nothing comparable, as far as he was concerned. Indeed, it was an aberration, science itself was an aberration, and only in sacred science could the true answers be found, as well as the right technology. There is certainly a truth in his position, but seeking in the past for the answer to the present can never bring the real Knowledge. I hope to be able to make this clear in the course of what I have to write.

All of this would be just an academic discussion if there were not those wonderful interconnections that so characterise my work. Therefore, let me give a background to this discussion which will put what I have to write in a different bracket. My interest in AVB’s book is not so much in what he reveals of de Lubicz’s thought and work but in the wonder of the interconnections and the proof these offer of the progress of this New Way. Each time I come across something of this order I become extremely excited because we are able to perceive in WHAT IS how the new creation has come into being and what its goal is. In this case the interconnections are remarkable, even to the fact that de Lubicz centred all his work on ‘the temple’. For him it was the Egyptian Temple and no other. For me it is the Mother’s Temple and no other. No other from the past that is.

In his work there is also the question of Number. His background is the Pythagorean School. My background has been, once again, the lived experience of Number in the present. And of course the yogic experience that offered me the pivotal breakthrough into the nature of the Zero.

But the Temple is the main connecting link. If you recall, in the VISHAAL in which I deal with the history of the Temple episode in Auroville (TVN 3/2, June 1988), I quote a letter I had received from my brother in which he describes an unplanned meeting with a clairvoyant in Rome. This woman began speaking about me and my work regarding ‘a temple’ and its ‘measurements’. If you recall she specifically related this to Egypt, that there was some connection with Egypt, and that I should ‘insist on the accurate measurements’, that this was very important.

At the time I was in the thick of the temple affair, seeking to convince the architects that they should respect the plan the Mother gave. We all know what happened thereafter and how these efforts failed. You were witness to much of what transpired. But the connection with Egypt was true. However, it was true in the sense that what was transpiring in the Ashram and Auroville regarding this issue was a means to draw the Work into the present. And there was a person involved in its early stages, who later became involved very closely with de Lubicz’s work. This was X. But, let me go step by step otherwise some points will be missed and they are all relevant to the assessment I wish to make of Schwaller de Lubicz’s work in contrast to mine.

In 1974 I was writing The Gnostic Circle. It was then that the problems with the Temple surfaced. Only AFTER the Mother left her body did I come to realise that changes had been brought about in the original plan she gave for the inner Chamber of the Temple. At that time X was beginning his studies of sacred geometry. I believe this grew out of an appreciation of de Lubicz’s work, though I never discussed the matter with him. He was, of course, insistent that the architects should respect the Mother’s original plan. Since I was not a resident of Auroville and rarely visited the place, it was important to have people who were there, on the site, who could put pressure on the architects before the Chamber was built. In 1974 there was nothing standing in the way of a rectification since it was still in the plan stage regarding the actual Chamber. The attitude we encountered in the architects was dreadful. It was a closed, skeptical, ignorant consciousness one had to face. A daily confrontation with this darkness, this personification of everything one would wish to ignore or pretend did not exist.

For X I believe this situation was just too depressing. Before long he announced that he was leaving Auroville. What astounded me most was the fact that he intended to go to France to perfect his French, which he had just begun to study, so that he could translate de Lubicz’s books into English.

This was the power of Diti in full, I recognised it then, with its comforting security and lure of the past offered as an escape from the trials of the present. Believe me, if I had had such a freedom of choice, I would have fled too! It was, if you recall, a most depressing atmosphere. Therefore, I understood X’s decision, but I could not agree with it. I explained that to seek in the past for answers, for knowledge, was futile. I also explained that the Mother’s plan of the Inner Chamber contained all that Egypt had to offer and much more. But clearly he had made up his mind. Another point is that until then I had not published anything concerning the discoveries I was beginning to make in the Mother’s plan. But, I realised later, even if X had read what I was discovering he would not have altered his plans in any way. I bring this up because significantly he was the first resident of Auroville.

It is clear that we vibrate within to what our destinies have arranged for us. X’s way was the past, and this found fulfillment in de Lubicz’s work. But he represented the problem we have to face in convincing seekers that the Work as it is unfolding today is far more glorious than anything the past has to offer.

There is another important point. According to de Lubicz, women are not at home with ‘abstract thought’. AVB quotes de Lubicz’s wife, Isha: “Woman does not know abstraction. Her imagination is entirely figurative, which is why metaphysics and abstractive sciences are usually “strangers” to her’ (p.263). AVB describes his own wife’s position vis-à-vis de Lubicz’s teachings: “Her very gender barred her from access, even if such had been her aim. For Aor [Schwaller de Lubicz] firmly believed in a constitutional impossibility of the female mind to handle abstract concepts with the extreme rigour Hermetic philosophy demands. He made no excuses for this contention, nor did he recognise exceptions. Isha, who had absolutely no contact with geometry, for instance, sustained him fully and sincerely’ (p.39).

Given this background it is understandable that X felt uncomfortable having to deal with women on this question of ‘exact measurements’ and the Knowledge thereof! To make matters more complicated, there was not only one woman to deal with BUT TWO. And though the first was physically gone, the other was very much present, and confronting him regularly on this issue. But, at the time I had no contact at all with de Lubicz’s work. In fact, the book you have sent me is the first such contact. When I advised X not to leave Auroville but to put his energies into getting the Mother’s plan executed properly, it was strictly from the Knowledge I had already received and which convinced me instinctively that nothing the past had to offer could compare with her creation. In 1973/4, I had just begun to have direct insights into the matter. Above all, it was the discovery of the Gnostic Circle that opened the doors to that Knowledge. Without that the rest would have been undecipherable. So, there was nothing to convince X at the time that he should not leave. In addition, there was this womanhood to confront and the conception of his teacher that Hermetic sciences are barred to women a priori, by their gender.

I agree with this assessment. Hermetic sciences as they have reached us from the past are barred to women. The abstract is something that I am constantly combating and seeking to eliminate in my work. Whereas, de Lubicz places great store in the abstract and the irrational. These are foreign to my work entirely. And this is the great dividing line between a woman’s approach and a man’s. However, these dividing lines are fast fading; and I hope my work will at least be responsible for this integration (of the sexes) at some point.

To return to history, X left Auroville and abandoned his efforts to have the Mother’s original plan executed. The ‘disharmony’ was clearly too much for him, and I am not only referring to measurements! I repeat, it was an exasperating experience which promised to go nowhere. The presiding architect’s consciousness was completely closed to any intervention on the basis of something so elusive as ‘higher Hermetic Knowledge’. His own ego was the only concrete reality. But one could understand his position, given his inherent limitations. It was X’s that baffled me, insofar as his destiny had drawn him to Auroville and given him, on a platter, the opportunity to develop his quest along the lines of sacred geometry and architecture which his dedication to de Lubicz’s thought clearly indicated was present in him from the beginning. At the same time, you can understand how disturbing it was to see people like X lose faith (the Mother was no longer physically present) and seek elsewhere. In fact, one by one all the people in Auroville and the Ashram who initially sought to have the Mother’s plan executed have ‘fallen by the wayside’, so to speak. They have all ‘joined hands with the petty tyrant’, as don Juan would say. The only ones who have persisted are those who came away with me, or who, though outside the Ashram, had a close contact with my work. I believe that now these people will reap the reward of this perseverance: the lines are clearly drawn and the way of Woman has been victorious, for it is the way of Knowledge.

It is the question of the lure of the past that interests me, the known in contrast to what has to be discovered in the present. At one time the knowledge of Egypt was the present and it must have been discovered in a manner similar to what we have experienced at this stage of the Supramental Manifestation – with some fundamental variations due to the prominence of Time now rather than Space, as in the Egyptian mysteries. This is what people do not realise. But, how can they? If one does not SEE, then one simply does not see. And no amount of words can make the difference. But when one is brought by destiny to the source IN THE PRESENT, then to turn one’s back on it in favour of what has already been achieved in the past is to miss one’s opportunity in this lifetime entirely. And these ‘choices’ are spontaneous. They arise in those trying ‘moments of truth’ in which one stands alone before God and one’s destiny, in the inner chamber of one’s soul. One faces those turning points armed solely with the power of truth of one’s efforts and one’s realisation. This is why the New Way is the way of the Warrior. This is why COURAGE is needed, which only the true Warrior knows. The pioneer-warriors must rely on this courage to carry them through the trying moments of the great Transition.

Before proceeding, however, I must state that in emphasising the experience of the present, I do not wish to appear as a denier of everything the ancients left us in these formidable schools of Knowledge, be these Egyptian or Indian, or whatever. In fact, the manner in which Schwaller de Lubicz has presented the Egyptian formulary is perhaps one of the most serious and important treatments available to seekers. It is not that those ancient formulations were wrong, but simply that the times demand something else now. Indeed, when we say that this is the time of the great Transition, it is implied that the old formulas, however great they may be, cannot suffice now. The evolutionary expansion of consciousness, which even de Lubicz dealt with in this presentation, is a fact; and this fact implies a leap never before experienced by humanity. We shall go into this matter as deeply as this brief space will permit.

In studying AVB’s book I find confirmation for everything I have written regarding the differences between this New Way and the ways of the past, especially in those areas where our lines cross, so to speak. That is, in what concerns the role of the Temple and geometry, and, above all, number. I believe that in quoting portions of AVB’s book in this regard, I can substantiate what I have seen and written about the way this work has taken shape and the foundation of its knowledge. Two items stand out in this assessment: the Zero and Time. But these occupy only an insignificant place in de Lubicz’s work, at least in the manner in which they are understood in this new Gnosis.

In fact, there is a most significant point: I use the word geometry in a special context. I call an important part of my work regarding the Temple ‘the geometry of time’. Several years ago I came across an article written by X in which he uses this same term. I am not aware that anyone prior to me had used it. Perhaps he did find it elsewhere; but it is more likely that he picked it up from my book, The Gnostic Circle. Needless to say, I found his treatment ineffectual and obscure. It had nothing to do with my ‘geometry of time’.

Be this as it may, X uses the term in his writings on sacred geometry, and this is the main difference with de Lubicz’s work: I have pointed out in The Gnostic Circle and in The New Way in particular, that the central focus in Egypt was SPACE. Now it is TIME. And consequently, the work has been transported to India. X should have realised this when he found himself to be the first resident of Auroville!

But the glamour of the past impedes a seeing in the present. This condition is conveyed in The Magical Carousel, in the chapter on Cancer, in the land with all its veils and masques and bewitching mystery. When one looks into the past from the present, often what remains is simply the glamour. And can anything be more glamorous than Pharonic Egypt? Hollywood  notwithstanding?

And then there is the question of Mystery and Secrecy…secret Brotherhoods and Societies, and the like. These are aspects somewhat foreign to my work. And there is a reason: I have always felt that when the COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE would come, mystery would no longer be necessary, nor secrecy. There have been times when I have wondered if this was really so. I remember specifically in my first meeting with an accomplished Tantric Master in 1972. Almost his first words to me were, ‘Do not throw pearls to the swine!’ And he repeated this several times, a fact which left me rather disturbed because it seems to be a part of my nature which I have had great difficulty curbing. Then, on page 66 of AVB’s book we find this… ‘It was to him [de Lubicz] but another example of the need for “temple knowledge” accessible only to the elite, another demonstration of the “pearls to the swine” metaphor…’ AVB mentions this with regard to de Lubicz’s hierarchic model as the true way to govern, an element in his teaching which contrasted with AVB’s point of view. Later, it seems this difference became too important to ignore for AVB and it drew him away from the teaching.

But the point is that secrecy played an important part in the teachings of the past. My feeling has always been that this was necessary while there were ‘gaps’ in the Teachings, but that once these gaps were closed this need would be superfluous. It was the existence of gaps, of a LACK OF COMPLETENESS, which made it possible for the knowledge to be misused.

Today, after 18 years in India and all the Knowledge that has passed under the bridge of Time, I have not changed my views on this issue. Rather, I feel that the completeness of this Knowledge is its protection. It is this decisiveness, this body of irrefutable facts which drive people away without the need to exert any effort to weed out those who do not belong on this path. At the root of it all is ego – the usual culprit, that ever-present shackle the human being carries with him into this life: the only ‘original sin’.

The question of an ideal government whose structure stems from the Knowledge is another point that draws my work and de Lubicz’s together. But, in this too the question is a ‘new way’ in the present. We cannot take a model from the past, like Pharonic Egypt and expect that to be implemented today. The very idea is an absurdity. Nor is there any need for such an implementation. The present offers its own solution and arriving at that solution is part of the establishment of the supramental creation.

I agree with AVB (and with Sri Aurobindo, as well) that democracy is a gain we cannot afford to lose; nor is there any need to do so. In my work there is a ‘vertical’ line and a ‘horizontal’ one. The vertical is what in the past could have been equated with an elite, the Hierarchy. Today this is the Solar Line, in this new formulation. But the Horizontal is no less important. It plays a major role in the development. And that is where democracy comes in. But in the new Creation there is a difference with the democracy we practice today. We are discussing a society POISED DIFFERENTLY. Wherein each member is a ‘sun unto him/herself’. This is the major difference; and it is fundamental. It is this condition that our 20th-century democracies have sought to grasp but have only partially understood.

Thus, we have already pointed out several areas in which this work and de Lubicz’s converge. But one is focussed on the past and one in grounded in the present. With this background, let us proceed with the discussion of the differences between the two and see where it leads.

Of course one could sum up the difference between this work and de Lubicz’s by the place Time occupies in them. In his work it is virtually non-existent. In mine it is central. This also carries us to the question of abstraction versus concreteness. In Schwaller de Lubicz’s work abstraction (and by consequence the irrational) is central; in mine it is not only secondary but non-existent. To be more specific, when Time becomes a key feature in the work, then we move out of the realm of abstraction and speculation and we MUST deal with form and detail and order and method and…evolution. The Temple, for me, contains all of this and more. But I am not so sure that de Lubicz’s ‘temple’ held the same all-inclusive substance.

Another point is that I believe he was constantly grappling with those ‘gaps’, as I call them. That is, we have in the original vision of the Mother’s Temple a pure form. But then in the execution of that form we have the mixture and the veils and waves from below and the consequent distortions.

As far as I can gather, this situation preoccupied de Lubicz greatly. And not having located a ‘pure form’ in the present, he had to turn his gaze to the ancient world. Thus in Luxor he found his perfection of form and concentrated on that as the vehicle for transmission of his ideas. I have done the same. I have used the Mother’s Temple in the same manner. In addition, in the third volume of The New Way, I have carried that structure down to the individual, to man, as de Lubicz has done in his ‘Temple of Man’. But again we come to the dividing line: I am using a form IN THE PRESENT. He is using a form OF THE PAST. It is obvious, to me at least, that we cannot turn to the past, no matter how ancient and sacred it may be, or may seem to us to be.

The crux of the matter lies in the universe we are describing as the macrocosm which is, in the Hermetic aphorism, equal to the microcosm via the formula, ‘As above, so below’. This, we all agree, must be true. We have had indisputable experiences to inform us that this stands as an eternal truth. AVB quotes de Lubicz on this with regard to the content of today’s temple and yesterday’s, for the more primitive human being: ‘His temple probably didn’t extend beyond a few things like ashes, bones, and rocks, but he saw the heavens above him more clearly, and it must have helped him to an early emotional perception of his sacred affairs. And that’s what counts, after all!’ (p.175) However, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, that ‘above’ has been altered in our perception of the cosmos. It is no longer the measure of six – actually Seven in the old cosmologies. Schwaller de Lubicz clings to that Measure, nonetheless. We note this in his remarks about ‘cycles’ and their relevance. He discusses with his disciple the importance of cycles, but he refers to the cycle of Seven – seven years. In this context he enters into a discussion of concreteness as opposed to abstraction. ‘The cycle is a functional rhythm, and cyclical thinking affords a concrete approach to the space-time problem. You can’t make a move without that kind of concreteness…’

This carries de Lubicz to the question of boundaries or ‘limits’, which has occupied so central a part in my work. He has rightfully understood that the solar system is one such boundary. But it appears to me that these boundaries are exceeded in his path through ‘abstraction’. This, it is clear, is the manner in which he deals with that perennial torment of the human mind – freedom. Geometry in his school is the supreme ‘abstraction’. It is the mind’s means to acquire a knowledge which is free from the limitations which time and space inflict on the human consciousness by keeping it within these boundaries and gravitationally pinning it to this confounded ‘concreteness’.

But then, herein lies the problem, and the answer. Again, I have to emphasise that it is not resolved in de Lubicz’s work. It is, nonetheless, implied in his comments on this very question: if the solar system is man’s horizon and one should not go beyond that or else one loses oneself, then it is understood that when that ‘horizon’ is extended, as ours has been, this extension must form a part of our new perception and experience of the reality we live on this planet. De Lubicz did not seem to be concerned with this issue. I believe that for him the cosmos was some sort of ideal, devoid of real substance and relevance. That ‘above’ was a pattern of perfection, but it had little to do with the day-to-day reality we live, nor could it form a ‘concrete’ aid in one’s quest. Thus its Measure could be six, or seven, or whatever, because it was just another ‘symbolic annotation’ for all practical purposes.

‘…The solar system is man’s horizon. That does not mean that there is nothing beyond. Simply that what is beyond is not of his nature, not on the scale of his vision. Teleologically, the sun is the end of man. It is folly to think beyond. It will lead to nothing, and it might destroy what is.’ (p.53)

The disciple writes in sequence to this quote: ‘I brought up the remarkable opportunities present in philosophical geometry for the bonding of abstraction and concreteness. This brought us back to space and time, as we admired geometry’s independence from such tyranny.’ (p.53)

Schwaller de Lubicz then explains how this ‘independence’ of geometry helps one to achieve that ‘abstraction’ which seems to be the keystone of his quest and teaching. He calls geometry therefore ‘the great temple-school’.

Again this brings us to several familiar points in my work. In the first place there is the solar system and its CONCRETE MEASURE. It is no longer six plus one, or the Seven de Lubicz refers to in the cycles which he finds relevant in life. However, this emphasis on seven years introduces the old formula, taken from the old System. In my work this measure is not incorporated. There is, on the other hand, the cycle of 9, based on the extended measure of the solar system. It is only when the Measure has been extended to 9 that we can truly incorporate Time as an ally in the process, in our perception, and not shy away from this power as from an implacable destroyer. Time for me, in my work, is not the bondage it is for others. It is the Liberator. It releases the ‘fuel’ to scale the new heights that await us. It is the ‘gold’ hidden in every single thing in creation.

By consequence, geometry has never been a tool for abstraction. Indeed, to make this clear, I have always referred to ‘the geometry of time’, rather than the geometry of space. The latter is a result of the former. And this brings us to the central difference: the Zero.

De Lubicz continuously refers to oneness, and the irrationality of the beginning, and so forth. It is clear that the beginning for him lies in the ‘one’. It is clear that unity must be described by this cipher. From the One the breaking up starts.

Now, in my work, as you know, unity is the Zero. Thereafter it is simply a question of time extending the essence of the Zero. That is, time as a tool for the Becoming. And since the 0 and the 9 are equal, we have in the 9 merely a ‘concretisation’ of that Zero-Essence. But this perception is closed to us if we closet ourselves in the old Measure. This fact posits de Lubicz’s work in the past and in no way is it allowed entry into the corpus of Knowledge that is the foundation of this new Age. He himself makes this clear by turning to Pharonic Egypt for the ‘form’ of his system and ideas.

Time and again I have pointed out that we cannot apply those ancient solutions to the present. What was evolved then was not only valid for a brief moment in history, let us be clear on this. Its truth has held up to the present, to the very time that de Lubicz began his work, in fact. That is, it held up until the beginning of this century. More specifically, it was valid until the dawn of the new Age: 1926. That was the clear demarcation. Everything from that point onward had to be ‘made new’.

I have gone into these movements of the Ages in great detail in some of my books. I have situated the Egyptian contribution in the 7^th Manifestation. This can help us to understand why de Lubicz clung to the 7 as his ‘measure of time’. Clearly the civilisation which arose in the 7^th Manifestation would have a natural affinity with that number-power. Similarly, in this, our 9^th Manifestation, the number 9 is the great key of Knowledge. The intermediate Manifestation between the two, the 8^th, also left its mark on the evolutionary process involving the power of the 8. This was clearly operating in Sri Krishna’s time, hence he is the 8^th Evolutionary Avatar, and this number plays a very prominent role in his coming. But the real and full power of the 8 was evident in the manifestation of Gautam the Buddha, whose birth at the tag end of the 8^th Manifestation, was a sort of culmination. It left an imprint which formed the basis of the movement into this 9^th Manifestation and the work that we are doing now is, as Sri Aurobindo commented, correcting ‘the error of the Buddha’.

Through this brief outline we can see that it is a simple matter to assess the nature, the purpose and the aim of any of the schools of higher knowledge we may encounter along the way, – whether they belong to the past or are a part of the new foundation of this 9^th Manifestation, and more particularly of this Aquarian Age which began in 1926, right at the time when de Lubicz came on the scene. It is immensely interesting to note certain biographical details: Schwaller de Lubicz began his work in Paris and was a part of the movement that situated itself in that particular place and time: the first decades of this century. Remember that the Mother took birth there and she herself was actively involved in occult schools in that very same spot on the globe. This may seem of little importance in a cursory analysis, just another one of those ‘coincidences’. But, given the development of her Yoga and mission and the legacy she has left us, it is clear that this convergence in France was deeply meaningful. I refer to her legacy of the Temple, the model of which would have answered all de Lubicz’s questions and provided the link with the present which he seems to have missed entirely. But this link was barred from his vision completely by his insistency that the female mind could not involve itself deeply in Hermetic studies, since it was not comfortable with ‘abstraction’. It is this point specifically which kept him a prisoner of the past and did not allow him entry into the ‘Temple-School’ of this new Age. For the fact is that it is precisely Woman who holds the key to these new-age Mysteries. And the answer lies in Time. Thus the ‘new model of the universe’, in the classic temple-form of transmission of Knowledge, is a hymn to Time and Concreteness. The reason is that we enter the Age of Unity, and implied in this passage is a ‘divinisation’ of matter, as Sri Aurobindo termed it. To put it succinctly, and thereby to draw de Lubicz’s quest even more closely into this comparative discussion, it is a unity of Transcendent, Cosmic and Individual principles. It is the reconciliation of ‘abstraction’ and ‘concreteness’. But to accomplish this integration, a third element must manifest. The Mother’s Temple shows us how this is done.

Thus Paris at the turn of the century was a brewing pot for a dissolving of the hold of the old ways. It was like the last breath before death sets in irrevocably. The old Piscean Age died in Paris (though its centre was Italy). And in my experience I know of no better mind than the French for dealing with ‘abstraction’. The mental principle had its full play there – its rise and its fall. Therefore France was the cradle of a magnificent convergence of brilliant minds in the early decades of this century. This position of preeminence which it occupied only came to an end with the Second World War. The function of Paris as ‘brewing pot’ where the old was melted down, came to an end then.

To make this situation even clearer, let me quote AVB on what de Lubicz felt his contribution to the world of higher knowledge to be, with respect to the passage of the Ages. AVB writes: ‘There seemed to be no question in his mind but that he was the ultimate repository of the Pythagorean line in the precessional month of Pisces.’ (p. 189) I have no doubt that this was a true perception and that he did summarise what was meant to take a new form, epitomised in the Temple of this present Age. But his concept of his role also reveals that for him the new Age had not yet begun. This increases the atmosphere of the past that I feel permeates his work.

Thus, out of the effervescence and churning in Paris at the close of the Age of Pisces, de Lubicz evolved his school by eventually turning to Egypt. (Instead of going forward into the 9^th Manifestation, he turned back to the 7^th!) It is also interesting to note that the Mother’s family roots lay in Egypt, while we have her testimony of occult experiences confirming a past incarnation as the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut – master temple builder! But the Mother MOVED ON. And then, herself a Pisces by birth, at the close of the Age of Pisces destiny drew her to India where the foundations were laid for this ‘redemption of time’, simply because India knew the Zero, as well as the 9 – for indeed the two go hand in hand. From ancient times India has used a ‘measure of 9’. By incorporating the Lunar Nodes in its astrological pantheon, it managed to keep itself ready for its central role in this new Age when the System would come to measure nine. Still today the 9 is considered by even the layman and the ordinary citizen as the supreme number, the most sacred, and, above all, the number connected to the Divine Mother. Indeed, the temple of this new Age is ‘The Mother’s Temple’, and its master key is 9.

De Lubicz’s work cannot be categorised as merely an intellectual exercise – that would not do it justice at all. I consider it on the order of an introduction to the splendours of geometry and form and the harmonies perceivable therein. But it is simply an introduction by way of a certain recapitulation. As if to say, ‘This is what the past has had to offer. Let it be a stimulus to seek the new in the present!’

At the same time, I cannot but feel a certain sadness at the fact that here we have a serious, intense labour of a lifetime, with splendid insights, perceptions, verities by the dozens…yet it is doomed from the outset because ‘the time had not come’. Nor had the Woman. But had she appeared on the horizon of de Lubicz’s world, he would never have recognised her, having condemned himself to the sterile corridors of the Abstract and the tomb of the past.

Harsh words? Perhaps. But it is the bare truth. And in this Age of the Truth-Consciousness, how can we ‘mince words’, as the saying goes. One has to call a spade a spade, as the other saying goes. This is the function of the Third, and it is interesting that de Lubicz had perceived this function and labelled it – or allowed his pupil to label it – ‘the third thing’. This is all part of the ‘ordering’ which the Third introduces. De Lubicz, however, makes a distinction between essential Harmony and then order.

‘This creative oneness in the beginning generates by its primordial activity not order, but harmony by affinity, through attraction and repulsion, through polarity, and only ‘then’ does order come into the worlds.’ (p.104) But in my experience that process of attraction and repulsion which is necessary in the transition from chaos to cosmos or order is what might be called the act of putting order into chaos. Then de Lubicz makes this remarkable statement, which isolates the core of the difference between our works, ‘Harmony effaces multiplicity…which means that becoming is negation…’ (p.104). Invariably in my experience with esoteric schools, the Becoming is the stumbling block simply because the question of time and its essence, its BEING as well as its own becoming, have not been understood.

*

How can we not be marvelled by all this, by the very fact that we can now discuss these differences at all, with the precision time has introduced by way of the lived experience in the present on the backdrop of what I have called Gnostic Time? For now we are able to evaluate a teaching such as that of de Lubicz on the basis of immediate lived experiences and the knowledge distilled from those processes. Here we are not concerned with ‘abstracts’ at all. Our discussion of de Lubicz’s work was immediately drawn out of that context when I mentioned the connecting link between then and now via the first resident of Auroville, his involvement with the Mother’s Temple and his subsequent withdrawal and escape to de Lubicz’s work and the lure of that great Egyptian past. Clearly what X sought he found in Schwaller de Lubicz, something that he must have felt was lacking in the Mother’s or my work. It was this question of the ‘abstraction of geometry’, or the ability to escape from those binding limitations which time and space introduce (in their view) and which one becomes ‘independent of’ in the abstraction of pure geometry, pure harmony as it is conceived and perceived by the mind. This is fundamental to point out. Though de Lubicz makes a pointed distinction between Knowledge and mental information and accumulation of data, and so forth, his work must be situated in the domain of a mental elitism, which is where one feels immensely comfortable with abstraction.

It was in 1973/74 that the question of translating Schwaller de Lubicz’s books into English came to the fore, according to AVB. This was the time of the Mother’s passing; it was the time when I began writing The Gnostic Circle, which was the key to the Temple’s knowledge. It was the time I discovered the discrepancies between the Mother’s original plan and the architects’ revised version. It was the time X came to attend some of my classes in the Ashram on these subjects. And it must have been the time when he began his study of Schwaller de Lubicz and his fascination with geometry and number according to that School. Soon thereafter he left Auroville and put all his energies into the precious labour of translating de Lubicz. That is, he left those ugly ‘details’ of the present which we were obliged to face in the Temple episode in Auroville, and he plunged into the sea of the past, into the realm of the Queen of Night and her luring, enticing labyrinth in her Castle of secure wonders.

This happening is, to me, a superb example of the clarity with which the Manifestation is taking shape in time. It is an astonishing confirmation, and to the degree that his work has provided this confirmation, I believe Schwaller de Lubicz deserves a foremost place in the galaxy of ‘temple-builders’, in the sense I attribute to the term. His work provides us with a ‘concrete proof’ of the old in contrast to the new, in a most unmistakable manner. Indeed, could this have been the proof he sought after so assiduously the whole of his life? The lived experience in the ‘laboratory’, the stage upon which to see the enactment of the drama of evolution on the backdrop of the elitist scenario he was devising? For we must now discuss this aspect of the work, de Lubicz’s world vision and the limitations he suffered due to, once again, this search into the past for answers suitable to the present. This is a contradiction in terms, but it seems he never realised this. Or perhaps there was just no solution, even though he might have realised the conundrum this circumstance was creating. For ‘the time had not yet come’, nor had all the details of the Solar Line been revealed and with them the foundation of a new world order in which this superior Harmony would play a central role. At the same time, it is this circumstance which solves the other disturbing conundrum: the resolution of the question of elite and plebe, or hierarchy and egalitarian democracy. These conundrums arise in the linear perception which is a limitation set by the One isolated from the Zero. All paradoxes resolve themselves in the spherical womb of the supramental Gnosis.

*

Before drawing this commentary to a close, I would like to dwell somewhat more at length on the element in de Lubicz’s work that seems to disturb AVB the most. At the same time, we uncover AVB’s own limitations in this regard. Clearly the man lives in fear of a repeat Nazi performance. He visualises scenarios in which a similar manifestation can arise again and inflict once more its dreadful darkness on an unknowing, unsuspecting and manipulated public. He identifies this power to manipulate with an elite perhaps in possession of secret knowledge which it uses to secure domination and impose its twisted order on the world. His special concern is ‘esotericism materialising into concreteness’ (p.246), or a spirituality which proposes to evolve a political doctrine and influence in the polity of nations. Implied in this reasoning is that esotericism and spirituality are fine, as long as they remain abstract and find no ‘concrete’ expression. (Readers of VISHAAL will recognise herein another demonstration of the matter/spirit split which plagues our civilisation.) AVB sees groups infected with this compulsion to mix spirituality with mundane matters as grey eminences working behind the scenes, secret but all powerful. And of course, this influence, if it does exist, can only be negative because of the violation of a demarcation which has to be respected if something similar to a Nazi lunacy is not to reemerge. To support his argument, he presents quotations which sound like the rantings of Bible-thumping fundamentalists, though I am certain the authors he quotes are as well meaning as AVB himself.

AVB’s memoir of Schwaller de Lubicz draws to a close on this theme. The impression is that he was more concerned with this factor than with presenting to the world a remarkable body of knowledge to which he had a special access and was therefore in a privileged position to discuss. He seems compelled to expose de Lubicz’s early political bent, which later took a more mature shape when he discovered Pharaonic Egypt. He sounds a warning to the innocent of the lurking danger of this unhealthy mixture of pursuits which must be kept separate if they are to be kept harmless. Given this preoccupation, given these fears, these subconscious influences, it is a wonder that AVB got anything out of de Lubicz’s work at all. For the condition of his consciousness was certainly not the best to receive a higher knowledge such as his teacher was seeking to transmit. By this I do not mean that AVB’s fears are wholly unjustified. Not at all. It is simply that I see him ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’.

That there were dark areas in de Lubicz’s work does not surprise me. How can it be otherwise? If one turns to the past for answers, or a ‘symbolique’, disregarding the exigencies and realities of the present, the fruit of that seed can only be contaminated by corrosive substances the resulting ‘gaps in time’ introduce. Shadows and waves infiltrate the field and produce pockets of matter highly susceptible to decay and decomposition.

But this is the story of our entire civilisation, stretching back through the millennia. Whereas, the glory of our present 9^th Manifestation is that the hands of the clock of the Ages are about to converge at the high-noon point; or, as the Mother explained: the Earth is poised beneath the midday supramental Sun, casting no shadows. This is the wondrous message of the Inner Chamber she designed: the Ray falling on the Globe, a play of light which casts no shadows, the ‘symbol of the future realisation’, or the new ‘symbolique’ for this New Age of the Supermind.

Naturally I am interested in AVB’s problem regarding this area of de Lubicz’s work. How can I fail to be when mine undeniably deals with the same issues? However, the approach is of course entirely different. And it is this difference that interests me.

Sri Aurobindo announced the coming of a NEW RACE and an entirely new Power manifesting which would uplift the entire Earth. True, this power had to be brought down and cemented by a group initially. Indeed, first by an individual and then a collectivity. The form Sri Aurobindo’s work took gives us the proof of this arrangement. But this does not imply an elite as an eternally separate entity from the masses, which is what AVB fears the most; and certainly not the sort of elite those fears conjure up in his imagination.

A central placement in this work grants no privilege to mould, to lead, to control. Being a centre in such a work is a position which, I assure you, none should covet. That individual – or even the initial group – must bear a cross which can only be borne because of a prearranged convergence of conditions which allow the individual to complete a process that others, not poised in this same way, would find impossible to achieve. The weight would be unsustainable. I can be very specific about this, mathematical, let us say. There is nothing of that Hollywood glitter of a Pharaonic elite, or else the glamorous imaginings of psychically inclined individuals who delight the world with their accounts of past lives as members of such an elite. Pleasant reading on a rainy afternoon!

This type of central placement does not grant power over people, a power to control. The individual is poised in such a way that the Power has a central nexus through which the new blueprint and the evolutionary matrix can be imprinted differently. Indeed, my constant experience, right from the beginning, has been that one is merely a witness to the extraordinary workings of the Supramental Shakti – this being one of the means to ‘imprint’. Consequently, I must agree with de Lubicz that ‘perception’ is the key to it all.

There is another point. This action which utilises the harmonies of the spheres for its implementation, uses channels available to it NOW, in the present. That is, it works through the actual conditions existing for the individual and the group and society as a whole. This point has been made more than clear in all my books – in particular The New Way. Just review the details of the Solar and Lunar Lines, especially the latter.

No doubt this evidence – of a line of individuals ‘destined to rule’ – would shock AVB. He would see in it the same ominous spectre of ‘dynastic rule’ which the opposition in India bemoans with monotonous regularity. But the point is, this arrangement has not been imposed on the people. They themselves have elected three members of the fourfold Line to power. And none can claim that those elections were rigged or that the Government in power manipulated the voters in unacceptable ways to achieve these results – at least no more than is normally done by parties in power throughout the world. No, the manifestation of destiny at work to bring about a ‘dynastic rule’ was carried out in the world’s largest democracy and through the popular vote in a series of elections spanning more than four decades. And yet the entire pattern and its intimate connection with the Solar Line through a unique harmony of Number, displays a new mechanism realistically rooted in the present, in world conditions as they are today. But yet it is a pattern and mechanism expressive of a most unique body of higher knowledge which might certainly be the envy of any former civilisation, sacred in its innermost core and being.

How would AVB deal with this happening? How would it affect his subconscious fears and his preferences and fixed ideas? How would it affect his stress on equality versus hierarchy which he sees to be the root of those shadow manifestations such as Nazism, or perhaps even de Lubicz?

In The New Way I describe a truly egalitarian society, in my view the only true equality attainable by the human being. That is, only in bringing about the new alignment in the matrix of the race, which permits this same alignment to be the new foundation for each person on this planet, can there be an experience of true equality.

In the meantime, while this work remains to be completed, it is not implied that there is a ‘divine right’ to rule of a privileged elite, lording over others by virtue of a superior knowledge or whatever. The ‘divine right’ the nuclear group enjoys is the command to serve, and to serve in this foundation of a new society, not by CONTROL over others but by being instruments more intrinsically at one with the Time-Spirit and therefore in a position to affect the change in those areas and levels which others would never wish to penetrate.

Sri Aurobindo once stated that ‘…we must do rightly what Hitler did wrongly’. AVB writes, ‘What is less well-known, yet well worth knowing, is that the Nazi regime was built up on the idea of “spiritual truths”. The spirituality was perverted, making the truth a falsehood, but nonetheless…’ (p.266). The point missed by AVB is that Hitler did not take a basic ‘truth’ and misuse it, though he did use certain formulas, symbols and ideas which were beginning to enter the Earth atmosphere and were ‘there’ for anyone to misuse. I consider that he never had a ‘truth’ to pervert. It was always a shadow manifestation, from the beginning, not something good turned bad somewhere along the way. He was never in possession of Truth. Therefore to use him as an example of how ‘spiritual truths’ can be perverted is really not tenable. We can only look back at that phenomenon and marvel at how clearly truth is displayed in all aspects of life, be they positive or negative. For everything serves the One.

Yet AVB makes it a point to disassociate de Lubicz from the cultists and the mystics with political aspirations: those who would advocate ‘a polity hinged to spiritual conceits’ (p.248). He states explicitly that de Lubicz was not concerned with theocracy á la Pharaonic Egypt as the answer to a future ideal government for the Earth. In fact, he records that de Lubicz believed that the end of the world had begun (p.249), thereby stressing his disinterest in a projection into the future. Further on AVB writes, ‘As to his preferences for ancient Egypt, we know it never was a “longing for the hierarchically ordered world of imaginary ancient theocracies” that drew de Lubicz to the Pharaonic, but considerations such as measure, number, and symbolique in general.’ (p.249).

Clearly AVB seeks to disconnect de Lubicz’s passion for ‘number, measure, and symbolique’ from his concern for a new world order. As if when he encountered his ‘language’ in Pharaonic Egypt this question became secondary and even ceased to exist for him.

This may well be true, but if so it is not that he matured from the ‘long-adolescent René Schwaller’ and this coming of age represented an abandon of the old concerns, but simply that the ‘number, measure, and symbolique’ he found in ancient Egypt could not answer the needs of the present time: the need to construct a bridge between abstraction and concreteness. It is clear that as de Lubicz went more and more deeply into the past to find the language to express his ideas, he went farther and farther into abstraction. It was therefore a coherent development, and his escape into ‘individualism’ was a result of the inability to use a symbolique of the past to construct that bridge in the present.

*

‘…And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh

a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords…’

These few lines from The Revelation of St. John (19, 6) highlight the most important feature of Schwaller de Lubicz’s work, the element which he himself felt to be the crux of the alchemist’s quest. It concerns the fixed salt which the ancients held to be the repository of IMPRINTS, the outcome of perceptions that have the power to produce these impressions. They are registered in the ‘fixed salt’, which in turn is formed in the thigh bone. This ‘nucleus’, as de Lubicz calls it, is the indestructible element (fixed salt) which survives decomposition of the organic, volatile substance and is therefore carried over from lifetime to lifetime. It is this nucleus, according to de Lubicz, which gathers the volatile elements around itself for reincarnation. In the terminology of the New Way, it is that ‘golden Seed’, that ‘Hiranyaretas’ or Agni (Fire) of the ancient Veda. Indeed, de Lubicz connects this salt in the thighbone directly with the Fire Element.

Chapter 9 of AVB’s book presents many of his exchanges with de Lubicz on this question of the ‘fixed salt’. He quotes de Lubicz as saying ‘…But there is a creative dissolution of all aspects of form, and it is only after form has been wholly decomposed that the fixed salt will become the point of attraction for the next form.’ (p.220). And further on he refers to this substance as ‘…the indestructible nucleus of inscription at the centre of mass…’ (Page 221). And this salt is presumably formed in the thighbone, basis and support of the physical body (page 284-5).

I cannot help but marvel at what I have read in this regard. And I ponder over the connections which in an indirect manner have linked my work with de Lubicz’s. That is, the Temple, number, geometry, sacred architecture, and so forth; and all this drawn into our work through X, the first resident of Auroville, the stage where some of the most important scenes were played out in this interconnected drama, cutting across time and space. But mention of the ‘thighbone’ is the most important linking factor. It is so important that it forms a key, central part of not only my cosmological work, but it is the most important element of Knowledge ‘written’ in the core measurements and design of the Mother’s Chamber. Consequently, I cannot fail to express once again my puzzlement at X having been brought into such close proximity with this key element in both the Teachings, and yet having turned his back on the living thing in favour of the theory and the abstract.

Being so important, I have kept this discussion for the last, though it must be stated that an entire book could be written on this particular feature of our respective contributions to the alchemist’s way. Clearly, this is not the place to undertake anything more than a brief survey of the salient connections which I trust will inspire seekers to pursue the matter by reviewing everything I have written in The New Way, Volumes 1 & 2 on the subject. In particular, the student should refer to the analysis of the geometry of the Globe and Pedestal (the Core), the very specific measurements of which are given in the book (The New Way, p.238). There is specific reference to the tiny ‘pyramid’ or the apex of the triangle of Sri Aurobindo’s symbol which constitutes the pedestal and provides its basic lines of Knowledge. This tiny apex of barely 5 mm is the uppermost part of the ascending triangle of the symbol. I relate this apex to the Great Pyramid at Giza (p.239). And again we find the connection with Egypt made evident. But, more importantly for the present discussion, I refer to it as the Golden Seed.

Throughout The New Way I emphasise the importance of this tiny apex. It is encrusted in the Globe. I have stated that it is a crystallised residue which fecundates the Globe. It is the indestructible part, the compressed immortal substance. Above all, and this is by far the most amazing part, I connect this apex, via the Geometry of Time, to Sri Aurobindo’s passing. That ‘seed’ extracted from his lifetime of yoga is then passed down and into the Pedestal, which in turn, by the geometry of time, describes his process of reincarnation. That is, this golden nucleus or seed is the immortal Fire substance which remained at his dissolution and immediately served as the nucleus for gathering the various sheaths required for rebirth – a rebirth which took place in the month of Sagittarius; after a dissolution which also took place in the month of Sagittarius; and even more significantly, within the Gnostic Circle’s 9-year cycle, it was also during the period of Sagittarius. The link with the alchemy de Lubicz presents lies herein, for Sagittarius rules the thighbone in the human body:

‘The Five of degeneration and regeneration is further represented in the core by the 5mm pyramid at the uppermost point of the Father’s revised symbol that forms the pedestal, which are encrusted in the globe on each of the four sides, together totalling 20mm. This encrustation presents a visual display of the energy consumed for the purpose of rebirth or regeneration. At the same time it explains the process of crystallisation and contraction of an essence into a point, what might be termed, a seed. The 5mm apex encrusted in the globe on four sides is the Seed – the bija of Shiva – planted in the Earth-globe; it holds the promise of the new race which is to originate from this initial act of creation. The 4x5mm have a relation to the 20 hidden centimetres of the pedestal’s base. As millimetres they stand for the crystallised seed, and in time they correspond to the period immediately prior to Sri Aurobindo’s withdrawal from the earth (76^th to 78^th year) in his initial physical form. After the Seed develops in the soil of Time, 20mm of triangular space at the four points of the globe blossom into 20cm of square space in the base of the pedestal, and therein the secret Son is formed from the hidden seed of the Father.’ (TNW, Volume 2, p.265).

According to de Lubicz this ‘fixed salt’ and its formation in the thighbone, and the question of imprints on this indestructible salt, are the core of the coveted secret of Al-Kemi, – meaning Egypt and the Egyptian school. I do not doubt his assertions. But I wish to add that while he was seeking assiduously this knowledge, the ‘time had not yet come’ when TIME would unveil as well as consolidate, for the entire evolution on Earth, this process and its knowledge which is its power.

Sri Aurobindo lived the alchemical process for the Earth which I have described in The New Way and in The Magical Carousel and its Commentaries. But it would not have passed out of the realm of one individual’s realisation and into the evolutionary matrix had TIME not become the ally and the fixing agent by way of the Fourth Power, the essence of his incarnation as the 4^th member of the Solar Line. Indeed, as I have explained in detail in my books, that alchemical transmutation is clearly described in the event itself – the Supramental Manifestation which centres on the incarnation of the four Powers of the Solar Line in the perfect and exact harmony of gnostic time. This process is recorded in the original plan of the Mother’s Chamber, in the measurements of the solar Ray and the Core (‘the symbol of the future realisation’). That transcript describes an imprint in the evolutionary blueprint and matrix – what de Lubicz would relate to the fixed salt in the thighbone (Sagittarius).

But was he aware of the connection of the thighbone to Sagittarius? Yet even if he was aware, how could he then, before ‘the time had come’, make any sense out of the connection? He was concerned with SPACE and by consequence with EGYPT (see TNW, p.366ff). He had no concrete use for Time; therefore he never touched the shores of the Indian subcontinent, where Time was made the ally in this alchemical miracle, where an integration took place which is the inner truth of the 4^th Power of the Solar Line. When that Power incarnates or fixes that principle in the evolution of consciousness and being, the integration is done – and integration which de Lubicz himself was seeking for the better part of his life. Indeed, de Lubicz passed away just before this Power took birth, when the Sagittarian principle of Fire and Immortality unveiled the real meaning behind the role of the ‘thighbone’ in the ancient way of Al-Kemi.

At the same time, all of this Knowledge, the discovery of the Temple’s message and its vertical measure of 9 and horizontal measure of 12, the truth and the role of Number – not abstract but as a power to render concrete, to fix in the soil of the Earth, the role of geometry of space and time in the new language and the new cosmology for our new Age of the Supermind, was passing right before the nose of X. Yet he saw nothing. He fled from the present and this marvel of LIVING power and truth, and he plunged into the sea of the past. This is the really amazing part of the ‘tale of two works’.

‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first Earth were passed away; and there was no more sea…’ (‘The Revelation’, 21,1).

Skambha, July of 1989

Author’s Note: It may be recalled that in the very year Sri Aurobindo anticipated a major breakthrough in the establishment of the supramental Truth-Consciousness on Earth – 1938 – he suffered an accident (see The Gnostic Circle, p.52). The affected part of the body was his thighbone. It was as if the old ‘imprint’ had to be broken or worked out of the ‘system’, by the long concentration thereupon which this accident produced, in order to heal the wound before the new impression could be made. In addition, from that time onward both he and the Mother focussed almost all their yogic effort on the eradication of the dark power that was threatening to overtake the world through Nazism. (For further details see The New Way, p,247, and all references to ‘Immortality Day’.)

Of course, when I read your letter I cannot really understand what the problem is. I mean, it seems to me you are making a problem where there ought not to be one. But this is usually the way it seems to someone who is outside – relatively speaking – the situation. You have to ‘live with yourself’ and be comfortable with yourself. And I suppose it is this point that creates all our disturbances: we all seem to be seeking ways to be ‘comfortable’ with ourselves and our lives. We have ‘made our beds’ and we want them, we DEMAND that they be comfortable to sleep in! This is our birthright, it would seem.

    So, coming to terms with our lives, as they are, is the problem. There is an underlying frustration in what you write. And I just wonder if it isn’t that you have not found the right companion for yourself. I believe that some of the difficulty lies in this. If the ‘right person’ were there, you wouldn’t be tormented so much about whether or not you should have a relationship, whether or not this would interfere with the yoga, whether or not this would be a distraction, whether it is right, wrong, or whatever. The fact that these considerations exist is what indicates that whoever the person, it is not the right one.

  I do not see how you can suppress your desire for a relationship when it is there. I have never asked you to do this. Just the contrary. What I have repeatedly asked is that you BE CONSCIOUS of what you are doing, whatever you do. So, if the need is there for a relationship, then approach this as consciously as possible. This question of ‘being conscious’ is not to be confused with the type of awareness that is sought in psychotherapy, or similar quests. It is not to indulge without ‘guilt’, ‘shame’, or ‘remorse’, and all the rest. That is not the point. The problems of guilt and shame and remorse are, in the context of this work, simply first-rung issues. They do not go deep enough.

The awareness you must seek here is a very careful and detached observation of yourself so that you can come to understand what DRIVES YOU, what impels or compels you into these situations. We are not concerned with remorse or guilt or shame, or the fact that it just ‘isn’t done’ when one is practicing yoga. Those considerations are all irrelevant or of secondary importance. But you must observe yourself and try to fathom what drives you into these situations. It seems to me that the relationships you find yourself in are inappropriate. They correspond to a certain ‘deformity’ in your nature, if I may call it that. So, you want to SEE THAT. You want to face it clearly and squarely. Unless you do, whatever relationship you find yourself in will never be satisfying. You may use the excuse of the Yoga now to hide the real cause of this frustration; but in your heart you know that this is not the point. The proof is that I have never said: Do not have a relationship. And yet you (and all of you there) keep harping on this issue. At the same time, you do not take seriously when I write that you must simply strive to be as conscious as possible in whatever circumstances life brings before you. The idea is so that these circumstances will be clear mirrors for you to perceive rightly and act accordingly. What must change in your way of being, in your assessment of things, is the focus of your attempts at awareness. I repeat, they are not to rid you of guilt. They are to try to ferret out what in your nature compels you to act in certain ways – anger is another example, and giving in to those impulses – and what therefore ATTRACTS certain situations to you.

My feeling is that you are caught in a circuit. The circumstances of your life are playing out an endless refrain; and you cannot get out of it because you are seeking the wrong thing. You are convinced you should be seeking something that is irrelevant to the real problem and therefore has no power to change anything in your life. But, take heart. Most people are in the same trap!

The fact that you cannot resolve your living and working situation is another example of this trap, if we can call it that. You are caught in a pattern that needs to be broken. You know it. But whatever you do seems to thrust you even more solidly into that same old web. This is due to the fact that you have not gone deep enough. The issues you are dealing with are simply distractions. They are not the real forces that are shaping your life. They are all superficial in the final analysis.

The visual impression of this type of situation can be had in The Magical Carousel, in the chapter on Cancer in relation to Capricorn (4^th and 10^th). And interestingly, these signs are the USA and India, respectively. That is why in America you have more or less superficial methods to deal with problems. Whereas in India, though the problems seem colossal and far more impossible to solve, the attempt is always to go deep, to the core of things. So, there is the Queen of Night in her beguiling disguises, offering one distraction after another. The children find themselves in a labyrinth, with no direction to the ‘search’. They don’t even know what they are searching for! And when they stumble upon ‘something’, it is veils and illusions and an enticing masquerade that gets them nowhere. Nowhere PERMANENT, that is.

On the other hand, in the Capricorn chapter, the entire ‘thrust’ of the chapter and the experience is this underlying direction, ever and always. They again find themselves in a sort of labyrinth, but with an immense difference. Something urges them forward on the basis of a clear direction, a rise higher and higher, not round and round and round… And on this basis they get to the root of things and they find their true destinies and their true dharmas.

The Woman who represents the finality of the quest in Capricorn is very different from the Cancer Queen of Night. The latter is constantly on the move! She is constantly changing, she has no permanent identity, and therefore does not encourage that quest in those of her ‘castle’. Even the Crab they fall asleep on in the beginning of the chapter offers the same image: they are convinced they have fallen asleep on a SOLID ROCK. But then it starts moving! This is to represent the ego. One thinks it is solid, unchanging, our ‘true self’. Yet it is thoroughly UNSTABLE, just like the rock that turns into a moving crab. And a prime characteristic of the crab is its way of moving about in unexpected directions – sideways, oblong strides this way and that.

Omanisol of Capricorn, on the other hand, is STABLE, PERMANENT, IMMOBILE. She represents that eternal element we carry within at the core of our beings. This is what you have to reach, through all the veils and shadows of the surface layers of your personality. When you reach that you can begin to ‘shape your destiny’. Which simply means that you will draw to yourself only those situations which are in harmony with THAT, which conspire to further THAT, which serve to enhance and make manifest THAT, and only THAT.

Now, this is for most people a frightening panorama. They feel that a pursuit of this nature will render them isolated and cut off from the little and meaningful things of life. It represents an ivory tower of aloneness for most. But this is a wrong assessment. As I have written, suppose you are meant to have a relationship with someone and to share your life with another person. How can you truly know this unless you reach that Core where your true destiny is written? At the same time, when you do, you will set in motion that play of circumstances which will draw to you the right person for expression of the highest part of yourself. It may be that you are meant to have this sort of expression in this lifetime. The point is to make the best of it, to make whatever relationship you are destined to have the outcome of a clear being, with no veils and shadows and twists. In such a state, what can one expect? Only more knots and more knots, and more and more…

We cannot reach this state by wallowing in guilt. Western psychology has rightfully understood what a negative emotion guilt is. But you do not liberate yourself from the drain this negativity produces simply by convincing yourself that to indulge is your ‘right’ and therefore you need not feel bad about it! In fact, people only have these reactions when they are in situations that are not in harmony with their true inner being. The ‘discomfort’ one feels is really the soul’s uneasiness in the situation. It is tolerated as a means to learn and to reach that clear condition of being. One has to move on!  But one has to strive to liberate oneself forever from those negative ties that compel us into situations about which we will feel this unease.

If you observe yourself very carefully henceforth you will see the root of the problem. This means that you cannot judge yourself (again, a point understood by many modern thinkers), you cannot condemn yourself, you cannot wallow in self-pity and a sense of guilt or remorse. You have to be alert for this task. And that means you have to be highly CONCENTRATED. You have to muster all your energy about you and create an atmosphere around you which will be conducive to SEEING. You must call on the Divine Presence. It must become a habit with you to be able to call this Presence forth in such situations.

*

‘The Void where Thought was born’…

(The following is a sequel to the letter that appeared in
VISHAAL 4/1, April, 1989, ‘The Infinite and the Detail’)

…I hasten to answer your letter because there seems to be a wrong impression formed. When I wrote about a wrong ‘direction’, I did not mean that you should stop your actual practice of the yoga. This was not the question at all. In fact, as far as I can see, in spite of everything, the practice is bearing results, especially along the lines I have been indicating. It seemed to me that concentration in the heart would be more beneficial. And this is what is happening now, perhaps more than in the past.

 The practices you describe are the general lines of the yoga. They are forever valid and should not be dispensed with. However, for each one the practice varies, as you know. In your case, the path you are following seems to suit you; and that is fine. But what I was referring to was the direction. This is something slightly different, though of course it does have bearing on the sadhana one follows.

By ‘direction’ I am referring to something Sri Aurobindo had written about, perhaps not using this term however, when he wrote of the overall aim of the yoga, its goal, which was different from all other paths. That is the direction. In other words, what is the final objective of your sadhana. As expressed by you I saw no difference in what you were pursuing than in most other paths. That is, the yoga was a means to go up and up and away. The sadhana in the embodied centres, the mental and the vital, was ultimately to provide a springboard for the ascending consciousness to reach the overmental and supramental planes. But then, after that? I mean, I see no difference from Tantra. And this has been my point all along.

The way the yoga is practiced by sadhaks does not convince me that what is gained can become a part of the evolution. That is, that it can CHANGE THINGS HERE, much less signify for the sadhak any bringing down of the light of those upper regions and establishing that as this base IN LIFE. Consequently, I have dealt with this issue at length, in my own yoga and recorded the results in the third volume of The New Way. This is because I find it essential. Also because, as I described in my last letter, it is the work of the Third in the Line to make this connection here below. Nothing of that work had been effectively done. Even now we are merely in the beginning, one could say. But with a difference. Now at least the lines are very clear. One sees clearly what has to be done and that the first solid foundation has been laid. This is a big step forward. But there are many more steps yet to be taken.

My whole point in the third volume of The New Way was to reveal the position in the body of the convergence of the descent and the ascent. I refer specifically to Tantra, as well as other paths. In Tantra, though the embodied centres are used for the sadhana and the Shakti is the focus of the worship and practice, what is the finality? The sadhak concentrates on the rise of the Kundalini, from the lowest chakra at the base of the spine, up through the others and then finally to the attainment of the highest. But where is that highest? It is outside the body. It is above the crown of the head. This is a clear ‘symbol’. The final attainment means a liberation from the body. The embodied centres were used simply to reach that liberation. And any Tantric will tell you that his aim is to secure release from birth ultimately, and a dissolution of his consciousness in the Absolute Brahman, unfettered by the coils of earthly flesh. This is no different from any other path. [In fact, the multiplicity of paths is mainly to cater to the different temperaments of seekers, rather than to provide different goals.] And hence the common slogan in spirituality is ‘there is only ONE TRUTH,’ and all paths and all religions ultimately agree and converge on this one truth.

Now, this is clearly where Sri Aurobindo’s work parts ways with ALL other spiritual paths. And this is why in the final analysis it is even difficult to refer to it as a ‘spiritual’ path. Again, this in itself introduces difficulties because one tends to rely on the old patterns and formulas which simply do not prove reliable in this work. But the new pattern or blueprint has been given; and it is this fact that I am constantly stressing. You have finally understood this when you write ‘….you used them (the Ashram, Auroville and Matrimandir) as objective examples of the development of their cosmos.’ This is accurate. Time and again I have sustained that the keys to the REAL development of Sri Aurobindo’s work are given in certain items of objective knowledge, foremost of which is the Mother’s original plan of the Matrimandir. Again in my last letter to you I stressed the fact: the Mother gave us a blueprint of a ‘soul’ with all its connections to time and matter. And in my work I have revealed those connections and the inner and deeper significance of the Chamber. For this reason it is not possible to regard the Auroville experiment as something to be left under the tutorship of individuals who have no idea of what the real meaning is in the elements they have taken possession of. We have to accept that this is so and continue with the work in spite of these ‘knots’; but at the same time we must see these conditions clearly and realise that these are the means devised to undo those ‘knots’. This too you have now come to understand.

I know of no sadhak in the Ashram or any person in Auroville or connected with that project who has seen the direction of the Work and who understands anything of the new way. And therefore I see that these people, some of whom may be quite sincere in their aspiration, as cut off from the reality of things, as if suspended, awaiting ‘something’, but not even having any clear idea of what that Something might be. That is, there is no appreciation of what is required to make Sri Aurobindo’s yoga radically different from all others, as he stated it was. The sadhana I have witnessed in the inmates of the Ashram – and I do not include the people in Auroville because I have yet to come across anyone from that place who is actually doing any sadhana at all! – is essentially no different from all other spiritual quests. People may believe they are ‘doing the yoga’ – the new yoga of Sri Aurobindo – but this does not make for any effective progress along these new lines.

When Sri Aurobindo announced that he was bringing something entirely new into the Earth’s atmosphere and revolutionising the world of the Spirit, he meant what he was stating very seriously. Far more seriously than what most people believe. That is, they do not have any idea of what such a statement implies. And so, when I write to you that the direction is wrong, I mean this: the goal you are positing as the finality of your quest does not strike me as being expressive of this newness. I see that it will lead you to the goal of all other paths: a dissolution in the Self, or the Brahman, and ‘release’ from birth. You may not see this yourself, for you may not even understand what this really means. Hardly anyone does. But it could very well be the finality of your quest. You may not realise this, for you may not even know what is implied in what I write. But nonetheless I must tell you what I see; also because I believe this lies at the basis of the strain you feel. Being destined for this path, it is clear that the Yoga Shakti will be constantly pressuring for a right direction. And when one is sincere, as I believe you are, one’s aspiration will always attract the person or persons or circumstances which will help to correct the direction and guide you along the way that is the truth of your soul in this lifetime.

In the late 1920s, Sri Aurobindo understood that a similar wrong direction was threatening to overtake his work. As you know from the Ashram literature, it was the period referred to as the Ashram’s ‘brilliant period’. This was because many, many sadhaks at the time were having dazzling visions, the Gods were easily seen and everyone believed that ‘heaven’ was indeed descending on Earth. The Mother herself expressed to Sri Aurobindo that she had received the Creative Word, the power to bring this ‘new’ creation on Earth.

But what was actually happening? Sri Aurobindo knew that the plane that had been reached and the powers responsible for these visions and countless experiences were the lesser forces of the Overmental Plane, and that allowing those powers to shape the new creation would not mean a NEW creation at all. It was in fact a very clever way to cement the old and impede for all times the supramental creation from coming into being.

Sri Aurobindo acted quickly. He halted the movement, stating that if it continued a new world religion would come into being, but nothing to do with his work. This assessment was entirely accurate because the finality of any Overmental creation is necessarily on the level of the religious consciousness. It is in fact the source of Religion.

The result of his action must not have pleased most of his disciples. It plunged everyone right ‘into the mire’. It was then said that the sadhana had gone into the physical, and there were no more dazzling visions and pleasant sleeping pills, as I call them. The work was hard, arduous, but RIGHT.

You see then that even with Sri Aurobindo present there has been a continuous danger of a wrong direction. This pertains to the overall lines of the Work, but it is no less relevant for the individual, through whom these new blueprints have been given. Whether or not they are used by disciples is another matter. If one’s aspiration is sincere for the truly NEW CREATION, then somehow one will be guided to the right way and the person who can guide one on this new path.

There is a ‘knot’ that is very, very deep-rooted in the human embodied consciousness. It is common to all who inhabit a body. This Knot is so difficult to undo – for after all, it is the nexus of the mental creation – that no one prior to Sri Aurobindo has made any effective attempt to get rid of this tremendous obstacle. To attain the heights, as has been done by countless seers and yogis in the past, this Knot presented no obstacle. One could overlook it entirely – precisely because the ‘direction’ was otherworldly; in which case, one had no obligation at all to deal with this problem. Ultimately, it became resolved, or rather dissolved by withholding any reality from it. One could UNDERMINE its existence to the point where it became an ‘illusion’, and the creation that it upheld, the mental human creation, was, by consequence, equally illusory. This was a very effective way of dealing with that Knot. It was so very effective that it is precisely this effectiveness that stands in the way today when we try to deal with this problem. In other words, these great sages had attained such wondrous heights that when we try to convince seekers of the necessity to disregard those past achievements and strive for this ‘new way’, they are not easily convinced. What have we to show for all the struggle and arduous tapasya required to undo that Knot? Especially in these early stages when it is demanded that we plough through the mire of ages in the effort to release those ‘rays of the hidden sun’?

When I assess what has been done so far and the QUALITY of the Knowledge that constitutes this New Way, I find nothing in the legacy spirituality has left us from the past to compare. And I include in this assessment all of Tantra and its various offshoots such as Tibetan Buddhism which has so much of the Tantric School in it. But an appreciation of this sort is not open to all. Precisely because none are aware of the EXACT nature of what is being accomplished by this new way. In the first place, they are not aware what lies at the root of the condition to be transformed, what Sri Aurobindo had alluded to in his poem, ‘A God’s Labour’. He stated very clearly that he had gone ‘where none had gone’, and he described what he encountered as ‘a falsehood…planted deep/At the very root of things’. And further on, he states, as he describes his plunge through ‘the dumb Earth’s dreadful heart’. …’I have seen the source whence her agonies part and the inner reason of hell’. And finally, ‘I have pierced the Void where Thought was born, I have walked in the bottomless pit’…

The ‘void’ that he sings of is the ‘knot’ I describe. The knot is not actually that Void but it is the ‘web’ that Mind weaves out of this nothingness and which it holds to as its sustaining power and ultimate apotheosis. Hence all the paths of spirituality that we know today in one way or another cling to this goal as the apex of the quest. It may not be explicitly stated, but when the goal is in some way ‘otherworldly’, as in all cases, then this Void is implicit.

So, you see, this is the direction that has to be changed. It means going against the current of aeons and aeons. It means having a PRECISE KNOWLEDGE of the old web and how it came into being and of the new matrix that is being created right now.

It is very easy for me to spot an ‘infiltration’ of the old. To such an extent that sometimes I find it bewildering because there is hardly anything free from this contamination. And yet we must do the work right here, and right now. Thus we are condemned (and I choose the word carefully!) to work in the midst of and in spite of this contamination. Perhaps with this background you can better understand why animals have had to be used for an essential part of the work, regarding certain basic lines of this new ‘web’. Their consciousness is not contaminated by that Knot, by that ‘falsehood…planted at the very root of things’, by that ‘Void where Thought was born’… This does not mean that animals are not subjected to the falsehood that is decay and death, or the perishability of this ephemeral flesh. What it means is that Mind has not the upper hand in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Regarding the latter, it is clear that the Mother found flowers to be more ‘receptive’ to her force and hence it was her custom to pass something of her power to disciples through this medium. Each flower she gave was a clear container of her Force; and since she had the capacity to perceive the ‘inner truth’ of each flower, she was able to localise the particular ‘container’ that would best suit the occasion and the type of force to be transmitted which would aid the disciple in his/her particular problem. This again is because the vegetable kingdom is not contaminated – the contamination being the rule of Mind. The problem with our species is the dominance of Mind, its USURPATION of the highest position. This is what has produced that hardened knot ‘at the root of things’.

In this too spirituality has provided an answer: go beyond mind, stop thought, sit in meditation and remove yourself from the problem, find peace in the beyond, in the static Brahman…and so on. The formulas are many, but none of them solved the ‘nether mysteries’.

The aim of my work presently is to create an indelible imprint on the human consciousness regarding this ‘new direction’. To achieve this I have to keep pounding away at the obnoxious habit of the human being to equate spirituality with otherworldliness, whatever the disguise. At the same time I have to offer impeccable means to see this new Power working in the world now, in its present state. In a word, I have to bring about a ‘new seeing’, a ‘seeing in understanding’ – not visions and lights and all the rest. In fact, that avenue has to be closed for now. One cannot add more baggage to the seeker which has to be shed in any case. But people equate spirituality with those experiences, or with ‘experiences’ of some sort. When these are lacking the person cannot believe he/she is doing any sadhana at all. Precisely because that ‘new seeing’ is not present, for if it were, ‘all things would be made new’ and the thirst for that sort of enticement would vanish. Whatever one perceives ON THIS EARTH would be transformed – the transformation being the lived experience of seeing the Divine Consciousness IN ALL THINGS, controlling everything, and carrying evolution to the next stage, the supramental creation.

But for most people this is not spiritual enough. And there are so many temperaments to contend with. Each seeker has his own individual consciousness to be accommodated into this new ‘web’.

I have difficulty with the terms ‘ascent’ and descent’ at this point. I feel that with the introduction of the supramental yoga, which had not occurred before, these terms are too linear, they do not truly express the real condition of the sadhana, either individually or collectively. So the terms that NATURALLY evolved out of this phase of the work are ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’. I see it in this way: what would be equivalent to the ‘descent’ is a vertical descending direction similar to the descent of old; but the main shift concerns this question of ‘ascent’. Presently it is more on the order of a horizontal expansion. These terms can also be equated with contraction and expansion. Visually, it can be ‘seen’ in this way: there is a descent, like a seed. This then produces ripples, expanding waves in the consciousness-field of the sadhak, which move ever outward from that point. And the ‘point’ I refer to is the important NEXUS in the body where this shift or reversal takes place. That is the new dimension of the soul experience I have referred to in my last letter.

In this condition the body, with all its subtle sheaths of course, is the FIELD of the sadhana. It is never rejected and there is no attempt to exceed its boundaries. But there is a widening so as to incorporate into its field more force, more light, more of the higher things which until now the physical instrument was not able to contain. Contraction draws these into the expanding field – a simultaneous movement.

Again I must refer to the real facts of the Manifestation to provide examples of this arrangement which is valid for the individual as well as the collectivity. The ‘descent’ or the descending vertical direction corresponds to the Solar Line – 9, 6, and 3. What does this mean for the individual? In what way can this Descent become a part of his/her sadhana? What the Solar Line represents is the reality of each individual on this planet, but IN POTENTIAL. That is, you consist of Transcendent, Cosmic and Individual Divine attributes. You, as an individual incarnate soul, come with these triadic attributes. The purpose of your sojourn on this planet is to REALISE that, to unveil these triune powers and ultimately to contribute this to the evolution on Earth so that we shall soon see a new world order founded on this hitherto hidden potential. The soul is that Point into which these attributes, transcendent and cosmic, are ‘compressed’. In the course of the sadhana, when that ‘reversal’ takes place, then there begins the expanding movement, with that Stable Constant, that ‘point’ as one’s base and no longer the Void. This is what I refer to as ‘the birth that fills the void’. At the Reversal the expanding movement begins which is like the ripples in a pond, extending outward from the centre.

The Gnostic Circle contains all of this: the Sacred Triangle is the Circle’s relation to the vertical descent; and the rest, the division of 12, corresponds to the fourfold horizontal poise of individual and collectivity. That is, the Gnostic Circle is a combination of 9 and 12, or vertical and horizontal directions. The 4.5 Orbit is the ‘nether region’ which was formerly the ‘void’ but which now, with the release of the Light, has become that kingdom of the Fourth Power in the Line, and hence the great Reversal Point. This diagram represents the complete field of consciousness-being. These are the lines of the Yoga now. (5.4.1989)

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‘The Relative, the Absolute, the One’

…In your letter you had asked about ‘truth’, perhaps it can be given only in ‘drops’. Well, this is true in a way. But the fact is I have given out the full thing, yet even when people read they themselves only select ‘drops’, or what they can understand at any given moment. So, now I have come to the point, just very recently, of taking a different attitude. I am not going to bother with people who have doubts and who cling to them, because they refuse to let go of their doubts since it would mean a commitment and a progress. They would have to CHANGE, quite simply. It is easier to keep doubting. The doubt helps one to remain the same, stuck in the same mire and never going anywhere. Or else they cling to falsehood, out and out. So, I shall not bother any more.

    I will put the truth to you, plain and simple. But I cannot promise that its simplicity will be of any help to you. However, let me try. It concerns your question about the Ananda Power… Yes, this Power corresponds to the Third… But I find these titles just too limiting. They are, for me, the old formulation which arose out of an incomplete knowledge. At the time Sri Aurobindo formulated his work in this way he was describing a manifestation based on TWO POWERS. This created a certain limitation. But he had no choice. That was all time had evolved and ‘permitted’. More ‘time’ was needed to be able to express the true new way.

   What this meant was a shift from two to three. That is, it revolved around the triune Godhead. This is another question you ask regarding September Letters. The Triune Godhead is this: Transcendent, Cosmic, Individual. It is as simple as that. But there is so much in this little triadic formula. Because, you see, these Powers have never INCARNATED together, in an unbroken line, before. And it is only when this shift takes place, from two to three, that we move out of LINEAR perception and into the spherical consciousness of Unity. This sounds simple enough. However, it is pregnant with a revolutionising content. Let me go further.

     In terms of Numbers the above makes all the difference in the world. You see, from very ancient times sages had perceived that Number held the key to almost everything. The Greeks themselves had perceived this, to the point where Plato, I believe, claimed that God only geometrises, that Number was the essence of creation and that through Number we could come to know God.

But what was the block in their perception? It was the failure to understand or to ‘see’ the Zero. And why had they failed to ‘see’ the Zero? Because this triune manifestation had not occurred yet. And why? Simply because ‘the time had not yet come’

Now, remember the words the Mother heard at the time of the Supramental Manifestation on 29 February 1956? They were, ‘The time has come.’ This sounds plain enough and easy enough to explain. Yes, the time has now come. But again there is much more to this simple message. TIME HAD COME. The ability via the channels of Time to give form to that highest Truth. This could only be done with Time as an ally, and on the basis of a complete shift regarding the seeing of Number and its relation to the Creative Power and its subsequent formulation. That shift concerned the question of Unity: unity could no longer be expressed as ‘the One’. It was the Zero.

Here I am not giving you ‘drops’ but the whole truth. Yet you could never appreciate what this means, therefore it must be, for you, just drops. But when I write ‘you’ I mean everyone on this planet today. That may sound like an exaggeration, but, believe me, I have very sound reasons to be able to make this apparently outlandish statement  . The reason is that this simple ‘shift’ marks the threshold between the old and the new consciousness, between the overmind and the Supermind, between the old way and the new way, between a world of relativism and a perception of absolutism.

The latter brings us to an important point. What I have written, equipped with this formula, in The New Way and in all my other books concerns absolute truth. Therefore it has this quality of definiteness and unquestionable precision, accuracy, fact. And this is what disturbs many people who read my books, especially The New Way. No one feels comfortable with Absolutes. Our civilisation is constructed around a ‘relative centre’. This is the Nothingness that is supposed to hold it together. This is where science has carried us: relativity, quantum ‘unpredictable’ physics, and all the rest. We are comfortable with that because it allows us to continue as we are. If everything is relative, anything can be true. But when you pick up a work like The New Way, how do you accommodate this poise? I mean, how can you be comfortable with all those unbelievable facts of events having already taken place in Time, in this exquisite pattern, and still hold on to the Doubt, which is the child of relativism? It is impossible. Either you agree to make this shift, or else you put the book (and all my work) aside and you simply admit that it is not for you… There are other, more wicked ways of dealing with this problem. You can destroy that Truth that makes you feel so uncomfortable. Such is the nature of fear…

Back to the Zero. From ancient times sages had seen unity as One. Isn’t it beautiful: the One is a LINEAR figure. The Zero is circular. Again, ‘the symbol is the thing symbolised’, this time regarding number symbols, or figures. This fact, that unity was equated with the One, may seem irrelevant or of little importance; but it describes the collapse of our civilisation; while the shift to the perception of unity as the Zero describes the new creation and its spherically perceiving consciousness.

Put another way, what this means is that we have torn a veil. We have pushed perception back, beyond the manifest One. You see, the One is the Fourth not the first – if you understand what I mean. Before that Fourth, who is the One, or the point in space, there are the three powers of the Zero, 9, 6, and 3. Never before had this been perceived, because these Powers had not incarnated in a connected Line. This is what is so special about the 9^th Manifestation. Can we have any greater Grace than to be born now, when this is taking place? But those who would freeze Sri Aurobindo’s work at the manifestation of just the first two Powers, would wish to impede us from enjoying and living this fullest truth of the Age. Z had asked about Tao and its relation to my work. Yes, I answered, there is a relation. But, you see, in Tao also there is a truth that was incomplete. They saw the world built on two principles, Yin and Yang. And there was a twist in that perception precisely because it was incomplete. Yang is, for the taoist, the creative power; but it is masculine. Whereas in India you have ‘everything in its place’: the Shakti is that Creative Power – the feminine kinetic principle, the formative Power of the Supreme. Why have they seen THAT? Because, remember, they also ‘saw’ the Zero. India gave the Zero to the world. She could only do so if she had seen its truth. When you are dealing with Numbers you are dealing with truths of perception, with expanses of consciousness, with seeings of absoluteness.

What are the difficulties I face? I have to bring the Absolute Truth into a world of relativism, into a civilisation of relativity perception. That is, I have to unveil the Being in the Becoming. To do this I have had to change the direction of the perception: into the Core where the seat of Absolute Truth is lodged, in the individual and in creation. This is why I place so much emphasis on the direction of the quest. It may seem irrelevant in a world that believes ‘all paths lead to God’. There is no path today except this one that leads to the Core. To describe the Third properly one must refer to the Core. It is true that Ananda is its quality – but there is so much more to say… If you read Chapter 10 of The Magical Carousel (and the Commentaries), you will understand the relation between the Core and Absolutism better.

…Yes, a number of Yogis in India perceive that ‘something’ is happening in India and in the world. But my experience has been that most are still bogged down in the mire of the Kali Yuga perception: we are in the Kali Yuga and everything is dismal and dark. And that is it. They do not go beyond that. They know that Kalki must come to redeem the situation, but they are bogged down there too because they have misseen  and put the Buddha at the 9^th place in the line of Ten Avatars, so this has thrown them off. What is amusing is that the old seers claimed that the Buddha, even though he was the 9^th Avatar, was a ‘ruse of the Supreme’ to ‘mislead seekers’. For reasons best known to them! Indeed, this misplacement has been misleading seekers for 2000 years! I am trying to ‘put order’ into this chaos, and to ‘put each thing in its place’. But is there any real interest? They are now embarking upon a major work, an encyclopaedia of Hinduism. I’ll bet you that even in this colossal, comprehensive work they will request some scholarly sage to write about the Ten Avatars and he will produce an article for this encyclopaedia that will continue to put the Buddha at the 9^th position! And so, the falsehood gets repeated and the seekers keep getting led astray by that rascal of Buddha! It is comical.

Enough of ‘absolute truth’ … (14.4.1989)

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‘The Secret of Immortal Life’

…It is a period of great difficulties, attacks, very meticulously planned, very hard to deal with since there are so many levels. I can understand why Sri Aurobindo and the Mother shared different aspects of the Work. For one person the immensity of it all is sometimes too much – so many levels and activities. One needs a great deal of precise Knowledge to be able to survive this period.

       You know, it is the last battle before the final and irrevocable reversal. The Falsehood seeks not only to hold its own but to gain more. Because EXPANSION, ACCELERATION are the keywords now. Whoever does not move forward, falls back; and the ground is lost to the Lord of Falsehood. There is a last-ditch attempt to arrest the Divine Advance. So, the times are indeed hard. But I wonder how many can see this? They are all so much trapped in the ego-consciousness. There is no wideness, no seeing, no true surrender to THAT. Alas, even in the best. It is indeed very difficult for the human being, this time of transition.

I can see you moving through the next cycle, 1989-98, with comparative ease, if you want, if something in you does not ‘decide’ to leave earlier. It all depends on the inner poise and that willingness to MOVE FORWARD. Inertia in such cases – indeed, in all cases – is the real and true Enemy. But Inertia is not overcome by noise and frenzy and wasted energy. Inertia is overcome by a special poise which puts us OUT OF ITS REACH, which places us in a dimension where the hold of Inertia simply does not exist.

Before, the way was to escape this force by dissolving the element that represents our connection to life, in time and space and on this planet. Then it was easy. Now, for us, it is not so easy because we are not permitted these escapes. So, we have to discover the Secret of Immortal Life. This means, we have to find the way to REALIGN that Core so that it can no longer be dissolved. Do you understand what I mean?

This is why in my work I am always stressing the NEW DIRECTION: into the Core. The consciousness must be so poised, so centred as to bring about an unveiling of that Point which has never been a part of the evolutionary experience before. This Point is centremost to the Core in our inner beings. A realignment permits that Point, or the One, or Agni, to uphold ‘our journey’ on the path of Immortality. This is the secret of that mysterious ‘Immortality Day’, – indeed, the day Sri Aurobindo gave you your name so many, many years ago…             (19.5.1989)

P.N.-B

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‘…Beautiful is the face of the Divine Mother, but she too can be hard and terrible. Nay, then, is immortality a plaything to be given lightly to a child, or the divine life a prize without effort or the crown for a weakling? Strive rightly and thou shalt have; trust and thy trust shall in the end be justified; but the dread Law of the Way is there and none can abrogate it.’

Sri Aurobindo
‘The Way’, CE, Vol. 17, p. 40.

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‘Nothing can arise from Nothing. Asat, nothingness, is a creation of our mind; where it cannot see or conceive, where its object is something beyond its grasp, too much beyond to give even the sense of a vague intangible, then it cries out, “Here there is nothing.” Out of its own incapacity it has created the conception of a zero. But what in truth is this zero? It is an incalculable infinite.

‘Our sense by its incapacity has invented darkness. In truth there is nothing but Light, only it is a power of light either above or below our poor human vision’s limited range.

‘For do not imagine that light is created by the Suns. The Suns are only physical concentrations of Light, but the splendour they concentrate for us is self-born and everywhere.

‘God is everywhere and wherever God is, there is Light…’.

Sri Aurobindo
‘The Web of Yoga’, CE, Vol. 17, p. 48.

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