It may strike the spiritually-oriented student as odd that the Gnostic Circle can be applied to an area of life as prosaic as horse racing. But in effect, the example I am presenting offers perhaps the best means to understand the most essential and profound aspects of the Circle. And in addition, this review will be seen as a most effective method for application in a human situation, more specifically, in the transformation of consciousness.

Perhaps it will not be difficult to understand why I am using the horse and racing as an example when we appreciate the real purpose of the diagram and what it signifies for the individual as a key to yoga and enhancement of one’s consciousness. The idea behind a monitoring of this order is to learn the method for unveiling one’s true potential, or inner truth, or dharma. Indeed, the Gnostic Circle has only one objective: to reveal the process by which a seed is made to flower and maximum growth is achieved. It is a diagram which can be related to the passage of time and its registration by means of the calendar. This monitoring is not fixed. That is, the Circle’s 0 Point at the head of the wheel is not restricted merely to one’s time of birth or even the beginning of the calendar year. As the example I am providing reveals, the 0 Point can pertain to the birth of an experience as well as the birth of an individual or even a civilisation. Above all, we are dealing with compressed energy and its release under certain controlled conditions.

In this light, of foremost importance is a correct assessment of just what that 0 Point might be and when it sets the Gnostic Circle mechanism in motion. For this the discrimination of the user must be honed to the degree that the onset of the process is recognised. Thereafter the Gnostic Circle can be a formidable aid in the process of transformation according to an evolutionary, organic harmony and with the allegiance of Time.

In The Gnostic Circle, Chapter 14, I used the successive incarnations of the Dalai Lamas as stages in the progression through the wheel – from the first to the present one, the 14^th of the line. Thus, each incarnation marked off one of the 9 (planetary) points or orbits – the 9^th bringing the line to the 0 Point where the cycle starts again. However, it is not at all a repetition thereafter. Return to the 0 Point and the 9^th stage, when the movement is still underway, brings to the process the accumulated experience of the previous cycle of 0 to 9. The example I will present, utilising the horse and a series of 9 races, will make this amply clear. Furthermore, it will reveal the role of what I sometimes refer to as ‘the residue’ and the burden this represents in the experience of transformation. In the Thoroughbred example from racing, it is very clearly indicated by the handicap in conjunction with other factors. We may view this as one’s karma, according to the traditional interpretation. But the Gnostic Circle goes beyond this view and serves a different purpose, which I hope will become clear as the study unfolds.

In effect, after time has carried us through the initial 9 stages, return to the topmost 0 Point is actually a spiralling motion, if we wish to apply a visual description to the operation. The movement of consciousness expands on the basis of the prior 9 stages (or years, months, days) of the lived experience. Whatever that has been must determine the nature of the next cycle – from 9 to 18 – in large measure.

Thus it can be appreciated that passage through the first cycle – 0 to 9 – is immensely important for it sets the tone of the entire development. It is said the Jesuits held that if they took up the education of a child from birth to five years old, they could predict the adult character of that individual. This is a valid statement which the Gnostic Circle corroborates, though perhaps extending the period somewhat. Yet even if the period is broadened from 5 to 9, it is evident that by the 5^th year or stage, if certain opportunities had been earlier missed, or if certain actions had misfired, when one reaches the 5 Point in the Circle, the remainder is in large part predictable. This will be made clear in the example I shall present.

 

Distinguishing Features of Traditional Astrology and the Gnostic Circle

 

The Gnostic Circle is the combination of two divisions of the 360° circle – into 9 and 12 parts superimposed. The former are the 9 orbits extending from the 0/Sun. The 12-part division is the circle of the ecliptic, or the horizontal base of the 12 zodiacal signs (see diagram below).

 

 

The planets orbit the Sun in one direction. As well, they all revolve on their respective axes in the same direction though at different speeds and polar inclinations. Thus there is this harmonious feature of our solar system, the only known exception of which is Triton, a moon of Neptune. What this uniform feature seems to indicate to scientists is that our solar system was formed at one time, as a whole, from a primordial cloud of gases which, when a certain threshold had been reached, experienced collapse and ultimate division into the system of 9 planets in orbit of the Sun as we know it today. On this basis it is entirely correct to view the solar system as a single organism, each planet bearing a pulse which is a product of its connection with the heart of the system, the Sun. From ancient times astrology recognised this relationship and equated the Sun with the heart of the body – be this in the human organism over which it is thought to ‘rule the heart’; or else involving an evolutionary organism – i.e., the human species.

This relationship is retained in the Gnostic Circle but it is given more prominence. The Sun is not merely held as ruler of the 5^th zodiacal sign Leo, sign of the heart. It is placed at the centre of the wheel; and in the number system of 0 to 9, which India bequeathed to the world, the Sun’s allocation is necessarily the 0. From that original Seed the limbs of the organism evolved. A pulsating Breath was the first Cause, flooding the extremities of the organism with particles of itself and in harmony with its own purposeful pulsation.

The essential difference between the Gnostic Circle and traditional astrology is thus the vision of wholeness it inspires. In traditional astrology the signs are taken as separate stages and are usually viewed linearly, or disconnected from each other. There is no real spiralling movement possible, for in a lifetime via the progression of the horoscope, a mere 70 to 90 degrees of the full 360 can be experienced, on the basis of the traditional formula: a day for a year. For the student who is unfamiliar with these terms, this is a method whereby each day after birth is taken as one year of life. A horoscope is thus drawn up by counting ahead in the ephemerides in this manner, – i.e., the 5^th day is equivalent to the 5^th year of the individual’s life, the 6^th day to the 6^th year, and so on. Predictions are made on this basis. This means that in a life span of 70 years, only 70 degrees of the zodiac are open to the individual’s experience.

We know that life is not so limited and that there is an infinite scope for development. Thus, the Gnostic Circle comes to our aid by discarding this method and revealing a diagram whereby in a given cycle of 9 days or 9 months or 9 years, or else 9 stages of any development, the full circle is open to our experience. This indicates that the potential for development or transformation is enhanced to a degree never before experienced in our period of recorded history, by the simple fact that it is now possible to monitor such a process; and this, in turn, is made possible by the fact that our solar system has ‘matured’ as it were. Consisting of 9 planets – where previously we were aware of only 6 – it permits us to harmonise the number system with the planetary body. This, in turn, is applied to the calendar when the need arises. The revelation of the Gnostic Circle thus indicates the degree of evolution of the human species and its mature condition. It also indicates that the individual is ripe for a process which prior to this expansion could not be undertaken.

Thus with the Gnostic Circle it can be seen that we traverse the entire wheel in any cycle of 9; and it is this factor which accelerates our transformation of consciousness by means of this revolutionary key of knowledge.

It is known that the horoscope offers an astrologer a blueprint of the potential of the individual in any given lifetime. It is not merely a pattern of destiny but rather a destiny which is a product of a certain combination of elements, – certain seeds, and a certain soil. But the horoscope in traditional astrology as it is still practised today, does not make use of the cosmic harmony in order to offer the individual a method for extracting that potential and encourage its fullest expression. Indeed, the conventional method is usually not concerned with this development at all, or any such method. Foremost is prediction. The enquirer wants to know ‘what the future holds’ and not what he or she ‘holds’ as a potential in the inner recesses or the core of oneself. On the other hand, the Gnostic Circle is only concerned with that: the method for encouraging the discovery and flowering of one’s inner truth, – or the release of energy from the innermost compressed ‘seed’ in a conscious manner most beneficial to its fullest utilisation and expression.

To this end the Circle provides a framework of points in time which allow for certain aspects of the process to become operative in one’s life. There is no emphasis at all on prediction. Indeed, prediction cannot be carried out by means of the Gnostic Circle, apart from the prognostication of a certain attained (or failed) poise of consciousness by which means the end result in the process can be known in advance. However, the emphasis is always on the method for enhancing one’s consciousness and growth from the ‘seed’, or expressing one’s fullest potential. This encompasses many levels: physical, vital/emotional, mental and spiritual. The ultimate aim is, in fact, an integration of them all.

 

The Gnostic Circle’s Wholeness

 

There are certain points in the progression which are especially critical in this regard. But it has to be stated that another essential feature of the Gnostic Circle is that it cannot be dissected and its parts divided from the whole. It offers a vision of unity and a movement in stages but always focusing on the whole, or the underlying unity, which is represented in the system by the central Sun, light of our world. From that Sun the ecliptic extends out and that is the 12 divisions of the Gnostic Circle which acts as a base, a unifying field similar to the drone in a raga – the Silence, eternal upholder of Sound.

The object of the quest in metaphorical terms is ‘to become the Sun’. This means the fullest realisation of the innermost truth of our being. The unified field provided by the luminary of our system, as a sort of backdrop whereupon the experience of life is played out, by its wholeness and unity is intended to function as that unifying element without which this integration cannot come about.

The problem with the human being’s perception is precisely a separative approach. This makes it extremely difficult to appreciate the interconnection of things and then to utilise this vision as a means of extracting one’s fullest potential. The evolution of consciousness is a construction process. One builds with the previous accumulated substance as a sort of mortar in conjunction with the elements life offers. In other words, we enter life with a certain inner substance which is the compressed essence of our previous sojourn in this material universe. This is the ‘seed’ of being. The receptacle of this ‘seed’ is the soul. The latter acts as a bridge to the Infinite and the Eternal. From this centremost point of our being the lines of destiny are drawn. With the first breath we take as individuals at the moment of birth, a web is being woven in time and space. Indeed, that ‘seed’ is compressed time. The aim of our passage on this planet is then to extend that substance, that compressed soul-essence from the Point outward.

The Gnostic Circle can thus be viewed as this web in which and by which the orbit-points of the Circle provide stimulus in order to engender extraction of the maximum potential. It is important to note in this context that we are describing a movement from inside outward; and more especially from a centre to an outer periphery. Therefore, essential in the process is precisely the ability to centre one’s consciousness so that this expansion may take place on the basis of a TRUE CENTRE.

One begins life at the 0 Point of the Gnostic Circle. Each 9 cycle thereafter brings into our orbit the full 12 signs of the zodiac as well as the entire gamut of 9 planetary points. There are a set of circumstances in which we must experience this progression and the purpose of centering, as it is understood in the New Way, is to establish a magnetic mechanism which obliges those circumstances of life ‘to serve the purposes of the One’. That is, be they positive or negative, the conditions of life will always serve the inner being in the development of one’s innermost truth.

The problem faced by almost all humanity is that rarely is one’s fullest potential drawn forth in life. Or else the development is lop-sided. There may be an exaggerated mental development at the cost of a depressed vital/emotional being; or else an emphasis on the spiritual at the expense of a suppressed vital and underdeveloped mental being. This is the hallmark of an immature species such as the binary human creation. The object of centering is to place the individual in a position whereby every aspect is drawn into the process and wholeness and integrality are the result. This cannot come about in a binary structure. Given this limitation, progression through the wheel does not extend from the 0 Point to the 9. Rather, it is aborted prematurely at the 6 Point and the 8^th sign Scorpio, – indeed the sign of death. Thus our human species is a mortal one, indicated in the world’s oldest book, the Rigveda, where the myth describes the eighth child of the Goddess Aditi as ‘Martanda’, the mortal one, who is father of our mortal creation. The ultimate object of a quest with the Gnostic Circle at its base – as indeed it was the object of the Rigvedic yoga – is the realisation of Immortality. This encompasses all four parts of one’s being, not only the physical. In fact, it may further be stated that anything less than this integral realisation would fail to establish this condition of immortality. When the work is completed, the mental and vital substance is also influenced by this experience of immortality. It is carried over from life to life as a part of this wholeness. One then enters each new life with a fuller capacity of experience and not diminished by the slumber which overtakes us at death and for which reason we are stripped of energies and must begin anew on this impoverished basis.

But the realisation of wholeness and integrality is still an experience of the future in terms of any significant collective manifestation. For the present we must focus our attention on the method provided to attain that centering and extraction of our fullest potential in a field of unified being. The just completed cycle of 9 races of the Thoroughbred filly under discussion will help to hone our perception and enhance the Gnostic Circle’s utility in our yoga.

 

The Horse Symbolism and the Human Being

 

Our example begins, as all must in the Gnostic Circle, with the start of the process at the 0 Point. This, in terms of the career of a race horse, would be the moment she was sent for training. At least in this particular case, given a prior aptitude for this sort of experience, the question of measuring the development was easily perceived to be that special moment. One of the items which made this filly particularly favourable as an example in the Gnostic Circle was her birth itself. This was unplanned and unexpected. It occurred on 1 October. Thus, she came into this world exactly nine months from the traditional birthdate of all Thoroughbreds in the northern hemisphere, calling attention by this fact to her possible affinity with the 9 cycle. Regardless of their actual date of birth, Thoroughbreds must regard 1^st January each year as their common birthday. This is an interesting convention because being so intimately connected with Time in the language of symbols, that Thoroughbreds should herald in the year by celebration of this common birthday, even though apparently arbitrarily designated, cannot fail to be seen as another example of ‘the symbol being the thing symbolised’.

Thus in the case of this filly, being born on 1^st October meant that by 1^st January, or three months thereafter, she would be considered 1 year old – at least as far as her career in racing was concerned. This meant that from the outset she would bear a sort of natural handicap: she would always be competing against more mature horses, usually 6 to 9 months older though they would all be included in the same age group. Nature had helped to compensate for this by giving the filly a larger and more mature conformation than many of her fellow equine competitors.

Another handicap was that given her unplanned birth, she could not be registered as the Thoroughbred that she is. Rather, she had to be raced as ‘pedigree unknown’. Indeed, it was clear from the beginning that this filly had a somewhat unusual destiny. She appeared to be a path breaker, at least for her sisters who were to follow her in the years to come.

The 0 Point for this filly was thus the moment she began her training. Thereafter, once completed, she would start her racing career. The monitoring in the Gnostic Circle went from race to race, 1 to 9 after the 0 period of training was over. Each race thereafter became an astounding confirmation of the Gnostic Circle’s accuracy in describing a process intended to extract the maximum potential from the object under study, in this case the filly and her racing potential.

I mentioned earlier that using the Horse as an example, especially the racing animal, is not such a wild digression. From very ancient times in India the Horse has been the finest symbol of the universal manifestation. The Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad goes to the extent in its opening verses of describing the universe in the form of a horse. Each part of its physical being is mentioned in connection with the diverse aspects of this material universe; until finally it is stated that ‘Time is the self of the Horse sacrificial’. Indeed, for this very reason, given that the Gnostic Circle’s own self is Time, we have been able to utilise this precious animal in the way we have, for the better understanding of that very material universe in which the realisation of one’s inner truth must come about.

There is another aspect in the traditional use of the Horse in ancient times which I feel must be mentioned. The Veda highlights the function of this animal in the Horse Sacrifice or Ashwamedha. As a part of the Sacrifice, a specially selected animal was let loose and permitted to roam the kingdom. The boundaries were thus established by the area this sacred creature had covered. In my view, given my own experience with certain recondite aspects of the Horse, I believe that there was far more to the Horse Sacrifice than is known today. And indeed, as I shall explain further on, the zodiac confirms the connection between the Horse (the 9^th sign) and the ‘extension of boundaries’. It is my firm belief that similar to the example I am presenting, the Horse held the key to a certain aspect of energy utilisation for the purpose of attaining that state of Immortality, coveted by the ancients at the time of the Rigveda, as well as the practitioners of the supramental yoga introduced by Sri Aurobindo in this century.

Speed is the principal ingredient in the Horse as symbol of the material manifestation. It is this aspect of our universal manifestation which can be said to be responsible for the generation of that special binding energy, without which no forms could evolve and be sustained. Indeed, to halt the movement of the galaxies and solar systems would mean a collapse of our material universe into a colossal Black Hole. The Horse then represents that special quality, – indeed, the ‘self’ of the universe. It is clear in this light that a sport such as racing would require the maximum extraction of that particular essence of which the Horse is the special representative in higher symbolism of the Vedic order.

The Horse is a symbol par excellence of energy (and the vital being in the human species). Contemporary society confirms this by measuring certain forms of kinetic energy in terms of horse power. Thus, our story begins with the training experience for the purpose of extracting the maximum speed from this particular filly. Once the point had been reached and her trainer felt she was ready to race, the filly’s private Gnostic Circle clock began ticking when she experienced her first race.

 

A Conspiracy of Diminishing

 

One travels light through stage one and two of the Circle. Especially in the first passage through the wheel, movement is as yet unhampered by a sort of encumbrance or accumulation of ‘karma’ which is often the case in subsequent passages. This is particularly evident in young children, especially up to four or five years old. Until then it is often quite simple to assess what the child has brought into this life as a residue from the past; whereas later this perception is not so easy in view of the accumulation which begins thereafter, as the experience of this life begins to add its own coverings.

Regarding the filly’s first race this unencumbered condition was displayed in the fact of her low handicap – a mere 50 kilos. In addition, she was given a light jockey, young and somewhat inexperienced. The trainer did not believe she stood much of a chance in this first outing, given her natural age handicap with respect to her fellow competitors. Though it was a race for three-year olds, due to her unseasonal birth, she was easily 6 to 9 months younger than her fellow competitors. At that young age this was a marked disadvantage. It was a race for ‘maidens’, or horses who had not yet won a race. Therefore, most of the competitors were already experienced to some degree.

There is a certain characteristic about the start of any cycle or event which we monitor in the Gnostic Circle. The initial experience can reveal much about the subsequent development, or the conditions under which development must occur, the conditions which will hamper or enhance our possibility of most optimum development. The circumstances of this first race, for example, would thus help to understand something of the filly’s essential nature and certain nuances of her destiny; or the elements she draws to herself in this lifetime. That is, she too enters the field with a certain ‘baggage’. She is therefore fashioned in a particular way which acts as a sort of magnet, attracting conditions which will provide a proper ‘field’ for the manifestation of her individual essence and destiny. Because of this, one should always study these beginnings carefully, or one should make every effort to be as attentive as possible to the ‘signs’ nature puts before us in given circumstances.

Regarding this filly, there was not much need of effort: the circumstances her destiny would throw up in the course of her development were made all too evident from the very moment her racing career was set on its way. It is as if one were analysing a soil into which a particular seed was being cast. The composition of that soil indicates the conditions in which the future plant will grow, whether or not it will thrive due to the richness of the soil, or whether it will struggle to reach maturity due to the inherent weakness of the soil-field. In addition, it is possible in the initial stages of the Circle to note something of the true potential of the individual in question. Regarding our filly, it was evident from the beginning that 1) she would have to face very heavy odds throughout her racing career, or at least during passage through the first cycle of 9, and 2) that she had the capacity to cope in spite of the odds against her, brought about by ‘extraneous forces’. In her case, these played an important part in the development. Indeed, they seemed to be essential to the filly’s destiny or ‘purpose’.

The circumscribing conditions of this first race were, to say the least, dramatic. By this very fact they were unmistakable in the events they portended. No sooner had the race prior to the filly’s come to an end with the trailing horse moving past the winning post, than rain set in. It was not just rain. It was a veritable deluge, and it did not cease until her race was over, the last in the day. Normally such appalling conditions would have merited the cancellation of the race. But this happened to be the last leg of the jackpot for bettors. Thus, the show went on regardless, and by 5:00 PM, in the midst of this cataclysmic downpour, the filly began her racing career proper.

The first indication this offered was that in some peculiar and as yet unclear way, the question of unexpected and additional ‘baggage’ thrown at her from outside her orbit, so to speak, would somehow come to weigh this filly down.

By the time the horses jumped out of the gate the ground was nothing but a muddy slush and the downpour continued unabated. The horses were confused to a certain degree and the field looked dispersed. Our filly in question  maintained her composure and managed to keep herself in the race, though positioned in the back. To place at all she would thus have to pass the others in that ‘heavy-going’ terrain, to use the racing jargon. Fortunately her handicap was small, and it was perhaps for this reason that as soon as the first drops began to fall the filly started being favoured by the betting public. This indeed would be another characteristic of her future career, a pattern which held almost throughout the entire cycle of 9 races.

Being ranged toward the end of the field of 9 horses meant not only that the filly’s effort to reach the front would have to be much greater given the slush into which her hooves were sinking, but there was the added misery of  the great quantities of mud being flung into her face by the horses in front.

Mercifully the race was short, – 1200 metres. And in spite of the appalling weather, the slush, the mud, the inexperience, our filly managed to gain ground, come up from behind to finish fourth. Given the weather and her natural age handicap, her performance seemed quite promising. The racing public seemed to concur with this judgement and she began gathering a few betting fans. The date of the race was 30^th June, or the natural 4.5 Orbit of the 12-month year – that is, its exact halfway mark. This too would provide an insight into her future career and ‘purpose’.

The time arrived for her second race. Again the field was rather large, all three-year olds, considerably more developed than her. The jockey was the same and her handicap was still low, a mere 51 kilos. She was thus still ‘travelling light’, as it were. The residue from her last race was therefore not this accumulation or ‘baggage’ of a handicap. It was another external complication and not earned as reward or punishment. Again this point must be noted because it is somewhat characteristic of the 4.5 Orbit in one’s life or monitored experience: an unexpected, external element from outside one’s cosmos or system enters to complicate matters considerably. The date of the filly’s first race having been indicative of this 4.5 quality in some way, caused one to suspect that these unexpecteds might bear a considerable impact on her racing career. At least in this early phase. Subsequent passage through the ‘asteroid belt’ of the 4.5 Orbit would make this clear, – that is, her fourth and fifth races.

But let us not ‘jump the gun’. The second race was a considerable improvement over the first, and the weather was obliging this time. She was moving more fully into and down the circle of 9 but still light enough to breeze along. There was this time only one hitch: the whip. The trainer had instructed the jockey not to use the whip in the first race, fearing that the filly might react negatively and thereafter take a dislike to racing. But in this second race no such instructions were given. The jockey was thus free to use the whip, which he did mercilessly. Having come up so far from behind in her first race, without use of the whip and in appalling weather conditions, certainly gave the impression that she did not need this external stimulus. In the last 200 metres of the race she was whipped perhaps a dozen times. And each time she reacted negatively, pulling her ears back, kicking up, and thus losing precious time with each superfluous movement. Finally, similar to the first race, she landed up fourth past the winning post. Given the filly’s character her reaction to the whip was to a certain degree predictable. A highly intelligent animal, she had been raised as a pet and not simply as a racing machine. She logically balked at the whip, and with each stroke it was evident that she closed up more and more until in the last 100 she was not extended at all but striding short and choppy. All her attention was on that whip and she seemed to be pulling out of the race – but the jockey never stopped, never perceived his error. Under the circumstances, it was surprising that she again placed fourth.

This particular example is being used as a choice means of demonstrating the Gnostic Circle’s ability to monitor the extraction of a certain deep inner essence or potential. In this case, the whole object of the training of a race house is to carry the animal to the point of giving its best. This is no simple matter, as any trainer and jockey can affirm. Each horse is an individual with his or her own special temperament. In addition, there is the question of the inherent potential and just how far the horse can be expected to go, just what his innate capacity might be. In training the equine athlete much of this capacity can be known. But finally it is on the track that the real and true quality of a race horse is exposed. The breeder prepares the animal, builds it up from a foal to a full-grown, finely developed specimen, under conditions which will provide the best environment for the purpose the horse will later serve. Under good conditions and sensitive care, this should bring about a maximum of growth from the original physical and mental potential. Then the horse is given to the trainer who is expected to bring the horse to a similar peak and make of it a first-class athlete. Finally this carefully nurtured product is handed over to the jockey on the day of the race – and fate.

Perhaps one of the greatest demands placed upon the jockey is the sensitivity to know the correct moment for opening up the horse in the last stretch, as well as the signals that particular animal requires to achieve this final extension and supreme exertion. The horse has to cooperate at that moment when the race is either lost or won. Clearly if the whip is producing the opposite result and with each lash the filly closes her strides more and more, throws back her ears and fails to extend, the jockey must on the spot recognise these signals and stop employing the whip. It goes without saying that the trainer must also perceive this essential dislike and instruct the jockey accordingly.

This did not happen however. The filly went into her third race with no instructions given to the jockey (the same one) in this regard. It was a new season and her handicap had decreased somewhat but was still within the weight of the same jockey. It was 48 kilos.

We had reached the 3 Point of the Gnostic Circle. In the normal course of things, this means that the movement is ripe for something of one’s inner truth to manifest. Indeed, in a human being’s life, any passage over the 3 Point, or when one’s age equals 3 by the Mathematics of Unity, allows for a contact to be made with one’s innermost truth, with one’s soul. It is the first stage when something of this inner essence can be known. Likewise in the case under discussion, this could and should have produced the filly’s first win. Considering her young age, she had been rested for the remainder of the previous season and therefore she was somewhat overweight for this new one, though still in very good condition. Indeed by then she was consistently a favourite, given her good looks and condition, regardless of the horses of superior breeding with which she was competing.

This Gnostic Circle 3-point race saw the filly exert her will to a certain extent, because this too is a feature of this segment of the wheel. She did this by demonstrating beyond any further doubt that she would not tolerate excessive use of the whip. To this end, when the filly reached the last stretch of what was again a 1200 metre race, the jockey began his insensitive use of the whip and caused her once more to balk. Her reaction was now more marked, her kicking more aggressive. But the point was finally and conclusively made when at last the jockey took heed and stopped whipping over the last 100 metres. He moved forward to encourage her, as he ought to have done earlier on instead of relying entirely on the whip, and the filly responded by extending somewhat and increasing her speed and indeed by concentrating on the race. It was not a display of her full potential. It was merely a sign of the relief that she was feeling, being then permitted to do what she really wanted to do in the first place: race well and perhaps win, fate and other conditions concurring.

The outcome was second place by a neck. But it was all too clear that had she not been distracted by the whip and had the jockey been sensitive to the precise moment for opening her up and moving forward, encouraging her with just his hands and feet as is the practice under such circumstances, she would have easily won. The winning post was just too close when finally she was left free to extend, given the battle she was subjected to throughout the most crucial stretch. It was decided then that her next race should cover 1400 metres instead of 1200.

 

 

The three angles of what I call the Sacred Triangle of the Gnostic Circle, 9, 6 and 3, invariably introduce decisive interventions. Their purpose is both to keep the movement circular, so to speak, and to accelerate or add impulsion. If we take the diagram quite literally or visually, we can see that at these triangle points something must intervene to curve the progression and not permit it to fly off into space as it were, and to maintain a certain momentum. This is very important since each individual bears his or her own particular ‘speed’ in this universal manifestation. The unfolding of destiny hinges in larger part on this factor. It is similar to the different axial rotations of the planets in orbit of the Sun. The progression must be kept within the precise boundaries of the particular ‘cosmos’ being monitored, and at a determined rate of acceleration given this individual characteristic of destiny, the sum total of past experience.

In this case, the intervention was the explicit instruction of the trainer that no whip should thereafter be employed. The inner substance of the animal was then allowed to prevail but not her true dharma as yet, or her fullest potential. The third was the first of her nine races that ought to have been won. And but for the whip, the filly would have responded and fulfilled the purpose for which she was being trained.

It was from this point that her handicap began to be a burden. In the sport of racing the handicap is both reward and punishment. It is a reward because it is increased according to the performance of the horse. The better the animal runs, the higher is the subsequent handicap. Yet it is a punishment because the horse is obliged to bear this additional weight, which, more often than not, causes him to lose the race. Carried over to the human condition, the handicap is one’s karma: the inexorable reaping of reward or punishment.

There are also classes, degrees, levels in the sport. Our filly began her racing career in Class VA, the second to the last category. She was striving to climb the ladder and move higher. Each promotion, decided by the horse’s performance and number of placings or wins, means that in the next higher category the handicap goes down. The horse starts from the back of the class he or she enters. Thereafter, as his performance permits, the handicap once again increases. Thus if our filly had won her third race, in all likelihood she would have been promoted. In which case the reward/penalty would have ceased to operate in her destiny of racing at that point. But as it turned out, having performed well in spite of the jockey’s insensitive handling, but not winning, served only to saddle her with a heavier handicap and decrease her chances in the next outing.

When applied to life and the individual’s progression through the wheel, the same law is seen to operate. The 3 Point often brings something on the order of a divine Grace into one’s life. But the subtle way in which this manifests makes it often undetectable, It is on the order of a ‘small, still voice’, – for indeed the 3 Point is the point of the soul (see Diagram 2). But when that voice is not heeded, the result is a loss which begins to add a residue to life. That is, we are slightly weighed down by our inattentiveness. In a more apt image, it is as if a veil had materialised in our consciousness. What is not seen then serves to cloud our vision by a certain loss of focus. In other words, the 3 Point requires the act of centering, of steadying one’s consciousness on the inner indestructible Point. When this does not occur the sharpness of the vision is made to suffer. There is a dispersal of energy whereby the experience of life is subjected to a certain degree of blurring, as it were. Seeing is not from a centre of being, which is the only poise from where true clarity is possible, or a true perception of the inner dharma. It is subject to a separative perception. In place of the central Point there is a void. And from this void ‘veils’ or ‘fumes’ arise which cloud our vision. This is what is meant by a residue. It is also a misuse of power or energy by which the desired momentum is not maintained.

In a more apt description, the angles of the Sacred Triangle are the points where centering is ensured. If this is not the case due to the failures discussed in our example, then one spins off and elongates the orbit. This occurs because the residue is in the form of a ‘dark sun’, shadow of the true luminous Sun of Truth. We then increase the binary nature of this mortal creation of which we are a part. Yet the experience [purpose?] of life is precisely to step out of that limitation, enlarge the scope by means of a transformation of consciousness and the attainment of the next rung on the ladder, the supramental species. This cannot come about in a creature of binary structure. Therefore, centering in the New Way meaning is essential in order to cease to fortify  the binary system of old.

The act of creation which is enacted in the human being’s experience of life is a vision that unfolds. Creation is simply ‘an act of Seeing’. A veil/residue dilutes that pristine vision. The result is an increasing diminishing of that Power’s ability to influence one’s life. As time moves us forward, we move farther and farther away from the centre and become increasingly more a plaything in the periphery of life. Never are we in its essence or poised in its core.

However, the Gnostic Circle does not end at the point we have reached in our filly’s racing career, and subsequent passage through the wheel is intended to provide the means of rectification.

 

The Critical 4.5 Orbit: the Asteroid Belt          

 

In the act of centering the angles of what I call the Sacred Triangle are perhaps the most important features of the wheel. This can best be understood by observing that it is only at these angles that the 12-circle division and the 9 join. That is, as Diagram 1, page 3 illustrates, the 0/9 Point coincides with the start of the wheel and the 1^st sign, Aries. Thereafter the two separate and it is only at the following 3 Point that they again converge, or the 5^th sign, Leo. Thereafter once again they separate and come together at the next and last angle of the Sacred Triangle, the 6 Point; the sign is the 9^th, Sagittarius.

 

 

Thus these angles are, as it were, stabilising points by this factor of convergence. It is as if they were the points where the cogs of the two superimposed circles join or become engaged, very much like the inner mechanism of a clock. The difference here is that these ‘cogs’ are really orbits within a plane; and the impulsion is Time. The nine orbits are connected to Time and are thus the points of impulsion primarily; or else they can be understood as the pulsations of the mridangam or tabla, the percussion instruments of Indian music. And these are the points which, through the magical properties of our number system, we connect to the calendar, thus converting this renewed body of Vedic knowledge into an applied cosmology. The 9 division with its balancing Sacred Triangle is the vertical dimension and the time key. Its inner pulsation is to the beat of 3. The 12 is the horizontal base, the field. The ‘angles’ of this base are the four Cardinal Points and therefore its pulsation is 4. The only place in the Gnostic Circle where the Cardinal Points meet the orbital angles is at the start of the wheel, the 0/9 Point. Thereafter they separate and the 2^nd Cardinal Point, the zodiacal sign Cancer, stands alone. The 3^rd Cardinal Point, the 7^th sign Libra, is the natural 4.5 Orbit of the 9 circle. The fourth and final one is Capricorn.

 

Our attention is now focused on the 4.5 Orbit or the ‘space’ enclosed between the 4^th orbit of Mars and the 5^th of Jupiter – that is, the natural midway mark in the 0 to 9 scale. What is fascinating about this area of the wheel is its subtle characteristic of emptiness. Indeed, this is the ‘shadow’ of the 0/9 Point (Diagram 4). We thus have a most critical zone indicated by the reversal action of the 4.5, as well as by the Asteroid Belt. And similar to the Asteroid Belt, it is an ‘orbit’ but there is no crystallised body therein. Only fragments, particles. Consequently, this splintered emptiness is not marked off by an orbit or number in the scale of 0 to 9. It is only emphasised by a number reversal. At the same time, this is another convergence point between 9 and 12. Here we find the 3^rd Cardinal Point Libra, the 7^th zodiacal sign. But the convergence between the two divisions of the circle, 9 and 12, is this void space, which however, by its location (in time) is critical in the unfolding of life and destiny.

To perhaps further  facilitate an understanding of the nature of this ‘emptiness’, we may view it, or hear it, as the location in the raga where the tala or tempo changes, the beat is quickened critically, and this point is the interval in the midst of that reversal.

The Enneagram (Diagram 5) conveys the innermost esoteric essence of the 9-division circle. Here reproduced, it highlights the stress lines, converging onto that ‘emptiness’. There is no other diagram better suited to help the student to understand the crucial nature of this passage through Time. Given this emptiness – that is, a zone exerting a critical influence but not housing an actual planet or crystallised essence or beat/pulsation, and yet converging with the 12 division of Space and the 7^th sign, Libra (see Diagram 1) –, it is perceived as the Shadow, the reflection of the opposite 0/9 Point of the Transcendent.

If we adhere to the gospel of the Void, under whichever of its philosophical, spiritual or religious guises, then this cosmic image is the justification for all schools which propagate the theory of an ‘illusory’ creation, a physical world somehow intrinsically unreal, a maya where the only reality lies beyond this gross dimension and in the Transcendent or Absolute beyond the cosmos. It would appear as the cosmological confirmation of the substanceless nature of the material universe. The 0/9 Transcendent casts its shadow or reflection of Itself, which is then the image of our material creation. In other words, this would justify all the Mayavadist theories, as well as the foundational premises of all religions: salvation comes after death and in a heaven beyond this cosmic manifestation.

This would have to be assumed to be correct, but for one element: Shiva’s Son, the Immanent One.

The exciting news conveyed in the Gnostic Circle is that out of the depths of the apparent void, the One arises, essence of the Transcendent Father compacted into a seed. In this light the beauty of the myth regarding the birth of Kartikeya or Murugan, as he is known in South India, comes fully to the fore. That is, we begin to understand the emphasis in the story on the collection of Shiva’s seed or semen during his loveplay  with Parvati. Legend has it that Shiva did not want to produce an offspring, yet the Gods knew that without the birth of Kartikeya the earth would be lost to the dark forces and would not be able to fulfil her purpose in the creative scheme of things.

The Gods then conspired to steal that precious bija or seed while Shiva lay with Parvati. And of course it is Agni who, in the form of a white dove, comes to the rescue and carries the sacred bija in his beak and deposits it in the Ganga for its gestation. (See The Hidden Manna, Chapter 12, and The New Way, Volume 2, Chapter 9.)

This myth is the most exact explanation of the combined contribution of the 0/9 Point of the Gnostic Circle and the 4.5 Orbit – its opposite in the wheel, or shadow. Were it not for this ‘seed’ dropped to the depths (indeed another name of Kartikeya is Skanda, from the Sanskrit root to fall), the compressed essence of the Transcendent, material creation would not bear this quality of essential PURPOSE and FULNESS. It would indeed be a maya devoid of all divine attributes.

For this act of creation to ensue, a prerequisite is, we may say, the Absolute’s slumber so that the operation may spontaneously evolve. Hence Indian mythology offers another exquisite myth to convey this message. Vishnu, the Lord of Preservation of the universe, sleeps on the serpent Ananta (endlessness or eternity), and when he awakens from his divine slumber the creation begins to unfold.

Another area of Vedic tradition is explained by this diagram when we analyse certain practices in Tantra which often perplex the non-initiate or the secular layman, or even the religious puritan. Tantra understood that the unconsciousness of the sex act was largely responsible for the mortal character of the human condition. And that this was the property of the male of the species. It is by ejaculation that the sperm is released. And this takes place in the moment of orgasm when the subject loses control and is overtaken by the finite ecstasy of the climax. This act then results in that special feature of the human creation (and the animal) whereby loss of consciousness is the mark of its first entry into this material dimension. Or a physical structure fashioned according to this principle of unconsciousness, with all that this entails.

The Tantric then resolved to use that very act and transform it, or utilise the sex act to render that moment CONSCIOUS, or a conscious tool in the manipulation of the creative energy. Instead of release in the midst of that orgiastic loss of control, the practitioner exerted the maximum restraint so that release would occur but on the basis of a conscious process and consequently a reversed direction of the released energy. Upward, not downward.

In the Gnostic Circle we may view the process as a containment whereby the energy is not allowed to escape from the system at the 4.5 Orbit but is rather channelled upward through the remainder of the wheel. Our contemporary model thus conveys the same message as these myths and practices. Indeed the myth, it needs to be stressed, presents this very same truth. The only difference is that the Gnostic Circle is an applied cosmology and mythology. The example we are using from racing is a case in point.

Given the recondite, critical nature of the 4.5 Orbit, we observe that all schools or religions apart from the Vedic have stopped short of a full understanding and posited their goals in a Beyond, precisely because they became enamoured of or beguiled by the Shadow. They did not press on and break through the veils and come to Guha, the hidden One, Shiva’s divine Son. This is the Point, first cause of the universe, Skambha, upholder of the worlds, the cosmic pillar/point, or Agni. And it is Agni in the form of a Horse.

The objective of this divergence has been to draw the student through the Vedic and mythic age to the present via precisely the Horse Symbol, and this racing example of an applied cosmology.

Passage through the Asteroid Belt, or the 4.5 Orbit of the Gnostic Circle, the ‘space’ between the 4^th orbit of Mars and the 5^th of Jupiter, which would be one’s 4.5^th year, or 13.5^th, or 22.5^th, and so on, is often characterised by unexpected happenings, elements injected into the ‘system’ which often alter the process significantly. In other words, they are not self-engendered as such, but are introduced from external quarters. For example, an asteroid wandering into the Earth’s orbit and colliding with the main body. Thus it is difficult to protect oneself from such invasions. But there is a method, and this will be explained by the example I am presenting through the 9-stage development of our racing example.

There are certain cosmic properties of this section of the wheel which merit special attention insofar as they present a formidable hindrance to the human being in not only the realisation of one’s full potential, but in the more sensitive question of direction, or focus of the energy.

This 4.5 (6/7) area is where a major shift occurs. It is, properly speaking, a reversal point. In the multiplication series of 9×1, 9×2, 9×3, and so on, the 4.5 is where the shift occurs from 45 (9×5) to 54 (9×6). That is the quality of reversal is demonstrated by this reversal of numerals, 45 to 54. This is then maintained throughout the remainder of the series: 36 becomes 63, 27 becomes 72, while 18 becomes 81 or 9×9 and closes the circle of 9. (See Diagram 5 above)

This pertains to the Gnostic Circle’s division of 9. As for its division of 12 and the 6/7 passage, though there is no reversal as such, there is an equally important development. This is the passage from the lower hemisphere to the higher. In cosmological studies of this order, the lower and higher dimensions of the zodiacal wheel have always been of foremost importance. In Indian cosmology, the hemispheres are designated dakshinayana and uttarayana, or the southern and northern ‘gateways’. The apex of the former is the sign Cancer, or the second Cardinal Point, and the apex of the latter is Capricorn or the fourth and last Cardinal Point. The solstice times were thus of great meaning because they marked entry into these segments of time through these sacred gateways.

To return to our racing example, on the basis of these considerations, it is clear that the 4^th and 5^th races would be the most critical in the first 9 series. And indeed they were.

Given the filly’s improved performance in her third race, in the fourth she was obliged to carry top weight, 59 kilos. The trainer had a more experienced jockey waiting for the moment when she would cross the 54-kilo mark in her handicap, to permit this particular jockey whose weight was 55 to ride her. He was not inexperienced but an old hand in the trade. But what transpired in this race bore the mark of the unexpected both for the jockey and the trainer, as well as the filly’s owner. Indeed, this race introduced an extraneous element, a complicating, unanticipated asteroid into her career which caused considerable damage to her psyche. It went completely contrary to the very purpose for which she was being trained. That is, to perform at her best and win the race. In this 4^th race the filly was impeded from doing that for which she had been laboriously trained.

There was no whip in this race, its use having been finally prohibited by the trainer, given the fact that she lost the last race because of it. The jockey could thus use only his ‘hands and heels’ to urge her on. But to better appreciate what transpired, it should be explained that a characteristic of this particular equine-athlete is her propensity for jumping out of the starting gate and placing herself in the lead, at the same time setting the pace for the others. Left to herself, this is the pattern she invariably plays out in every race.

Naturally, with a heavy handicap the risk in such a strategy is that the filly might become exhausted halfway through and not have anything in reserve for the crucial last stretch. As often happens in such cases, others come from behind, overtake the horse, open up by the use of the whip and, more often than not, go on to win the race, especially if the weight they are carrying is less. In this case, I repeat, the filly was carrying a top 59 kilos.

Nonetheless, true to her pattern, the filly jumped out and was pressing on to keep the lead. Clearly the other jockeys were keen on letting her wear herself out and fade out of the race in the final stretch. But she seemed determined to win and contradict their designs. She fought her own jockey magnificently since he was clearly not of the same mind as the filly. And he kept fighting her to the very last.

It is not necessary to enter into any elaboration of what transpired in that race. Suffice to say that we were left with the gnawing thought that something was very wrong. Doubts, suspicions abounded, complemented by the body language of the filly as she came off the track. She was angry, full of an unreleased energy – and confused. We noted that an ‘asteroid’ had been thrust into her orbit. And it went right to her heart, for it was in this race that the filly began to demonstrate the very first signs of ‘turning sour’, as it is called in racing. The reason for this was simply the confusion in her mind of trying her utmost to fulfil what she had been trained for – her dharma, quoi – and having to contend with a jockey of a different mind. She had exerted herself in these restricting conditions to reach the winning post first, but the struggle, very obvious to the observer, ended in a win by a mere neck for another filly carrying 5 kilos less than ours. The confusion this produced in her instinctive being was that though ready and eager, she was not permitted to utilise her fuller potential.

This ‘bottling up’ was the first ingredient in the ‘reversal’ whereby the potential or energy released after such laborious preparation on the part of breeder and trainer would begin to turn back on itself – ergo, turn ‘sour’. The filly reacted predictably, mathematically. From that point onward this negative imprint began to crystallise in her consciousness. She began to equate the last stretch either with the whip which she loathed, or else the struggle with a jockey who was, in the words of the newspapers reporting on his riding at the time, ‘…pinching the baby while rocking the cradle’.

Carried over to the human condition, this is wonderfully descriptive of similar afflictions which serve to diminish rather than replenish or release energy. We are studying via this example the optimum conditions of growth from a seed to a full flowering tree, expressing the fullest potential of its inherent worth. Inasmuch as the 4.5 Orbit is connected to the One, or the Immanent Seed, it is directly related to the question of PURPOSE. Thus, this is the area of the development most susceptible to an understanding of purpose. This is achieved by an erosion in the foundations, in the depths of being. In the human species as a whole, it is this area of the cosmic wheel that signifies an erosion of purpose by providing an escape route, a ‘way out’ of the cosmic dimension and material being. In spiritual paths it is the offer of nirvana and similar ‘liberations’, whereby the element which the human being is meant to consolidate or crystallise in his or her lifetime is disintegrated. The consciousness or energy base is inflicted by a realisation or an ‘unexpected’ which serves to disintegrate rather than integrate. This is wonderfully described by the Asteroid Belt, an orbit which consists of nothing but a series of fragmented particles of a once crystallised cosmic body. That this should be the halfway point of our solar system, ought to cause us to ponder on the matter and seriously strive to understand what exactly might that ‘purpose’ be which is so viciously attacked by all and sundry. The racing example I am presenting is one method for providing a simple means to understand this complex cosmic/evolutionary conspiracy and its devastating effects on the human race.

The tool used for this undermining is a corrupting, corrosive element. Equally, it is difficult to perceive given the hidden quality of the 4.5 Orbit. In the case in question, this difficulty was present and the operation was undertaken in such a way as to make detection if not impossible, at least ‘excusable’. Thus, the filly entered her 5^th race, in her passage through the Asteroid Belt, with the same jockey.

Again, given her performance in spite of the heavy handicap, she was once more ‘penalised’ with the top weight. Since the 5 Point is the orbit of Jupiter, this race bore many characteristics of that planet. It was Derby Day and hence there was more pomp to the affair, a Jovian characteristic, as well as a packed stand and an illustrious public. Our filly was judged ‘the Day’s Best’ for bettors and the favourite of the betting crowd. There were even favourable write-ups in the newspapers. All eyes were on her and hopes were high that this time she would conquer.

As it turned out, the jockey contradicted her from the beginning and did not permit her to take the lead at all. The result was that other horses moved in front and constantly blocked her way. No serious effort was made to position her for a win, even when there was an opening, and not only was this the most miserable race of her career until then, but it was equally a miserable display of riding by the jockey. Again, the details are unimportant. It is only important to note that this blatant mis-riding caused a reaction which finally went to liberating the filly from the menace of this manipulation. Thereafter, she would never be ridden by that jockey again and subjected to this humiliation and his penchant for ‘rocking the cradle while pinching the baby’.

But the damage had already been done. She was completely ‘sour’ and would pin her ears back at the least insistence on opening up. When the final stretch approached, she would react by throwing her head to the side or pinning her ears back in protest. There was no exertion, no extension, just this firm NO. And this was carried over to her morning exercise which previously she had fully enjoyed. The energy was completely reversed indeed, but for the purpose of collapse into the void of being and not the ‘rise to the summit’ as the Gnostic Circle indicates for the final goal. In the case of our filly, this would be to win a race and move up the ladder to a higher grade. Nothing of this happened. There was nothing but diminishing, waste, shrinking, and not growth and contact with a plentiful source of energy.

 

The Residue

                       

This entire discussion, it should be evident by now, is one centred on energy; a conscious utilisation or manipulation of a carefully balanced play of energy. Our experience of life is simply the question of a more and more harmonious utilisation of the energy at our command in order to fulfil our journey and reach the summit of Being. Thus, in the ancient Rigveda that experience was referred to as ‘the journey’, and the summit was the mountaintop. But to attain this destination, this superior goal, a very knowledgeable utilisation of the energy base is demanded. For there are deceiving pitfalls, traps along the way. One especially deceptive point is passage over the 4.5 Orbit because there is the overwhelming temptation in that section of our experience to disregard the indications life provides and find release from any pressure by escaping, by opting for ‘the easy way out’.

In a psychological process this means not using one’s perceptive faculties properly. One adopts a see-no-evil/hear-no-evil attitude. One deludes oneself, fails to face the reality of one’s true condition. The veils which emerge in our consciousness from that point onward, if not ruthlessly dealt with, make it increasingly more difficult to extract from within that inherent compressed potential or essence of being.

In the cosmic process which can be applied both macro- or micro-cosmically, there is the need to avoid a negative crystallisation of energy at this point. Applied to our filly, the ‘sourness’ was simply this negative crystallisation. Energy was not released for winning but turning back, collapsing into a sort of Black Hole. It is a knotting up, as it were. The external signs of this collapse were easily perceivable in her case whenever an opening up was asked for. Since this collapse or knotting up of energy had occurred or become crystallised, it was not possible for her to respond in any other way.

Cosmically, the danger is explained by the Asteroid Belt of our solar system: a planetary body in formation is shattered, splintered. This represents the inability to carry out a cosmic process, to engender the ‘energy that binds’. The utilisation of the horse as an example is quite apt because we are dealing precisely with the question of speed, a certain threshold crossed, an increase and correct utilisation of ‘fuel’ so that this binding energy is generated and the body in formation is held together and does not collapse, as we see in the Asteroid Belt. Properly speaking, there is the danger of a ‘negative copy’ emerging, a shadow of the true thing, a substanceless, centreless Nothingness, glued together by the Shadow. This is when we remain in the system, still engaged in the on-going process. The other possibility at this point is simply a disintegration to such an extent that one steps out of the cosmos entirely, be this individual and microcosmic, or macrocosmic.

In the human being, it is during this passage that careful attention has to be given to ‘shedding baggage’ so that the residue does not become akin to an anchor in one’s being, impeding acceleration and rise to the summit. Or else it may be viewed as a strenuous exertion the final aim of which is minimised by this ‘dead weight’. This is known as karma or samskaras.

Yoga, and especially the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo for reasons which will become obvious as this study progresses, helps to relieve us of these burdens and especially to accelerate our march. For it is obvious that after a certain critical threshold is reached and the mass accumulated is too dense, one lifetime is insufficient to work it out, to dissolve this dense compactness. It is a question of collapse of purpose. The ‘seed’, container of that ‘purpose’, is not organically unfolding by the aid of Time, giving forth always more of its inner essence in a sublime and ceaseless act of creation. Rather, it is being crusted over, covered in veils. The energy utilized for that process is as if dead, lifeless, inert. For this reason the Rigveda considers our mortal race the offspring of the Goddess Aditi’s eighth son, Martanda, whose name in Sanskrit literally means dead egg.

Indeed, it is at the 8^th sign, Scorpio, that this ‘death’ sets in. Clearly the meaning of ‘dead egg’ is an aborted process; not the experience of the full Circle or progression, but truncated prematurely. For that is what death is. In the Gnostic Circle’s superimposed structure, this is the third quarter of the wheel – from the 4.5 Orbit to the 6^th in the 9 circle, or the 7^th sign Libra to the 10^th sign Capricorn in the 12 division.

But Capricorn is that summit. Having failed to release the energy properly, having caused a collapse, this negative crystallisation does not allow us to rise. We can only fall back then, and back, and back, depending on the degree of our burden or ‘handicap’.

Yoga then accelerates the process of seeing, of undoing the ‘knots’, of freeing the Seed and permitting its inner essence to flow freely, creatively. An acceleration of the process is imperative so that in one lifetime the work is done. As one progresses, it is possible to register an acceleration which shortens more and more the periods between collapse and the subsequent undoing, to the extent that action and so-called retribution can follow upon each other almost immediately, thereby never permitting any permanent crystallisation to occur, any hardening which defies dissolution. When such an irreversible hardening does set in, then Death is the inevitable result and only ‘solution’. The burden, the anchor is too great and the pace of the journey is forcibly slowed down until collapse of even the physical being occurs.

But it is not really a new beginning in the real sense of the word. The next life is the result of this unconscious, diminishing process. That is, we re-enter with the same ‘seed’ but bearing encumbrances. The seed-energy is enclosed in a sac, the hardness of which is measured by the veils accumulated in moments when our perception failed us, moments of unconsciousness and lapses into deeper or denser slumber. Until death ends our journey, the soundest and greatest slumber of them all.

The ‘dead-egg’ human race is in its entirety characterised by the unconsciousness that overtakes us and increases in proportion to the accumulation of veils or encrustations.

Of course the filly in our example is not expected to be engaged in yoga or a conscious progression. She is simply playing out a cosmic process for us and demonstrating how certain actions of unconscious or conscious human beings can hinder or enhance that process. She is offering us an example closest to the essential truth of the cosmic manifestation because the Horse is symbol supreme of that universal Energy. Extracting her fullest potential for racing would thus mean the ideal utilisation of energy. In this case, the filly herself was akin to the Seed containing that essential, compressed energy. The arena of breeding, training, racing was the soil in which the seed-filly was planted and expected to flower.

 

The Cave

 

The filly’s fifth race, the 5 Point of Jupiter in the Gnostic Circle, carried us to the portals of a most interesting segment of the wheel: Scorpio, or, as it would be known in the Rigvedic myth, the cave of the Panis. This is where the stolen ‘cow’ is hidden by these hostile powers, known also as the hoarders and misers. The Cow is the Vedic symbol of that seed-energy in its potential form, as the Sanskrit word indicates – go or ray of light. The ‘misers’ or ‘hoarders’ are known in the myth for what they are: diminishers, powers which close in, or ‘pen in’, as the myth describes, that precious energy. This is very aptly descriptive of our filly at this point in her career. Her potential, her energy base was boxed up, penned in, hoarded away. The idea is to break through the ‘rock’, according to the myth, and release the cow/energy.

The correspondence with our racing example is obvious. For it was at this point in the first passage through the Circle that serious attempts began to be made to expose the falsehood and to liberate the filly from the clutches of this dark force which had had such devastating effects on her racing spirit by adding more baggage to her already considerable burden.

The jockey began persistently maligning the filly in the effort to cover up his own dubious actions in her regard. This was a simple matter at that point since the filly is what we humans call a ‘dumb’ creature. She could not defend herself. The veils thrust over this seed-energy were these layers of false labels which she was forced to live with. Her reputation was thus destroyed. No really good jockey would accept to ride  her because she was described as ‘mad’, ‘unpredictable’, and therefore a dangerous ride. Interestingly, this filly was perhaps one of the most well behaved on the turf. Her manners were impeccable both at the starting gate and during the race. Her only ‘misbehaviour’ was her unwillingness to open up and her sourness. But to cover up his bad actions the jockey cast the blame on the filly who was then obliged to carry not only the burden of her own inner sourness but this external pollution as well. In other words, inwardly she was weighed down and the external field of her experience was also spoiled.

This describes the outcome when passage through the 4.5 Orbit does not bring about the true release and balance of energy. The remainder of the ‘journey’ is indeed a struggle. The residue is an anchor. Instead of moving from 5^th to 6^th on the wings of an acceleration – for this is what contact with the 5^th planet/orbit, Jupiter, is meant to do – the planet which replaces the Sun, as it were. That is, if still there is a chance of retrieval and creative expansion, the 5^th Point is meant to introduce a ‘bolt out of the blue’ and propel one forward regardless of the encumbrances. In the Rigveda this action is known as Brihaspati’s word, which pierces like a lightning bolt the rock of the cave in Scorpio which stands in front of the 5 Point. Then the ‘ray’ or the ‘penned in’ energy is released.

Jupiter is also the Guru, the spiritual guide or he who enlightens. Thus it is clear that to deal with this darkness, this conspiracy of hostile suggestions and powers ranged against one, the tactic is always that of forcible exposure. Brought to the light their dark substance is dissolved.

After her 5^th humiliating performance, it was clear that a process of cutting through the crusts, loosening the thick layers had begun. The first step was to forbid the trainer to put that jockey on the filly, be it in her morning exercise or, more importantly, in a race. As for the filly herself, she then had to be handled more like an invalid or a psychological casualty of man’s insensitive attitude toward ‘dumb’ creatures. In this case, the gross insensitivity was compounded, or perhaps had its roots, in the element of corruption, the desire for illegitimate gain which so plagues the ‘sport’ of Kings.

Indeed, this is another aspect of Thoroughbred racing which must be discussed. Being the symbol of the vital force is only part of the matter. For it is this same force that is connected to money, or money power. The ‘hoarders’ and the ‘diminishers’ represent the acute selfishness which afflicts a society overridden by corruption. Economics come into his area of the cosmic dispensation as well. It is, once again, a question of the right use of energy (money), its balanced or imbalanced usage. Corruption is the selfishness of the individual who is cut off from the larger body of which he is meant to be a complementary part, a cog in the wheels which makes the collective manifestation a channel for the expression of a supreme Harmony, a divine life on Earth, as Sri Aurobindo has described. The corrupt individual cares only for himself or his immediate circle. Indeed he is a pani or a dasyu, to use the Vedic terms. Energy is penned in, confined to this closed-off circuit and not integrated into the collective pool which can then benefit both the community and the individual.

The Horse thus combines in its representative role this wrong utilisation of energy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ‘sport’ of racing. The difficulties our filly experienced have to be viewed on this backdrop. This was the condition of the ‘field’ into which she was thrust.

The time came for her 6^th race. We had, by then, a still splendid-looking animal, in good physical condition but entirely disinterested in racing or the question of exertion, of striving for perfection, of reaching the goal – in this case, the winning post. She seemed to be focussed exclusively on herself, on fulfilling her will; and invariably this clashed with that of her rider in the last stretch of the race. The least ‘interference’ by the jockey would cause her to close up and pull out of the race. Thus she had to be allowed to run her own race, as she liked.

An apprentice jockey was put on her, an allowance rider. That is, his inexperience was compensated for by offering the tempting prospect to the trainer of a 5- or 3-kilo reduction of the horse’s handicap. For this race she was carrying 56 kilos, which, with the allowance would come to a mere 51.5. This could be considered on the order of ‘cheating destiny’, or ‘making light of one’s burden’!

The 6 Point and the planet Saturn stands at the threshold of the sign Sagittarius, sign par excellence of the Horse. One begins to emerge from the Scorpio cave, the darkness is somewhat lifted of mystifying, burdening veils, and a great release is felt in the open spaces offered by Sagittarius, after the confinement of Scorpio. This portion of the Circle is on the order of a pleasing interlude, a playful expansion, entirely deceiving however.

In spite of her diminished spirit the filly responded to this atmosphere of lightness in her race. She did this by ignoring the jockey entirely. She ran out front and kept the lead, kept her own pace throughout the entire race. He did not interfere, or rather, he could not. He was too ‘light’ for her, primarily in will. By that time, her will had crystallised negatively. It meant that she was her own boss and was not engaged in a complementary sport with her jockey: two athletes competing together and with a harmony of wills. Hers was inverted, collapsed into a hardened mass.

In this condition of course the ‘light’ jockey could not get her to extend in the final stretch more than she herself seemed to have decided upon. She was seen to race in what was virtually third gear throughout, right up to the end. She never really changed her pace, never really extended and remained disinterested. From time to time her ears would be pinned back to indicate her dislike of the sport. Of course she was sour in the extreme. If she came out of this race in second place, it was largely because she ‘cheated’ by the allowance handicap. Indeed, there is something of this element in the sign Sagittarius. Its lightheartedness often causes it subjects to ‘cheat’ – with a smile. They could be known as the lovable thieves of the zodiac.

Sagittarius is meant to bring the subject to exceed his or her limitations. That is, provided the release has come about and the correct transmutation of the energy. It is then the power which, in this sign of the Horse, does indeed cause one to exceed one’s limits or to extend one’s boundaries (as in the Vedic Horse Sacrifice, or Ashwamedha). It also indicates a period when an expansion of consciousness can occur, so important for the experience of the next and final quarter of the Gnostic Circle and passage through the signs Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. The planetary orbits reached are the 7^th and 8^th, to close the wheel at the 9^th, or Pluto at the farthest reaches of our solar system.

For our filly the only indication of any sort of exceeding was that she was finally free of her suppressor and antagonist, that pani who had caused a ‘penning in’ of her energy. She had a young and enthusiastic jockey whom she could easily ‘make light of’ and virtually ignore. But she was also determined to remain closed in her shell and was beginning to be considered ‘difficult’. Thus in this diminished condition she approached the Circle’s last quarter and faced the ‘Mountain’, the fourth and last Cardinal Point, Capricorn.

Truth is the keyword of this sign. But this word means all things to all men. Indeed, a significant characteristic of our age is the conundrum thrown up when we are faced with absolutes and relatives, in particular in the domain of truth, thus having a bearing on the moral base of contemporary society. Therefore it is necessary to digress somewhat and again move into the world of myth so that a very clear understanding can come about regarding the precise meaning of the word in the context of a process such as we are describing, monitored in the Gnostic Circle.

 

The Replenishing Source and the Axis of Truth

 

Indian mythology contains a number of descriptions of the sign Capricorn. The Mountain symbolism is perhaps the most important ingredient in its mythological lexicon. This has been carried over to temple architecture where the myth is rendered in stone and the temple symbolism is that of a mountain. Central to the structure is an axis.

In the most important ‘mountain’ myth, this axis is the navel of the world. It is known as Mount Meru, the churning stick around which the serpent Vasuki is wound. The head and tail of the serpent are held by the Asuras (Titans) and Devas (Gods), respectively. When the primordial ocean is churned by these powers of Dark and Light, various elements of creation are brought up – each one symbolic and pregnant with meaning.

However, there are aspects to this tale which are overlooked, or perhaps have never been appreciated. It is more than a story of creation and the first churning of that Ocean of Life. Indeed, it is the churning of any process which can be monitored in a diagram such as the Gnostic Circle. That is, a formula in which Time is used as an ally, as a collaborator in the progressive transformation or development of consciousness. The Mount Meru tale refers to Time’s action. The axis-symbol is the Golden Rod of ancient traditions, the divine Maya of the Veda. The idea is to establish this axis in one’s being. Around that both dark and light orbit. The absolute Truth is this immobile, central axis. All the rest is ‘relative’.

However, the relative is necessary for the evolution. The only question is that each thing must be in its place. Thereafter harmony ensues, a ‘cosmos’ and not chaos. Thus, this quarter of the Gnostic Circle presents an opportunity to create a cosmos or order out of an essentially chaotic conglomeration of forces. The Mount Meru tale points the way to this ordering process. To be noted is that the power of the Light, the Gods, are not the central axis, as one might be inclined to think. Rather, they are ranged with the dark forces. Something else holds the play of forces together. And it is this something else that is so brilliantly described in the myth and so carefully captured in this segment of the time-wheel.

For our filly the moment of truth had indeed come. She was entering her 7^th race and it would be her last of the winter season. The 7^th planet/orbit Uranus is posited, in this section of the circle, who, in Indian tradition, is Varuna, the God of Truth and the Law.

Her 7^th race brought the truth to the fore. She had another apprentice jockey, also offering an allowance to her top weight handicap, a crippling 60 kilos. This was indeed the truth of her ‘accumulated baggage’ or residue. The allowance brought this down somewhat. But this jockey was inferior to her last and there was none of the playfulness of the sign Sagittarius to breeze her through her trial. She was serious about her sourness and pinned her ears back dramatically at any attempt by the jockey to encourage her to extend. The result was a poor fourth place – on the board as she always was, except for the humiliating race where the ‘baby was pinched while rocking the cradle’. It was clear at that point that there was only one solution: the filly had to leave the track and return to her ‘source’, that is, the farm where she had been bred. Thus, her 7^th race seemed to close a chapter. But in the larger vision of the first completed cycle of 9, this was not exactly a closing of a chapter. It was simply an ordering. It was a return to a source of replenishing, of healing. It was a time to come into contact with her inner being and truthful energy base. Interestingly, this was in the mountains.

The filly responded to the treatment admirably. From the first moment she stepped into the premises she was a different creature. She had been removed from her constricting environment and hence there was an immediate relaxation. There was nothing of her sourness in evidence at all. She was ridden regularly, and apart from a few kicks and initial slight battle of the wills with her rider, she very quickly moved into the spirit of the thing and began to enjoy her rides. There was no evidence at all of the minor displays of boredom and determined opposition which she had been demonstrating toward the end of her period at the track. But her physical condition needed attention. Her hoofs were in very bad shape, almost as a reactive symbol to her unwillingness to race. Had she remained on the course, the condition of her hoofs would have deteriorated even more and would have perhaps become a physical problem forcing her out of racing, or at least impeding her from racing until the problem had healed. But it was clear that under the prevailing circumstances, there would have been no healing. The only place where that could come about was by a return to the farm-source. Her healing was many-dimensional, not only physical. As her psyche healed, her hoofs returned to their original condition.

For everybody involved in this matter it was equally a moment of truth. The filly’s rest period was extended to a full three months. Interestingly, it came to an end on 30 June – or exactly on the first anniversary of her first race. Thus, the 4.5 Orbit was again seen to be operative in her return to the track. In this instance the circumstances surrounding that trip seemed to indicate something of the perilous Asteroid Belt in that she set off on her journey just when a nation-wide truckers’ strike was scheduled. Thus during the entire 15-hour drive the perils of the Asteroid Belt were evident. Lorries which were found plying the roads were stoned and even burned by angry strikers. Our filly, however, seemed to move through the ‘orbit’ of the system where ‘stones’ (asteroids) were flying past helter-skelter from all directions! Anything could have happened, but she and the vehicle in which she was travelling remained unharmed. With her on the trip was her sister and stablemate, with whom she had reestablished a very close bond during her sojourn on the farm. Her sister too was being sent for  training. However, the power of the axis of truth began to emerge in the process. A notable shift was felt in the entire affair. There seemed to be a compelling magnetism operating, obliging all elements to serve ITS purposes.

The first overt manifestation of this compelling magnetism was a change in stables and a new trainer. The presence of the ‘baby-pinching’ jockey in the former stables among other things, made a continued association with the trainer for this particular filly difficult. It was clear that new conditions had to be created. This was not a MENTAL decision. It was a compelling play of circumstances. Given that contact had been established with the ‘source’ and the subsequent forging of the axis of truth around which all the diverse elements of that particular ‘cosmos’ would have to orbit, the environment in which the sourness took shape, manifesting finally in the deterioration of her hoofs, had to undergo a change. Thus there was really no choice as such involved. The newly-forged axis determined or IMPOSED these new conditions. The dangers of the 4.5 Orbit were still clearly in evidence, but they would not be able to impede a determined progress or development.

The meaning of forging an axis of truth in an individual’s development or transformation of consciousness is akin to creating a cosmos out of chaos. That is, the peripheral elements of the system are no longer left free to create havoc, as it were, and to endanger or impede a certain development. Rather, when the axis comes into being even those same negative elements, conditions, situations must serve the purposes of the One – or, the central axis of truth. This may pertain to an individual and one’s inner truth, or a cosmic system. Or else, as in the case under discussion, the career of a Thoroughbred race horse. To further drive home the importance of this axis, in Hindu temple architecture this mountain-axis symbolism is reproduced in stone and serves the community by acting as that compelling axis. Of foremost importance for this to come into being, even in the question of a temple construction intended to capture this power, Time is the essential ingredient, indeed, the essence of that axis. Or, like the Horse symbolism of the Veda, the ‘self’ of that universal consciousness.

Thus, the filly’s sojourn in the mountains, or her return to the source where the truth of her being could be encouraged to manifest, took place exactly in the segment of the Gnostic Circle where this operation can ensue, and only in this segment: Capricorn. This sign is represented by both the mountain symbolism and the Time-Spirit, a combination which fortifies the view that the axis is singularly involved with Time.

The operation of this power-axis in the process did not exactly indicate the start of a new cycle, in spite of the ‘new’ conditions prevailing, as the layman might assess the situation on the basis of the entry of a new trainer, new stables, and so forth. This would indeed have been the case had the progression been aborted at the 6 Point and the sign of Death, Scorpio. Indeed, this is the position where, for the mortal, ‘dead-egg’ human species the ‘journey’ does come to an end. The remainder of the wheel – a full 120 degrees of the total 360 – is either a limbo (Sagittarius) or heaven/hell (Capricorn). In other words, the process is truncated on Earth in a time-continuum. It is effectively aborted as far as extraction of the compressed potential in the ‘seed’ is concerned. The journey can then only be pursued in ‘heaven’. This is the relative ‘truth’ of all religions.

But these postulations came into being during the period of history when our solar system was thought to consist of only 6 planets, very accurately confirming the 6 Point of the Gnostic Circle as the end of the journey for the ‘dead-egg’ human race. Now, however, our cosmic vision has expanded and 9 is the measure. Thus, the Gnostic Circle comes to our aid with its measure of 9 superimposed on the scale of 12, by indicating what is meant to happen in the segment of the wheel previously barred from our experience in a body, on this planet.

This is nowhere more accurately described than in the Rigveda in the passages dealing with Swar, commonly considered the ‘heaven’ of the Veda. That this concept has been distorted over the ages due to the rise and supremacy of religions is not the subject of this study. It has been treated elsewhere in depth. The point I wish to make here is simply that the possibility of our expansion of consciousness, or the extraction of inherent potential, has increased by a measure of three. This means that in one incarnation that much more can be attained, mirrored as well in the prolongation of the average life span of the human being. But to make full use of this enhancement, it is necessary to understand in depth the nature of that newly-opened segment of time-consciousness. Indeed, central to this greater potential is precisely the consciously-lived experience. No longer is it slumber and death but a progression in full or fuller awareness, under the light of the midday Capricorn truth-conscious Sun which casts no shadows.

This is the nature of the ordering process indicated in this segment of the Gnostic Circle. With a central axis, a Mount Meru, both dark and light, or negative and positive, are drawn into orbit in a sort of complementary labour. Similar to the Asuras and the Devas who pull the Serpent of Time wrapped around the churning stick-cum-axis, Mount Meru, in order to extract from the ocean of life the precious treasures hidden in the depths, the individual too draws both negative and positive into his or her ordered cosmos when contact is made with one’s innermost centre and the axis is forged. These powers are then obliged to serve the individual in the process of extraction. The magnetic centre indicates its presence by drawing to it the proper conditions for this orderly and harmonious play. For our filly this was made immediately evident by the changed circumstances of her training. The new trainer, moreover, was young (and a woman), and appeared more suited to the ‘new beginning’.

Thus this was not a 0/9 point or the start of a monitored experience. Contrary to appearances given the new conditions, it was simply the 7 point, part of the fuller scale of 9 stages or progressions. If the measure was 6 it would have been truncated or aborted before the 7. But in a full scale of 9, the meaning of the new conditions is simply the inevitable, predictable result of an ordering process whereby new conditions are introduced which allow for the power of truth to operate with a determined goal in view. For the proper understanding and application of the Gnostic Circle, I repeat, it is essential to know or to recognise the true 0 Points or the start of a process. And thereafter to recognise that when new elements are introduced they are not indicative of a return to the 0 Point but are merely in answer to the imperatives of the Gnostic Circle operations in a full scale of 0 to 9 over a field of 1 to 12.

 

Dissipation, Dispersal or Dissolution: the 8^th Stage

 

The filly responded well to her new environment, her trainer, the fact of having her cherished sister with her and a part of her racing experience. Above all, this seemed to convince her that contact with the farm-source had not been broken when she was previously sent for training. The return to the farm seemed to have a relaxing effect also due to this discovery which was further compounded by the companionship of her sister. Her sourness disappeared and the only indication of any difficulty was a tendency to bolt during her morning work-out, but this was more an indication of an energy imbalance rather than a vice as such. She was clearly suffering from a hampered or damaged energy flow, and this was clear both from her bolting as well as her performance in the 8^th race, a month after returning to the track.

Indeed, the 8^th stage is often indicative of a dissipation of energy, a dispersal. In the Gnostic Circle the 8 begins to draw the movement to a  close and will always be the faithful outcome of the previous 7 stages and what passage over these points had produced. For our filly there were various aspects to the problem she faced at the 8 stage, in her 8^th race. The first is that she continued to be saddled with a heavy handicap: 57kgs. She had not performed well enough to seem to merit or attract any of the top jockeys to ride her, though she was still a favourite, and therefore she was obliged to accept the services of a lesser-experienced jockey whose weight was only 49kgs but who offered no allowance. She was therefore carrying 8 kilos of dead weight to reach the prescribed 57. In other words, she was drawing the first round of 9 to an end encumbered by this penalising handicap and still blocked at Class VA.

This merits some elucidation. If the filly had met with ideal conditions in the earlier stages of her experience, passage over points 3 and 6 should have resulted in promotions. Thus, after her first legitimate and merited win in her third race (ideally), she ought to have been promoted to Class IV, the next one up the ladder. At the same time, she would have entered at the bottom of that class and this would have meant a reduction in her handicap – i.e., no accumulation of karma/residue. And even if she had failed to achieve this promotion in her third race (at the 3 Point), there was a second chance to catch up with a legitimate and merited win in her 4^th. But in both these races external factors impeded her from winning. They had nothing to do with her inner worth. Rather, impositions placed on her then served to stifle that potential: the energy turned back on itself.

Consequently, at the most critical 4 Point, opening onto or into the 4.5 Asteroid Belt, the encumbrance or excess baggage should definitely have been shed in order to make passage into the higher hemisphere (the sign Libra), a real promotion. With a lowered handicap in Class IV the filly could have looked forward to a swift passage from the 5^th to the 6^th Point; and the (ideal) win at the 6^th would have brought her another promotion to Class III and once again a reduced handicap. The handicap in such a scenario would never have accumulated to the degree where it was a true penalty which she could not shake off and a decisive conditioning factor in her performance. It served truly to anchor her, to pin her down at the lowest rung. Contact with the two angles, 3 and 6, of the Sacred Triangle should have been points of intervention, of grace whereby accumulation of residue would be impossible. But this would have meant that an ideal balance between release and proper utilisation of the compressed energy had been achieved. Given the circumscribing conditions she met in the field of her experience, this was not the case.

By consequence, the filly performed in her 8^th race as could have been predicted from a perceptive scrutiny of her previous 7 races. She displayed an imbalance – i.e., great initial burst which then was seen to fade out. She failed even to place in that race due to the imbalance and also as a result of her long rest prior to the race. But she did display the effects of that sojourn and her new conditions by her eagerness to race and the complete absence of sourness.

 

 

 

The 8^th stage is a sort of limbo, a suspension before the 9 and the true new beginning. There are no demands or expectations. In this case, something of the residue was dissolved as the 8 does indicate by its connection with the power of dissolution and undoing, in that at least one of the former encrustations was broken down: her sourness. She had attracted to herself the conditions which would serve to undo that formation or imprint or encrustation. But this was only part of the problem, only one aspect, albeit the most serious and obstructive. The harsh conditions of first passage through the wheel left other imprints, reflected in her heavy handicap. And they would all have to be dealt with in the course of the next cycle, 9 to 18.

The 8^th race was akin to a safety valve in a pressure cooker. Steam is released in a controlled manner to avoid disaster, but it is wasteful, purposeless. There was a powerful accumulation due to the rest and return to the farm-source, a great enthusiasm even as witnessed in her bolting during morning work-outs. But none of this could be channelled to the fulfilment of her purpose – that is, to win a race. It was frittered away. Yet this experience was at one and the same time a necessary outlet for pent-up energies and a means to produce a certain balance. Indeed, she settled down thereafter and ceased to bolt. She was then in the right condition for the start of the new cycle and race 9.

In addition to this imbalance and the need for controlled release, there is the question of accumulated residue to note. At the same time, a tool of knowledge such as the Gnostic Circle is meant to indicate when such moments of accumulation (or release) are met and by consequence how they can be dealt with. For the aim of the Gnostic Circle is precisely KNOWLEDGE in contrast to ignorance. It is true that our filly emerged from the first cycle with a sizeable residue reflected accurately in her handicap. At the same time, in view of the fact that the axis of truth was timely brought into being, the indication is that the knowledge gained in the first cycle would be precious nectar extracted from the churning of the Capricorn Mount Meru, and that this would be a valuable aid in the subsequent cycle. However, we cannot escape the fact that mishaps of this nature signify that in the next cycle, 9 to 18, one carries along this shadow residue. Instead of breezing through lightly, it is now an uphill struggle given the weight one is saddled with – ergo, the encrustations which still hamper the free and creative discharge of the compressed inner potential. Indeed, our filly displayed this encumbered condition very faithfully in her 9^th race.

The 9 as the ‘new beginning’ made itself felt by a change of venue. Her 9^th race was in a neighbouring city and the new centre and season meant a reallocation of handicap. She raced with 58 kilos – still one of the highest. The jockey was the same but the result this time was an easy second. Though the race was won by 5 lengths, the winner was carrying a mere 49 kilos, – that is, a full 8 kilos less than the filly. Moreover, it was a horse from a higher class which had been successively demoted to reach VA. She was thus facing considerable competition. Nonetheless, even without exerting herself unduly, she breezed along, showing for the first time enjoyment and willingness and a wonderfully extended gait, even if only for a brief span at the end. There was no major release of energy but she kept ahead of another filly carrying 11 kilos less and who finally went past the winning post 1/2 neck behind our subject.

This 9^th race marked a return in a sense to the starting point and her first race. Indeed, even the weather seemed to corroborate and remind us when just as the race was about to begin, it started to rain. Unlike her first race it was not a deluge; just a reminder. In fact, it was this light rain that served to crystallise the vision and understanding of the first cycle of 9 races as having been faithfully monitored in the Gnostic Circle. I had written in the beginning that it is important to note the circumstances surrounding the first monitored experience for they provide insights which may be valuable in the subsequent denouement. Thus this recurrence of rain served to reveal the inner mechanism operating in the career of this race horse and its potential for application and understanding of the human condition.

With this knowledge it was possible to enter the next round in a healthier, sounder more enlightened condition. The experience gained within this framework in the first round would have to be applied if at all the remaining encumbrances were to be dismantled and the filly’s true potential allowed to surface. Though her psychological state was greatly improved, there were still imprints to deal with – indeed, an uphill task. But that will be the subject of another study, another chapter.

 

Concluding Summary: A New Poise of Consciousness

 

The purpose of this study centred on the Horse and racing in a pattern of 9 has been to illustrate certain essential attributes and the mechanism of the Gnostic Circle. Important to note is that we are monitoring a process in this case largely by hindsight. That is, I did not seek to fit the 9 races into the Gnostic Circle framework either by prior manipulation or subsequent adjustment of circumstances or contrived readings of the situation. There was no possible way I could have arranged the circumstances surrounding each race which were clearly uncontrollable by any human being. Countless elements and people entered the design and contributed to the unfolding accuracy of this singular experience, over which no one could claim any control. Therefore, it ought to be immensely interesting for the student and investigator to observe how these elements all played their part and with astounding exactitude of time, place and circumstance.

We have in this study the filly central to a complex play of circumstances. It is as if she were posited in the centre of a circle which we view as a sort of cosmos. In the beginning it is somewhat disconnected or fluid. Then as the movement progressed deeper into the hidden purpose of the exercise, a distinct pattern began to emerge. At the same time, the elements involved were seen ranged on either side of a certain subtle demarcation: negative or positive; or else, elements furthering that central purpose or hindering. By the aid of this key of knowledge, we were in a position to establish on which side of the demarcation the peripheral protagonists are located. This is a unique aid for making the fullest use, conscious use of their participation. For ultimately, once the axis of truth is forged and firmly rooted in the centre of the process, these elements are obliged to serve that central Truth. Their qualification of positive or negative undergoes a certain transformation in our vision.

Thus, this brief first study, only a small portion of which is given here, reveals the unique role of Time and the ineluctable CONTROL prevalent in the operations of our evolution and the universal manifestation as a whole. The axis of truth is the foundation of the cosmos itself, just as it is the foundation of each human being given that everything we know, we are a part of, is soul. That is, this material dimension with everything it contains is simply a jelling or crystallisation of the soul-substance or essence. Given the fact that Time is wedded to the soul in a very special way, it is through Time that the control I refer to is maintained and we have a cosmos in lieu of chaos.

In the early stages of evolution, indeed the point where we find the actual human species, the existence of this control is not easily appreciated. It exists, it is always the foundation of the universal manifestation and is responsible for the order we observe in our cosmic habitat, from macrocosm to microcosm. But it is only when the species crosses a certain threshold, as ours is presently poised to do, that certain veils are drawn aside and one is granted that coveted vision of the Mysteries of old, or the vision of Mahakala, the Great Time, which not even the warrior Arjun on the Kurukshetra battlefield was able to endure of his beloved friend and lord, Krishna, the 8^th Avatar. For indeed, it is the 9^th who incarnates that very Spirit of the Great Time. With his subsequent appearance the threshold is crossed as an evolutionary breakthrough, and not simply a preserve of an elite, and ‘all things are made new’. Then, as a race WE SEE. That is, the human species comes to express certain hitherto hidden qualities or capacities, first sporadically, then consistently.

The threshold when crossed carries the individual, society, civilisation out of the binary structure where mind stands as the highest attainment or reigning principle, and the species moves into the supramental realm and the habitat of the gnostic being. In that domain gnosis or knowledge prevails. But it is not EXTERNALLY engendered or imposed. It arises from within.

To provide an example, the filly was a perfect instrument for demonstrating the poise of consciousness which is ideally suited to an operation involving the power of gnostic time. She was in a sense a passive receptor. She stood at the centre of the movement on to which the peripheral action was aimed. She was, as it were, the nexus. And her non-interfering poise allowed the faithful and accurate evolution of the exercise to unfold. Knowledge in this case was not a tool utilised to influence, or to impose a desired result, or to manipulate events and people. It was simply an aid for SEEING, for PERCEIVING.

This is valuable when the axis is forged at the 7 Point because the key then is a centre that holds. One ‘acts’ simply by HOLDING FIRM, thereby permitting by this immobility the action of ordering to take place. Then everything included or drawn into this orbit of the central sun (the filly in this case), must serve the purposes of that inner truth.

Given the fact that the greatest obstacle the individual must contend with in the transformation is Mind, which operates EXTERNALLY to the central Purpose and therefore does violence to this soul essence, it is understandable that in the initial stages, as my work has revealed, animals are precious helpers in this New Way. Similar, no doubt, to what they were for the ancient Vedic Seers. The Horse is not governed by mind but rather the vital and physical. The power or impulses from strata higher than mind have easier access without this shadow element during the period when Mind is itself in a process of transformation in order to permit it to occupy its rightful place in the echelon of Being. Consequently, given this clear channel we are able to reach depths from which we are barred by mind.

Finally we must return to the original perception regarding the aim of the Gnostic Circle. It is to draw out FROM WITHIN one’s maximum potential. This is lodged in that compressed seed by the process of INVOLUTION. Mind is there, as well as the vital and as well as the supramental. If we write of the gnostic being as the next species, a higher manifestation in the echelon of creation, we want to know where this being is coming from. It is clear that he or she is not going to descend from heaven or from outer space, as some new-age groups contend. For that would again be an imposition external to this planetary evolution and a denial of all that the Earth stands for in this solar system at the third orbit from the Sun. This position implies an evolution FROM WITHIN of the thing that seeks to manifest, an extraction of a compressed essence which involution posited as the seed of our evolving world.

The Gnostic Circle helps us to know how to extract what has been until now hidden, unexplored, untapped source of energy, a layer of creation entirely unknown to us as a species. Its expanded measure, from 6 to 9, allows us to appreciate that a full triad has been added to the cosmos which inscribes that hidden potential. By consequence and given the fact that this single seed is the foundation of all creation, it is clear that the method required for the individual and the species to make that courageous leap forward to a higher rung has to be a system, a method with its key of gnosis which permits us to reach far deeper inner depths and to extract from therein that untapped energy by which we may exceed our limits, our boundaries as a mental binary species.

In the zodiac this exceeding is depicted in precisely the 9^th sign, – inter alia, the sign of our entire 9^th Manifestation of 6480 years starting from 234 BC. And it is precisely the sign of the Horse. In another exercise in seeing ‘the symbol as the thing symbolised’ in this New Way, I have presented an example of the method using precisely a living horse in a lived experience reflecting that inner mechanism of that extraction and exceeding process. All the protagonists in this drama lived the experience with me, the only difference between us being that I have seen it in a different light, from the perspective of the control of gnostic time in orbit of an axis of Truth. It has been an important exercise to demonstrate the responsibility the human being bears toward creatures lower down on the echelon of evolution. Our awareness has to be enhanced so that our relationship with the entire gamut of creation is transformed. Only then can all things be ‘made new’.

 

Dadikravan [the Vedic Horse] is he of whom now we must

do the work; may all the Dawns speed me on the path!

For the Waters and for the Dawn and the Sun and Brihaspati,

he of the puissance, the Victor.

 

May this Power of being who seeks the full-bringing

and seeks the Light and who abides in all activity

turn into inspiration the impulsions of the Dawn,

may he abide in their speed that carries us beyond.

– Dadhikravan who is the truth in his running,

yea, he gallops and he flies – brings into being

the impulsion, and the abundant force, the heavenly light.

 

When he runs, when he speeds in his passage,

as the wing of the Bird is a wind that blows about him

in his greed of the gallop; as the wing that beats about

the breast of the rushing Eagle, so about the breast of

Dadhikravan when he with the Force carries us beyond.

 

For the abundance of his strength he carries his impellor

beyond, a rein binds his neck and a rein holds him about

the chest and a rein is in his mouth. Dahikravan puts

forth his energy according to the will in the mind

and gallops along the turning of the path….

 

                                                            Rigveda, 40, 1-4

 

 

 

October of 1992

Aeon Centre of Cosmology                                                                             PN-B

at Skambha

 

 

 

 

In the August 1992 issue of VISHAAL, I drew our readers’ attention to the intriguing emergence of a third element in the up-coming presidential elections.  To summarise the point I made then, America is simply responding to the great shift in a subtle dimension which brought the binary creation to an end and established in its place the unitary system.  This meant that as of 1983-4, a process was set in motion which would result in a new world order.

This is a phrase easily bandied about these days by politicians, diplomats, policy makers in various fields and of various hues.  But non really appreciate the import or the responsibility which comes with that statement of facts.  For indeed we, as a global society, are feeling the effects of this new world order.  In this initial stage these effects are, on the whole, negative.  But they are negative simply because the human being is lagging behind in the process.  Instead of rising to the occasion, expanding one’s consciousness and cooperating with the movement, we find a reaction setting in, a closing up rather than the desired expansion of consciousness.  Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the United States of America and centred on the presidential campaign now in its last leg.

The third element is once again affecting the contest.  This independent candidate has added an unusual, unpredictable ingredient to the affair with perhaps far-reaching consequences which may not be immediately evident.  Indeed, the election falling on 3.11.1992, a day of 8 number-power, indicates that there will be something inconclusive about the affair.  But for our study what is more significant to note is that this three-cornered contest, unlike any other in the history of that nation, is simply America’s response to the ‘new world order’, or the shift from a binary to a unitary system.  The nation is being forced to exceed its habitual pattern and make a quantum leap into the new and the unknown.  However, this is not easily appreciated, and the result is that irrelevant issues are displacing real issues.

What I will now state I realise is going against all political analyses regarding the American campaign.  In my view the REAL issue and the one which should be central to the campaign is precisely that new order.  Instead we find the American people unconcerned, oblivious even of the totally new world ‘out there’, beyond its borders.

For the truth is, America’s internal economic difficulties are entirely due to that great shift which affected and continues to affect the whole world.  One of the key features of this shift is, of course, the collapse of the opposite end of the pole upon which the binary system found its incomplete and unhealthy balance – i.e., the USSR.  The result of the end of the cold war has been a dramatic reorganisation of America’s economy and the attempted shift to an economy not based on the manufacture of armaments, with all its innumerable ramifications throughout the system.  Indeed, the economies which were not founded on the arms race are certainly in better condition than the American for the present.

A weapons-based economy does not lay centred on the actual production of weapons, war planes, missiles and so forth.  It is widespread.  Countless smaller industries rely on contracts sometimes very indirectly connected to the weapons industry and which might seem far removed from the manufacture of those weapons.  In many cases, the producers of nuts and bolts and whatnot, may not even be aware of the actual part they play in that larger industry.  The producer feels the squeeze only when, like now, the economy which was formerly bolstered by the manufacture for itself and sale of weapons to others begins responding to a shift on the world stage.  Science and technology are also affected by the shift.

Thus, America’s woes are in large part due to that new world order which she herself helped to introduce.  Yet the American people and their representatives in Government are being encouraged to view their internal plight as something somehow disconnected from that new order and from which they can detach themselves and concentrate on ‘the real issues’, – i.e., their collapsing economy.  The result will be an even more rapid collapse, unless a leader emerges who can rise to the occasion and deal with America’s internal economics in the context of that larger new order.  Failing to do so will crate tremendous impediments for the new order, with the result that old patterns and policies will be resorted to.  Even, it is easy to predict, there will be an artificial situation sought to be created whereby those old patterns can be ‘legitimately’ restored.  In such a scenario, America will have to create a binary partner and attempt to impose the old order so that she may feel comfortable with the known and tested system of the past.  The manufacture of weapons on an even larger scale can then readily serve as the main prop of the economy, as it had done in the past. The manufacture of weapons on an even larger scale can then readily serve as the main prop of the economy, as it has done in the past.  The American people will have their jobs restored and revel in the joys of the tested consumerist society which is the hallmark of the nation’s economy.  In other words, if America does not move boldly forward and meet the future with a new vision, she will lead the world into a regression (not a recession) by the turn of the millennium.  This means a radical reversal of the process of establishing a unitary and global world outlook, the basis of the new world order.

Due to the intrusion of the third candidate, the presidential campaign, we  are informed, is now to be centred on ‘real issues’.  I consider that those real issues are fictitious unless they are seen as part and parcel and inextricably linked to the larger world order and the dramatic end of the binary system with all its inevitable ramifications.

The leader of nations in the new millennium is going to be that nation which can and will base its actions and policies on the principle of unity.  This means that the nation which as a whole, leaders and populace, can see itself always at the centre and inextricably connected to the periphery, and steadying itself on this higher and broader vision.  That is, it has a vision of the whole, the parts, the centre and the periphery always.  And ALL policies evolve from that superior perception and perspective.

America is struggling to come to terms with a responsibility placed on her shoulders which she cannot sustain alone.  She is meant and destined to be aided by India – the nation which is that Capricorn centre.  This, it must be stressed, is not a new version of the old binary structure.  It is a unitary system, spheric in essence, bearing a ‘centre that holds’.  For that ‘centre’ America serves as a bridge to the periphery, a leader indeed in that larger body but dependent upon the Centre to provide the global consciousness and vision.

Born under the zodiacal sign Cancer, America will always respond under pressure with an isolationist attitude: the Crab, which, when faced with danger, closes itself in its shell.  Similarly, this sign easily succumbs to the temptation of comforts and material security.  It has great difficulty in ‘sacrificing for a higher cause’.  True it does often rise to the occasion at crucial times, but his is explained by the Cancer episode in The Magical Carousel, Chapter 4.  In ‘Cancerland’ the Queen of Night is easily moved to compassion and sincere concern.  She wants to nurture and care for all those whom she feels are in need.  There is indeed a motherly quality to the sign/nation, but it is limited in scope; for which reason it is often submerged in a sea of sentimentality.  It nurtures by covering with comforting veils – more and more soothing veils rather than their removal, or the crutches which such motherly comforts may provide.

India, on the other hand, is ruled by Cancer’s opposite sign, Capricorn.  It is equally a sign of the Mother.  But in The Magical Carousel’s Capricorn chapter (10), we find that same Mother portrayed as the Universal Shakti, not offering any comfort at all but rather the extreme difficulties of an initiation whose aim is precisely the removal of all props and illusions and ‘veils’ until the subject stands utterly alone before the truth of his or her inner being and faces Time and Destiny in that bare and unencumbered condition.  Having successfully achieved this state, the initiate may then rise to the summit of the mountain and the coveted vision of Omanisol, the Universal Mother, who presides over the whole evolution from her position above it all, yet one with the All.

America cannot be relied upon nor expected to play the role of the Universal Power.  But she can fulfil her destiny serving as the material bridge by which the vision ‘from the mountaintop’ can be transposed onto the world scene.  However, if America continues to close out the tremendous relevance of the changed world scene and its impact on internal condition, she will not be fulfilling her destiny  but rather taking recourse in the now outdated attitude of closing herself within boundaries of her Cancer shell.

This will no longer suffice.  World conditions will force America out of that shell.  But the simple fact that this most important presidential campaign has thrown up the old response causes us to wonder what lies before the world.  It certainly boggles the mind to observe how the man under whose tenure the principles for which America had been struggling for decades have triumphed – free-market economy and democracy versus the Soviet model of socialism and communism – can have become so unpopular with the American people in a matter of months after this unprecedented development.  The entire world stage has flip-flopped during his presidency.  And yet these spectacular gems of a most definitive nature, seem to have no impact at all on the present campaign.  Rather, they seem to be calling upon the incumbent president the wrath of the people and the accusation that he was too concerned with foreign policy and not enough with domestic issues, – ergo, their livelihood and well-being, for an within themselves.  This, it has to be noted, is an attitude which by itself suggests that America cannot be expected to be the leader in the new times to come.  She must follow, and she must follow the nation and her people who have been prepared throughout the millennia for the difficult, demanding and self-sacrificing labour of transcending the personal (Cancer) in favour of the universal and global (Capricorn).

The actual third candidate reveals himself to be an ideal instrument for the task allotted to him within the framework of the cosmic vision.  He seeks to focus the campaign on the real issues, this is true; but there is something far more significant in his participation.  He draws the campaign away from the personal, so much a characteristic of America’s ruling sign, Cancer.  His intervention forces a more impersonal approach, without a focus on a certain petty and irrelevant considerations regarding the personality and personal lives of the candidates.

But of far more importance, this third element is ideally suited to forcing an expansion by focusing on the inadequacies of the system.  Indeed, the USA is struggling to overcome the binary imprint she has been obliged to follow for almost two centuries.  The third candidate is constantly emphasising the immediate need for a reform of the system which he feels can no longer ‘deliver the goods’.

This is entirely true insofar as the collapse in cosmic terms of the binary structure has resulted in this unexpected (though predictable) desire for a system which will allow it to handle adequately the needs both of the American people and their obligations on the world scene.

In a sense, the real issue is indeed the system.  But seen from a cosmic perspective, it is a struggle to experience an expansion and subsequent adjustment within a new system which responds to a triadic play of forces and no longer the binary.  This indeed is the task of the third force in any comparable situation.  The third candidate in this campaign offers the student of the new cosmology an excellent example of the quality of that force and its role in the enhanced harmony being established in the world.

To be honest, the problem does not lie with America, for indeed the reaction of her people was predictable and truthful.  The problem centres on India.  There is no superior vision gaining effective ground, no attempt even to come to terms with a higher destiny for the nation.  India, I repeat here as I have stated elsewhere, is caught in the periphery.  She has been dislodged from the centre which is occupied by the Usurper and the nothingness of the Void.  And while India continues to occupy a position which is not hers by destiny, America cannot be expected to fulfil a role for which she has not, by destiny, been prepared.

I am writing these lines as Kuwait goes to the polls, the country which was the focus of the Third’s War, commonly known as the Gulf War.  There is much criticism within America and throughout the world of the role of the western democracies in the conflagration.  But again people fail to recall conditions in the Middle East before that war, or the impact the fall of the binary system had upon the forces in that arena.  There was an almost complete realignment, the result of which has bene that for the first time leaders of almost all the Middle-Eastern nations have been periodically gathering for talks to achieve some sort of peace settlement.  Whether or not they will be successful is not entirely the issue.  For the point is that prior to the Third’s War such meetings were unthinkable.  The shape that conflagration took was the result of the collapse of the binary system (see VISHAAL, 5/6, February 1991).  In my opinion, the fact that the American people, and the whole world by and large, can overlook these irrefutable gains and cast them off as meaningless in face of the ‘real issues’ of one’s daily bread and butter, however painful their lack may be, is an indication of how small the average consciousness of the human being is and how unwilling and incapable the human species on the whole is in coping with ‘a higher cause’.

Nonetheless, Cosmos and Time continue to bear witness to this ‘higher cause’ and controlling power.  Today, as Kuwait elects its parliament and brings a certain phase to an end regarding that most important turning point in world history and opens a new chapter, we note that the date is 5.10 (=1).1992 (=3) – or the numbers of the Third Power: 5.1.3 (=9).*  It is also the Navami of the Durga Puja, the Navaratri or the Festival of Nine Nights.  The Navami is the 9th night when the Asura is slain by the Goddess.  This year the harmony of the festival’s timing is especially important in that its culmination falls on October 5th, which is an exact 9 months from 5th January, the most important date in the scheme of India’s higher destiny.  It is significant that this happened to be the date chosen for the Kuwaiti poll.

The introduction of the new, or true change, is always a contribution of a third force.  Without it there can be no renovation or expansion.  In the new cosmology, this is made abundantly clear through the Gnostic Circle, the diagram describing the system’s cosmic foundation.  Three powers contribute to the harmony and compelling force for change.  For example, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s work, bereft of that third element would have remained deadlocked and imprisoned within the old boundaries.  The truly new conditions emerged at the third stage and became the foundations for the NEW WAY.  Similarly, the American political system is now seeking to be released from the binary two-party deadlock by a third candidate because, after the new alignment and the unitary new world order, a third can now surface with the power to introduce that change.  No independent candidate prior to this cosmic shift had made a similar impact on the American system.

Truly, there is nothing like a Third to make life interesting!

5 October, 1992
Aeon Centre of Cosmology
at Skambha

*  Editor’s note:  The Third’s birthday is 5.1.1938 (1+9+3+8=21=3).

 

Even as the individual has a psychic being which is his true self,
governing more or less openly his destiny,
each nation too has its psychic being which is its true self,
moulding its destiny from behind the veil;
it is the soul of the country, the national genius, the spirit of the people,
the centre of national aspiration, the fountain-head of all that is
noble, great and generous in the life of a country.
True patriots feel its presence as a tangible reality.
It is this which in India has been made almost into a divine being
and all who love truly their country call it ‘Mother India’
(Bharat Mata), and it is to her that they daily
address a prayer for the welfare of their country.  It is she
who symbolises and incarnates the true ideal of the country,
its true mission in the world.

The Mother

 

 

The central shaft of the Mother’s unique chamber is similar to an Indian raga; the latter is equally an axial alignment and as subtle as the one the Mother devised for her Temple. But while the raga is played around an axis of SOUND, the axis of the Mother’s chamber is of LIGHT. But both have a similar function and perhaps this comparison will help the listener to understand the fundamental importance of the drone, the axis of the raga. For it is the drone which acts as a sort of undifferentiated background shaft of sound. The raga is then the differentiated alignments corresponding to the Earth’s movements around the Sun. Each of the 72 known ragas are thus expressions of the Earth’s position at different periods of the year and day. They are categorised according to a seasonal alignment, depending directly upon the tilt of the Earth on her axis and the Sun’s southern and northernmost reaches. And then there are the ragas corresponding to the time of the day which are determined by the Earth’s revolution around her own axis. Briefly, this highlights the extraordinary importance of alignment in the cultural fabric of ancient and modern India.
These categorisations of the 9 x 8 ragas are the only features which help us to understand, still today, that the music of old on the subcontinent was cosmically founded. But they tell us even more. They reveal unmistakably the Earth-oriented nature of the inspiration. The structure of Indian music highlights better than anything else what I consider to be the essential premise of Hinduism: Fulness versus the Void. In music this is emphasised, and I would say it is the basic ‘message’ of the raga, particularly because of the Earth-oriented nature of its structure. Thus the drone is that inspired rendering of the Sound of Silence, this is clear. But there is a deeper purpose in establishing all Indian music around the sound-axis of the drone. It is to convey that Silence is not to be mistaken for emptiness. The drone is therefore a permanent, uninterrupted background. It never ceases, never leaves gaps, voids, intervals which are devoid of the sound, even a ‘sound’ which represents Silence, thereby establishing that the cosmic manifestation is equally a creation which arises out of and abides within this sacred Fulness. This is the fundamental importance of the drone, the reason for which, perhaps of all Vedic cultural expressions, music is the most sublime. And again, moving even deeper, the ragas focus our attention on the two phenomena which I have been discussing at length in this series: the tilt of the Earth and its axial rotation. Included in this is the shift of the Earth’s equatorial plane which produces the southern and northern extreme positions of the Sun.

These movements are also found central to the Mother’s inspiration, given the prominence she allotted to the 15-step entrance into the chamber and the 12-sided walls which she related explicitly to the months of the year. But there is much more in her design, in particular the central shaft of Light, the Ray falling on the globe, filling it with the light of the Sun in an uninterrupted play. It is this ‘play’ that the Mother described as ‘the symbol of the future realisation’. But, from this analysis, it would seem that the ‘play’ not only belongs to the future but was central to the ancient yoga of the Rig Veda. It is only when we discover the meaning of the exact measurements she gave for the Ray that we begin to realise how accurate her description of this interchange was. For indeed, it carries us right to the portals of the ancient inspiration of the Indian raga at the dawn of civilisation. We realise then that in this discovery also lies the key to the renovation many are seeking in the field of music itself.

However, when the above is unveiled the result is likely to be surprising. The question of renovation itself will be transformed as we begin to hear with our new auditory faculties enhanced by a wideness and depth brought about by this expanded cosmic vision.

It was in the October 1989 issue of VISHAAL that I first began writing on this subject. I described the drone as the element of unity, or the underlying ‘sound of silence’ as the integrating factor, the fabric where and upon which all sound finds its being. The drone is to the raga what the Vedic ecliptic base is to India. The latter is also a constant upon which the ‘sounds’ of the varied spiritual expressions have been played throughout the ages. They are indeed akin to planets, or ‘notes’. And their purpose is similar to the function of the planets in our solar system. Or else the similar role of the notes of the scale: they differentiate, they elaborate, they diversify and render audible what would be obliged to remain silent and eternally a prisoner of its inappreciable unity. Indeed, in such a scenario, unity would not exist. There would be only Nonbeing. For unity is only rendered appreciable when this differentiation takes place and permits the consciousness to realise the essential oneness of this creation.

In each of these phenomena there is a unifying element, a factor common to all which makes the differentiation possible. This factor is Time. In the solar system the planets influence not by emitting a special ray or wave, which then causes a person born ‘under that star’, in the astrologer’s jargon, to behave in a particular manner or to enjoy a certain destiny. That is, it is not by any sort of physical factor, or wave, or emanation, of this order that the planets ‘influence’ our destiny. Rather, the influence is simply time. The function of a planet in orbit of the Sun is similar to the tala or time of the raga which the percussion instrument reproduces in the Indian musical complex. The beat or ‘pulse’ that comes into being is due to a special interaction between the Earth and the Sun and their respective and interconnected alignments.

 

Time’s Energy   

 

It is known now, after further planetary probes and observations from the Hubble telescope in outer space, that Jupiter has a pulse. It experiences a regulated contraction and expansion of its mass which was measured by the several different probes. It is akin to a pulsation, as if the planet were indeed a living organism. We know also that the Earth has a pulse, once in every sidereal day – or 2 pulsations every 24 hours (see ‘Culture and Cosmos’, TVN 4/4, October 1989), and of course that the Sun’s pulse is an exact 9 in our 24-hour day. Thus one pulsates at the 12 mark, the other gives 9 beats. Together they recall the structure of the Gnostic Circle, 9 and 12. But what has not been discovered yet is the origin of all these pulsations, contractions, expansions and so forth. For that discovery to be made, science will have to come much closer to a discovery of the role Time plays in the gestation not only of a human being but of a solar system as well. Indeed, it will have to appreciate the true creative function of this universal power and that Time did not start with the Big Bang, as science sustains. The singularity which, according to scientific cosmologists, gave birth to Time and the universe is in fact compressed time energy. Russian scientists were closer to the mark when they sought to explore this question of ‘energy locked in time’ and realised that in this discovery would lie the road to unimaginable concentration of power, and that it would grant the discoverer an unlimited source of energy.

To return to the raga, its cosmic character would be impossible to establish without the drone in the structure of the music, its character determined by the particular alignment (attunement) of the planet with the central Sun. In the ideal circumstance, the instrumentalist or vocalist becomes attuned/aligned with that same cosmic harmony in the act of improvisation upon the theme of the raga. Without such an attunement, there is little hope of the true essence of the music to be realised. And it must be said that this question of ‘improvisation’ is another element which strengthens our perception of the role of the Third Power in the Indian destiny, or the Individual Divine. Indian music, because of this element, is an entirely individualistic experience. But this we shall discuss further on. That is, the role of the individual in this cosmic context.

Certainly many thousands of years ago on the subcontinent, music was a yoga. The same may be said for dance and all the other plastic art forms. The Vedic Seers gave birth to these forms via the special processes of yoga known in those ancient times and now lost. Central to the experience was alignment. The Seer had to be aligned (attuned) in a particular manner so as to ‘hear’ those special sounds. This was not a mental working, just as the Mother’s vision of the chamber was not mental or thought out by the processes of mind. Nor was the act of measuring which immediately followed the vision. The inspiration came because of that alignment or attunement. A raga was born simply because the Seer was in perfect harmony or alignment with the cosmos and he or she could only be the vehicle for the transmission of pure and unadulterated forms. The Mother mentioned this explicitly in what have  come to be known as the Matrimandir Dialogues (see TVN, 1/5 & 1/6). It is this alignment which then places one in a position to be a transmitter of a pure and uncontaminated form.

This is unknown to our civilisation. The Chamber of the Mother’s original vision is the only pure and uncontaminated art form in existence today and a product of our very times. Unfortunately, it was so pure and exceptional that it found no executors who could rise to the occasion and reproduce that vision as uncontaminated as we find it in her original plan. This says much about the state of the human being and the obstacles yet to be overcome before we can begin to speak of a Satya Yuga or the establishment of the Truth-Consciousness on Earth. The Mother left a superior ‘instrument’. It was then simply a question of penetrating that organ and listening to the ‘sounds’ it produced. Or else, of taking up that ‘instrument’ and playing upon it the only harmony for which it had been created. And this is what I have done and recorded in the pages of The Gnostic Circle and The New Way, and now in VISHAAL.

Insofar as this cosmic consciousness was the background or founding experience of all art forms in the subcontinent of Vedic origin, traces of this foundation are still discernible. It was this background knowledge which allowed the Mother to ‘see’ and ‘measure’ the chamber in the yogic way she did which resulted in a marvel of sacred geometry and architecture.

But these categories are too limiting and they do not describe the real nature of her achievement. Geometry and architecture are too ‘lifeless’ for our purposes. I have often called the chamber a ‘new model of the universe’. But this too can be lifeless or static. Music, I would submit, is a better category. And even more adequate is the ancient designation, music of the spheres. I have called this work cosmic harmonies precisely in order to add that musical content to the study, without which we would be left with the lifelessness mentioned above. Or else the dry study after Newton of contemporary scientific cosmology, devoid of all vibrancy and pulsating life. In contrast to the new cosmology it is a cosmology devoid of purpose. It is simply mechanical function. Not that in the new cosmology this aspect is underplayed or ignored entirely. It is just that the question of function and mechanism is viewed from a very different perspective. The propelling motor of the universe is seen through another lens. Essential to the evaluation is purpose which in turn is a component of Will, and which in turn arises from that compression of time and the birth of the Point. All of this eludes the scientific cosmologist because it pertains to the process BEFORE that singularity came into being, from which the birth of the material universe in his view then took place via the Big Bang.

Thus, the element common to all these expressions, be it macro or microcosmic, is Time. The drone could never sustain a diversified alignment if Time were not added to the experience by which means that differentiation comes into being. This is then nothing more than the pulsation which arises out of compression of that essential sound-shaft – the drone – according to a particular planetary alignment which then results in the pulse that is the tala of the raga.

For this consolidation of Silence to come about compression is essential, or contraction to a point which is then a ‘seed’. Thereafter, once ‘born’ or germinated, that seed lives on as long as time moves on in its irreversible forward drive. Consequently, if a civilisation comes into being on the basis of just such an experience, just such a yogic process, it is immortal. It is indeed a sanatan dharma, an eternal Truth. Similarly, the ragas are eternal in that they arose from a yogic process of alignment such as the one described in the Rig Veda. Had that alignment not existed, the result would not have been the exquisite inspirations we know today but rather cacophony and perishability.

The point needs to be made regarding renovation of such a system of music that emphasis must lay exclusively on that alignment, otherwise there cannot be a renovation to the same degree as the original inspiration. But, I repeat, it is no longer understood as a re-making or re-inventing. Rather, similar to the Vedic Dharma, the raga also has an in-built mechanism of renewal. This mechanism is the individual, the interpreter, the instrument through which that cosmic inspiration is continuously renewed. Indeed, each time a raga is played in such a condition of being, a renewal is taking place. That is the marvel of the Indian system of music with its cosmic foundation. It is an expression equally founded on an eternal truth, the same truth as the dharma. Therefore, it is simply a question of the individual executor reaching the same heights in the yogic process as the Rishis of old, and renewal is spontaneous.

The problem we experience in this context is that music is no longer a yoga in India – at least to the degree it once was. True, the guru-shishya parampar or teacher-disciple tradition continues and is the basis for the transmission of the art, with a strong colouring of the mystical and yogic. But similar to other areas of Indian civilisation, the true ‘alignment’ was lost. Consequently, though the skeleton of the process exists, it cannot produce the same results. At this point, given the lack of a living exponent of this sort of art, this Vedic expression par excellence, we hear the constant demand voiced for a renewal, or else criticisms of anyone who dares to attempt the introduction of something ‘new’.

These criticisms are often justified because rather than renew we are faced with embellishments, layers, coatings cast on the original. This is easily discernible if we compare the music of North India to that of the South. The former is highly embellished. It is almost comparable to a different architectural style laid upon a temple of old, perhaps an exquisite filigree work in marble, or other such embellishments which represent an entirely different style or culture than the original.

Therefore, it is often that when one’s mood is intensely inward oriented, when the consciousness is compressed to that point where the BONE of the organism is reached, then Hindustani music is found to be insufficient to satisfy a longing for essentials and purity of form. This is only attained through Carnatic music, as the music form of the South is called. Hindustani music of the north tends to pull one outward, by virtue of this embellishment. It is similar to the Taj Mahal with its remarkably beautiful shell, a device that does indeed pin one down to that more external surface of consciousness. Whereas, Carnatic music constantly draws the consciousness within and drives the listener to experience something of that essentiality of old. South India is indeed the preserver of the culture to a remarkable degree.

 

The ‘Sound’ of Time 

 

If we carry this comparison over to the Shaft of Light in the Mother’s chamber, the same may be said. The Mother’s condition of alignment spontaneously put her ‘in tune’, first of all, with the correct time for the vision to take place. This resulted in a differentiation process in the subsequent Act of Measuring which was identical to the raga in relation to the drone, or the differentiation of the shaft of Silent Sound.

The Act of Measuring is localised in the Core of the chamber at the central base of the room. In the Mother’s vision the measure is, like in the ancient Veda, expressly connected to the Year. This is the Divine Measure or Maya. Our 365-day year is the earth’s synodic revolution, the period during which our planet has made a complete revolution around the Sun and returned approximately to the same location. It is that specific spot in the orbit which is of the utmost importance, that position of the Sun at a particular time located for the collectivity by the calendar. It is called the solar return in astrology, an important element in the art of horoscopic reading. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo also attached considerable importance to the solar return for their disciples as a time of spiritual renewal or re-charging, as it were. For each of us the date of our birth signifies the measure of the solar return. But for the planet, what might that be? That is, what might be considered the date of birth of the Earth herself?

The Earth’s ‘birth’ is the period of the Festival of Light, culminating at the 15^th degree of the sign Capricorn, or January 5^th/6^th in our calendar year. Therefore, I call this 15^th degree the soul of India as well as the soul of the Earth. Consequently, in ancient tradition as well as in contemporary Indian society, this period is considered the most auspicious, the most worthy of celebrating when the Sun makes its reappearance in that special zodiacal month. And this same period we find marked off with an astounding exactitude in the Core of the Mother’s chamber, for which reason she could refer to that shaft of light and the globe filled with this light as ‘the symbol of the future realisation’.

Similar to the raga alignment, the Core of the chamber is the element of differentiation. It cuts into the Ray of Light (sound) at a very specific point whereby the 365 days of the year come into being or materialise down the light-shaft but originated or set in motion at the sacred moment of the Festival of Light. Thus, based on the original measurements, the figure 15.20 metres the Mother gave must be somehow ‘equivalent’ to 365 days. And the chamber’s Globe must be so positioned as to mark off at its uppermost portion 21/22 December. When this is achieved a most extraordinary feat of sacred geometry is realised, what I have called the Geometry of Time. Exactly in accordance with the ancient tradition, the 15 days of the Festival are ‘captured’ in the visible portion of the light-filled Globe. Thus, its upper circumference is 21 December, its exact centre is 1^st January, and the Pedestal intervenes to interrupt the Ray at the point where the Festival culminates, 5 January, or the upper rim of the Pedestal. Thereafter, the ‘light’ is no longer seen. These 15 days are captured in the Globe because of its diameter, 70cms, to present the seeker with a transcript in architectural form of the most exquisite ‘raga’ of cosmic harmonies the Earth has ever known in this very special hymn to the sacred Festival of Light.

As I wrote in the last VISHAAL, each element in a creation of this order supports every other element. Thus, the 15-step stairway is highlighted in the visible portion of the light-filled Globe by the fact that due to its special geometric properties these 15 steps become 15 days – the 15 days of the Festival of Light. This is further integrated in the lived experience of the room by the fact that the Mother ‘saw’ this phenomenon precisely when the Earth had ‘reached’ the centre of the Globe; and she concluded ‘measuring’ just when the Earth ‘reached’ the top of the Pedestal. That is, the entire process took place within those first five days of the year – a period considered by many ancient civilisations to be ‘out of the calendar’. That was because they were seed days, the most sacred portion of the Festival and the seed from which the entire year was then to evolve. The whole exercise of the Mother’s seeing and measuring culminated over these days with the culmination of the Festival of Light – but according to the true Makar (Capricorn) Sankranti which is 21/22 December.

 

Harmony or Discord   

 

Let us now turn to the Auroville architect’s rendition of the Mother’s vision, which he and the builders claim is ‘faithful to the original’.

First of all, as already established in the last portion of this study, the architect needlessly eliminated the 15-step entrance directly into the chamber through the floor. The first cacophonous note was sounded, loud and strong. But there were many more to follow.

Instead of respecting the 15.20 metres as the ‘measure of the year’, this measurement was lost by a haphazard placement of the Globe, which in the Auroville construction is called ‘the crystal’. This cacophony, however, merits a very detailed analysis for it concerns this contemporary garbhagriha, the heart and soul of the chamber and the element which therefore demanded the utmost precision of execution to permit it to differentiate the ray/drone so that a superb harmony would arise and not the deplorable cacophony which emanates from the Auroville building.

Two measurements were mentioned for the height of the room: 15.20 metres and 15.50. In The New Way I have given the reasons for these two figures. One pertains to the length of the visible ray from the ceiling as it enters the chamber to the top of the Pedestal. The other is the height of the room, outside the 3-metre garbhagriha area where the Core stands, to the ceiling. But these details were decided respecting the strict precepts of sacred geometry, whereby, utilising one of its most hallowed diagrams, the exact dimensions of the height and width of the Pedestal emerge. This figure is called the Vesica Piscis. With the Globe’s diameter as given by the Mother, the vesica reveals the precise space the Pedestal must occupy beneath the Globe by the space provided when that original circle is duplicated according to the geometric formula of the vesica piscis, with two equal circles of interconnected diameters. The diagram below, taken from The New Way, Volume 2, page 236, makes the process clear.

It can be noted from this diagram, drawn on the basis of the specified 70cms of the Globe’s diameter, that it is this Globe which sets the measure for the chamber’s sacred Core. Everything arises out of this one sphere. All is determined by its properties. Consequently, the Mother made a specific point of emphasising the correct diameter for this all-important item.

Not so clear was the size of the Pedestal. And there was a valid reason for this. In the fluid vision of the first day of her discussion with the secretary-disciple and the architect, 3 January, the Mother mentions an approximate height for the Pedestal. But this was well before the Act of Measuring when she was inspired to give the correct diameter of the Globe, that is, on 10 January. Then out of that the true dimensions of the Pedestal were spontaneously born.

This is entirely in keeping with the knowledge content of the chamber in connection with the Solar Line manifestation, for indeed the Pedestal and its connection with the Fourth, the Son, is born of the Third. By consequence, as a yogic act of seeing, the Pedestal MUST be the direct outcome of the Globe’s dimensions. And this must be fully verifiable on the basis of sacred geometry if in truth we are dealing with a piece of true sacred architecture and in particular one expressing the highest Vedic Seeing and the Supramental Truth. The Mother’s original plan displays this uniqueness and singular characteristic. But not so the architect’s rendition in Auroville. There we find the Pedestal, which has become ‘a stand’, totally out of harmony with the Globe (crystal). There are no geometric relationships between the two. They are entirely disproportionate and disconnected, as the illustration (A) below reveals of the finalised version in Auroville. In the sketch the dotted lines stand for the other symbols, four in all, which form the stand. The crystal is thus perched on the tips of these wrought-iron symbols; the triangles’ lower tips serve as the feet of the stand.

 

 

If we leave aside all recondite or esoteric considerations and simply view the above with an eye for aesthetics and harmony of proportions, it is clear that those responsible for the above rendering (A) are deficient even in these basics of architecture and aesthetics. This stand is weak, effete and visually unable to sustain even the empty crystal. Compare it to illustration B of the Core, taken from The New Way, Volume 2, page 238.

Indeed, we return to the question of the EMPTINESS of the Auroville rendition of the Mother’s creation. The transparency of the architect’s crystal indicates emptiness. By consequence and to avoid this result, the Mother specifically requested a TRANSLUCENT and not transparent globe. But insofar as this clear instruction (see TVN 7/3, page 38) was not heeded, the crystal, transparent as it is, conveys emptiness and not fulness. That is, it is a ‘symbol’ entirely opposite in import to all that the Vedic Dharma stands for – not to mention Sri Aurobindo’s supramental message. This, however, was only the first distortion. The next is indeed an outcome of the first.

I have pointed out that the Pedestal is born of the Globe. In the Auroville rendition the stand is as empty as the crystal it supports. Given the fact that we are always dealing with Truth, albeit in the negative, the architect in desiring to create a temple in his own image rather than the Divine’s, and by the special properties of this unique manifestation, could only follow the same ‘law’ in his deliberate falsification of the original. Thus, his ‘stand’ was as linked to his ‘crystal’ as the Mother’s Pedestal was linked to her Globe. The latter reproduces the Cosmic Truth: Fulness and not the Void, the Fourth born of the Third. Whereas, in the architect’s temple we have a display of the shadow of that Cosmic Truth. We have the essence of the Cosmic Ignorance. In a word, a void and empty ‘crystal’ has given birth to an empty and weak ‘stand’.

The architect has expressed the nature of emptiness in the stand again by going contrary to the Mother’s indications and refusing to execute the Pedestal in stone, with Sri Aurobindo’s symbols carved thereupon, on a closed rectangle space of perfect proportions, thoroughly in harmony with and entirely born of the Globe it upholds. Contrarily, he has made the stand of wrought iron, with Sri Aurobindo’s symbols shaped in this metal. Not only is the stand seen as weak given its dimensions which are too small and bear no relation to the size of the crystal, but this see-through wrought iron construction, similar to the transparent crystal, cannot but convey in equal measure the message of Emptiness – ergo, the crux of the Cosmic Ignorance.

In such a rendition, it is impossible for the core of the chamber to capture the essence of the Festival of Light, as indeed it is meant to do. For this, the first prerequisite is a light-filled Globe. Second is an accurately positioned Globe, a placement which can only come into being by the correct height of the Pedestal.

When these prerequisites are fulfilled the result is a core as it figures in The New Way: a light-filled, self-luminous globe, but with a pedestal cutting into that light at a very specific point so that: 1) the Globe ‘consists’ of 15 days – precisely the 15 days of the Festival or 21 December to 5 January, and 2) the descending Ray, of which the Globe is the culmination, is terminated at a particular point in order to establish the divine Measure of the year of 365 days as the temple’s central axis. Thereafter, no further ‘light’ is seen. It is, by that time, compressed. The ‘seed’ is born, the Transcendent has been compressed to this ‘point’. And this is ‘seen’ in the Globe from its centre to the top of the Pedestal, the period of the year – 1 to 5 January – when compression to a ‘seed’ occurs. Thereafter the year unfolds from this magic of gnostic time.

While the descending solar Ray is the 365-day year and its ‘measure’ ends at the top of the Pedestal, or 5^th January in calendar time, the operation in the Pedestal is hidden; indeed, following the hallowed tradition of Guha, the Hidden One, Shiva’s son or the 4^th. It is an alchemical process very accurately described in the Rigveda, in verses such as those I have already quoted:

‘The young Mother bears the Boy pressed down in her secret being
and gives him not to the Father; but his force is not diminished…

 

‘…Who is this Boy, O young Mother, whom thou bearest in thyself
when thou are compressed into form, but thy vastness gives him
birth?…’

 

The third power in the Solar Line is the ‘young Mother’, in contrast to the 6 or the cosmic Divine Mother. The compression of that ‘vastness’ discussed in these hymns is of light/energy, and if we ‘see’ the Globe as this figure, we ‘see’ it as the compressed (contained in this spherical form of special geometric properties) womb wherefrom the Boy (the Fourth) is born, himself ‘compressed’ into form. The Pedestal describes and reveals the rebirth process of Sri Aurobindo, or his passage from Transcendent (9) to Immanent (0/1) or the Son. It is a hidden process, not visible to the eye, for which reason, among others which I will discuss further on, the Pedestal is a closed form. It was undertaken on the other side, as it were, in the subtle dimension. Therefore, it is entirely incorrect to have an OPEN Pedestal as in the Auroville rendition. It contradicts everything the Pedestal represents of the Supramental Manifestation. This alchemical process is hidden because of the nature of the operation and the dimensions to be linked. But it has been known and recorded in the Tradition when we read the alchemical dialogue between Isis and Osiris, ‘One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the One as the fourth.’

That One, the Transcendent Sri Aurobindo, is indeed the same ‘fourth’ of the above dialogue: the One is reborn as the Fourth. Or else there is the Puranic rendition of the same occurrence in the narrations of the birth of Guha, the Hidden One, Shiva’s Son. As such he is the fourth of that special family, brother of Ganesh. It is for this reason that the text states time and again regarding this Son that it is ‘Shiva himself who stands before you’, in the form of the War God. He is the War God because he is Mars, the fourth planet and fourth in the Line. (We shall discuss the role of this planet in the contemporary Indian destiny further on in great detail, for example, with regard to the collapse of sports. Mars is the planet of sports, therefore it is understandable that if an affliction is experienced in its regard, as in the Matrimandir where the Point representative of Mars is left a ‘void’, this same condition will be reflected on an increasing scale in the nation as a whole; much as if a negative ‘horoscope’ had been cemented as the country’s unalterable destiny.)

Succinctly, this is the alchemical operation in the Pedestal. It produces a compressed seed, a compaction of the transcendent vastness whereby its ‘force is not diminished’ by this compression but is only compacted into a golden Seed, Hiranyaretas, as indeed the Vedic Agni is known. And it is this compression to a Point which upholds the universal manifestation as a ‘pillar’. This, in turn, is the pillar of Light, ‘up-pillaring the worlds’. For which reason I have stated that the Mother’s temple is the purest rendition of the Vedic Law that has ever been expressed in architectural form.

On this basis it is evident that having left that Point void in the Auroville rendition, the architect has been a faithful instrument of the Cosmic Ignorance, as I have written earlier. If at all he desired to penetrate the world of the Symbol, as he claims, and make of his creative act something worthwhile, had he entered into the Mother’s consciousness he would not have left that centremost point void but would have fashioned it of solid gold. But this was impossible given the totality of prevailing conditions which, by the miracle of the Laws of Correspondence, has made the construction of the Cosmic Truth an impossibility in Auroville. Given the quality of emptiness of the crystal, given the emptiness of the disproportionate stand, bearing no relation to that crystal, the point beneath the two indeed could only be a void. From the first moment of rejection of the Mother’s original plan in early 1970, and later my own efforts up to 1977, this ‘truth’ was sealed.

 

The Festival of Saturn, the Time-Spirit  

 

I have given the amount of days ‘contained’ in the solar Ray as 365. Now we must turn our attention to the Pedestal which carries the exercise to even greater heights of Vedic Seeing. The amount of days ‘contained’ in the Pedestal are 13, given its height which is expressly arrived at on the basis of the vesica piscis, or a direct product of the Globe. If we add these 13 to the 365 days of the year (of the Ray and Globe), the total is 378. And these, by a wonder of the Geometry of Time, are directly connected to the Festival of Light, as I shall explain.

Each sign of the zodiac is allotted a planetary ruler in traditional astrology, similar to the days of the week which in most languages, including Sanskrit, are named after one of the planets. The sign Capricorn in which the Festival falls is thus ruled by Saturn. Consequently, this same Festival was known in ancient Rome as the Saturnalia, considering that it fell in Saturn’s period of the year.

If the 365 days of the Ray are the measure of the Earth’s synodic period, or the year, and the Globe is the light-filled 15 days of the Festival, by the extraordinary magical proportions of the Globe, in connection with everything else, we come to a measure of 13 days for the 50cms Pedestal. And by adding them to the rest, the total of 378 days gives us exactly the synodic year of none other than Saturn, ruler of Capricorn and that very period of the Festival of Light. The full measure of the Ray, the Globe and the Pedestal comes to 15.70 metres, from ceiling to bottom of the central axis.

With this exact measurement of the Pedestal, marking off January 5^th at the upper rim, Saturn is incorporated in another extraordinary manner by serving as a direct link between the Third and Sri Aurobindo. This involves the position of all-important Saturn, India’s ruler in addition to all the rest, in his natal horoscope.

Saturn in Sri Aurobindo’s horoscope of birth is found precisely at the 15^th degree of Capricorn. This of course corresponds to January 5 in our calendar year, and it is the birthday of the Third, through whom his rebirth occurred, and the point of the soul of India. Never has such non-speculative cosmic precision been recorded in an architectural plan.

But without this exact measurement, 15.70, there can be no reproduction of this wondrous Act of Seeing. For never has such a feat been accomplished via sacred geometry and architecture, drawing them utterly out of the realm of the abstract and speculative, the bane of all research on these subjects, and carrying them into the Vedic truth-conscious plane where the symbol is the thing symbolised. At no place on the planet, at any time, in any age has the Act of Seeing reached such awe-inspiring heights. That Consciousness is primarily characterised by UNITY, a vision of harmony and interconnection whereby each thing supports each other thing. The Festival of Light is rendered in architecture not just by the 15-step entrance into the chamber; or the 15 days ‘contained’ in the Globe – exactly 21 December to 5 January; or the time when the Mother ‘saw’ that Core which was exactly in that Festival of Light of 1970. The Pedestal adds the final ingredient to the unified vision of the Truth-Consciousness through Saturn, ruler of the Festival or the Saturnalia, and the measure of that planet’s 378-day synodic year. For this reason I have stated time and again that a pick-and-choose attitude is inadmissible in those pretentious enough to take upon themselves the task of reproducing such a vision as the Mother’s. Yet this has been the attitude of the architect, for which reason nothing of all this remains in his building.

But even in their own superficial field of purely external considerations, of aesthetics, the Mother’s plan incorporates symbols in a way that no contemporary architect can hope to better. The Globe contains the 15 days of the Festival of Light, and it is precisely full of light. It is not transparent. It is light-filled. It does not reflect the images of the builders and architect and all the devotees who visit the chamber, as is presently the case. In the Mother’s vision we have a pristine rendering of the symbol equal to the thing symbolised, and aesthetically, visually that very thing. There are no obtuse, recondite, contrived symbols. There is the Light, where it should be – filling the Globe. There is the closed Pedestal – powerful, capable of concentrating, accumulating the compressed Light from the Globe it supports and upholds. A Pedestal that is able to stand as the Stable Constant, as the Immobile amidst the mobile, as the Divine Will working in the world.

 

The Ignorance Exposed, or the Logic of Equivalency 

 

At this point, once again we are justified in questioning how, without any adequate credentials qualifying him for the task, the architect was able to gain control over the construction of the Matrimandir and for a long period of 18 years to maintain that absolute and undisputed control, a situation which permitted him to destroy the Mother’s creation while fulfilling, in his own words, his life’s ambition. If there had been no coherent voice opposing his designs and defiance of the divine Writ, no solid and irrefutable body of higher knowledge to challenge his ignorant intrusion in a field entirely beyond his capacity, then we could assume that his act was simply ignorance of the facts and that these once known would have encouraged him to revise his plans, though ignorantia juri non-excusat. But since he was constantly confronted with this Knowledge, and since it had been regularly plagiarised by the powers-that-be in Auroville, this escape via the route of innocent unknowing is closed to him. His actions were deliberate, premeditated and permanently damaging. Given his obstinacy and clinging to darkness rather than the light of reason and higher knowledge, one is forced to draw these conclusions.

Such being the case, we must ask how it is that this secular, commercial architect and his colleagues could have carried out this long construction process and that not one person among the residents of Auroville or in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, or indeed among the disciples and devotees of the Mother anywhere in the world raised their voice, even a feeble one, to bring this usurpation and demolition of the knowledge to a halt. Especially in view of the fact that the campaign for adoption of the original began long before actual construction of the building. (To be fair, I must mention that recently I heard of an attempt made by an intrepid soul in Auroville, an Italian woman, to confront the architect with the fact that ‘the measurements are all wrong’. His reply to this was, ‘Do you think the Divine cares about a few centimetres?’ This reply, it must be noted, was given in spite of the fact that he has the Mother’s own words on record insisting upon the services of an engineer only, and not an architect – precisely to secure the desired ‘precision’ which he has ridiculed, time and again.)

In seeking to find a reason for this general indifference, we must realise that the Matrimandir is a representative model, an isolated fragment of time/consciousness which describes the truth that IS. This means that if these forces were able to gain and maintain their hold over the temple entirely unchallenged, and if the Matrimandir in its essence was to be the field for the reestablishment of the Vedic Dharma and as such represented the real conditions prevailing in India where that Dharma is to be reestablished, then the same defiance and impotence which has been revealed in this sordid episode must be reflected in the greater sphere or the nation as a whole. And indeed, as I have often pointed out, in the very species itself; that is, representative of those flaws in the human consciousness which impede it from reaching a higher rung on the ladder of evolution as a species.

If I have stated that the primary objective of the undermining of the Point was intended to dislodge the soul as ‘pillar’ upholding the Dharma and hence the Indian nation, and if, in turn, that Point is the consolidation of Will, of Agni, and in the shadow-temple this Point has been left void, we understand that this Will itself, on all levels, is effectively absent.

How else to explain, for example, the simple fact that three wars have been fought with Pakistan over Kashmir, directly or indirectly, all of which were WON by India, and yet India did not claim and regain all of Kashmir which had in its entirety joined the union at the time of Independence? Concession upon concession was given to Pakistan, including the return of land won in the last and most victorious war of 1971, as well as 93,000 prisoners of war. Yet nothing of what India had lost was demanded and regained, though this was precisely what had been disputed and fought for. The Shimla Agreement, which was the outcome of the final negotiations between the two countries in 1971, has served mainly to provide an opening for what is now transpiring in Kashmir, it would seem. In addition, Pakistan now has a nuclear weapon to add to the dangerous alchemy.

It is unfortunate to have to state that India, given its policy of non-violence, has lost the capacity to deal with victory. For the undermined Point in the Dharma, related directly as it is to Will, is particularly connected to the Kshatriya segment of the energy base – both individually and collectively. This means that the 20^th century policy of non-violence was simply the final blow to that much earlier undermining and the disintegration of the energy base of the three harmonised and mutually-supporting gunas, or qualities, which I have discussed at length in the previous VISHAAL. The segment especially vulnerable was rajas, particularly reflected in the Kshatriya or Warrior capacity in its widest and most comprehensive sense. This includes, for instance, the capacity to rule as well as to wage and win wars, and even to bear defeat.

It is a simple matter to handle defeat. Far more difficult is to be the victor. In India’s case, the policy of non-violence was founded on a severe infliction of guilt brought about by a tremendously powerful inverted will. That is, a negative ploy, a negation. The result is that while it may attain its aim and thus lay claim to a certain success, it is structured negatively. Guilt then corrodes the true will, or Agni of the ancient tradition. It is as if water were continuously poured over the fires (Agni) which an aspiration for wholeness and integrality kindle. The fires are stoked, but they are doused with water just at the moment when that special combustion should occur, that precious energy which the Aryan Warrior strives so nobly and courageously to engender and release as fuel for the rise to the Summit of his or her quest. By consequence, given this undermining, we are left with a shadow of the true will, – that is, no substance, no skambha; or in the Auroville construction, a void central point.

In facing a rajasic character such as we find in the northwestern portion of the Capricorn hieroglyphic geography of India, this substanceless condition is quickly taken advantage of. India has thus faced Pakistan after each war as the victor in name only but not in substance or inner fibre because of its guilt in being ‘violent’. And it goes without saying that this attitude serves in the present to condition India’s response to the open support Pakistan gives to terrorism and secession in both Kashmir and the Punjab, and extending to other parts of the country now. Unless this is understood and, above all, dealt with at the dimension of the ancient roots of the problem, no true and lasting ‘victory’ can come about.

But for this a great courage is required in order to question the unquestionable. The new India has been established on these inverted concepts which serve to drain the nation of the impeccable energy it needs in order to wage and win the war as a true Kshatriya. Its policy has indeed been one of appeasement, as many hold, because this is the only one it knows given the tools at its command for handling these unruly energies let loose upon it over the centuries. The same attitude of appeasement operating within the country at so many levels, often justified on the basis of the ‘wideness’ and ‘tolerance’ of Hinduism, was witnessed in moments when it should have conquered and faced the moment of victory on the basis of a clear knowledge of what exactly it had been fighting for, and therefore as the true Kshatriya, guided by these higher and wider considerations which tradition informs us were the contributions of the sage who stood above the ruler and advised him or her in these intricacies and without whose guidance that impeccable energy could not have been sustained. Not humbled and humiliated because of a fictitious and misguided guilt over the hard-won victory, but rather conscious of the force it was dealing with, the sanctity of the land it was fighting for or defending, and the real strategy to be followed according to the demands of integrality and harmony.

 

Contemporary Tools of Conquest: The Sacrosanct Hoax  

 

Let us now contrast this with the ancient concept of the Aryan warrior as he comes to us across the ages in the Rigveda. Indeed, it is in the verses of this Veda that the question of compression is discussed in connection with that warrior Son and hence WILL. But just as the undermining affected through guilt the ability to win a war and enjoy the benefits thereof – in the true spirit of the Aryan warrior of old, the Enjoyer – so too has this concept been thoroughly undermined by the interpretation of the Rigveda precisely by western ‘conquerors’. And similar to the ‘conquerors’ of the Mother’s temple who stand unopposed in their destructive mis-rendering, so too has the Rigveda been twisted to serve the invaders. And following the same pattern, there is no voice in the nation, in the corridors where it matters, powerful enough to actually bring this farce to an end. The Indian researcher, no less than the occidental, clings to this misrepresentation as if survival of the nation depended upon the continuance of this hoax. And it is this combination or long accumulation of events and hoaxes which have gone into the destruction of the collective will, rendering the nation impotent in the face of aggressions. I shall provide an example taken directly from the contemporary world of academia.

But let me first make it clear that when I write of the Rigveda as a record of a yogic process and not a text of history, I do not mean that the battles, conquests and victories were ‘symbolic’ in the sense that Mohandas Gandhi sought to interpret the Bhagavad Gita from the Mahabharat, India’s second important epic and moulding force of the consciousness of her people. Gandhi sought to make the text ‘non-violent’. The struggle was thus, in his interpretation, inner, psychological, spiritual. Not a real war, only ‘symbolic’ of the inner and moral struggle of good over evil.

This is not the position I hold regarding either the Gita or the Rigveda. As anyone knows who has experienced this type of yoga, the ‘Aryan warrior’ uses conditions of the real world, the harsh and inescapable realities of life for the purpose of his or her self-perfecting quest. The reason lies in the nature of that ancient quest: it was Earth-oriented, not otherworldly, regardless of the significance attributed to the summit of the ‘journey’, Swar.

The objective was to become the Sun. This meant an alignment similar to the Sun in our solar system which makes of it a true centre – that is, able to ‘hold’, or to hold in orbit of itself numerous planets of diversified expressions. Only a special alignment process would permit this centre to come into being. The Warrior used every condition and circumstance OF LIFE (indeed, in the apt description Sri Aurobindo gave … ‘All life is Yoga’) for this attainment so that Time would become an ally and oblige both positive and negative to serve him in his quest.

Thus, the Rigveda is entirely ‘historical’ in this sense. We must understand those circumscribing conditions which the Aryan used in the way described above. But unless those ‘historic conditions’ are analysed on the backdrop of this special yogic process of alignment, of becoming the Sun, no coherent and truthful understanding of the hymns will be possible and the Rigveda can then be interpreted to serve the devious purposes of invaders and colonisers, as indeed has been the case for the past several hundred years.

To expose the flaws in the ‘historic premise’ and the real purpose for this deliberate misinterpretation, I shall dissect just one text of contemporary academia as a sample to be carried over to every other text of this order, all of which have so heavily coated the mind of the intellectual elite in India, severely hampering the process of national integration.

We shall deal with these ‘historic’ references further on. But first it is necessary to clarify that the ‘symbol’ used in the Vedic context is entirely misleading. Yet this is difficult for the 20^th century researcher to understand. The present poise of the human consciousness, in particular in the highly mentally oriented creature, the intellectual of various persuasions, is characterised by an intrinsically dualistic perspective. Consequently, analysis is always undertaken from this separative poise. Thus a chasm exists, a great cleavage whereby Mind casts a cover over the true ‘eye’, exactly as described in the hymns concerning the Aryan struggle to attain the luminous solar Truth-Consciousness. The difficulty is very accurately perceived as a ‘cover’, and the action is epitomised in the character of the serpent Vritra, whose name derives precisely from the root, to cover.

The ancient Rishi knew that given the binary structure of the human being, this ‘cover’ would emerge as fumes or vapours from the chasm of the void for reasons which I have described in Volume 3 of The New Way. Suffice to state for our present purposes that mind, when it stands as regent, as apex in the echelon of consciousness, inflicts this dualistic perception characterised by a separative vision. In the Veda, it is Vritra, the coverer. The goal of the quest is to remove that cover, to thus conquer Vritra. We find this same characteristic figured in a more recent document, in St John’s Revelation or Apocalypse, Chapter 12, as the Red Dragon.

The difficulty a ‘covering’ of this nature imposes is twofold. First, it is the separation which comes into being between ‘the symbol’ and ‘the thing symbolised’. In fact, for the Vedic Seer, ancient and contemporary, there is no ‘symbol’ as we have come to understand the word. There is nothing that stands for something else. Everything reveals the truth that IS, or, in the terms we have often employed, the inherent dharma.

With a perceptive ‘eye’ of this order, it is understandable that Sanskrit, the language of the Veda, should itself demonstrate this exceptional ability to render the symbol the thing symbolised. Indeed, one of its main features is the multiple meaning of words so that the truth of all these levels could be conveyed. As a result we have the cow venerated through the ages because of her function in the above context, as epitomising that many-dimensional truth. Cow, go in Sanskrit, is both the animal and a ray of light, in particular sunlight. It is rare that the animal is experienced as one with the thing symbolised. But it is entirely possible and does sometimes occur in modern India. And the universal property by which this ‘seeing’ comes into being is Time.

I have explained this in some detail in Animals in the Emerging Cosmos TVN 3/4-5-6. From that analysis, or record of seeing, of a lived experience with the cow, her connection with a ray is perfectly clear when that Ray in turn is known to be a certain space of time. That is, the divine Maya comes to our aid and we realise that the gestation of the cow (nine months), when involved with or integrated into a yogic process, such as I have described in ‘Animals in the Emerging Cosmos’, is this sacred space of time which is that luminous Ray (the Golden Rod of western tradition). It forces us to remove the ‘cover’ from our eyes, or, in the proper Vedic expression, from the face of the Sun, and to see the two as one, or the symbol as the thing symbolised. As such, it is no longer a ‘symbol’ as we have come to understand the word, because of which we cannot appreciate what the Vedic Rishi meant by his wild and imaginative exclamations.

The second point I would like to make is the personification technique employed so that the ‘symbol’ might become even more concrete in our yoga and perception of a many-dimensional reality. These, it must be stressed, are condensations or alignments of consciousness. When heavily ‘tilted’ they are hostile or dark inasmuch as these ‘tilts’ do indeed create a ‘covering’. The light is either decreased or increased. The Sun, that ‘eye’ which Vritra covers, is either experienced shadowless, or from a poise of consciousness whereby the Sun is directly overhead and therefore casts no shadows, as in Capricorn, the period of the Cosmic Midday and the Sun’s highest position in the heavens. Or it is fully obscured in the darkness of night as in Cancer, the Cosmic Midnight position of the Sun when the luminary is at the Earth’s nadir. Vritra then personifies that opposite condition to a shadowless perception and existence. Vritra is not a symbol. Vritra is 1) a cosmic/Earth alignment, and 2) a human alignment of consciousness. Vritra is real and not ‘symbolic’ inasmuch as our Earth does indeed ‘experience’ the alignment conspicuous to his nature, and the human being as well. In other words, Vritra is a real problem for the Earth and also for the human creation. Both give life to Vritra. Thus he can be known on many levels: cosmic, societal/civilisational, and individual. What is required for this personification to come about is a condensation around an axis, be this planetary/cosmic or individual. Or else a collective consciousness. Vritra cannot ‘exist’ without these channels, without these conditions.

Similarly, if the human being produces a Vritra-consciousness, it is due to his misalignment whereby perception is ‘tilted’, his axial alignment is such that it resembles the southernmost reach of the Sun at the June (Cancer) Solstice, or else at the midnight nadir and variations thereupon, in contrast to the December (Capricorn) Solstice and the Sun’s midday shadowless luminosity. This means that in order to dissolve the consciousness we call Vritra, it is simply a question of introducing a different alignment, one closer to the Capricorn midday position, and all that this signifies. In other words, a shift from the binary to the unitary system. With this accomplished, Vritra dissolves simply because that off-centre condensation can no longer take place.

Two factors emerge from the above. One is the aid Vritra can be in our quest, our ‘journey’, to use the Vedic term. And this is because Vritra will not disappear as long as the misalignment persists. Thus, for the yogi and true seeker these obstructions, these ‘hostile forces’ – the Lord of Nations is an example in contemporary times, to whom I have referred in the Auroville context – compel us to make a progress. They are truly like shadows pursuing us relentlessly. Wherever we go, we draw this shadow along with us, stuck to us. We cannot escape.

And finally the darkest and most persistent shadow of all is Death. But Death is as illusory as his lesser agents who plague us daily and inescapably. When the species, as a whole, experiences this new alignment as an evolutionary feature, then the final and foremost shadow, Death, will also be dissolved. Then, as a race, for the race, the true and full Satya Yuga or Golden Age of the cosmic midday Capricorn Sun will have manifested. This is what the Festival of Light presages and for which reason it has been a revered segment of time for so many millennia and in many different cultures.

Let us contrast this Vedic perception of reality with the formulations of religions in our 9^th Manifestation. All of them attribute an entirely fixed and permanent character to their respective personifications of these shadows. Thus, Satan of the Middle Eastern religions is, like in Vedic times, a personified ‘being’. But the vast difference between this Satan and Vritra, for example, is that while Satan is an eternal antagonist, Vritra’s existence is entirely subject to one’s poise of consciousness. In other words, Vritra is the devil in OUR image. Altering that ‘image’ in a significant way causes Vritra to dissolve. This is also why exact measurements and alignment in a representative cosmically-based edifice such as the Hindu Temple or the Matrimandir are of foremost importance. In a structure of stone, concrete and steel, we are fixing a wrong alignment. That is, we are rendering the Vritra consciousness, or the Lord of Nations, PERMANENT, not dissolvable as in the organic, evolutionary human consciousness which can be transformed at will. This is also why to undo a misalignment, only the services of one knowledgeable of the character of the force captured in the distorted structure can be called in. That is, even demolition, if it is required, must be done knowledgeably.

The other distinguishing feature is that there is only one stable constant in the Vedic perception. It is the Light – or the principle of unity, if you will. But this too merits some elaboration.

In the Veda we have the luminosity of the truth-conscious Sun. Superimposed on this Sun are the ‘covers’ (Vritra) thrown up by our poise vis-à-vis that luminary. The Sun is the stable Truth, the only permanent and unchanging reality of cosmic existence, so beautifully and accurately described in the Rigveda as ‘that which moves and that which moves not’ – for indeed, the Sun is to our solar system fixed and immobile, while to the centre of the galaxy it does indeed move, carrying all its family members with it in a progression ever closer and deeper into that more central Sun. The act of Becoming permits the evolving consciousness to attain an alignment with our luminary in a conscious process – for this is the most important feature of cosmic existence. The Sun of Truth-Consciousness is Satyam, truth and being; but it is only ‘attainable’, rendered ‘audible’, perceived, made conscious through the act of becoming, central to which is Time.

Consequently, the Veda focuses almost entirely on Time. The main ‘axis’ of the hymns is the year, and that is the Cow or Ray, so beautifully rendered in the Mother’s chamber in the pure Vedic imagery of the central Ray of the Sun, an architectural rendering which is the most perfect epitomisation of everything contained in the Vedic universe.

In the course of the year, the truth-conscious Sun was seen and one BECAME the Sun when Vritra and Vala and the Dasyus were conquered, by which means the ‘veils’ covering that Sun were removed and its full glory emerged, enveloped, fashioned the consciousness of the Aryan warrior in its own image – i.e., shadowless. That meant a new alignment whereby the correct axis of consciousness emerged in the Aryan warrior and these cosmic phenomena were refashioned. The Aryan was thus the instrument re-tuned by the Supreme, where upon a new and better harmony was played.

 

The Eclipse of the Vedic Sun

 

There have been attempts to understand the Rigveda correctly, many in fact. Foremost is Sri Aurobindo’s rendering. Not only did he seek to understand the real meaning of the hymns, but he used them for his yoga. As his Record of Yoga reveals, which is currently being published in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram for the first time, he sought to make of the Rigveda his manual of Yoga. The final results of his endeavours are, of course, not given in the Record. Indeed, if one were to use his Record as a manual, as I am sure many are now attempting, nothing of the Truth-Consciousness would come into being in one’s quest. Sri Aurobindo in those early years was simply cutting a path through the jungle that has come to surround the Veda, similar to the dense tropical jungles which have engulfed the temples and pyramids of Central America, or the sands which covered the Sphinx at Giza, and which, interestingly, were removed in 1926, precisely the year when Sri Aurobindo had completed that very phase of his long and laborious Yoga. Surely Vritra, in the evolutionary progression of consciousness, had been dealt many blows by his hard labour.

But that was only the first phase. Thereafter he entered another which culminated in his passing, for which he employed the Vedic technique of compression in order to emerge as the Point, the ‘son of the White Mother’, whose ‘womb’ in turn is compressed in order to allow for HIS compression and return as the 4^th, the Son, the Point or Agni; or else, as the 10^th in the Puranic line, Kalki. New, realigned axis and navel of the world.

In order for a sadhak to follow Sri Aurobindo along the path he opened, he would have to live the above ‘death’ by extreme compression consciously. Yet this is not necessary. The purpose of Sri Aurobindo’s laborious, painstaking early phase of yoga, detailed minutely in his Record, was simply to cut through that jungle and open the path to what Time has covered over in thick and dense veils – Time, or the serpent Vritra who for the misaligned is the Determinator, the Compeller, but for the realigned is the Instrument, the Ally. To prove the point of his quest in this regard, we have Sri Aurobindo’s own words when he received psychically a list of 9 yogic attainments which he was to strive for; the 9^th referred to Time: ‘Time must no longer be determinative, but only an instrumental factor in the siddhi (realisation or power).’ (A&R, Vol. 13, No. 2, Dec.1989)

He understood that the Rigvedic process would ultimately produce instrumental Time, the greatest ally in our quest, as individuals, as a civilisation, as a species. The path he hewed through the jungle is opened. There is no need to labour over the details he has already worked out. Or the Mother, for that matter. Indeed, we move ahead in time and with the aid of time; and in the Mother’s plan of the Vedic chamber, we discover each and every conquest they made and the unveiled supramental sun-ray which we can attain instantly by aligning our vision to that midday Sun.

This, of course, is easier said than done, as the fiasco of the Matrimandir construction in Auroville demonstrates, where every choice the architects and builders made in the effort, supposedly, to reproduce the Mother’s vision, produced the opposite, its shadow. For our race is still a misaligned  phenomenon. Cover upon cover cloud our vision, and they seem to increase rather than diminish, as the architecture of the shadow-temple proves. Or else there is the work of academics, the western and even the oriental Indologists who continue to serve Vritra rather than the truth or even true scholarship.

Let me provide an example, for which I must again refer to A.L. Basham’s compilation A Cultural History of India, a series of articles by prominent scholars, each of whom has specialised in a different area of Indian history. His book is especially interesting for our purposes, hence I refer to it occasionally, because he has selected material from the foremost exponents of the different theories pertaining to Indian history, from Vedic times to the present. And it is a recent enough publication (1975) to serve our purposes insofar as from the time of its publication, not much progress has been made in the corridors of Indology regarding the Rigveda. Thus, we can quote portions of this 1975 publication and safely assume that no further light has been thrown on the matter. Indeed, I shall now provide an example of just how efficient a scholar can be as an agent of Vritra, as a tool for creating further layers or covers to obscure the Sun. What I shall quote will reveal that in terms of the Rigveda at least, it is no longer a veil, or a series of veils. It is a total solar eclipse.

This is what Dr. T. Burrow, professor of Sanskrit and Fellow of Balliol College at Oxford has to say about those enigmatic Aryans, our forefathers on the path to the midday supramental Sun. I have enumerated some of the points he makes as follows:

 

1)  ‘…So far we have had to rely entirely on linguistic relationships to account for the origin and early movements of the Aryans’… (A Cultural History of India, page 23)

Let me begin by reminding the reader that the accepted and undisputed fact of history, by occidentals and orientals alike, is that the Aryans invaded the northern portion of the subcontinent around 1500 BC. This is truly indisputable now. There is no evidence of any contrary theory or hope of a substantial revision of the postulation. In discussing this matter in depth, basing our analysis on Prof. Burrow’s arguments, I believe the results will be rather surprising and perhaps shocking when we come to realise how utterly limited is the academic mind when it approaches an investigation involving a consciousness which perceives ‘the symbol as the thing symbolised’.

Thus Prof. Burrow explicitly states that the Indologist has relied exclusively on linguistics or the ‘science’ of philology to arrive at the above conclusion. In the light of what I have written concerning the special quality of the language Burrow has treated in his investigation, we have to question what his line of approach has been. It is of fundamental importance, for as he himself has pointed out, scholars have had to rely entirely on ‘linguistic relationships’ to reach the conclusion that the Aryans invaded the subcontinent and through a series of battles with the tribes they encountered, gradually came to displace them and establish their Vedic culture throughout the whole of North India. In his paper, Burrow’s statement are conspicuous for their contrived flavour, the doubts they cast on the motives for the conclusions he reaches, and finally just plain ignorance of certain essentials, without a knowledge of which the Rigveda can never be understood. I base this assessment on his inability – similar to that of any academic – to deal with that language on its own terms rather than the terms the ‘Enlightenment’ has imposed on these ancient and sacred things.

 

In countless verses there is mention of a city, or cities, as for example, ‘…They have called to him, getting wide knowledge, they guard sleeplessly the strength, they have entered the strong city…’. Professor Burrow considers such references to be conclusive proof of an Aryan invasion and the destruction of the Indus Valley civilisation’s cities. He writes,

 

2)  ‘The evidence of the Vedic texts themselves is decidedly in favour of the former view, notably on account of the frequent references to the destruction of cities, the war-god Indra being known as puramdara, “destroyer of cities”. Agni, the fire-god is also prominently mentioned in this capacity, understandably, since many of the Indus cities appear to have been destroyed by fire. In view of these repeated references the conclusion seems inescapable that the destruction of the Indus cities was the work of the Aryans.’ (Ibid, page 25.)

 

One has to make every effort to be charitable in reading the above. But unbelievably this is the stuff our academic world is fed on, and feeds others, namely our children who depend on such research in their formative years for the fashioning of their outlook. In addition, the prison is constructed of such material and devised on such a plan that none can break out while still aspiring to a place in the sun of academia.

Each scholar is obliged by an accepted methodology to build on what other scholars have already published and the research already done. To secure a doctorate it is obligatory that a list of references be included of sources from which the aspirant has taken material for his or her own construction. That is, it is a new ‘wing’ in a building of already well-established foundations. And any further work on the Vedic civilisation, for example, cannot be accepted unless it is simply an addition to the already well-established foundation of the philologists who have preceded Professor Burrow. He is permitted to differ, but never to step out of the edifice. In other words, the prison is the method, not even the conclusion. It is to be noted that one of the greatest successes of the Lord of Nations has been the strictures placed upon the human consciousness whereby only mental formations, formulations, speculations, are accepted as valid specimens of the scientific methodology. The result is that research can never be liberated from the existing edifice the duality of mind imposes.

By consequence, scholars such as Burrow are trapped in a consciousness which can never SEE the symbol as the thing symbolised. As a result, he makes statements which, for one who does see, are almost ludicrous, – i.e., that since Indus valley cities were destroyed by fire and since Agni of the ‘Aryans’ was a fire-god, and he is referred to as a ‘destroyer of cities’, we are driven to the ‘inescapable conclusion’ that the Aryan warriors did indeed bring to an end the Indus valley civilisation. This, of course, ‘proves’ that they came AFTER that civilisation, or around 1500 BC.

In view of the role of Agni in the yogic process of the Rigveda, the Point, the axis, the compression, and so forth, so clearly explained in the text, not as ‘symbols’ but as the truth that IS, Burrow’s conclusion is indeed astounding. Yet, and here is the rub, these conclusions based on the accepted methodology of academia, are the stuff of which the whole edifice of the origins of Indian culture are formed. And if this were not enough, they are the ‘conclusions’ which have eased the conscience of both the Islamic invaders and the British colonisers. (In fact, Burrow often refers to the Aryans as ‘colonisers’.) They are indeed the conclusions which lie at the root of the two-nation theory which in turn gave rise to a partitioned India in this century. Thus, the consequences of this sort of inane deductive process are far-reaching and have greatly maimed the fledgling Indian nation.

I have stated in earlier portions of this study that the purpose of the Indologist’s emphasis on the invasion theory is to consolidate a Euro-centric world view. This is entirely borne out by Burrow, in no uncertain terms. To illustrate, let me pass on to another of his remarkable statements:

 

3)  ‘The Aryans, whose presence in north-western India is documented by the Rigveda, had reached the territory they occupied through a migration, or rather, a succession of migrations, from outside the Indian subcontinent. The final stage of this migration cannot have been very far removed from the beginning of the composition of the Rigveda, but, at the same time, a sufficient period of time must have elapsed for any clear recollection of it to have disappeared, since the hymns contain no certain references to such an event. The Aryan invasion of India is recorded in no written document, and it cannot yet be traced archeologically, but it is nevertheless firmly established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology.’ (Ibid, page 20, italics mine.)

 

We are informed by the learned professor that this alleged ‘migration’ is an established historical fact, though there exists no evidence other than the Rigveda, wherein there is no mention of this ‘fact’ – which, considering that it meant the displacement of an entire civilisation, ought to have merited some mention in the only record they left of their culture. Further, he claims, the evidence available is the study of language – but a language whose depth is far too deep for these researchers who are like fish out of water when the real ‘language’ emerges of which Sanskrit was the perfect channel given its singular capacity to integrate the symbol and the thing symbolised. That language of the Rigveda is the cosmic notation as the foundation for a yogic process which relived the creative act in micro/macrocosm. This is the purpose of the Earth’s existence at the third position in this solar system. It is the planet whereupon this cosmic realignment can take place. The saga of the ‘Aryan’ speaks of nothing else. Unless Sanskrit is seen as a channel for that knowledge, obviously the only ‘conclusion’ which can be drawn from a scrutiny of the hymns is that their composers were babbling idiots. But not entirely, because there is another aspect of the charade which has to be borne in mind. Again I refer to the Euro-centric imperative. Implied in this is a Europe awaiting salvation, hence ‘pagan’ at the time of the Aryan ‘separation’ from this single domicile in Europe, which branch of the family then moved eastward. The ‘proof’ of this eastward march is entirely linguistic, there is no other.

Interestingly, even the scholar has to admit that a sensational historical fact of this nature, fashioner of an entire civilisation and culture – persisting still today – is nowhere mentioned in the only text the contemporary Indologist and philologist have used to ‘conclusively’ prove that the Aryans came from outside and invaded the subcontinent in ‘successive migrations’, none of which are mentioned anywhere. This is the stuff our academic ‘truths’ and ‘established facts’ are made of. Quite simply, no greater scholastic hoax has ever been perpetrated on a civilisation, and on the whole world. And surely there is no other race like the Indian, and the Hindu, which so easily, happily, willingly, accepted this hoax and continues to make use of it as a model for the fashioning of the new India as a sort of cultural syncretism. To achieve the latter, with all its sinister overtones which we shall explore in depth, the first imperative was to secure as ‘established history’ this fictitious migration from the West of this Aryan race described in the Veda.

The above theory is an illusion. It has no scientific basis – and I am using the term within the walls of their own edifice. With neither archaeological evidence or any clear written reference to this migration, we can only marvel at the gullibility of the human being and the Hindu in particular which caused him to rally around that ‘theory’ and make of it the foundation for his divided world. Partition was one result, and will continue to be the result in an endless stream, for the aim is the total destruction of the Vedic perception as a fashioning principle of the ‘new world order’ and to posit in this central void space the divisive nature of a mentally-oriented binary creation, the cradle of which is Europe. Hence Sri Aurobindo in his 76^th Aphorism wrote,

 

‘Europe prides herself on her practical and scientific organisation and efficiency. I am waiting till her organisation is perfect, then, a child shall destroy her.’

 

This aphorism – that is, Sri Aurobindo’s record of a prophetic seeing – is playing itself out today. The ‘organisation’ is indeed perfect; for, as I have written above, none can break out of the edifice. The ‘scientific’ method for accepted truths which alone are permitted to fashion our thinking, our world, our civilisation, is that organisation Sri Aurobindo refers to. And yet, he writes ‘…a child shall destroy her’.

This is Sri Aurobindo himself born as the Child, the Son or Agni, or the singularity of a perfect centre. When that comes into being, as it already has, that ‘organisation’ is doomed. The new creation is on its way, bringing with it ‘all things made new’.

 

Seeds of the Third Reich 

 

Regarding the question of usurpation and returning to the theme of the Euro-centred Aryan as the source of all that India has given to the world, history does indeed inform us of the extremes reached in this falsification process. The shadow-concept threw up its finest instrument in Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime. There we encounter the full-blown Euro-centred Aryan theory. Hitler was a most logical, coherent outcome of the work done by 19^th century revered Indologists, some of the best known of whom were German, it may be added. Hitler did not even seek to camouflage his message, his usurpation. He called his race the true Aryan. He adopted the sacred Vedic Swastik as his symbol; he even drew in the carrier or vahana, to use the Vedic term, of the Vishnu Avatar, the Eagle, which perhaps more forcefully than any other symbol or emblem drove home the message of an imperialistic supremacy which Hitler sought to convey. He was indeed the most faithful tool of Vritra as the Lord of Nations the world has ever known. But what I wish to convey is that Europe cannot absolve itself of its responsibility in the events which led up to, surrounded and followed the Third Reich. The falsification of the Aryan/Vedic truth is a root cause for the emergence of a Hitler, or the consciousness that this perversion reveals. And in that almost the whole world participated. For indeed, Vritra, lord and master of the Third Reich, is common to all misaligned human beings. Similarly, a new alignment can dissolve the Hitlers or the Vritra agents. Provided that one sees. Professor Burrow does help us to see. He writes,

 

4)   ‘A frequent misconception which should be mentioned arises from the misuse of the term Aryan. This name can be applied properly only to the Indo-Iranians, since it was the name they used to designate themselves. Its use should not be extended to apply to the Indo-Europeans in general, as has too frequently been done. The result of this extension of usage has been a confusion, which is often encountered, between the early Aryans and the primitive Indo-Europeans. As a result the Russian and Central Asian steppes, which were the habitat of the Aryans, i.e. the Indo-Aryans, in the period preceding the migration to India, etc., that is to say for an unspecified, but no doubt considerable period before about 1500 B.C., have often been regarded as the home of the original Indo-Europeans. The result has been that Greeks, Hittites, etc., are represented as migrating from this region at a time when only the Aryan branch of the Indo-Europeans was in occupation of it. On the contrary the evidence is that the European branches of the Indo-European family are native to Europe, and that after separating from them the Aryans extended to the east. As already observed, during this period, between their separation from the other Indo-Europeans and the later migration beginning about 1500 B.C., the characteristic features of their civilisation were evolved.’ (Ibid, pages 24-25, italics mine.)

 

This is of course an astounding confirmation of occidental scholarship obsessed with proving itself the cradle of everything, even the pagan babblings of those early Aryans who, in turn, were obsessed with only one thing: the destruction of cities, their inhabitants and civilisation and the smattering of tribes which put up any resistance to their ‘colonisation’ – Burrow’s own term. He emphasises this ‘eastward’ direction throughout his article, pushing the Aryan origin via a sleuthing through the languages of the peoples of Iran, Central Asia and Europe, ‘…still further to the west’. And finally we have his remarkable statement (4) to the effect that the real origin was Europe wherefrom the branch of Aryans who finally landed up in the subcontinent had broken off.

I must mention the fact that I am using the term Aryan as Burrow has done simply in order to facilitate this dissecting process. In India this civilisation has never been known as Aryan, except in the corridors of academia. Vedic is the true and only designation, as the term is used in the Rigveda itself: Knowledge. A civilisation founded on the principle of Knowledge. Certainly this was a unique phenomenon and clearly could not fit into the historian’s image of a pagan band of warlike migrants destroying everything they found in their path. Aryan, as any sensible reading of the text will reveal, is the term used for the warrior who attains that coveted ‘sun of knowledge’, who realigns his consciousness according to the process described in the text, to ‘become the sun’.

It ought to be self-evident, but I shall nevertheless mention the fact, that so massive a migration, as even Burrow has to admit it must have been for an entire civilisation to be transported from one location to another and to displace completely the already considerable development it met in India, finds no mention in the Rigveda. Yet scholars seem to agree that the hymns were created AFTER the migration and after destruction of the Indus cities. Yet we find nothing to attest to this massive movement and action. In this light, given the fact that no historian, archaeologist or philologist could break out of the ‘Enlightenment’ prison, it is understandable that even a nationalist of the calibre and intensity of purpose of B.C. Tilak should have tied himself in linguistic/geographic knots to somehow find traces of this migration, or invasion, from the West. On several occasions I have referred to Tilak’s interpretation of the Rigvedic references to a six-month night as being, according to him, an indication of not a Central Asian but an Arctic origin for the Aryans. Yet so thoroughly has the real language of the hymns been lost sight of that no one has linked the reference to its true meaning and connection with the uttarayana and dakshinayana, or the two hemispheres, north and south, into which we divide the year as if it were a 24-hour period with six ‘months’ of day and six ‘months’ of night. Once again this disclosure must be a further undermining of the migration theory. But above and beyond, it indicates where to look, how to approach the language of the Gods, Sanskrit, in which the Rigveda was composed. In so doing, it becomes evident that it is not language itself that is the barrier but one’s poise of consciousness – a poise which no longer permits us to appreciate that the symbol is the thing symbolised. In this view we are forced to observe that Burrow’s conclusions about the indisputable evidence in the hymns of the Aryan destruction of the Indus cities is equally flawed. For what is the symbol-meaning of the city in such a ‘language’?

The Mother has provided a contemporary indication by the fact that she had originally used her 12-part symbol as the basis for the city’s plan. And when we know that her symbol is cosmically-founded and displays the divine Measure of the year, then we begin to understand in what way the Vedic Rishis used the term. Alignment of such a city is paramount. (This is borne out by many ancient cultures, including the Roman.) The destruction of a city when it is carried out by Indra or Agni or any of the Gods refers to that misaligned form.

It is rather surprising to observe that Burrow and his colleagues have forgotten that there are numerous references to the ‘city’ even in Middle-Eastern Scripture. Indeed, the Revelation, last book of the Christian New Testament, culminates with the glorious descent ‘from heaven’ of the City. It is not even necessary to tax one’s imagination to appreciate that St John’s city is a cosmic symbol. (See The Hidden Manna, Chapters 21 and 22.) We find this same symbol in almost every myth, scripture, or culture of the ancient world. And yet in dealing with the Rigveda, Burrow simply will not consider this symbolism in its true character and persists in reading into the lines the ‘inescapable conclusion’ that the Aryans invaded and destroyed the Indus cities.

And why? There is no archaeological evidence of the existence of the Indus civilisation. And via Carbon-14 dating scholars are confident that they have located the civilisation in its proper time-map, – i.e., in the second millennium. This is convenient because if we can then provide certain ‘inescapable conclusions’ from the Rigveda that the Aryans destroyed those cities, then we are justified in positing Vedic civilisation in a much later time frame, – i.e., at a time which can fortify the Euro-centric fortress. And this is precisely what the western Indologist has done and the Indian academic, scientist, intellectual and artist have applauded and upheld. For how can it be otherwise? Scholarship in India is founded on that edifice of the Enlightenment. No thinker or artist in the India of today can break out of this prison. His or her scholarship is obliged to respect the ‘tested’ methodology the enlightened mind of the West has produced. And it is precisely that methodology, so revered and so ‘proven’, that is flawed, terribly flawed. No doubt for this reason the Mother, when asked to name the first school of her city, called it Last School.

This is not because, as another trick of the Lord of Nations, the yogic methodology is unacceptable because it is a subjective experience which cannot be duplicated in a laboratory, bearing respect for certain strict parameters. For even if it could be so tested and measured, this would not be the answer we seek. The contemporary yogi is as misguided as the scientist, and he displays this in ample measure when he attempts to apply the methodology of the Enlightenment to his area of discovery. None of this will carry us closer to a true understanding of the Rigveda. It is only the new cosmology which can do so, on the basis of its language and its sound and empirical methodology of the instrumentation of gnostic time.

According to the new cosmology, the Aryan invasion never took place. Or if it did it was in such a remote cosmic age that it left no traces and any attempt to locate the mother civilisation is futile. And indeed, objectively we must admit that the evidence, or entire lack of it, is precisely the clearest indication that Vedic civilisation was born in a very distant past. That is, evidence of such a massive migration simply does not exist. We have only one thing to hold as representative of that ‘Aryan migration’ and it is the Rigveda wherein no mention is made of the ‘fact’!

Then again, what is the scholar really looking for? If it is evidence of a subcontinental origin of the race that has inhabited the Indian landmass uninterruptedly throughout the millennia, the ‘proof’ lies in the race which still occupies the same land, whose culture still exists, whose civilisation has still maintained its distinguishable features in spite of true historic invasions of the past 1200 years, lost measures, and any number of shadow-covers accumulated along the way. In this light, we begin to ferret out the real utility of the invasion theory. It is to convince Hindus that whatever has gone into the composition of their essence and being and civilisation is not native born. It came from outside. And if it did so in the remote past, the Hindu cannot lay exclusive claim to the land. It is, as history has proven, up for grabs, as the saying goes. In this area of his deductions, the real contradictions emerge in Professor Burrow’s theorising:

 

5)   ‘…The culture which we find in the Rigveda was not developed in India, but, in most essentials, imported already formed, from outside.’ (Ibid, page 24.)

 

Before proceeding, given its compactness, directness, indisputable tone of authority, I submit that this statement should be engraved on the walls of each and every institute of lower and higher learning in modern India, for it encapsulates and succinctly reveals exactly the quality of the foundations supporting the contemporary Indian nation.

Having stated this, let me proceed with Burrow’s contention to reveal its many contradictions. He believes, along with other scholars, that the Rigveda was composed considerably AFTER the alleged migratory phase of Vedic civilisation because there is no reference to this massive migration or displacement of an entire culture and its people in the text. Yet we are perplexed by this fact to note that of the period during which this transmigration took place, there is no evidence of such. And the Rigveda itself is of no use in that it simply describes the imported culture already formed. Yet, according to Burrow, it was penned long after the migration, so long after that this displacement of the civilisation was forgotten and not even mentioned in the one text that faithfully conveys, in its entirety, the contours of that outside Aryan nation.

It is reasonable to question how such pieces in Burrow’s jigsaw puzzle can be expected to fit into place and provide a true and undistorted picture of the real ‘facts’. The philological material collected to support the invasion/migration theory is questionable. The following will elucidate the reason for the questions it raises:

 

6)   ‘The Aryan invasion of India is recorded in no written document, and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically, but it is nonetheless firmly established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology. The Indo-European languages, of which Sanskrit in its Vedic form is one of the oldest members, originated in Europe [italics mine], and the only possible way by which a language belonging to this family could be carried all the way to India was a migration of the people speaking it…’ (Ibid, page 21.)

 

On the basis of this authoritative statement, we have to assume there is sound proof that the direction of the migration which lay at the bottom of this ‘mutual relationship of the languages concerned’, was from Europe, the alleged place of its inception, eastward until finally it reached North India.

I contest this assumption, for it cannot be called anything else. Given the fact that the science of language cannot lay its hands on the single origin of language, just as anthropologists cannot be sure where or when man first took shape more or less in the form we know today, there can be no solid and irrefutable evidence to prove that Sanskrit had its origins in Europe, – that is, in the west and not the east. Into this argument comes the necessity to shorten by millennia the civilisation in question. Yet the dishonesty is revealed when the Rigveda is perversely misread and the proper links are not established between the Veda and contemporary Indian civilisation. A colossal unknown hangs over India, as far as western scholarship is concerned. There are no historical records nor any archaeological evidence to fill the gap and ease the discomfort these unknowns must necessarily give rise to. There is only the Rigveda, and given its inscrutable language and imagery, it has become a convenient tool to further the Euro-centric concept and obsession.

The logical deduction from the available evidence, and in this I include all the research done on the Iranian civilisation with its clear links to the Vedic which Burrow and others have established, is that the origin of all this was India. From the subcontinent the language and culture fanned out and spread to many parts of the world, not only to Europe.

Regarding the Iranian civilisation and certain elements found in Zoroastrianism which are similar to the Vedic culture, it is clear that we are dealing with an off-shoot of the Vedic Dharma and not the reverse; or not one of the twin branches which simultaneously broke off from the European matrix, as Burrow would have us believe.

It is evident that we are dealing here with a form of topsy-turviness, nowhere better imaged than in the upside-down reflections in the crystal of the shadow-temple. This perverse and falsifying consciousness insists on standing truth on its head. It resists all and any attempt to be convinced that the distortion arises from an initial wrong positioning whereby Europe is the centre. Great leaps of imagination must be taken to sustain this premise; or else colossal misrepresentations must be nurtured and constantly re-nurtured in order to carry on with the hoax and bolster the premise irrespective of the incongruities that arise. But if we wish to discover the true foundations and the real centre, from where the movement fans out, we need only refer to the original floor plan of the Mother’s chamber (see the New Way, Volume 2). Therein all is in place. The lens is focused and the images are ‘faithful and true’, in the words of St John’s Apocalypse.

It is interesting to note that certain esoteric societies which have fostered not only this Eurocentrism but also the platform of a united Europe, hold the date, 17 January, as particularly meaningful in the fulfilment of these aspirations. And it is interesting to note that this was the last date when the Mother dealt with the distortions of the architects. The period of her endeavours covered 18 days – 31 December 1969 to 17 January 1970. I have referred to the connection between the two in VISHAAL, 5/6, February 1991.

 

Cheating Truth and Time 

 

We must turn now to the question of culture and the various connections to be found between the Vedic civilisation, the Iranian, or even the Roman at a later date. But this is not culture as we understand it today. The elements of the Veda which surface in those regions west of the Indus pertain to a system of higher knowledge which was the real and only content of the Rigveda. This is not to say that we are not permitted to search for certain facts of the routine life of the Vedic Seer through the hymns, or to understand therefrom the character of his or her ancient world. It is clear that in composing the hymns, the Seers utilised or drew from the experiences of his or her known world. And in that context the Rigveda is ‘historic’. But if we extract only this from the text or do not accept that these images are secondary to the real content, then of course we are not in a position to formulate any theory as to the conditions prevailing in India in those former times.

In fact, to be honest, what is the aim of the Indologist and philologist? It has been mainly to establish an inescapable historic fact that the culture which we still find in the subcontinent today is an import. In addition, and we shall return to Burrow once again for the ‘authoritative’ word on this, the Vedic culture as it comes through to us in the Rigveda, indicates in no uncertain terms a civilisation at its peak. There is no evidence at all of a seeking after knowledge of a method of yoga. It is done, it is the unchallenged backdrop or foundation of the hymns. This is maintained by other perceptive scholars, such as Jeanine Miller in her The Vedas (B.I. Publications, New Delhi), ‘…All these Rigvedic and Atharvavedic references contain in more than germ the doctrine of sheaths and subtler levels of later ages. Passing references without explanation would rather point to a body of doctrine already well established…’ (page 140).

In this sense we may view the Rigveda itself as a sort of raga whose drone-axis is this Vedic ecliptical foundation, the central shaft of which is, of course, the OM. It is a base which has never left India and can be traced uninterruptedly to a remote pre-Judeo-Christian era. Consequently, there is no archaeological evidence of a determined period, because there are simply layers upon layers of a constant development of the indigenous civilisation. Burrow goes to great lengths to establish the fact that the migrations into India were undertaken by one of the two main branches of the ‘Proto-Indo-Aryans’ whom he localises in their advanced stage of development in Eurasia. However, he is insistent that this too was merely an off-shoot of ‘a location still further to the west’, – i.e., in Europe.

There can be no doubt that not only elements of Sanskrit are found in languages west of India but, more especially, there are clear transports of the Vedic Gods. This is especially to be noted in the Mittani kingdom of the Middle East, where, as Burrow points out, some of the principal Vedic deities appear in the annals of their cultural life entirely uncamouflaged. And then of course there is the worship of Mithra in Iran which is indisputably the Vedic God Mitra.

But from this evidence Burrow and his colleagues derive numerous assumptions. In fact, the whole of the Aryan migration theory is based exclusively on ‘assumptions’ reached through the ‘evidence’ the various languages provide. That is, there are common words, common deities even, – ergo, there was a common mother culture, fully developed and situated in the steppes of Central Asia which sent migratory hordes into North India in the second millennium before Christ, as well as into Iran at the same time, and also to the Mittani kingdom. And this mother civilisation, in turn, was an off-shoot of a civilisation ‘still further to the west’.

There is a point to note in these assumptions. We find in India still today the full expression of the Vedic culture. That is, the full progression through the millennia in an unbroken line of the same, single civilisation which we call Vedic and the philologist and Indologist calls Aryan. He does so because to him the Rigveda is a document relating the conquests of these Aryans, as they are often described in the Hymns. But this alone is sufficient to reveal that these scholars have not at all grasped the real content of the Rigveda and have thus conjured up an assumed civilisation called Aryan on the basis of ‘evidence’ found therein, disregarding in the process the most important clue to the text in the very name veda, from the root to see, to know (witness the Italian vedere = to see) – that is, knowledge. In other words, a civilisation not known as ‘Aryan’, but Vedic, or founded on the higher knowledge established in the hymns themselves. If this is not grasped, how can anything true emerge? We shall deal with aspects of this problem further on. Here I wish to question the ‘assumption’ that the civilisation which became established in Iran and India about the same time, according to the philologist, are derivations from one source located in the steppes of Central Asia.

For the fact is, where is that formidable mother civilisation today, or any clear evidence of its existence as we find abundantly in India regarding the Vedic culture? The Rigveda, whatever its date of composition, is central to all Hinduism and its off-shoots, whatever the angle they may expound of the original Idea. It is the seed for the entire civilisation. Burrow has to admit that this evidence indicates a well-established culture, but to him it was IMPORTED, whole and complete into India at the same time is was supposed to have moved into Iran. But one must persist in asking what the evidence of the existence of so formidable a mother civilisation might be? According to Burrow the evidence is purely ‘linguistic relationships’. In these areas still today there are traces of the same language, or languages. The assumption is therefore, automatically, that the origin of these languages and civilisations is Central Asia. Again we must ask, Why? And we are entitled to demand more conclusive proof that such was indeed the case. For linguistic evidence does not reveal the DIRECTION of the spreading influence. It does not tell us conclusively that Sanskrit came to India from the west, or even that the countless elements of Sanskrit which we find in languages to the west of India originated in the subcontinent. These conclusions can only be arrived at upon establishing which civilisation and which culture came into existence first. If this can be conclusively proven, then it is safe to ‘assume’ that Sanskrit evolved from the mother culture at some remote period and that this was ‘imported’ whole and entire into India.

It stands to reason, in light of the above, that the date established as the beginning of the civilisation, or in this case, the importation, has to be later than what might be conclusively proven as the beginning of the civilisations philologists hold as ancestors of the Vedic. This is the key feature of the hoax, and it is for this reason that such great pains are taken to find support for the contention that the Indus civilisation was pre-Vedic, or that the Vedic Gods did not make their way from India to Iran and elsewhere inasmuch as the dates of the Iranian developments are more easily verifiable. The Vedic therefore must be linked to them and held as a more or less simultaneous happening.

Yet, I repeat, Burrow ties himself in many contradictory knots to sustain the assumptions. He writes, with regard to the expansion of the phantom civilisation, mother of all the rest,

 

7)  ‘…To account for the later vast expansion, we must assume that favourable climatic and other conditions had led to a continuous increase of population…’ (Ibid, page 24.)

 

And on the basis of this grand assumption which we must take to mean an over-population that encouraged such ‘vast expansion’, he continues,

 

‘…Only on this basis can we account for their ability to colonise such extensive areas in Iran and north India…” (Ibid).

 

Dissecting the above reveals rather unsound innards. The entire postulation thus hinges on a series of such ‘assumptions’ for which no other proof is offered other than  ‘linguistic relationships’. Does evidence of similar sounds or words tell us in any way that climate was favourable in Europe and Central Asia in the second millennium to produce a population explosion serious enough to encourage a migration and to conquer and ‘colonise’ (Burrow’s expression throughout) a vast area? And further, if that mother civilisation existed, where are traces in that zone, be these archaeological or otherwise, cultural or religious?

Yet we do find traces of a spiritual expansion of the Vedic Gods as far west as Rome, according to Burrow, via the Mithraic cult which we know so heavily influenced early Christianity to the extent that it is believed the birthdate of Jesus was fixed as and when it was in order to draw worshippers from the cult into the folds of the new creed by this strategy of adopting a date sacred to Mithra – i.e., the Festival of Light. (Even today Christianity adopts a similar strategy in a black, brown or yellow Jesus.) We find this Festival, the Saturnalia, well established in Rome, as I have pointed out earlier.

The point is, if we understand the knowledge content of the Rigveda and its cosmological foundation, it is evident that this assumed ‘imported’ culture is of a very high order and surpasses anything we may encounter in the Middle East and certainly in Europe and Central Asia. Regarding the latter, there is no evidence that in the second and third millennia anything of this order existed. Yet we have contemporary India itself as evidence of the uninterrupted evolution of the society from a civilisation as highly evolved as is depicted in the Rigveda, into the Upanishadic period, the Puranic, and then the true period of conquests from abroad and the evident decline. The Rigveda expresses this culmination, an attainment in terms of depth of perception and cosmic awareness and knowledge thereof which is not equalled elsewhere, especially in terms of written language. Sanskrit of the period was, and still is, a language perfectly fashioned to serve as a vehicle for those higher perceptions and reflective of a consciousness of unity. Indeed, the Rigveda provides the indisputable proof that the civilisation it stands for had only one obsession: the attainment of Swar, or the Truth-Conscious world of the supramental Sun. Not even the ancient Egyptians were as obsessed with the Divine. It is an obsession which, in spite of the extreme materialism prevalent in the character of the contemporary Indian, is still the axis of the nation.

 

The Zodiac as a Guideline

 

I have referred time and again to the zodiacal content of the Rigveda, especially its relation to yoga or a transformative process, very much akin to what we know as alchemy in the west. Most remarkable of all is the Capricorn hieroglyph superimposed on the geography of the subcontinent which not only indicates the complete borders of the nation but provides valuable knowledge regarding the character of the inhabitants of those areas via the energy flows, or gunas (qualities) which describe the particular area the tri-part hieroglyph covers. No one has yet furnished conclusive proof of the origin of the zodiacal symbols. What we do know is that as an instrument of knowledge the concept – the division of the ecliptic so as to mirror the human condition and through the calendar to regulate the life of a diversified collectivity, as well as to describe an evolutionary ‘purpose’ – has been found central to almost every ancient culture. The actual symbols may vary but the concept is the same.

Regarding the twelve of the zodiac we use today, there is no unanimity as to their place of origin. Scholars posit this origin in Mesopotamia simply because they have found written and sculptural evidence. But none that states: The zodiac hieroglyphs were born HERE, and not THERE. It is also quite possible that they later RE-ENTERED India via that route.

My point is that if we wish to carry out an investigation into the origins of Vedic civilisation, it would be far more intelligent to seek for origins in a system such as the zodiacal which covers a multitude of fields, revealing as well the cosmic awareness of the civilisation and its orientation.

Regarding the Vedic culture as presented in the Rigveda, the striking feature is that zodiacal wisdom comes through the hymns as a web of sorts, as a backdrop that is not often referred to explicitly but is understood to be ever present  and is ‘assumed’ by the Rishis or Seers to be the foundation of the civilisation for which the hymns were composed. As Miller mentions…‘a body of doctrine already well established’. There is an assumption of a vast body of knowledge, of the zodiac not as a tool of prediction or prophecy as we find in astrology today, but as a cosmological framework into which went aspects of the art lost to us now in its knowledge content and its relation to the transformation of consciousness both individual and collective, but nonetheless still operating and influencing contemporary Indian society precisely because of the blanket assumption and a civilisation which arose from that original content. As an example, we may take the importance given to the lower and higher hemispheres of the ecliptic, uttaryana and dakshinayana and the signs Capricorn and Cancer, their respective ‘axes’; and these, in turn, mark off the periods of the Sun’s farthest equatorial reaches north and south.

The Rigveda does not provide any information by which we can locate the origin of this special knowledge. But the manner in which it is used in the hymns does provide evidence of a civilisation long in possession of the wisdom the zodiac grants and of a civilisation structured according to that wisdom – i.e., the caste system devised on a certain division of the ecliptic into four parts, personified as the Cosmic Purush or Agni Vaiswanara. When these are brought up in the hymns, no background is provided. The four castes flow through the verses freely and easily; or Vishnu in his connection with the four zodiacal signs of Preservation: the Bull, the Lion, the Eagle and the Friend. This indicates a knowledge tested and accepted by the entire civilisation and firmly rooted in the culture. It is this sort of evidence we wish to find in the areas Burrow and his fellow philologists consider to be the cradle of that Vedic wisdom and culture.

Even in Iran, which they hold as a sort of twin in the development of the ‘Aryan’ civilisation, the knowledge I refer to is not found in as pure a degree as in India, nor is it of such a high philosophical and mystical quality, then and now. Moreover, if there is any indication that a culture is an import, it is to be found in the fact that at a certain point it is dislodged and replaced by another. Its roots are weak precisely because the culture or belief had no real foundation in the soil into which it was transplanted. In the effort to secure a germination, given this ‘biological’ imperative or the natural process of rejection of a transplanted organ by the body, invaders have invariably adopted elements of the indigenous culture to assist in the assimilation and to coerce, as it were, the population into accepting the transplant. The result is that a certain shallowness pervades such cultures in view of the fact that processes are truncated or prematurely aborted. In its place another foetus is posited which, in its own turn, is again aborted, and so on. There are numerous examples of this in the ancient world. One of which I have mentioned above being the borrowings of Christianity from the Mithraic cult in order to secure a foothold in the psyche of the people of the area. Or else there are the aborted developments of the civilisations of the Americas, or the Middle East and northern Africa. But when a civilisation has very deep roots – the ancient Egyptian, for instance, or even the Graeco-Roman – in order to install something else, a long period of decline must preface the new establishment. The civilisation slowly disintegrates, caves in on itself. Then the invasion can take place and the new ‘organ’ is accepted. The civilisation is weakened, exhausted and cannot offer any resistance.

India gives evidence of a tremendously well-rooted edifice unlike anything witnessed in the ancient world around the time of the alleged ‘Aryan migration’ (1500 BC). And if this culture was indeed an import, whole and entire, as Burrow and most others in the academic field and the Indian intelligentsia sustain, then we are faced with an unprecedented sociological phenomenon of a most unusual order. That is, a psychic affinity between the peoples of the mother civilisation, wherever and whoever they may be, so great, so complete, that the transplant never provoked any known rejection. On the contrary. The invaders who did succeed in establishing their empires in the subcontinent ultimately, where the Vedic civilisation was still found whole and entire (as it was supposed to have been at the time of the alleged migrations), were never able either to dislodge and eliminate the indigenous culture, nor were they able to secure a dilution by means of an interpenetration of beliefs. This, of course, is largely due to its total incompatibility with the new faiths of the Medieval and contemporary invaders which are fundamentally different from Hinduism and as such cannot be amalgamated. If at all any success has attended these efforts, it was during the British rule and the subtle infiltration, mainly via the educational system, to undermine Hinduism through concepts of ‘the Enlightenment’.

A civilisation which has persisted for so many millennia must clearly experience a very extended period of decline in order to weaken its roots and finally to bring the immense tree to the ground and replace it with another variety, another species. The age of decline, if it may be so called, is in a sense temporally proportionate to the depth of the roots. By consequence, it does indeed cause us concern when we realise that India is at a civilisational crossroads, a nadir in the process of decline of a development extended over vast stretches of time.

What appears to irritate Eurocentrists the most is precisely the indisputable continuity of the Vedic civilisation and its survival more or less intact, largely on the basis of a transmission of knowledge through the Guru/Disciple tradition and the practice of yogas of various hues. This tradition did not start at the time of the Rigveda. It preceded the hymns by innumerable generations. It was there from the time the first Rishi observed that the cosmos mirrored the human condition and the evolution – as above, so below. And, as pointed out, this concept was present long before the actual penning of the hymns.

Thus, if these hymns do not give evidence of any migration, or a succession of migrations, yet they do reveal the cosmological knowledge the Rishi possessed and utilised as a process of yoga fully detailed and by consequence the structure of his entire civilisation, it boggles the mind to consider that a hoax such as the Aryan migration theory was so easily accepted by Indians during the British rule. Indeed, this is the successful undermining I referred to earlier. But if it was possible, and still has a firm hold today over the nation’s mind, in particular that of the intellectual elite, it is only because centuries earlier the Will or Point was so effectively undermined that invaders thereafter were able to move into the subcontinent and occupy it almost entirely. This decline in the spiritual fibre of the nations finds no better reflection than in the visualisation before our mind’s eye, drawn up from the annals of history, of foreign forces demolishing thousands of temples while the indigenous population stands by meekly and observes the destruction. Indeed, apart from Kashmir where, it seems, the tactic continues, it is now almost impossible to imagine that such events did indeed take place. At the same time, the intelligentsia, fashioned according to the undermining principles of the Raj, will go to any extremes to obstruct Hindus from demolishing even one mosque and constructing a temple to Lord Ram on the site, a mosque which, in any case, long ceased to be one insofar as there is a Hindu idol installed therein which must necessarily, in the purist’s interpretation, be considered a pollution of the zone. Therefore, the unwillingness to concede the space to Hindus, and especially in consideration of the long history of reverse demolitions, is perplexing. That is, as long as we do not take into consideration the ‘enlightenment’ the British brought into India which makes such acts appear unsecular, intolerant, fundamentalist and even fascistic. But what of the fascistic notion of a Euro-centred Aryanism, exported into ancient India?

 

In all of this I have not mentioned the role of the South as a fundamental component of Vedic civilisation. If we equate the latter with ‘Aryan’ – i.e., rulers or conquerors of the North – ,then there can be no place for the Dravidian in that civilisation. Or else, as Burrow interprets the matter, that those Aryans were obsessed with war and their main objective was to conquer the Dasyu tribes which they considered to be their arch enemies. And if we go a step further and we equate those Dasyus with the southern Dravidians, then we have a perfect tool to divide and rule, and even after that rule collapses, to go on dividing. But this interpretation, held so widely, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Rigveda and is simply the result of a Euro-centrist perversion.

At the same time, it is interesting to note how little importance is given in scholarly works to the ancient Tamil literary works, especially those which, I am told, describe the great flood and the submergence of the continent believed to be Lemuria, from where the Tamils arose and then established their kingdom in Madurai. Even the Greeks bear witness to the ancient tradition in that the Dravidian land was called by them Limyrike, or else Damirica, clearly connecting the inhabitants with the legendary Lemuria. And this is corroborated by the local tradition of the various Sangams, the first and oldest of which records events of some 30,000 years ago.

If at all a common source of knowledge is to be sought, which fed both north and south of the subcontinent, I believe this is where it is to be found. And of course, there will be no evidence but in the corpus of Vedic/Hindu cultural expressions and the philosophical and spiritual/yogic practices which have been feeding this civilisation from time immemorial. And who is the custodian of that knowledge, that tradition? It is only the Vedic Seer – or one who sees. Which proves the point I made earlier in this study that, unlike Egypt which utilised colossi in stone to preserve the Knowledge in times of decline, conquest and subjugation, India used the consciousness of her people uninterruptedly throughout the millennia.

 

 

 

July of 1992

Aeon Centre of Cosmology

at Skambha

 

(to be continued)

In the last VISHAAL I referred to the attitude of compromise which became part of the Indian character as a result of a series of invasions, conquests, and long periods of foreign rule. This attitude permitted India to survive as a homogeneous territory via the sanatan dharma, but with considerable damage to the latter. The Toltec master, don Juan, describes a similar situation in Mexico after the Spanish conquest, with the difference that lacking the strategy of myth and given the wholesale conversion of the population to Christianity, the ‘old seers’, don Juan refers to, carried the work underground where it became a preserve of esoteric groups such as don Juan’s. This did not happen in India because of the persistent character of the Dharma and its indestructible ‘seed’, though, I repeat, considerable damage had been done.

 But this was a process long in developing. The attitude of compromise after the first incursions was the result of a much earlier undermining involving a balance of energy in the collective consciousness, based on the fundaments of the Hindu Dharma which was sustained throughout the ages by the practice of Yoga. Finally this same undermining of the energy base was reflected in the partition of the nation, as I have discussed in these pages (see TVN 6/2, June 1991).

The reason why a corrosion in the practice of Yoga could be reflected in a geographical dismembering is because of the many-dimensional scope of the Dharma given its cosmological foundation. Thus, the same energy base is geographical, collective and individual – a situation desired by many religious groups but not sustainable given their lack of a proper cosmic connection. The play of a balanced and harmonised rajas (kinetic), sattwa (stabilising), and tamas (dissolving) is pertinent to all these dimensions.

It is understandable that when that order was disturbed it had an effect over this wide spectrum. This disruption is most easily noted in the simple fact that when the quest was finally oriented to a Beyond, the energy base became irrelevant. Its natural order was revised and no one thereafter listed the three expressions in the correct manner by virtue of which they could be connected to the true cosmic harmony. It thus became Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas, rather than the proper order given above.

In this too a certain ‘measure’ was lost. After this disruption, this rearrangement, it was impossible to link the play with the energy flows as they manifest in the cosmic process and by consequence in the human consciousness-being. The flow is Creation (rajas), Preservation (sattwa), and dissolution or Destruction (tamas). No one in India even today would list this triad as Preservation, Creation and Destruction. It would be an unbearable cacophony to the ear. Yet this has indeed been done in schools of yoga because the cosmic connection has been lost and the equivalence between Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva as godheads epitomising this process of creation, preservation and destruction, were disconnected from the energy flows or deprived of their cosmic function. This might have been aided by the followers of the three deities seeking to establish their God as supreme, and hence first on the list, as many historians believe. I, however, do not concur with this theory because there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that in the competition between followers, it was Vishnu (Preservation) who won the contest and thus Sattwa was listed first. I attribute the disarrangement rather to a shift in perspective which affected the entire foundation of the Dharma.

The energy play is now no longer what it truly is, in both individual and collectivity. This development evolved pari passu with the Lost Measure of Time and the shift in the quest after Buddhism and Mayavadism gained supremacy – camouflaged or overtly. Indeed, in most schools oriented along these lines, that energy play or cosmic Lila is shunned almost entirely. The last thing the practitioner wishes for is a harmonisation of the energy play in his body and being, for that body with its cosmic connections is a thing to be cast aside by means of the practice. He is encouraged to withdraw from it, to distance himself from the snare of his senses, enmeshed as they are and a product of the cosmic manifestation. He seeks to be merely the Witness, the Purush to this play but in no way INVOLVED. For his aim is to bring the cycle of birth into the cosmic process to an end entirely. Therefore, to put effort into a correct ordering and balancing of the cosmic play of energy within himself through yoga is a contradiction in terms. At most, given the soundly established cosmic consciousness of the race, the play was to be maintained as a part of the philosophy, but it had to be rearranged in order to serve the purpose of escape from the cosmic process. This was done by perverting rather than complete elimination, as I have described regarding the Matrimandir disfiguring. Hence, the order became Sattwa, Rajas, and Tamas, or, incongruously, Preservation, Creation and Destruction.

To my knowledge I stand alone in drawing attention to this fact and in making the connection between Rajas, Sattwa and Tamas, or Creation, Preservation, and Dissolution, and the triadic play of energy in each quarter of the zodiacal wheel. In traditional astrology they are called the Qualities: Cardinal (Creation/Rajas), Fixed (Preservation/Sattwa) and Mutable (Destruction/Tamas). Having pointed out the connection with the Hindu Trinity, the equivalence is more than obvious. At the same time, it is also evident that the Lost Measure was companion to this disruption of the natural cosmic flow. This is one more item in a long list which causes me to believe that the zodiac with its knowledge content emanated from India rather than the Middle East. This view is fortified by the fact that in that area astrology has disappeared entirely, whereas it continues to thrive in India in spite of the Lost Measure, invading ideologies contrary to a cosmic consciousness, and an ‘age of enlightenment’ such as we have known.

This unfortunate but entirely predictable reordering of the energy flow given the persistent undermining of the Point or the soul, has so thoroughly come to colour the Indian perception of reality and its reflection in the practice of yogas, that even Sri Aurobindo refers to the play in this disturbed order when he discusses the various schools of yoga, without drawing attention to the roots of the misarrangement, or noting that there is anything untoward in the listing or any ‘ulterior motive’, as it were. Sattwa in all schools was exalted, hence it had to be placed first, regardless what this did to its cosmic connection. In his The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo writes,

 

‘…These modes are termed in the Indian books qualities, gunas, and are given the names, sattwa, rajas, tamas. Sattwa is the force of equilibrium and translates in quality as good and harmony and happiness and light; Rajas is the force of kinesis and translated is quality as struggle and effort, passion and action; Tamas is the force of inconscience and inertia and translates in quality as obscurity and incapacity and inaction. Ordinarily used for psychological self-analysis, these distinctions are also in physical Nature. Each thing and every existence in the lower Prakriti contains them and its process and dynamic form are the result of the interaction of these qualitative powers.’

            

(Chapter X, page 220-21)

When the link was severed with the cosmic harmony through loss of the divine Maya or Measure, and the loss of what exactly had to be measured in order for Maya to retain her DIVINE status, it was just a question of time before the energy base became equally disturbed. It was thus the detached Witness Consciousness which almost every path of Yoga postulated as the highest achievement. The result was a dismembering similar to the dismembering of the subcontinent and the splitting asunder of the Capricorn hieroglyph which precisely describes this play in its correct order.

The result for the new India is obvious: If in the yogic process sattwa was exalted above all others, rajas had to suffer, and tamas as well. It was indeed those portions of the hieroglyphic geography which were cut away from the full body of Mother India at the time of Partition – for indeed this cosmic Lila or Play describes the consciousness-being of the Divine Mother. It is therefore HER body and being, captured in the subcontinental landmass and the consciousness of its people that suffered this real and seemingly irreversible dismembering.

To illustrate the entrenched nature of the problem, just recently a news item appeared on the editorial page of The Hindu in the daily feature entitled, ‘This day that age’, dated 25.5.1992. The column reproduces select editorial comments of the same day fifty years earlier. In this case the selection was from the 25.5.1942 edition, as follows:

 

      More support for C.R.’s approach

 

Mr. C. Rajagopalachariar’s unorthodox approach that the Congress should have a common approach with the Indian Muslim League (by accepting the latter’s demand for a separate Muslim State of Pakistan) in negotiating with Britain was gathering more support.

In Moradabad, Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, Member of the Central Legislative Assembly, addressed a three-day session of the Muslim League’s ‘Pakistan Conference’, and said that C.R. deserved appreciation from all right-thinking people for his courageous stand against the rest of the Congress, which, in his view had alienated the Mussalmans in the first place and forced them to make their demand for a separate State. He was sure that the move initiated by Rajaji would gain force so considerably that Pakistan would become a reality very soon and enable Hindus and Muslims thereafter to live in unity in the sub-continent.

Two other supporters of the Rajaji [C.R.] approach were non-Muslim Radical leaders. Speaking in Calicut, Mr. A.K. Pillai, of the Radical Democratic Party, observed that Rajaji had made an eminently realistic proposal and warned that if the Congress did not accept his suggestions, it would lose its last chance of survival as a meaningful movement. In a statement issued by him in New Delhi, Mr. M.N. Roy, General Secretary of the Indian National Democratic Union, adverted[sic] indirectly to the crisis in the Congress following its rejection of Mr. Rajagopalachariar’s suggestion at Allahabad. Mr. Roy deplored the Congress pursuing a negative and sterile attitude. The Radical leader practically echoed certain words that Rajaji had used earlier.

 

This selection is particularly interesting with respect to the attitude of compromise I have highlighted, which can readily be traced to the reordering of the energy flow so as to disrupt the natural process and disconnect it finally from the cosmic process, which, in turn, can be traced to the Lost Measure.

This has been the development in an unmistakable pattern, once this cosmic harmony is restored to the Vision and the divine Maya is redeemed as we are doing in these pages. The Hindu selection from 50 years ago makes it all too evident that the ones to have benefitted from this loss were those who had no cosmic foundation to be bothered with and who were positioned by character, temperament, and belief to be able to handle those very energies which the Hindu had come to eschew – the kinetic or rajasic manifestation. In the ancient tradition this is connected to the Kshatriya or Warrior caste.

I have reproduced the above also to demonstrate to what extent the attitude of compromise had permeated the national consciousness and made many eminent figures lose sight of the integrality of the landmass and its sacred quality. This, it must be pointed out, was no less a figure than C. Rajagopalachariar who was later to become the Governor General of the independent, bifurcated nation. Finally, it is to be noted that the anticipated inter-community harmony which it was proclaimed would come about once Pakistan was formed, did not materialise as expected. Three wars have been fought with Pakistan in spite of this partition. It is clear that the move was a misconception to begin with. Something else was required which, under the prevailing circumstances, could not evolve.

Let us review further the situation in India around the time of the above statements. What came to be known as the Cripp’s Proposal had been going the rounds in April of that same year. This was supported by Sri Aurobindo openly, – as openly as his secluded state permitted. The proposal was intended to grant dominion status to India as a step toward later total independence. I am sure that Sri Aurobindo’s support of the proposal was condemned by many at the time. To a certain degree, it must have been considered a betrayal of the freedom struggle in which he had vigorously participated until his departure for Pondicherry in 1910.

In spite of Sri Aurobindo’s canvassing for the Proposal, it failed to gain acceptance. He later expressed the fact that he knew it would indeed fail. His disciples then asked him why had he backed the Proposal if he knew it would fail. His reply was, ‘Niskama Karma’ (disinterested action).

Why, we must ask, had Sri Aurobindo thought it wise to accept dominion status? Perhaps the above selection from The Hindu throws some light on the matter in that to a perceptive observer the Congress was in no position to avoid Partition. Mahatma Gandhi’s method or strategy to win over the Muslim population was clearly not having the desired effect. And worse, to an observer of Sri Aurobindo’s calibre, it would have been clear that what would come to pass from this method was simply a weakening of the Hindu WILL. This was further secured by the foremost pillar of the strategy, non-violence. In the way then practised, it played upon guilt in both practitioner and opponent. And nothing corrodes will more easily than guilt. If we add to this Gandhi’s heavily Christianised attitude toward sex, the element of guilt was considerably fortified with its destructive results in the collective will. Further, Gandhi’s way was to stress the equality of religions and the great tolerance of Hinduism. The chant, Rahim and Ram are one!, must surely have arisen in those painful days as a desperate attempt to keep the nation whole and united.

For Sri Aurobindo this possibility was fast receding. By collective recitals from diverse Scriptures, in the effort to convince the various communities that religions are all one and that they could live under one firmament, alienation was increased at deep levels in followers who have difficulty in accepting that their God is not exclusive and unique.

This dilution of the Hindu foundation in knowledge served to corrode the ability of those men and women who could distinguish in such matters, to instil in the nation a will power born precisely of a knowledge which alone could harmonise a diversity such as could be found on the subcontinent.

Sri Aurobindo knew that time was needed to work on this problem, precisely in the area of his Yoga. Thus if an unpartitioned nation came into being under dominion status and those diverse elements could be kept under a single umbrella for a spell, it would go a long way in deflating the Muslim League platform insofar as it would give the nation time to organise itself independently, to a large extent, and work out those ‘knots’ which were simply being exploited by ambitious politicians. After all, these communities had been living together for many centuries, in an undivided land. Through a gradual transition they could have been carried ahead in the process and experience of co-existence until those divisive forces had been exhausted. To achieve this, however, the attitude of compromise had to be confronted since it had served to turn things on their head and obfuscate the true state of affairs, as the above report from The Hindu of those days reveals.

For Sri Aurobindo himself time was needed. His supramental yoga had not reached the point where those ‘knots’ could be undone. And it was there, in that area of the nation’s ‘body’ which could be reached only through a specialised Yoga, that the harmonisation and integration had to be secured first. On the physical, visible plane, the rest would follow. When he was not heeded and several years later independence was proclaimed on the basis of the ‘two nation’ theory (Hindu and Muslim), a different strategy had to be elaborated. We shall explore this in depth for central to the problem is WILL, or the Point, or Skambha.

To make confusion worse confounded, during the time of the freedom struggle few had an understanding in terms of Knowledge of the real basis for territorial sanctity and the demand for maintaining certain boundaries intact. There was an emotional response; but this is never sufficient in the realm of politics where such sentiments are juggled about by deft manipulators. Only persons of real knowledge could have saved the country from partition in those days. Unfortunately, as Sri Aurobindo’s case demonstrated, the few who lived in that state of higher awareness were marginalised, as he himself had been regarding the Cripp’s Proposal in 1942.

When the proposal was rejected, in the light of The Hindu report quoted above, it is interesting to note what then transpired. Gandhi and dominant members of the Congress Party demanded only full independence. In August of the same year he launched his famous Quit India movement, at which point all those who could have resisted the partition were put in jail and the Muslim League, headed by Muhammed Ali Jinnah, founding father of Pakistan, was given a free field to accomplish its divisive deeds by the absence of the Congress leaders. This would have been avoided had Sri Aurobindo been heeded.

Of course we are isolating a small period of history in the above which can be misleading. For the truth is that given the ‘choices’ made centuries earlier, the gradual corrosion of Will, the undermining of the Point or soul, was the reason for the inability to deal with those divisive elements – then and now. Indeed, for Sri Aurobindo to attempt to divert the inevitable course of history at that point would have been a case of niskama karma, as he stated.

I shall continue in this study to demonstrate how this development, even the partition of the country, is now written into the shadow-temple in Auroville, and how the architects and builders have been able instruments for revealing what had been cemented in the national destiny centuries earlier. At the same time, we shall underscore the purpose for such a shadow to be left hovering over the work of Sri Aurobindo.

 

Will and Purpose in Material Creation

 

It is legitimate to question why so much emphasis was placed in Vedic times on the question of ‘a divine Will working in the worlds’, as Agni (Fire), foremost of the Vedic godheads, is described. Agni is the first manifestation in creation; he is also the incarnate divine Will. The Veda therefore establishes WILL as the primordial quality of material creation. Implied in this is purpose. In the Toltec master don Juan’s teachings, this same principle is described as INTENT. The selection of the word is clearly meant to add purposefulness to will. That is, a play of energy the compression of which creates a combustion. Inherent in that combustion, or particular organisation of the energy, is purpose or intent. Tantra goes a step further in the same direction and calls that primordial creative impulse Desire.

In other words, material creation starts – at the moment of 20th  Century science’s Big Bang – with a compression of energy by which, due to the great Reversal and the shift from vertical to horizontal, the consciousness-being of the Vast is instilled with this divine Purpose as the original foundation of our material universe. Because of this we experience a creation of supreme harmony and order, nothing of which would be possible without a first principle of Will or Purpose, or intent.

Science debunks the notion entirely. Orthodox schools sustain that there is no ‘purpose’ in the cosmic process, or even in biological evolution on our planet. Belief in such a purpose or intent is reserved for spiritual or religious minds. But it is curious to note that while purpose is debunked as a fashioning principle, various accepted branches of science do concede that a form of intent does govern the evolutionary process. The theory of survival of the fittest is itself an admission of a certain inherent purpose. That this is labelled instinct does not release it from a linkage with that ‘divine Will working in the worlds’. Similarly, zoologists will invariably explain the elaborate and extravagant displays of Nature in the enormous variety of exotic plumages and markings, or sounds animals and birds make as a means to attract a mate. This too implies purpose and intent.

Such manifestations are bracketed under the label of ‘instinct’ in the effort of science to divest kingdoms below the human with intelligence, a preserve of the higher species. Whether or not we accept this premise as correct is not the issue (I have treated this subject in the 3-part series ‘Animals in the Emerging Cosmos’, TVN 3/4-5-6). My point is that even if we deprive instinct of any form of intelligence, we do not eliminate the component of will, purpose or intent. Indeed, the Veda has been particularly careful in drawing attention to Agni’s connection with the vital (in contrast to the mental) plane by giving him the alternate form of a Horse, symbol par excellence of the vital. Instinct, as prescribed by science, is associated with the vital, or the vital mind, if you will. Its centre in the human body is located at the navel – an area reserved for Agni, the axis mundi or navel of the world.

When the Veda speaks of Agni ‘up-pillaring the world’, or else of Skambha being that very first component of material creation, it is understood that included in this description is the question of axial balance or alignment. Previously I stated that this was the ‘obsession’ of the Supreme. Indeed, in view of the above it is clear that in any school of real Knowledge evolved from the direct experience a true yogic process provides, the conclusion must be that this ‘obsession’ is not only the preserve of the Supreme but is necessarily carried over to our own experience of life and being on this planet, inasmuch as we are a product of the cosmos, fashioned in the image of that Supreme Cause.

This ‘obsession’ must then be observed in every aspect of life, if observation is founded on this Knowledge. It must be seen to affect the individual as well as society. In India’s case this is exceptionally clear because, as I have stated, that cosmic foundation is still decipherable in the present structure of the collective consciousness. Particularly helpful in this regard is the Matrimandir in Auroville. Though we must utilise that shadow-temple in the reverse, as a NEGATIVE image, a comparative analysis between what the architect and builders have produced and the Mother’s unexecuted original is the best means to bring to light the ancient Vedic ‘obsession’ with axes based on the exceptional knowledge the ancient Seers had of this essential characteristic of the divine Reality. They claim that what they have built is as faithful to the Mother’s original as possible. I will demonstrate not only the fallacy in this claim, but in so doing we shall discover the deepest, widest and highest meaning of the Mother’s creation. In particular we shall discover in what way the Mother’s creative act was meant to ‘realign the Dharma’, involved in which is this question of axial harmony.

 

India’s Misplacement on the Periphery

 

Reestablishment of the Dharma is meant to encourage an axial alignment of the collective consciousness. Thus, what is executed via the Vedic yoga becomes established in this collective consciousness. This means that the Mother’s original plan of the chamber, if it had been executed, would have served the purpose of fixing that same axis, remade according to the conditions of this 20^th Century, in the race. India would have then experienced an almost miraculous realignment, similar to the recent stunning collapse of the binary creation on the world stage.

In the 1980s, because of the successful outcome of the Yoga of the Chamber, that realignment process was carried out for the Earth. That is, the Yoga of the Chamber affected the whole planet. For this reason we observed an almost miraculous collapse of the bi-polar world – or the binary system, as I call it. If there is one striking aspect to the great changes beginning in the second half of the last decade and accelerated from 1989, it is the immediacy, the unavoidable, irrevocable establishment of something the world had not known perhaps for centuries: a unitary system established almost painlessly. Indeed, this unitary system could not have come into being until the possibility of a global society had evolved. What we are experiencing in the global context now are simply the aftershocks of that collapse. At very deep levels things have been shaken up, so to speak. It is a world consciousness struggling to come to terms with this new alignment.

Thus, the Yoga of the Chamber affected the Earth. But what of India? We have seen no similar realignment. Indeed, positions are more entrenched. I am not referring to the sphere of economics. In that regard the changes India is bringing about, with a considerable amount of pain given the radical shift in 50 years and more of socialist dogma as the nation’s economic model, corresponds to that world realignment due to the Yoga of the Chamber of the first half of the 1980s. India forms a part of that global society. She too must cope with the ‘aftershocks’ of the great shift and the consequent ‘new world order’.

This, however, has nothing to do with what the Matrimandir was meant to facilitate. India, unlike any other nation in the world, is a centre. By destiny only India as a nation can do the Vedic yoga of forging that ‘centre’, that Point that fills the void for the entire world. In other words, given the fact that India did not accept this realignment, we have the Earth realigned indeed – but centreless.

Why did this reverse process occur – that is, the global realignment BEFORE the creation of a centre? In the first place, it must be stated that the centre does exist in India, but not COLLECTIVELY, or in a way which can have an impact on the nation as a whole. We shall explore this in greater detail further on, in particular the way in which the nation was ‘held together’ in spite of herself, as it were.

The pattern was set in 1975 when the architects pointedly refused to erect that new alignment for India in the Matrimandir then in the initial stage of its construction. They proceeded in their work on the basis of the 3-metre void in the middle of the structure, precisely where that alignment should have been established. The entire construction thus went from periphery inward, converging on this central Void, rather than the Vedic direction from centre, or garbhaghriha, outward.

This made it obligatory to do the Yoga of the Chamber beginning in 1980 and to realign that periphery. But the central Void remained in that it is only India which can serve as the ‘point that fills the void’.

We have then a global society realigned and on the road to a new order, but perched precariously due to the centre of the Earth consciousness, which is India’s dharmic position, being ‘occupied territory’ and the domain of the Lord of Nations. In other words, no real ‘centre that holds’.

What this has meant for India is that she finds herself being dictated to mercilessly. Just as in the Matrimandir where the architect refused to construct the 12 walls (the periphery) of the chamber at the correct position as stipulated by the Mother, and ENCROACHED upon the sacred space of the chamber (India), with walls pressing in and squeezing out the centre, so has it happened in the world scene with India held ransom by world banks and other powers and conditions. This situation will not change while the Matrimandir remains what it is and under the control of the Lord of Nations. And inasmuch as the Government of India (any government that is elected to power) is drawn now into that ‘alignment’ where the periphery calls the shots, as it were, this vulnerability and reactionary response is only destined to worsen in the years to come. India’s debt will increase, with all that that entails. Its reliance on the commands of the world economic community will deepen and she will be unable to fulfil her destiny of ‘centre’ and hence truly non-aligned, – or not caught in the play of the periphery. The uni-polar world is thus of India’s own making. She is virtually forcing the United States of America into a false position. It is not exactly a uni-polar world, but a system where unity has replaced the binary. The central ‘pole’ (Skambha) is entirely missing – that space having been overtaken by the nothingness of the Void.

The Matrimandir was to provide the miraculous means to bring India into a new alignment according to her Vedic Dharma, a destiny entirely written out for her in the cosmic Script and ‘read’ more than 5000 years ago by the Seers who carried out this process and established that as the seed of the nation’s destiny. This then they described in the hymns we have received as the Rig and the other Vedas. It was simply a question of ‘time’ for that Seed to evolve. There was no way in which a different seed could replace that original Vedic core.

But what has happened is something else, described quite accurately in the Matrimandir: the circumscribing conditions, or the SOIL in which that germination and evolution was to take place is a phenomenon which establishes certain conditionalities. Thus history brought into that ‘soil’ a series of determinants via invading and conquering powers with cultures or ‘purposes’ entirely opposed to the inherent nature of the Seed. By consequence, this composite ‘soil’ was carried over to the Matrimandir where we also have extraneous cultures imposing their dictates on the Core. Correspondingly, we have a global society imposing on the government and people of India certain constraints which can only serve to weigh the nation down under the burden of these impositions.

At the same time, this peripheral imposition by the builders of the Matrimandir, I repeat, set the pattern for the Yoga, similar to the reevaluation Sri Aurobindo was obliged to carry out given the partitioned condition of Mother India. This imposition obliged me also to do the Yoga of the Chamber which focused on a realignment of the global (peripheral) axis. In the meantime, the architect installed the ‘void’ crystal and stand, by which symbols India’s present condition has been revealed.

The grace of having had a Matrimandir to work out the alignment for the nation was eliminated by these latter-day ‘invaders’, who, it is assumed, will maintain their hold for as long as any other invader had in the subcontinent. What a realignment would have meant for India would have been a miraculous establishment of a ‘centre that holds’. The nation would have resolved certain apparently unresolvable problems which became crystalised in the Partition – or the Vedic base torn asunder by the religious consciousness, tool par excellence of the Lord of Nations whose primary characteristic is to divide-and-rule, ever and always. Unity is not in that power’s vocabulary.

In India’s case this activity focuses on its spiritual destiny – the essence of that Vedic ‘seed’ – though it is in no way apparent to the layman. But spiritual is misleading. The real designation is simply Veda, gnosis or knowledge. It is a civilisation founded on the principle of Knowledge. We have the exact opposite displayed in the Matrimandir in Auroville, for which reason I am obliged to refer to it as a ‘shadow-temple’. It displays all the characteristics of the Ignorance (as opposed to Knowledge), of darkness which must be dissolved by the Light of Gnosis if India is to realise the inherent truth of the Vedic seed of her destiny by the aid of this mechanism.

To summarise, given the failure to insert the proper alignment in the Matrimandir, the shift to the periphery took place for strategic purposes – i.e., the global society where the Yoga of the Chamber brought the desired realignment and gave birth to the unitary system to replace the binary. Having failed to forge this new axis, India has thus been carried into the periphery because she cannot occupy her rightful place of CENTRE while the Matrimandir ‘belongs’ to the Lord of Nations, usurper of the ‘centre’ due to its condition of emptiness. Thus India is totally out of place, as it were, and is left vulnerable, obliged now to follow the dictates of the major power of the periphery – i.e., America.

As for the United States, it too is ‘out of place’. That is, America is being forced BY INDIA, ironically, to appear to occupy the Centre (the single ‘pole’ of the new world order), simply because of this possession on Indian soil at a crucial location. The result is that though the periphery has been realigned, it is still vulnerable and precarious because all things are not yet in their place due to India’s inadequate response to her pulse of destiny.

In this light it has to be understood that in terms of India’s future it was the possession of the Matrimandir by the consciousness we call the Lord of Nations in the mid 1970s that was the decisive, most deadly blow India has had to endure over the past 1000 and more years. It outstrips any harm even Partition brought. For the latter could have been miraculously rearranged had the Matrimandir been left intact and the Mother’s original plan been respected. All things would have been ‘made new’ in India, as they are in the world, in this one masterful flash of a divine Seeing. It must also be borne in mind that such a realignment and creation of a centre, a point to fill the void, has been the area of India’s destiny reserved for the Avataric Line. Yet the circumscribing conditions (of the ‘soil’) imposed a complex shift in order for the work to survive.

It has survived – but just barely. That is, we stand precariously on the brink of an abyss where the periphery is realigned but around a void. This means the centre can be filled by any usurper. As it has been occultly by the Lord of Nations.

 

The Solar and Lunar Strategy 

 

There is a certain aspect to this problem which needs to be highlighted, if we are to appreciate that there is a meticulous CONTROL over the destiny of this nation which is not so much in evidence in any other nation. I refer to the manner in which India has been held together through a most difficult period – from the time when the dismembering was ‘decided’ upon – by a particular arrangement based on the cosmological formula 9/6/3-0/1. This formula is realised in the nation by the Solar Line. But there is the Lunar as well. And it has been via the latter (in conjunction with the former) that the country has been ‘held together’ in spite of being centreless. At the same time, though this arrangement has functioned meticulously, we note that there was a worsening of conditions from the very time the wrong axial measurement and the void became cemented in the Matrimandir construction. I mentioned that this took place in the mid 1970s. On the national stage, it was precisely then, late June of 1975, that a crossroads had been reached in the Indian polity. The external manifestation of this mishap in Auroville and its correspondence in the national scene was the imposition of emergency rule by Indira Gandhi at that very time. The two events occurred simultaneously.

From that point onward the political life of India underwent a considerable worsening because, for the purpose of survival given the compound problems, the nation was being held together not by any political party but by the presence of the Lunar Line exclusively. Thereafter the cries of dynastic rule were heard everywhere and from everyone. But occultly speaking, or in terms of the pattern established to hold India together during the period when it would be ‘centreless’, or unable to forge that centre, it was precisely the ‘dynasty’ irrespective of any political party or policy which had taken upon itself, by destiny, the labour of holding the nation together until the moment when conditions would permit the alignment required for the ‘void’ to be filled and for India to occupy her true place within herself and in the world.

It can be noted, however, that the stresses felt by the Lunar Line during that period – from 1975 onward – were severe. In fact, each of the last three members in the Line was unexpectedly removed from the national scene in tragic circumstances. Those circumstances described conditions operating in more subtle dimensions, but they did indeed have their physical counterparts. We note therefore that as of that time the nation began to reveal a worsening on many levels. This culminated in terrorism on an unprecedented scale and open secessionist movements at the three angles of the nation’s body.

The point I wish to make is that the tenure of Rajiv Gandhi, for example, had for its purpose something other than good or bad government. He was heading India for the sole purpose of ‘holding’ during a most critical period. As well, he fulfilled his destiny precisely by creating certain tensions which would result in the rise of a more determined call for a new base, a new perception of India’s destiny based on her true destiny and inherent Dharma. This is the first time in the history of post-independent India that such a call has met with a tangible response. However, there is more involved in the tensions Rajiv’s policies created which we will analyse in the course of this study. For now I would simply like to conclude by noting that his removal from the scene occurred just after the crystal reached Auroville from Germany and when he was in its very vicinity.

It should also be pointed out that Indira Gandhi, third power of the Lunar Line, through my explanations was aware of the role the temple was to play in India’s destiny. Though serious troubles had surfaced in Auroville and there was a demand from many quarters to take over the project forthwith, she did not do so but ordained that a number of years should transpire before any final arrangement would be decided upon. During that time, a victory over the usurping forces could have come about. This period came to straddle the entire ennead of 1980 to 1989. Unfortunately, given the circumscribing conditions (of the ‘soil’), she was removed from the national scene. There followed a final take-over by the Government of India when the new ennead set in (1989), and no one now in power with the sensitivity required to handle this delicate matter.

I have enough faith in the wisdom of this civilisation to know that had the true situation been given the right exposure while the Matrimandir was being built, India would have responded from the soul and the heart and the usurpation would have been brought to an end. However, this exposure was wickedly obstructed. And now there is the added complication that this sacred space, reserved for the realigning of the nation’s time-axis, with all that this signifies, has become an arena for political ambitions to become satisfied. This is one of the reasons why the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, as any other spiritual leader would do, resisted the intrusion of government into their creation. One cannot expect politicians, bureaucrats and academicians to be yogis. They are impelled precisely by the drive of their ambition, and this is tremendously complicating in a project such as the one initiated by the Mother in the Ashram and in Auroville, regardless of the goodwill of the ruling party. In this regard, it must be pointed out that there is one party in power today and tomorrow perhaps another. The destiny of the project is thus as precariously perched as the world is now in orbit of a central Void.

Thus, over and above the presiding architect’s ambition – now fully satisfied, in his own words, with the near completion of the shadow-temple – we have the mundane drawn in. None of those ‘in charge’ of Auroville have had the grace of an enlightenment which would preclude them from being instruments of the Lord of Nations. Each one is thoroughly vulnerable. And what has been ordained by an Act of Parliament is now a fixed law.

There is no member of the Lunar Line in government now to be sensitive to this issue. There is, however, one hope: the survival of the Knowledge which is an undeniable fact. It has been preserved. But this is nonetheless insufficient. It must be accompanied by a force inherent in itself to overcome the blockage. There are for the present no indications that a decisive victory of this nature can be expected. All we can do then is to continue casting more and more light into that dark ‘cave’ where the luminous Ray has been concealed, hoarded, hidden away.

 

The Eclipse of the Light 

 

The alignment and creation of a centre for India was meant to deal with problems entirely unique to India, though they are reflections of flaws in the global consciousness, – indeed, in the nature of the human species itself. They are the consequences of a species structured according to a binary pattern, which must necessarily evolve civilisations which reflect this bi-polar characteristic. And though these flaws have been reconstructed in India, in this microcosm, they are present and form a part of the realignment in a way not to be found anywhere else. For example, the scourge of the religious consciousness, though it torments the world as a whole, is not found elsewhere in the same measure. In India it has resulted in a division in civilisational terms. The Lord of Nations appears to have succeeded in convincing the contemporary Indian that this is a nation of TWO cultures, TWO civilisations…and of course two religions because of which there is this civilisational split. The wholeness, the homogeneity of the Vedic ecliptic base has been torn asunder. Indeed, the result is there is no base, precisely because there is no centre which automatically produces a base/plane. Nothing really and truly holds this play together. Consequently, we have a dismembered physical body, and the threat of a continued dismembering. This is unavoidable given the usurpation at the Matrimandir and the condition of what was to have been the Globe and Pedestal but is now called the ‘crystal and stand’ in the shadow version.

I mentioned the question of a collective will in Spain at the end of the 15^th Century and beginning of the 16^th, which was sufficient to expel a foreign rule of many centuries and establish a homogeneous culture. This never took place in India, given the quality of the Vedic Dharma where this sort of imposition, of dogmatic rejection is foreign to its nature. The attitude of compromise easily took hold in such a soil. But while Spain rose to great heights thereafter, India sank lower and lower and finally had to submit to a humiliating dismembering in honour of that inability to exert its collective will. This came to pass because the Vedic foundation, the ecliptic Base, no longer remained intact, given the fact that these extraneous cultures secured a foothold in the nation and could not be dislodged.

This was fortified by the British Raj which took full advantage of the conditions it found when it entered the scene. That is, unlike Spain, India went from one foreign rule to another. And the latter simply took advantage of the corrosion brought about by the former rulers in the Vedic-inspired collective Will, or Agni, to consolidate its own occupation. Under those circumstances, it is evident that India could not overcome the onslaught and heal the damage before this further invasion. Contrarily, the British did indeed introduce quelque chose de pourri in the nation, to use the Mother’s words, a ‘corrupting element’. They increased the sense of guilt in the Hindu masses by which they were obliged to recite ‘Rahim and Ram are one’. Failing to do so would be ‘intolerant’, and no Hindu could accept such a label which went entirely against the grain of his cultural substance.

The result of the above is that Hinduism and Islam became equal on the scales of the religious consciousness. It is a situation still not overcome in the national psyche. There has been no greater victory of the Ignorance than this successful placement of the civilisation on the Hindu/Muslim seesaw. It has helped neither in overcoming divisive forces which have struck both.

This is not to say that Islam is lower and Hinduism is something higher on the ladder. It is just that Hinduism does not belong on the seesaw. That is, there is no such seesaw, in the deepest sense of the nation’s fibre and destiny. It is simply a concoction of the Raj to divide-and-rule because then it was the British rule that stood ABOVE, towering over this indigenous seesaw of two ‘civilisations’ still suffering from superstitions and trapped in the lesser realm of religion which the occidental world, after the Age of Enlightenment, had thoroughly rejected. Great Britain was thus legitimate heir to the position of secular world leader able to hold cultures of many religions under its wise rule.

This is a pattern that is defended even today by Indians themselves because the British took great care to ensure that India would serve the Raj in this way even after its removal. Thus, the educational system – a part of which is the interpretation of history to serve that Raj and the concept of European supremacy – and the secular mould of consciousness were adopted as tools for this self-perpetuating subjugation. These are so entrenched now that they resist all attempts at dislodging.

I would also add to the above that it was precisely this state of affairs that sealed the Matrimandir’s fate. I also found myself pitted against that very consciousness – a mindset which contradicts everything the Veda and Gnosis, in Sri Aurobindo’s terms, stand for. The reason why the architect and powers-that-be in Auroville so easily took possession of the temple and maintained their hold, irrespective of the indisputable Knowledge that sustained my position and which was formulated and published in advance of the construction to prove my point, was simply because I could be dismissed as a lunatic, a pre-Age of Enlightenment casualty whose mind resisted the superior science of modern architecture and its right to ‘interpret’ according to a secular, profane preparation, eschewing all ‘sacred’ overtones. What I was upholding as Indian tradition and culture was precisely what the British were able to dismiss as pagan and backward. The cosmic harmonies, in view of this superior secular preparation, was merely superstition with no scientific basis. And any connection made between the Mother’s original plan and that Harmony could be conveniently dismissed on this basis. And any connection made between the Mother’s original plan and that Harmony could be conveniently dismissed on this basis, in particular when the Government entered the scene after Indira Gandhi’s demise.

The architect of the Matrimandir embodied the full consciousness of scientific/academic ‘enlightenment’ by sustaining that his rendering of the temple was in all ways superior to what I had been pleading for in my insistence that the Mother’s original should be respected, and that only a person schooled in the higher aspects of symbolism could be expected to ‘interpret’ whatever of her original that was not clear and needed a certain elaboration.

The architect, by his own admission that the 4cm void point in the centre of the room he has constructed is ‘symbolic’ in his eyes, forces us to consider him a valid ‘interpreter’ and elaborator of the Mother’s vision and prepared to deal with the required elaboration in the light of a higher approach to these matters. This is precisely the usurpation I have been lamenting all along, because these architects, trained as they were in the West where there is no such grounding in the higher and sacred aspects of architecture, have taken upon themselves a task for which they are completely unprepared. And what is worse, they clung to that task and refused any help in the endeavour so that truly the Mother’s vision could be translated adequately and captured in her Temple. The result of this refusal is that the Shadow is there for all to see. But with what eyes? This is the problem.

The British ‘corruption’ (quelque chose de pourri) distorted the lens of the modern Indian by this ‘secular’ colouring, which may have its place, but certainly not in such matters. Thus we find a nation torn asunder not by Islam or any claim of ethnicity of whichever hue, but engaged in the exercise of self-undoing by this brand of secularism which insists in equalising what had never any equal footing on the civilisation prior to this imposition. The result has been a loss of the cultural identity to such a degree that often we are faced with sheer cacophony when applauders of this equality persist in singing the praises of all religions in one breath. In the strictest terms of the religious consciousness, to equate Rahim with Ram has to be somewhat disturbing to the Muslim. There is no ‘oneness’ between the two so why must anyone be labelled a communalist or a fundamentalist when this distinction is to be made? Indeed, this is the self-undoing guilt inflicted upon the nation, making use of the innate wideness of the Hindu psyche. To draw distinctions between elements does not imply an inferior or superior ranging. It is simply defining on the all-encompassing ecliptic of the nation’s foundational base for the purpose of harmonising and integrating those elements.

 

The Shadow Core 

 

The above is written simply by way of an introduction to the core of this portion of the study which is an analysis of the Indian condition as we find it today, and how these conditions – for example, willessness – may come to be reflected in the shadow-temple.

The original premise of this study, based on the foundational premise of Hinduism, was Fulness versus the Void. I have demonstrated the manner in which an aspect of the Veda in this regard has been denied. That is, by the VOID point, centremost item in the architect’s interpretation of the Mother’s vision. But there is much more denied  of the Knowledge preserved in Hinduism in that construction. To demonstrate, I will concentrate now on the crystal in itself and for itself, and various aspects of the symbolism in comparison with the true and sacred Globe. Thereafter, I will discuss the ‘stand’ installed in the shadow-temple, in contrast to the Pedestal in the Mother’s true chamber-core. To conclude, the two, crystal and stand, will be analysed together as interconnected elements, compared to the Core of the New Way creation which is formed by the appropriate Globe and Pedestal. I shall provide geometric proof to support my contention that what has been installed in the Matrimandir ‘as faithful as can be’ to the Mother’s original, is in fact a pathetic display of ignorance of any aspect of the Knowledge the Mother so brilliantly captured in her original. As well, this analysis will also reveal the inferior aesthetic impact of the centrepiece in the shadow-temple. The proportions executed, given the fact that the ‘stand’ bears no relation proportionally, geometrically, to the crystal it supports, reveal the lack even of a heightened aesthetic eye in the executors.

Regarding the ‘crystal’, some background must be provided to appreciate the deeper aspects involved in the architect’s interpretation of the Mother’s vision. For it must be pointed out that there are two aspects to the problem. One was the deliberate falsification of the vision; the other was the manner in which the Mother’s vision came to be interpreted and then executed, because indeed there were elements to be resolved even though her plan existed and her taped conversations to accompany the plan and help in the interpretation. The latter is really what interests us most because it reveals the level of consciousness of the powers-that-be and the manner in which they have taken upon themselves to ‘interpret’ the vision. The result has been a temple in their image, very accurately and revealingly, and not the Divine Mother’s. This is especially exposed in the upside-down reflection of those images in the crystal. Compared to the Mother’s consciousness, the other is truly standing on its head.

The architect has tried to cover himself in the event of any questioning, inasmuch as I have repeatedly asked the Government for a hearing on this important matter and that the architect should be obliged to present his findings and explain his position, the reason for the changes he introduced, or the ‘symbolism’ he sought to instill in the creation – as, for example, the ‘symbolic’ meaning he attributes to the 4cm void Point. This hearing was always denied to us, for obvious reasons. The Government preferred to uphold the architect’s position, without ever hearing the other side. Therefore, we were never given the opportunity to do privately what I am now obliged to do publicly in these pages: dissect each and every item of the executed room and, in the light of the knowledge of sacred Vedic symbolism, compare it with the true vision and the correct rendering. Indeed, there is no need at all to interpret, as the architect has done. One the basis of that Knowledge, the resolution of each item on the agenda was self-evident, as I have demonstrated regarding the 15-step stairway penetrating the floor.

But there is also a certain amount of dishonesty involved in the architect’s position on the stairway, for example, He declares [Auroville Today, January 1992] that it was the only item eliminated, and gives the reason as being the inability to execute entry into the room in the way the Mother had designed because the floor had been subsequently lifted above ground level. By this we assume he means that structurally the placement of the stairway had been rendered impossible from beneath the floor given the room’s suspension, so to speak.

I would like to point out that originally the 12 pillars were eliminated because they were not needed to support the roof, given the availability of reinforced concrete in structural engineering. Clearly, this same method could have made it possible for the architect to resolve the matter of a stairway leading to an opening in the floor with very little difficulty.

But, I repeat, this statement is not at all honest. It is an attempt to protect himself from the questions I constantly raise regarding this important elimination – perhaps the only one visible to the naked eye and easily adjudicated as a deviation from the original plan. For the fact is there was never any discussion on this matter after the Mother gave the architect her original design. The first architect never raised the point of the impossibility to execute this unusual feature. It is clear from the taped conversations on this subject that his only concern was aesthetics and resolution of the stairway according to the accepted norms of contemporary architecture. On the basis of this criteria, the stairway from beneath the floor was eliminated in one stroke at the very beginning of the discussions – that is, between 3 and 17 January 1970. (See Matrimandir Dialogues, TVN 1/5-6.) It was replaced by entrances piercing the walls; and this formed the basis of the plan the presiding architect used for the construction. When he took possession of the work early on, he did not deal with this item at all. Hence we have every right to question his contention that the stairway was eliminated because of this structural problem.

When the presiding architect took up the work in 1974, and never let go of it thereafter, the stairs had already been redesigned, though the room was far from being executed. There was every possibility of executing them according to the Mother’s original plan. But, to my knowledge, the issue was never raised again.

This is an interesting point to study in greater depth, however, because it is very revealing of the quality of the consciousness the Mother (and later myself) had to contend with. If a client specifically asks an architect to execute a room with a stairway moving into it from the middle of the floor, it is, to say the least, an unusual, unconventional request; especially when the room does not structurally require such an entry. In fact, in her original plan it is the only item which draws one’s attention as being a singular, uncommon feature. In addition, each step had specific measurements, and the length of the rise as well. Therefore, to attack that item without even questioning the Mother’s reason for demanding this exotic entrance, certainly says much about the insensitivity of the architects and throws light on her admonition: NO ARCHITECTS!

The only explanation for their callous treatment of this important feature is that they must have thought it was a quaint idea – and nothing more, of someone not at all versed in modern architecture and its aesthetic concepts. Clearly they did not consider that it had any intrinsic value or higher purpose, or that her words should have been taken seriously: ‘…There are no doors, but going deep down, one comes up again into the temple. One goes under the wall, and comes up again inside. It is another symbol. Everything is symbolic.’ (Ibid. 10 January 1970.)

As fortune would have it, I made the discovery that this ‘quaint’ touch was an astounding display of architectural genius, incorporating higher knowledge and clairvoyance in the bargain. For the fact is that the design the Mother gave for this 15-step, carefully-measured entry, apart from everything else I wrote about it in the last issue of VISHAAL, is an exact correlation of the entrance into the Great Pyramid at Giza. I reproduce reverse below the diagram from The New Way, Volume 2, page 468, proving this point. If the measurements are correct, Sri Aurobindo’s symbol is occultly present in the plan, and since its triangles (only the ascending one is reproduced in this diagram) are of the same proportions as the Great Pyramid, the Mother was inspired to provide an exact correlation for the entry into her chamber. In addition it must be pointed out that this was not a mental decision or calculation. It was entirely a spontaneous, intuitive happening. A real demonstration of the true Vedic Seer. The architects should have done their utmost to execute that vision faithfully.

But this correlation has now been completely lost in the executed temple purported to be ‘her vision’. It is this that prompted me to request the Government that my findings should at least be scrutinised and I should be allowed to question the architect before a panel of competent judges. If he claims that his changes and interpretations are ‘symbolic’, as he has done publicly in certain matters, then he should also be expected to confront me and defend his position. I was willing to defend mine before an official forum. But unfortunately, the architect has never been questioned nor has he ever had the courage to confront us. And he is now supported by the Government of India and the attitude of compromise in such matters where compromise is impossible. It is also now a question of protecting the status quo and one’s position. Consequently, it is simple to deduce that truth and knowledge have been entombed in Auroville. But Truth does have its own platform, and I will continue with the exercise of dissecting so that in a certain area of the nation’s consciousness-being, that Truth will live on.

Given the usurpation, we are expected to accept that the architect’s feeble reason for mauling this stunning example of a divine Seeing is somehow sacrosanct and must not be questioned. For to do so is labelled dogmatic or superstitious, in addition to being disruptive. One is labelled a ‘trouble maker’. Indeed, this state of affairs is adequately displayed in the topsy-turvy reflections in the architect’s interpretation of the chamber’s core. My call is therefore to that collective soul of the Indian nation which can and will one day unmask the fallacy in this position and expose it for what it is: a usurpation of a work that had to be undertaken not by western-trained architects but by people of sound knowledge in these matters, with adequate credentials thereof. Not from a  conventional academia which is incompetent in this realm but true and proven Gnosis.

 

The Mother’s Vision at the Service of the Void   

 

The Mother’s vision took shape in two stages. The first was simply the vision, the seeing. It occurred somewhere between the evening of 31 December 1969 and the early morning of 3 January 1970. The second was the act of measuring. This was sometime between 3 and 9 January; the exact date should be with the Ashram engineer to whom the Mother gave the measurements and design for the original plan. It was the act of measuring which was the more important of the two and displayed the full power of a divine Maya at work. For it was then that the vision was organised, and the details of the vision which were left fluid after the first seeing were finalised. Notable among these is the precise 70cms diameter of the Globe, in contrast to the earlier 30; the 24 metres of the chamber ‘ending at the walls’, in contrast to the architect’s desire to alter that measurement by a few meters; the translucent material of the Globe, in contrast to the earlier possible transparent quality; the colour and material (stone) of the four symbols of Sri Aurobindo upholding the Globe; and finally the carefully designed (and measured) entrance through the floor.

What is especially disturbing is to note that the choices made by the powers-that-be in Auroville for the ‘final’ solutions, which they claim are ‘as faithful as possible to the Mother’s vision, are all the WRONG choices. Rather than execute the finalised, measured vision, the FLUID oral description of the first day, before she had finalised the plan, has invariably been selected. What has been revealed in this is that unquestionably the architect’s and builder’s state of consciousness is far lower than the Mother’s – if there was ever any doubt – for they are not IN TUNE with her vision; or else that the choices have been a deliberate attempt to demolish her vision. Let me provide a few examples:

 

1) Transparent or translucent globe: After drawing up her plan, the Mother states,

 

‘…A translucent globe…we do not know yet in what material’,

 

‘…A globe which is not transparent but rather translucent.’

 

‘…and the globe is translucent’. (10.1.1970)

 

In spite of this clear instruction, the architect and builders have chosen to make their crystal transparent. Is it any wonder that it came to reflect their images upside-down?

 

2) Sri Aurobindo’s symbols: ‘…I did not see them in white, I saw them in undefinable colour which was between gold and orange. A kind of colour like that. They will be upright. They will be carved in stone.’ (Italics mine.) (Ibid.)

 

The builders have chosen gold plating on metal rather than ‘carved in stone’. Is it any wonder that the casting has been terribly flawed, with countless holes throughout, making the plating a very costly, labour-consuming and imperfect exercise.

We must now turn our attention to the 4cm void Point and question how it came to be devised and executed by the architect. I have described it as the single most important ‘symbol’ in the shadow-chamber, just as it is the single most important item in the Mother’s own symbol when present, though in many reproductions that central dot or point does not figure. I have equated it with Agni, the divine Will working in the worlds, and the ‘singularity’ which gave rise to the material universe we inhabit; or else, the immanent Transcendent. It is therefore appropriate to question how this void might have arisen in the mind of the architect.

I am perhaps largely to blame. From 1974, I have been vigorously campaigning for the execution of the Mother’s original plan in contrast to the architect’s which, in those early days, was completely different from the Mother’s. The two could not therefore be juxtaposed. Misrepresentation was impossible at that time. But my insistence (nothing of the chamber had then been built) resulted in a certain tension wherein the present architect seems to have edged out the original chief architect of the project and took over complete control. What existed in the way of any construction then was the skeleton of the edifice which was executed according to the original architect’s revised plan, – i.e., it contained, among all the other changes, a 3metre hole in the centre of the floor (where the Mother’s symbol was to have been placed). He had eliminated the Pedestal entirely. The void was firmly set in place – three metres of it – by a steel ring; and its execution was costly and structurally complex in a floor space of close to 24 metres in diameter.

Thus, when I began exerting pressure for the adoption of the Mother’s plan and when the present executing architect took control of the building from his colleague (who had, it ought to be noted, agreed to a return to the Mother’s original), the campaign was started to counter my ‘claim’ by proving that it was the Mother’s plan that was being executed and that I was lying. This campaign was so effective that until today there is barely a handful of people who know the truth in this matter.

Hence, the 12 columns which had been eliminated because they were ‘a symbol of the old creation’, and with the invention of reinforced concrete they were no longer structurally required, were reincorporated, their absence being an obvious deviation from the original. Of course the 3-metre hole in the middle of the room had to be closed somehow, this gaping void being equally incompatible with the original and an evident deviation to the naked eye.

Closing the hole was done, though its inclusion in the beginning of the construction greatly increased the structural costs of the building. But filling the empty space must have been an unsustainable development (from void to filling it up) precisely because so much money had been spent to install it in the first place. It was perhaps to appease his conscience that the executing architect decided to make some sense out of the waste and leave 4 centimetres of the 3 metres unfilled! The structural costs for the latter were certainly higher than would have been required for this 4cm ‘symbolism’. Perhaps the architect can explain that ‘symbolism’ in an adequate manner which will justify the expenditure involved. What was the deeper sense to the void Point which, in his eyes, made this very costly exercise worthwhile and valid?

What I wish to bring forth is that my campaign obliged the architect to reincorporate elements from the Mother’s original plan, and in the process permitted him to be in a position now to declare that it is as faithful to the original as possible. Be this as it may, let us now return to our analysis of his executed model and continue dissecting each point. In the process, I propose to reveal the manner in which even the partitioned condition of India has been faithfully captured in the shadow-temple. This will reveal  that architects and builders have been apt tools in constructing a monument to India’s decline and dismembering.

The fact that the original plan survives in The New Way is indication that there is more to this madness than meets the eye. For the fact is, most religions have evolved in a similar manner. For example, it is argued that Jesus, were he to return, would not recognise the Church which operates in his name. This is understandable when we consider that the latter developed long after Jesus had left the scene. Thereafter, it was the ‘interpretation’ of his teachings which served as the model for the religion; and which in turn gave rise to numerous sects and an unending string of disputes between them. This development usually takes a certain amount of time to become consolidated. Perhaps several hundred years. It is rare that a distortion of this nature can be countered, or even recognised, in close proximity to the founder’s passing.

But in the case of the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, there has been an immediate response to the degeneration. It is precisely in order to avoid that Sri Aurobindo’s teachings become just another sect of Hinduism, or the foundation for another religion, that this exposure has been carefully prepared. The result is similar to Sri Aurobindo’s masterful expose of William Archer’s shallow and insidious essays on Hindu culture which drove him to pen a reply. The outcome was one of his most remarkable books, The Foundations of Indian Culture. I have been quoting extensively from this work throughout this series. As a fount of truth-seeing, it is inexhaustible.

Regarding the current act of exposing, certain points must be recapitulated. They concern India’s ruling sign Capricorn, which is the period of the Festival of Light, precisely when the Mother had her vision of the chamber which was to serve the nation in realigning its time-axis in accord with that sacred Festival and sign. The Matrimandir as the Mother’s original plan reveals, describes many dimensions of India’s civilisation, culture and geography. Not to speak of her spirituality and philosophy. In the measurements of the chamber according to her original plan, we have an India whole and integral – unlike the present condition. For it is a geometrical, architectural design of a knowledge which establishes a source of power to faithfully secure this condition of integrality. The main ingredient for this to come about is unity. That is, a unity of design wherein each item is incorporated in the execution so that it is related to every other and they support each other as a means to achieve and sustain that unity and integrality. This requires harmony, a particular play between items, – proportionate, harmonious, interrelated. Above all, an unmistakable connection.

We have seen how numerous dimensions are captured in such a vision of Unity whereby not only the Dharma is served in the exercise of its reestablishment, but the nation’s time-axis is REALIGNED. And also its geography rendered whole and complete.

One all-important item can serve to illustrate the manner in which such an integrated vision operates. It is the chamber’s centremost core, the area of 3 metres which is the equivalent of the sanctum in the traditional Hindu temple were the icon is housed – the garbhagriha or womb-house.

 

The New Vedic Seeing  

 

The Mother’s original plan is faithful to Vedic tradition, but carries it to even more sublime heights. The Principle of Fulness which the Hindu temple captures and upholds by a convergence of the symbolism in  the execution on the garbhagriha and its obvious meaning of fulness, is expressed in the entire chamber of the Mother’s design. Indeed, the whole temple is expressive of the creative Womb. Entering the inner chamber is akin to penetrating that womb – hence, another reason to have respected the entry as it had been originally given by the Mother.

In the chamber’s core, therefore, we have the various elements which are required for this Principle to operate through the design and measurements. The Core of the Mother’s original contains the elements a creative process of the supramental manifestation requires. That is, an integration based on a harmony of form unlike anything that has been achieved in the old creation, regardless how sacred and ancient. This requires the integration of time and space, or vertical and horizontal dimensions or directions, aligned in such a way as to produce the perfect centre – because of which the time/soul-axis engenders the Point, or Skambha.

To begin with, in the core there is the Globe. According to the Mother’s specific indication, its dimensions had to be 70cm diameter. When she gave this measurement no one, least of all the architects and disciple, cared to enquire why she had selected this particular diameter. And yet it was because of this measurement that the integration and perfection discussed above could come into being. Let us then analyse in depth this item; thereafter, I will demonstrate in what way this fulness, harmony and integrality were destroyed in the Auroville interpretation and execution. For it is only in a careful comparative analysis of this nature that the student and disciple and real seeker of Truth can understand why every effort had been made to convince the architects to follow the original vision and plan, basing our efforts on solid knowledge and not sentimentality as this analysis will amply reveal.

To appreciate the uniqueness of the Mother’s creation, the analysis has to be sustained by knowledge of the Gnostic Circle. The latter is the gnostic key to the original plan. Without it no understanding would be forthcoming. And it is for this reason that the Mother made sure that the basic structure of the Gnostic Circle had been transmitted just before she left her body. That is, in October of 1973.

Thus, with the diagram in hand, it was then possible to discover what I came to call ‘the geography of the Gnostic Circle’ (plagiarised in Auroville Today, June 1991). This revealed that the full and integral India consists of 40° longitude and 30° latitude. Together they equal 70 degrees. And this is the precise diameter of the Core’s luminous globe. Thus these 70 degrees are the integral body of India and they encompass the whole of pre-partitioned India (see The New Way, Volume 2, Chapter 9).

Insofar as this globe, in its many-dimensional function, is the individual soul and also the Earth’s soul, and that it is India’s as well, we have these various elements combined in this geometric symbol. But this could refer to any 70 degrees were it not for the fact that for such a globe to come into being, the Yoga of the Chamber had to have been undertaken in order to produce a perfect alignment of converging, traversing planes or dimensions: vertical and horizontal universal directions. Or gnostic Time and Space. When that occurs – and only then – the true Globe comes into being and FULNESS rather than emptiness is the result.

In this light, if we observe the frontispiece of The New Way, Volumes 1 & 2, or the poster thereof, Agni-in-the-Core, we clearly perceive this fulness. It is unmistakable as the principal objective of such a symbolism: the Globe is luminous and translucent, not empty and transparent. That is, one cannot see through this piece in the Core, for to do so would indicate emptiness, a void space. And if we compare this to the ‘crystal’ the architects have installed as the centrepiece in the shadow-temple, it is more than obvious that they were not at all conscious of the true character of the Mother’s creation inasmuch as their crystal is entirely empty and void, and can never hope to be  otherwise.

How then, we are entitled to ask, can this item stand as having been a faithful interpretation of the Mother’s original vision, ‘as faithful as possible’ when it displays a character utterly and totally OPPOSED to the fundamental concept of not only her new creation but of the ancient Vedic tradition as well? Yet these architects and builders have usurped the right, supported by the Government of India, to hold themselves as authorities in such matters, without the least foundation in the Yoga required to permit one to be considered an Authority.

But the most lamentable part is that none really care. Neither the residents of Auroville, the disciples in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, nor the devotees in India and throughout the world. And more especially the Government of India which now ‘owns’ Auroville and is responsible for everything that transpires therein and which it is making its own very special political/cultural/ international platform. This ‘platform’ is, on paper, intended to further the ideals and teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Yet I have demonstrated that the shadow-temple is precisely a disfigurement of their teachings, – a negative copy of the original. The ‘crystal’ installed stands in stark opposition to the single most important feature of Sri Aurobindo’s revolutionary message. But if one has never really understood those teachings nor practiced his Yoga, then a ‘crystal’ in that commercial, unenlightened condition is entirely appropriate and may be quite impressive.

Let me now carry this analysis over to the human condition. The ‘crystal’ is not simply empty, it reflects everything surrounding it. The meaning is self-evident, but for the record I would like to explain in what way this singular imagery is a faithful mirror of the actual human condition of the ‘old creation’; and, by contrast, entirely unrelated to the new species of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.

Due to his binary alignment, the human being cannot contain POWER. He cannot bring about a concentration of energy which provides him with a self-luminous CENTRE. Or rather, that luminosity arises out of a perfect alignment whereby a centre emerges. It is this Centre, due to its connection with the Source, which sustains the inflow and for which reason we call it self-replenishing. It is similar to fusion in the core of the Sun. In Vedic terms, it is that pillar/point or bridge to the other dimension, or swar, as it is called, the solar world of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the Truth-Consciousness. That dimension serves as the channel for this eternal replenishing. On this basis, because of the realisation of Agni, Skambha or the Pillar/Point, a condition of immortality can come into being. It requires a special concentration of energy from an ever-replenishing Source.

In his present condition, the human being can never experience this fulness and continuous replenishing because his instrument is mis-aligned. Thus, it breaks down under certain stresses, being OFF-CENTRED. The result is Death. The whole experience is aborted prematurely in that at the mid-point of one’s life, when the experience of Reversal should draw in this replenishment, it is the Void, the emptiness that is ‘contacted’ rather than that dimension of the Vedic Swar, insofar as in his present condition, off-centred and mis-aligned, the human instrument orbits a ‘centre’ devoid of the ‘point that fills that Void’. The result is collapse of energy and ageing, rather than a balance which prevents this hitherto unavoidable calamity.

In our binary condition we orbit therefore a void. Given this fact, there is no self-replenishing source, no auto-luminosity, no fulness. Thus it is not a CENTRED CONDITION, not a creature in orbit of a true centre by a perfect alignment – a centre that therefore HOLDS. Rather, the human being, given this inner emptiness, or the void centre-point, is poised on the surface of his or her consciousness.

Thus, the crystal the architect and builders have created is truly and accurately in their own image, and not at all the Divine’s, the Mother’s. But THEIRS is a replica of the whole human species and the old creation. It has nothing at all to do with the supramental world and hence can in no way stand as a ‘faithful’ representation of the Mother’s vision. It has no auto-luminosity, or in the strict terms of the vision, no containment of the Light, the energy. It has thus no fulness. It displays no concentration. All of which are prerequisites for the new supramental species to come into being. Indeed, for this reason the Mother laid emphasis on the fact that the chamber of her original vision was a place to concentrate not ‘meditate’. She made a point of the distinction.

In contrast to the above, the ‘crystal’, as a faithful image of the human condition, is surface-oriented with everything FROM OUTSIDE reflected thereupon. In addition, these surface images are turned upside-down, in an apt representation of just what occurs in the perception of a creature structured binarily. And finally, the main point of the symbolism is a fixation on externals. How can anyone seated before such an item escape this fixation? There is no centremost core which draws one within. There is simply an endless display of inverted images, and this ‘noise’ is projected on an inner emptiness, a nothingness. These two words are explicit denials of Sri Aurobindo’s message. Yet they are the only words we can find to describe the ‘crystal’ in the architect’s interpretation which, in the Mother’s words, along with the descending solar Ray was supposed to be ‘the symbol of the future realisation’. Can his rendition be accepted as having realised her pregnant description of the chamber’s core?

Those of rajasic temperament who have taken over the construction have secured a firm foothold, similar to the British and prior to them, the Moghuls, the Turks, the Persians, and so on. All have been able to do so due to the undermining of the Point in the Dharma which results in the cumulative diminishing of the collective will; and with this the subsequent attitude of escape and compromise. The architects and builders of the shadow-temple have easily overtaken the project and brought about this gross and unredeemable, unpardonable distortion simply because the conditions in India were favourable for such a misappropriation. More specifically, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, as a laboratory encompassing representative energies from the whole of India, with all its complexities and problematic ‘knots’, provided these usurpers with a proper field conducive to the take-over of the temple, Above all, the lack of Knowledge in anyone in that collectivity made redemption of the vision virtually impossible from that quarter; and in any case, as another deft strategy of the Lord of Nations, there was by then a complete split between these two bodies of the Mother’s work which precluded any official intervention by the Ashram in the affairs of the township. However, this did not preclude an unofficial application of pressure; rather, there are elements in the Ashram actually collaborating now in the execution of this Shadow. But Sri Aurobindo described the position accurately when he wrote in Savitri…‘God shall grow up while the wisemen talk and sleep’.

I shall proceed now by this comparative analysis to demonstrate exactly in what way this national lack of will is depicted in the shadow-temple, by which means its high truth was so easily distorted beyond recognition. I shall demonstrate with precision how the physical body of the nation is contained in the vision and dismembered in the pseudo version, and how the original plan, if faithfully executed, was the means to remake both the Dharma and the partitioned geography. It is no wonder then, given the enormity of what was at stake, that forces should have rapidly converged and within just 18 days of the Mother’s revelation, the entire creation was stripped of its power and meaning.

These points will all be dealt with as I proceed with analysis of the Core, or the Pedestal and Globe, its proportionate unity and the way sacred geometry provides the key to what can safely be considered the most sublime aspect of the Mother’s vision, for without very exact measurements, the Pedestal cannot serve as the potent tool for realignment of the time-axis by establishing a particular height to the Core and rectangular CLOSED space beneath the Globe. Being the heart of the sanctum, it is understandable that the full power of sacred geometry should have been reserved for this centrepiece: Agni-in-the-Core.

 

 

 

 

June of 1992

Aeon Centre of Cosmology

at Skambha

 

(to be continued)

 

I have time and again brought up the issue of the misuse of the Rigveda to support the claim that the Aryans of the hymns were historical figures from distant lands who entered Bharat and conquered the indigenous population, bringing with them a superior culture into a largely primitive society. This basic premise has been invoked in countless ways to further the divide-and-rule syndrome. It must be admitted that the tactic was immensely successful and effective. Any attempt to counter the effects of this undermining postulation and to provide a true and faithful interpretation of the Veda engenders a vehement antagonism, or else simply indifference.

But it is not only the misuse of the Rigveda that concerns us. Many other aspects of India’s culture have been similarly misused. And if this is not so evident, there is another aspect to the conspiracy which is perhaps the most damaging. It is the fact that certain means had been provided to re-make or re-structure what had been distorted over the ages. Yet these elements themselves were taken over and perverted to the point where their function became twisted to serve the Falsehood and not the Dharma.

One such case had been the Matrimandir in Auroville. Most unfortunately for the public, that structure is held by the builders, and even disciples of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, to be ‘the Mother’s creation’. But a series of distortions crept into the original plan, the consequences of which have been that it is the Mother’s creation in name only. The Vedic essence she brought down through the original plan has not only been lost but worse, it has been perverted in the extreme. And yet that ‘creation’ was meant to be a central element in the establishment of the ancient Vedic Dharma.

Let me proceed to explain in depth the significance of this loss because pari passu with the loss in terms of sacred architecture and geometry as a means of realigning the Dharma, there is the most important factor of the lost Measure. That is, the misalignment of the time-axis.

Certainly one of the most important discoveries I have made in the field of cosmic harmonies has been the time factor in the Mother’s original plan of the Chamber (see The Gnostic Circle and The New Way, Volumes 1 & 2). Indeed, over the centuries many seekers have attempted to make the same discovery; but lacking a true ‘model of the universe’ provided by an enlightened sage in contemporary times, they have invariably sought for this knowledge in the extant remains of ancient cultures. The Great Pyramid at Giza is one example. Many have been the attempts to read into the Pyramid a time key. The result has always been a speculative mental theory without a firm truth-foundation and not at all a working model applicable to our times.

The Mother’s original plan of the chamber was entirely different. And insofar as the actual construction of the building fell under the rule of Falsehood – or the Lord of Nations, to use the name the Mother once gave to identify this falsifying element operating in our times, – this precious time element was lost in the actual physical building. But it lived on in the realm of Knowledge. It is this that has provided the foundation of the New Way.

But, we must ask, why is it necessary to have this ‘time factor’ at all in a building of that nature, or even in an architectural plan? For it must be pointed out that it is the plan which serves as the Philosopher’s Stone. However, the necessity for such a device has to do precisely with the reestablishment of the Dharma. And in India’s case, given the objective of its millennial destiny which is to ‘conquer Time’ (in contrast to the Egyptian which was to conquer Space), this question of reestablishment is intertwined inextricably with Time.

This, however, is not abstract, as we tend to view any theory involving Time. I shall proceed now to draw very specific connections in this part of the study between the ancient Veda and contemporary Indian society, focusing especially on the elements provided for the reestablishment. This is a work exclusive to the Avataric Line. It is understandable therefore that the Mother, second in the descending scale of the supramental avatars, and as such embodying the Cosmic Divine, was called upon to offer her contribution precisely in the area of the cosmic manifestation. She left humanity, India, with a ‘new model of the universe’. This was the culmination of her mission. But it was not the end of the work, nor of the Line. Two further stages remained and only half the work had been accomplished successfully. The most difficult portion stands before us and its successful completion hinged precisely on the discovery of the time factor in that ‘model’. Without that the exercise would have been entirely sterile, static, non-evolutionary and inorganic: once again simply speculative and abstract. Indeed, for the people of Auroville and the devotees of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in the Ashram and throughout the world, that is all they can extract from the temple. Devoid of Knowledge such a structure is merely a church. It serves as a focal point for the congregation into which it can pour its adoration and aspirations. But it is not a key of Knowledge and never a tool for the Yoga.

Yet, a model of this nature was meant to be something far more than even just an instrument of yoga and personal enlightenment. It was indeed a new model of the universe. Therefore when today we speak of a ‘new world order’, and if the Mother’s creation indeed epitomises the new creation announced by Sri Aurobindo in all his writings, then we are entirely justified in expecting to find that ‘new order’ somehow written into the Mother’s original plan. I shall demonstrate how meticulously this has been the case.

Similarly, if the Mother’s plan is that model and by consequence not only a vessel of knowledge but POWER as well, as a corollary of the former in all true processes of Vedic Yoga, then everything surrounding its creation must reveal what IS. In other words, the distortions brought into the construction by the architects and builders and devotees must be as revealing of our times as the pure, uncontaminated original model.

This is precisely the case, the state of our times: everything has been contaminated. Similar to the Rigveda and the outlandish interpretations foisted upon it, so heavily entrenched in the mind of contemporary Indian academia, the Mother’s original plan underwent a disfiguring in even worse proportions. But if the misuse of the Rigveda tells us everything we need to know about the prevailing consciousness which has settled over the nation in that it reflects an imperialistic, colonising, Euro-centred mindset, the same may be said of the Matrimandir in Auroville. Those in charge of the project are not only European but, to my view, they seem to have been carefully ‘selected’ to represent an important ‘knot’ in the transformative work, centred on architecture and aesthetics; precisely what Sri Aurobindo described in his comparative study of European and Indian culture. This seemed to be a residue from the Italian Renaissance.

The items distorted, the nature of the distortions clearly reflect the consciousness of Falsehood which overtook the project in the mid 1970s – to be precise, at the 4.5 Orbit of that ennead, or July 1975. To give just one example – and I will furnish many more in the course of this study – the crystal the builders have recently installed with great care reflects the surrounding objects and people UPSIDE-DOWN. A person sitting in meditation on one side of the room sees those on the other side reflected onto the crystal but in this topsy-turvy position through this optic inversion.

It goes without saying that such an occurrence would have been unthinkable had the Falsehood not overtaken the construction. In the first place, based on the true Knowledge, that ‘crystal’ should not have been transparent but rather translucent and nothing of the surroundings should have been reflected upon its surface. But at the same time, I repeat, even the distortions help reveal WHAT IS and nothing is more revealing that this topsy-turviness and, more especially, the factor of reflections onto that sphere in the first place. In other words, the sacred, luminous Globe has become simply a tool for the projection of each person’s image rather than a resplendent, self-luminous object, full of its own light and power. It is precisely the work left undone from the Italian Renaissance, which has so heavily coated occidental culture throughout the world. It is the exaltation of the individual as creator, in contrast to the Vedic poise of instrument for the divine manifestation. This ‘new model of the universe’ as it has been built in Auroville displays a singular ego-centredness and distortion, as indeed the ego does inflict upon the human condition: everything we perceive in our state of imbalance, of binary poise and alignment according to this bi-polar reality is similarly flawed, turned upside-down. I shall deal with this imagery further on in greater detail.

This is of course no different than the distortions suffered by the Rigveda which have permitted it to be used to divide-and-rule. And it is certainly most interesting to note that in both cases it is the European who has introduced the distortion, while the Indian meekly accepts and even applauds the act. Equally, as with the Rigveda where any attempt to clear up the misinterpretations meets with contempt and ferocious opposition, any attempt to correct the distortions introduced into the Mother’s original plan, and later the construction, aroused similar if not worse reactions. For the aim of the Lord of Nations is precisely to distort, to disfigure, to pervert. That is, the shell remains in order that the item may retain its name, but it is connected to the true thing in name only: the essence has been squeezed out of the creation by the series of interpretations; or, as in the case of the temple, by a systematic alteration of each item in the Mother’s plan. In this way, by this distortion rather than wholesale rejection and introduction of something else, the builders can continue claiming that it is ‘the Mother’s original plan’ that they have built. Unsuspecting devotees are easily duped. And as far as the disciples go, there are few remaining of the calibre able to distinguish in such matters.

It must be realised that Sri Aurobindo’s work as it stands today in the two centres he and the Mother left is far closer to a religion than a new and vibrant supramental Yoga. Not to speak of the Supramental Manifestation. Indeed, the core of the latter is precisely GNOSIS, knowledge, the truth-consciousness. Vijnana and vidya to replace the colossal ignorance that has overtaken the world as an outcome of the human being’s misalignment of consciousness-being. In fact, this is the exact definition of a ‘reestablishment of the Dharma’. In every age when this hard labour is to be undertaken, in some form or other, we may appreciate that the task involves enlightenment, a casting away of veils, a dissolving of mists and shadows because of which the seeker cannot SEE, cannot perceive the Light and remains entrenched in his or her appalling condition of avidya.

In the case under discussion, what better tactic than to take the Mother’s own plan or model for the new creation of Truth and disfigure it to the point where it remains ‘hers’ in name only, and therefore acquires an unquestionable LEGITIMACY. But its truth-essence has been carefully, meticulously eliminated to the point where Knowledge cannot arise in the seeker through that channel – only a reinforcement of his or her ignorance. In this light, it is clear that the devotee who sits in meditation before an object which reflects his own self upside-down, is indeed being subjected to a formidable power of falsehood. Unless of course the aim is that the Matrimandir be a mirror of the individual’s falsehood and not the higher Truth, in which case to see one’s image inverted would be taken as a mirror of one’s true condition, unmasked and without veils; and as such an immense help on the path. However, I doubt that those who are drawn to participate in that enterprise or to visit the construction would be inclined to assess this upside-down reflection in this way.

 

Duping the Lord of Nations

 

The Mother was well aware of the nature of the power she was dealing with when she first gave out her plan for the chamber. Indeed, because of her acute sense of strategy, of ‘stalking’, to use the terminology of don Juan’s unique body of Toltec teaching, she grasped the situation and immediately understood that to save the creation this disfiguring in her name had to be avoided. The Matrimandir, as far as the Mother was concerned, needed to be the architects’ creation entirely. By consequence, she stopped insisting on the adoption of her plan after the 18^th day of its revelation, and thereafter seems to have ‘blessed’ each and every change the architects introduced. Within a very short time the entire plan was redone and in such a way that no connection could legitimately be made with her original. It was similar to the urn positioned near the Matrimandir, wherein earth from over a hundred nations was placed for the inaugural ceremony of Auroville in 1968. The Mother had provided a design for the urn, with very exact measurements. This was replaced by the architect and something entirely different came to be executed and installed. It bears no relation at all to the Mother’s original and can in no way be said to be ‘her design’; nor has there ever been any attempt to do so.

 This strategy was entirely in keeping with her wisdom, her intimate knowledge of the methods of the force she was dealing with in this Age and the clever tactic of disfiguring while ever clinging to the name of the thing.

We find the same occurrence in the placement of Gautam the Buddha in the 9^th position of the Puranic avataric line. Though the true person of knowledge in India knew that this was a ‘ruse of the Supreme’, devised in order to ‘mislead’, the masses could not be expected to grasp the subtleties of such a strategy nor its purpose. Thus, for all practical purposes, the Buddha remains the 9^th Avatar, usurping Sri Aurobindo’s position. In this instance too, it is evident that this was not the Buddha’s handiwork but rather those forces which began operating in the beginning of the 9^th Manifestation, set upon the destruction of the Vedic Dharma. Similar to the Rigvedic ‘ruse’, the Buddha also became a precious tool in the hands of these forces. At the 9^th level of the Puranic Line therefore there stands this aberration which defies any attempt at rectification, similar to the contemporary concrete and steel colossus which has been built in Auroville in the Mother’s name.

Knowing fully the nature of the Lord of Nations and this insidious capacity to distort the true things and disfigure them beyond recognition, the Mother, I repeat, allowed (and perhaps even encouraged) the architects to introduce any changes they liked. This is proven out by the fact that after 17.1.1970, the Mother did not refer to her plan again. The basis of the construction became entirely the architects. We know from the recordings of her conversations up to that date on this subject that she considered the proposed alterations of the architects to be a ‘mixture’ and far below her consciousness. We know that until then the changes were unacceptable to her. But once she realised there was no possibility of her plan being executed in full, she knew that the need of the hour was, similar to the urn episode of several years earlier, to have the architects take over the project entirely and that it should become THEIR building, unrelated to her in any way.

When I entered the scene toward the end of 1971, the foundations were already dug and shortly thereafter actual construction began. In 1974 the plan to be executed was shown to me by the presiding architect for the first time; this was a number of months after the Mother’s departure. It was then in no way recognisable as hers. And this was, I realise now, fully in keeping with her secret intentions. For in this way there could be no confusion in the minds and hearts of seekers. Her creation could not be misused.

To illustrate, the 12 pillars of the original had been eliminated entirely since the architects considered them to be ‘symbolic of the old creation’. The central symbol and pedestal had been removed and in its place a 3-metre hole had been inserted. The symbol that was to form a part of this area was shifted many metres below this void, this central open space in the room, and submerged in a pool of water at ground level. The entrance to the room, so carefully designed and placed by the Mother in her original plan to consist of 15 steps of specific measurements and proportions, and above all at the south end of the chamber, was also eliminated entirely; entrance was changed to two openings through the walls. And in the more subtle sphere, less easily perceived by the naked eye but of far greater importance, the diameter of the room was inaccurately rendered and the 24-metre horizontal plane shortened by close to one metre. In terms of the precision demanded in such a creation and upon which the Mother insisted, this discrepancy makes all the difference between correct axial balance and wrong alignment.

The point I wish to emphasis in the above is that EVERY visible and invisible item of the Mother’s original plan was allowed by her to be changed after 17 January 1970 – so as to reach the point where there could be no indulgence in the age-old and tested tactic of perversion of the true thing while calling it still the ‘original’. The Mother in this sense had outwitted the Lord of Nations. But it would not last long for reasons which I shall detail in this portion of our study in time, cosmos and the Indian reality. Insofar as the outwitting finally failed and the possession and consequent disfiguring did come to pass, I have felt myself obliged to dedicate the better part of my energies to an unmasking of the operation, also because this unmasking forms an essential part in the reestablishment of the dharma. In addition, and more importantly, it was precisely in the effort to unmask and expose the true character of the powers which have overtaken Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s work that the real and full Gnosis was brought down and became the weapon of Truth, the sole power I would add, to serve in the reestablishment.

 

Not a Religion but a Yoga of Transformation

 

The goal of this 9^th Manifestation and the work of the 9^th and 10^th Avatars is different than that of 6,000 or 12,000 years ago, during Sri Krishna and Sri Ram’s Manifestations, respectively. This 9^th Manifestation is characterised by the rise and the establishment of organised, orthodox religions – a phenomenon unknown to the ancient world. In earlier times there was a formal worship, if it may be so called, but the purpose of such a collective expression was not to subjugate the people but rather to create ORDER, to regulate society.

 This ‘orderliness’ was especially evident in ancient Egypt, but also in China of old and even pre-Christian Greece and Rome – not to mention the great civilisations of Central and South America. But one of the finest expressions of that Order (ritam is the Vedic term) evolved on the Indian subcontinent. More interestingly, it somehow managed to survive, to be carried over into this Manifestation, unlike all the other civilisations mentioned above. In the effort to survive, however, a strategy of compromise was the result. Indeed, so powerful was this urge to survive that this element of compromise has become a distinguishing and determining feature of Indian history of the past 1500 years. The result has been the disfiguring of the Dharma across the ages, for it must be stated that compromise with the Falsehood is a misconception. When one enters into a concord with that force, the disfiguring begins. Thereafter it is just a question of ‘time’ before the edifice of Truth is completely overtaken by the Ignorance and vidya has been entombed for good.

However, the wisdom of India lies in the fact that the mythic/epic character of the civilisation persisted. And, as I have pointed out earlier in this essay, in myth the true Knowledge has been preserved. Deep in the consciousness of the inhabitants of the subcontinent the higher things were ‘stored’. However, the attitude of compromise did indeed colour the history of Bharat from early Medieval times until today. And unless we come to terms with this element in the national psyche, there will not be the regeneration the collective consciousness demands for the Dharma to be re-established. Indeed, so serious has the situation become that it may no longer be appreciated and accepted that such a task begs to be undertaken. Or if it is accepted as the goal, there are few who can truly appreciate what this entails.

Thus, in the remaining portion of this essay I would like to concentrate on various aspects of this problem. In the process it will become clear that a major scourge of our times, our 9^th Manifestation, is the religious consciousness. And by this we mean those partial expressions which rigidly and dogmatically seek to cage in the human consciousness and forbid it to approach the Supreme Truth in the atmosphere of full freedom which any true path of knowledge demands.

 

In our century fundamentalism has become a major factor to contend with. Indeed, it can be said to be the issue, the focus of the great unmasking and the core of the reestablishment of the Dharma. And precisely because of the tactic of adoption and disfiguring, we are faced with an interesting phenomenon in this sphere. When we mention the need to re-establish the Vedic way, understandably panic sets in among the secular western-oriented intelligentsia. This necessity is immediately perceived as fundamentalism, or a rigid imposition in the present of Hinduism of the past which, though it has experienced a certain regeneration and evolution with time and accommodated itself to the demands of this 20^th Century, is still a product of an age of darkness, of a pre-‘enlightenment’, to be introduced later by science. And its reinstatement as imagined by these zealots of occidental secularism is nothing less than obscurantist. Mixed with this is the polity of the nation which seems to be experiencing a shift toward Hindutva or ‘Hindu-ness’, as it is called, particularly evidenced in the popular support of the proposed building of the Ram temple at Ayodhya. This has engendered a panic response in the intelligentsia of the nation. And as is usual in such an emotionally charged atmosphere, reason, logic and clear perception are lost. But in this case something even more precious is glossed over: the true meaning of ‘reestablishment’ and the impossibility to connect it in any way to fundamentalism and hence obscurantism.

If we persist in calling Hinduism a religion, then of course enlightenment on the matter becomes more difficult if not impossible. We have to return to the roots of Hinduism primarily in this area. That is, the first prerequisite is to understand in full that the focus of the discourse is not religion but rather culture, for want of a better word. To be more exact, it is CIVILISATIONAL. What is at stake is the continued survival of Bharat as a civilisation. In India’s case, given the fact that the lines of the civilisation had been established in the distant past and by the attitude of compromise they have been carried over into the present, albeit somewhat disfigured, the parameters of the discourse are thoroughly defined. It is now not a question of compromise – for then the disfiguring would continue and no reestablishment is possible. Rather, the key words are today harmony and integration.

Each religion that has arisen in this 9^th Manifestation has established its own particular area of influence. In the effort to maintain supremacy over those areas, wars have been fought, crusades, conquests, and the like. Our history books are full of these ‘glorious’ exploits. But with certain cosmic ‘shifts’ which began in the 1700s, these positions became threatened. A new tactic expressed itself in colonialism and the secular mindset; these were instigators then of the disarray we observe today in world affairs which in certain key areas on the globe have given rise to the reactive response of fundamentalism.

Where then does India stand in this break-up and collapse? Again I must stress that the answer lies beyond Hinduism as a religion and in Bharat as a civilisation. This means that we must re-establish certain fundamental supports which are somehow still holding up the edifice of the nation but are greatly weakened by the distortions accumulated over the ages in the effort to compromise – i.e., to survive.

Thus, it is not a question of returning to the dictates of the Manu Smriti with its time-bound character, or to any other scripture as a fount of dogma. Nor is it simply a question of eschewing ‘foreign’ culture in favour of indigenous expressions or a revival of the arts on the basis of only that which can be acclaimed as Vedic and uncontaminated by any other culture. These activities may accompany the reestablishment we are discussing, but they are not the true channels and focus of what needs to be accomplished. It is not even a question of banning cow slaughter, of a rigid espousal of the caste system as we imagine it to be. Rather, something else is demanded. And it is this ‘something else’ that the Mother bequeathed to India in her original plan of the chamber. This is the key to the reestablishment of the Dharma in very great detail and precision via the correction of the nation’s time-axis in order to realign it with that of the ancient Vedic Age, and all that this act signifies. To comprehend what this may be, we shall explore the matter in detail in this study.

I am aware that this makes little sense to the layman, the devotee, or even the disciple. It is a language of INITIATION. But even this has wider and deeper connotations which we must explore. But to begin with and to make the discourse more easily comprehensible to a wider circle, I will take up one item of ancient civilisations which served to create order and maintain a diversity of expression under one umbrella held by the State over the population, but without a violent imposition of any sort. This was the calendar.

 

The Cosmic Order, or Unified Diversity

 

In ancient times the calendar served, to a certain extent, the purpose religions serve today, in particular as of the Middle Ages. Dogma, a rigid belief structure, replaced the cosmic harmony as the organizing principle in society, for the calendar was merely the instrument for carrying the population into that harmony, providing a systematisation (of time) by which that greater Harmony could be lived on Earth collectively and serve to unify the diversity which necessarily characterises any collectivity.

     I mentioned earlier that as of the 1700s a shift came about and an element was injected into the earth atmosphere which served to corrode gradually the hold of religions over human society. This element of change was epitomised in the discovery in 1781 of the first of the outer triad of planets, Uranus. From that point onward we observe that accompanying the great expansion we have known as a global civilisation has been the consecutive discovery of two more planets, Neptune in the 1800s (1846) and Pluto in the 1900s (1930). And that expansion of the solar system had to have an effect on the basic contours of our civilisation. This should have been expressed in Hindu civilisation in the re-organisation of its methods of time reckoning and planetary positioning. But this did not take place; rather, as I have discussed extensively in these pages, the Divine Measure, which had been lost in the earlier portion of the 9^th Manifestation, has been ‘slipping’ for Hindu civilisation ever since.

I am not alone in lamenting the loss of a correct key to time reckoning and a universal calendar for India. In the realm of secular sciences there is an even greater dismay at the present state of affairs in this domain. To illustrate, recently a seminar was held in Calcutta, sponsored by the Birla Planetarium and the Indian Astronomical Society. The topic of the two-day seminar was the ‘rectification of astronomical parameters published in Indian Panchangs [almanacs].’ The Times of India (13.2.1992, Delhi edition) reports that the eminent astronomers attending the seminar… ‘expressed concern over [the] bewildering variety and multiplicity of various Almanacs mostly based on gross unauthentic and miscalculations [sic] and not in line with astronomical parameters.’

It was lamented that even ’36 years after the implementation of the national Saka calendar’ which was ‘just an adaptation or a phase-shifted version of the Gregorian calendar’, the desired uniformity and accuracy was not achieved. In the keynote address of the secretary of the Society, Prof. A. Bandopadhyay regretted that such a calendar had yet to achieve the ‘desired popularity’ even as it was ‘designed to serve the purpose of a uniform and scientific Panchang.’

 

‘…Barring Maharastra and Gujarat where almanac compilers have been following correct astronomical parameters, others are still blindly engaged in the conventional process that leaves behind errors and wrong data in the Panchangs.’ (Ibid)

 

The errors Professor Bandophadyay refers to, I assume, are the positions of the planets in the tropical zodiac and the accumulating error of the inaccurate calculating of the precession of the equinoxes, the latter being the keystone of Hindu astrology/astronomy given the fact that the constellational sphere is used as the backdrop for positioning the planets rather than the tropical zodiac involving the equinoctial alignment discussed briefly in the last portions of this study.

The problem is immensely complex, as I am sure astronomers such as Professor Bandhopadhyay realise. For involved are cultural and even religious elements. It is for this reason that the professor justly points out that even 36 years after the adoption of an official calendar, it has not attained acceptance and the desired popularity. Indeed, the situation is that Hindus, Muslims, Christians and so forth, cling each one to their respective calendars and almanacs and use them to locate the time and place of their festivals and rituals. Needless to say there is no uniformity between these systems insofar as they reflect certain beliefs or are affirmations of reverence for the founder of the religion fixing the start of the count at the founder’s birth or other important dates in the evolution of the religion. They do not pretend to be accurate cosmic dials, unlike the Hindu almanacs which traditionally bore respect for the actual astronomical phenomena rather than a revered figure of the faith.

Bringing all this into harmony in a society and devising a calendar acceptable to all communities and sects is understandably impossible. Soon after Independence the Government of India realised that this situation needed attention if India was to function in a global secular society and occupy therein any position of relevance. The adoption of the official calendar was a step in that direction and intended to facilitate the new nation’s integration into the world community. Insofar as that community regulates its affairs on the basis of the Gregorian (Christian) calendar, the official Saka calendar was established on that model. This naturally could not have any emotional appeal to the majority Hindu community or even the Muslim. Thus there remains this split in the nation in this regard. Officially there is one system of time reckoning, but culturally and emotionally the cogs in the wheel of the national consciousness move at a different pace. Indeed, there are many such ‘cogs’ and they are all at odds with each other. Hence, the despair of the astronomer. This is similar in a way to the adoption of a national language intended to integrate the nation and the difficulties experienced in bringing the whole nation to accept the selection.

Regarding the calendar, the problem cannot be solved if it remains in the domain of religion – for example, a Christian choice over a Hindu, and so on. But insofar as Hindu astronomy became scientifically oriented when the split between science and spirituality was consolidated, the latter can be expected to understand the problem far better than any other community. Nonetheless, the irritant will remain when the Gregorian calendar gains supremacy, in particular as an aftermath of the imperialist, colonial age.

The question is therefore, Does a method exist to systematise the flow of time and the cosmic process which rises above these sectarian preferences and encompasses a more universal concept, one that can be accepted by all sections of the society?

I have laid great emphasis on India’s destiny to ‘conquer Time’. By this I do not mean to do violence to Time but rather to integrate this fundamental aspect of our material manifestation into a sort of ‘unified theory’ similar to what science seeks in order to evolve a ‘grand design’ which will explain the whole of the cosmic process. I am proposing this not within the parameters of current scientific thought but rather in harmony with the unalterable destiny and by consequence in tune with the deepest and widest parameters of India’s cultural and spiritual essence. This may not be appreciated by the scientific/academic community, though the result would not further aggravate the complex problem of adoption of a uniform calendar but would rather facilitate India’s integration into the world community, not merely officially but emotionally as well. In the process, within her own borders an integration would result when this question of time and cosmos is fully grasped and its relation to the ancient Veda established on the right foundation.

Nothing of this has happened so far. One need only review the research done by proponents of a ‘Vedic calendar’ to understand that the Lost Measure entails first and foremost a loss of the correct understanding of what it is that must be measured. That is, what is the principle which must govern such an undertaking – for in this discovery lies the key to a retrieval of the divine Maya or Measure.

My investigations have brought me to conclude that unless the current Hindu system of time/astronomical reckoning is taken as the all-important indication of the choices India made in the past which then permitted invasions, conquests, subjugations and the general decline of the civilisation, it will not be possible to bring any correction about. That is, the probe has to be pushed to the root of the problem. If a rectification is to come about which will be acceptable to Hindu society, we must disclose what transpired in Hinduism, and when, to bring the nation to its present state of confusion in this area, so vital for the proper fulfilment of India’s higher destiny.

For me the matter is wonderfully clear: the measure was ‘lost’ when the spiritual endeavour veered BEYOND the cosmic manifestation; and that Beyond then became the focus of the quest. This problem is an ancient one, though it acquired the power to pervert the destiny only after the onset of the 9^th Manifestation, or after 234 BC. In the Atharvaveda this juxtaposition is confirmed and a certain conflict that it produced in the seeker when we read,

 

      ‘The branch of Nonbeing which is far-extending

men take to be the highest of all.

They reckon as inferior those who worship

your other branch, the branch of Being.’

Or else,

      ‘Great are the Gods who were born from Nonbeing,

yet men aver this Nonbeing to be

the single limb of the support, the great Beyond.’

 

However, in the age of this particular Veda, that Beyond was not yet the victor. Indeed, these verses to Skambha (‘the Support’) are the clear proof that at least up until that age, Skambha was the object of the spiritual endeavour and not the Beyond, or the Nonbeing. It was this axis mundi, this ‘binding energy’ of a ‘centre that holds’, or the national consciousness held together by this principle in an harmonious whole. The hymns to Skambha are exemplary in that they are the clearest description of what I came to call in the 1980s, the Yoga of the Chamber. This Yoga is EARTH-oriented. It forges that ‘skambha’ or Point; and from this ‘seed’ the entire cosmic manifestation has come into being. Contemporary science calls it the ‘singularity’ which resulted in the Big Bang, the theory upon which 20^th Century cosmology is based. Science does not treat the question of what lay beyond that singularity, or what came before the so-called Big Bang. But the Atharvaveda does. The essence of these hymns is precisely the careful, faithful and exquisite description of that bridge, that cosmic ‘pillar’ (Skambha) which connects the two dimensions:

 

      ‘Men recognise the Golden Embryo [Hiranyagarbha]

as the unutterable, the Supreme.

Yet it was the Support [Skambha] who in the beginning

poured forth upon the world that stream of gold…’.

 

In other words, the Hiranyagarbha, or Golden Womb, is thought to be the FIRST step in the cosmic manifestation. But this verse makes it clear that prior to that ‘womb’ – or in the terms of 20^th Century cosmology, the Big Bang – there came into ‘existence’ the Pillar or the bridge between that Beyond or Nonbeing and this material dimension. This is the ‘singularity’ science is seeking to establish. In the new cosmology which integrates the before and after, the first point of space is the ‘pillar’ formed by the 9, 6, and 3 as degrees of time-energy, compressed into this ‘singularity’, thus fully in keeping with the early Vedic perception, in particular the references in the Rigveda to Agni in the form of the Universal Purush… ‘With his vast and ample upbearing he props up the firmament like a pillar’ (RV, IV,5,1)

This forces us to ask where in the Middle East or in Europe of  the the time of the ‘Aryan invasion’ were similar concepts expressed? That is, if the Aryans brought these profound perceptions into India from beyond, where is there any evidence of a civilisation which had similar perceptions? But more than that, which was entirely founded on those perceptions? On the other hand, the Veda, starting with the first book, the Rigveda itself, considered to be of much earlier composition than the Atharvaveda, speaks of nothing else. The hymns do not indicate the faint beginnings of perception of a ‘supreme cause’ as scholars such as H. J. J. Winter imagine, and that a gradual development began with these ‘Aryan invasions’ which finally resulted in the highly evolved sciences and philosophies we know from the Upanishadic period and beyond, into medieval times. The hymns describe as an APEX, a civilisation at the height of its spiritual and cultural creativity. Thereafter the decline began and these sacred ‘measures’ were lost, precisely when powers arose which had no understanding of these profound concepts and realisations, – and the tactic of undermining began.

I must return to the question I posed earlier on in his essay: What was it that had to be undermined for the fast and furious decline to set in? It was precisely that point, that Skambha. Science, as separate from the spiritual arose and gained supremacy in India after that Point had been effectively eliminated or hidden under impenetrable veils. Hence we have the later myth of Guha, the veiled hidden One, the Puranic counterpart of Agni and Skambha. What I mean to demonstrate by establishing these simple connections is how that original high perception came to be transferred to the myth and thus PRESERVED in the collective consciousness during the full period of the decline, conquest and subjugation of the race.

In our times we have even clearer evidence of the great Undermining in the Matrimandir. For in what way have the builders of the pseudo-temple captured this fact of India’s spiritual and material evolution, this undermining of the Point? In the architect’s own words, he explains why he left the centremost Point of the room’s floor empty, void.

 

‘It is symbolic: I do not think you will be able to see it in the daytime, as the natural sunlight will be too strong. But in the evening maybe a tiny spot of light will be visible underneath the floor of the Chamber’…  (Auroville Today, August 1991)

 

Given the extraordinary significance of the central Point in the Dharma, the public has every right to demand of the architect what ‘symbolism’ he is referring to when he makes this statement, apparently with sound authoritative knowledge of such matters, that the ‘void’ in place of the solid and concrete Point is ‘symbolic’. Clearly he can have no satisfying answer. Once again, he has been merely a tool of the Ignorance. But in this way the ‘temple’ these commercial architects and builders have constructed is nonetheless allied to the Knowledge but in the NEGATIVE, by this symbolism revealing the reality of what IS, the realistic conditions to be seen and then finally transformed.

The great Undermining attacked the collective Will. This is amply confirmed by the Knowledge in that Agni, (Skambha or the Point) is referred to precisely as ‘…the divine Will working in the worlds’. Vedic Agni is the divine particle in the human being which holds his or her consciousness together and centred on this divine element rather than the dark ‘sun’ of the ego. The objective of the Vedic Yoga is the shift from a binary to a unitary creation. The means by which to achieve this end is through realisation of that Point, that perfect centre, that Skambha or pillar upholding the world and the axis around which the human consciousness itself is structured, in the apt aphorism, ‘As above, so below’.

 

‘As the unborn he has held the wide earth, he has up-pillared heaven with his Mantras of truth. Guard the cherished footprints of the Cow of vision; O Agni, thou art universal life, enter into the secrecy of the secret Cave.’     (RV, I, 67,3)

 

If we understand this then we are in a position to comprehend what it is that must be measured, and why I can state that wisemen, after the Undermining, lost sight of what that meant. To be precise, the Point is the axis of the soul, or the END of the Skambha or ‘pillar’ connecting the Transcendent to the Immanent. This may be individual or collective. It may as well be civilisational, and even involving the physical boundaries of a nation. In India’s case this is beautifully clear: the soul-axis, or the Pillar/Point, is located in the individual and in the civilisation, as well as the very geography of the country, because all these have been contained or integrated in a philosophy and spirituality wherein they are integral, interrelated parts. We do not find this demonstrated in any other civilisation or belief system. Though fundamentalist movements attempt to bring about a sort of integrated relationship between citizen, state and religion. Or in Israel’s case, the desire to read a divine sanction into the acquisition of land which conflicts with the ground reality in the area.

The reason why this integral approach is easily perceived in India’s case still today is because of the cosmic foundation of the Vedic Dharma. This is not relative or time-bound. That is, it does not hinge on reinstating values of past epochs, or else on an individual, a prophet, a founder, a saint; or even a book, a sacred scripture. It relies on the Cosmic Harmony which is an eternal scripture, ever in the process of evolution and expansion. As the human consciousness widens and perception is heightened, both spiritually and scientifically, that much more can be extracted from this cosmic Script. There is no final word, no definitive ‘interpretation’. But there are certain principles, laws; and these are indeed eternal and unchanging. This unchanging foundation in the Law (Varun of the Veda), the Dharma, is the single most important element of Hinduism. The Measure which was lost implied that a certain aspect of this Law was missed or lost sight of. This was precisely the centremost position of that Point or Skambha in the Dharma, so beautifully symbolised in the pseudo-temple in Auroville by the 4-cm VOID in the room right where that Point should have been lodged with reverence and knowledge. I repeat, this pillar/point is the soul’s axis. On this Principle or Law the entire material manifestation is founded. The evolution of the cosmos began with this Point, this soul-axis…

 

      ‘The One on whom the Lord of Life [Prajapati]

leant for support when he propped up the world –

Tell me of that Support [Skambha] – who may he be?

 

‘That which of all forms the Lord of Life

created – above, below, and in between –

with how much of himself penetrated the Support?

How long was the portion that did not enter?

 

‘With how much of himself penetrated the Support

into the past? With how much into the Future?

In that single limb whose thousand parts he fashioned

with how much of himself did he enter, that Support?’

(Athar.X,7)

 

Inasmuch as the human being is located on the planet Earth, at the third orbit of the solar system, this planet is that same ‘centre’ or ‘soul’, being the third measure from the Sun. More specifically, the planet is like a womb. And in that ‘womb’ we find the Point, Skambha or Agni of the Veda. It is for this very reason that so much importance is attached to the planet’s axial alignment and I have stated that it is in understanding this tilt that we can know the most profound aspects of our destiny as a planetary society, as an evolving collective consciousness. For that axial tilt is representative of the soul-axis which the planet itself must experience as a CONSCIOUS PROCESS through the collective yoga of the species, – or at least a representative portion of the human species. And that this Yoga or process is played out in India.

In the Solar Line the Third is the ‘bridge’ or ‘pillar’ – the connection to the Transcendent (9), and through whom that Power is reborn as the Fourth, the One or the Point. Thus, what constitutes the cosmic reality in macrocosmic terms, is a feature of our solar system; and it is lived by the Solar Line whose members enact this creative process in Earth-time:

 

‘The young Mother bears the Boy pressed down in her secret being and gives him not to the Father; but his force is not diminished, the people behold him established in front in the upward workings of things.

 

‘Who is this Boy, O young Mother, whom thou bearest in thyself when thou art compressed into form, but thy vastness gives him birth? For many seasons the Child grew in the womb; I saw him born when the Mother brought him forth’. (Rigveda, Secrets of the Veda, ‘Hymns to Agni’, Sri Aurobindo, CE, Vol.10, p.367).

 

When secret knowledge is revealed regarding the ‘compression’ to a ‘point’, the role of the ‘young Mother’ or the Third Power in giving birth to this ‘compressed point’, no longer can these verses be held as obscure, esoteric, or even exclusively for the Initiate. The existence and activities of the Solar Line have definitively brought the Veda down to Earth. The above describes with very great precision the process as it has been lived by the Line, mirroring the cosmic act of creation which science is seeking to unravel. The very first line makes the process clear, ‘The young Mother bears the Boy PRESSED DOWN…and gives him not to the Father’… The ‘Father’ is the Transcendent. The meaning is that this ‘Boy’ (Agni or Skambha or the ‘compressed Point’), is not drawn up into the Transcendent, or the Beyond – for that is the whole objective of the Vedic quest. At the same time, the hymn states that by this compression and emergence from the Womb of the young Mother, the Father’s ‘force is not diminished’. After the birth of that Point ‘the people’ experience this power ‘in front in the upward working of things’. There is perhaps no clearer rendering of the REVERSAL I have often described, precisely relating to the Fourth Power, the Son of the Solar Line, who introduces the horizontal plane after the ‘compressed vertical descent’ of the 9 and 6 and 3. The role of the Third is very clearly defined in these hymns as the power to give form to this compressed Point, within which is contained the full force of the vast Transcendent. This is the description of the birth of the Father (Transcendent), through the 6 and 3, the ‘mothers’, the latter of which is the Third Power of the Line and through whom the birth actually takes place – i.e., the Transcendent is compressed to emerge in the cosmic manifestation as the Immanent. Then, after the Reversal, the ‘upward workings of things’ can begin.

In this light, it can be appreciated that I am not exaggerating when I state that the Rigveda describes a yogic process and can in no way be interpreted as an historic document, or even a manual of ritual as it came to be viewed after the divine Maya or Measure was lost. Having lived this very process in full, I feel I am entitled to challenge the upholders of the ‘historic interpretation’ on every point they have made in support of their theory, a falsification which has done immense harm to the process of national integration.

The Third of the Solar Line equals the Earth in the new cosmology. The connection between the Earth and the Point, or Agni, is borne out by the Rigveda in the hymns to Usha, the divine Dawn, an aspect of the Earth, and her relation to Agni in the form of the white Steed:

 

‘Blazing out brilliant as the lover of the Dawn, filling the two equal worlds like the Light of Heaven, thou art born by our will and comest into being all around us; thou hast become the father of the Gods, thou who art the Son.

‘Very bright and lustrous is he like the lover of the Dawn. May his form be known and may he wake to the knowledge for this human being, may all bear him in themselves, part wide the Doors, and come to the Seeing of the Sun.’ (Rigveda, I,69,1-5, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Sri Aurobindo, CE, Vol.11, p.56-7).

 

But the relationship between Earth and the Fourth is even more explicitly stated in the Puranas where the Earth as a planet is said to have given birth or form to Mars. This tallies exactly with the new cosmology and the details of the Solar Line in that it is the Third (Earth) who gives birth or form to the Fourth (Mars). The cosmological formula is simply a numerical rendering of the myth.

However, what brings these tales and formulas out of the realm of ‘symbols’ or abstract ideas is TIME. When the above is connected to actual births in time of a third ‘principle’ or a fourth, and that the details of these births as verified in a universal calendar are completely in harmony with the Knowledge and serve to render it concrete and no longer abstract, the quest undergoes a notable shift. It is no longer directed to a beyond, an extra-cosmic dimension. It is Earth-oriented. As the myth reveals, the Earth carries that Point in her ‘womb’. To actualise that in a yogic process and thereby to establish that Point as the ‘support’ or Will, both individually and collectively, societal and civilisational, then the message of the Hindu Temple has to be taken very seriously: the garbhagriha or ‘womb-house’ has to be respected and acknowledged as the focus of the Dharma, symbolically rendered in the Hindu Temple in this way. Or, conversely, denied in the rendering of the Matrimandir in Auroville by the elimination of that Point, centremost in the room.

When these elements of the Dharma are understood, then it becomes clear that in order to retrieve a correct measure of Time and that this becomes reflected in the acceptance of a calendar and astronomical system of positioning which serves that Dharma in full rather than to make confusion worse confounded, then the Yoga of the Veda has to be experienced. This means an entire reevaluation of all the spirituality India has been practising since the Middle Ages in the light of this retrieval of the divine Measure. To return to the Vedic ROOTS, or to reestablish the Dharma, demands that this Yoga be experienced. Otherwise what is it we are seeking to re-establish?

India, in the unconscious but controlled unfolding of her destiny, acknowledges time and again this sacred process and the central role it plays in the civilisation. We confirm this by the exactitude of this same cosmic harmony reflected not only in the birth of the members of the Solar Line but the Lunar Line of the Nehrus as well. In addition, we note that the Government of India adopted an official calendar based on the Gregorian (universal) model. For indeed, these harmonies cannot be verified in the Hindu calendar. Relying on that they would have been lost and the process rendered futile. To lay emphasis on this fact, we also note that this official adoption took place in 1956, or the very year of the Supramental Manifestation. This occurred on 29.2.1956, and it was the signal that ‘the time had come’ and the Harmony or formula would begin to play a pivotal role as the key to ‘the organisation of supermind for Earth-use’. For that, India had to have a universal calendar from that very year.

The evolution of the Matrimandir in Auroville and the manner in which the architects and builders, in complete ignorance of sacred architecture of any school, so easily gained possession of the construction and maintained control over it in spite of all attempts to retrieve the building and make of it a womb of Truth rather than a tomb of the Knowledge as it presently is, is evidence of the almost impossible task ahead. However, some gains have been made, precisely because of that ‘victory’ of the Falsehood. These gains arose because the victory of the Shadow FORCED the Knowledge to descend. That is, given the ignorance and opposition I was faced with in the Matrimandir, and perceiving the terrible loss for humanity which would result from an acceptance of that victory as definitive, with nothing of the higher aspects of the Mother’s original plan allowed to reach the public because of this possession, all I could do was to experience the Yoga, realise that Skambha – and in the process to  resurrect the ancient Yoga of the Veda. I must confess that had the builders accepted the Mother’s plan unquestioningly from the beginning, there would have been no need for ‘the Yoga of the Chamber’. In which case, nothing of what needed to be reestablished, in its highest, deepest and widest sense, would have been known.

 

Defining the Time/Soul Axis

 

The essential lines of the Yoga of the Earth, or the birth of Mars, or Agni, or the Point, were given by the Mother in her original plan of the Chamber. To begin with, her specification regarding the entrance into the chamber emphasises the points I have made regarding the axial tilt of the Earth and the fundamental part the Tropics and Equinoxes and Solstices play in the Yoga. The Mother appears to have been fully aware of this connection, if her original plan of the Chamber is any indication. This is amply borne out by the fact that she positioned the entrance into the chamber precisely at the south end. The Mother was emphatic that this entrance should not only be located south, but that it should pierce the floor – or the horizontal plane of the room.

I am presenting here the floor plan of the chamber as designed by the Mother. It can be noted that the stairway rises into the chamber from below and is specifically located to penetrate the room from a certain position. In terms of symbolic/aesthetic representation, this position serves first of all to emphasise the quality of a plane which the Mother desired to bring forth in her design. All the ‘action’ was to be on this plane; and she was greatly disturbed when the architects and disciple kept insisting on changing her design with numerous entrances piercing not that horizontal plane but the circumscribing walls. This impertinent insistence, preserved on tape at the time, revealed a singular ignorance of what exactly the Mother wished to capture in her design: the harmony of the cosmos, centred on this third planet Earth; though in her recorded conversations on the subject she is revealed to be more than clear about the matter, explicitly relating the 12 walls, for example, to the months of the year – in other words, the zodiac.

What emerges from the analysis of her plan, supported by her own recorded comments during the 18 days when she sought to defend her vision before this outrageous demolition campaign waged by the architects and the disciple, and later carried through by the actual builders of the pseudo-temple, is that there are DIRECTIONS emphasised: horizontal and vertical. The former is the ecliptic, or the equatorial plane if we wish to connect it specifically to the axial tilt of the Earth and the solstice/equinoctial points in calendar time. This is the base, in the sense that I have written in the last two issues of VISHAAL regarding the foundational plane of the Veda, extending from the Sun of Gnosis. By designing the entrance opening right into and onto this plane, the Mother was establishing the first all-important fact of the chamber’s symbolism: the seeker’s merging into that plane as he or she enters the room, and is sustained by that Base. In addition, the foundational plane is the space dimension and the physical proper. But the design she gave goes much further. It provokes the experience. I shall explain in what way.

Thus, there is also a vertical direction emphasised in the Chamber’s original design. This is brought forth first and foremost by the descending central Ray (of the Sun), as well as the walls and pillars. This direction relates to TIME, above all else. The Mother made this clear when she spoke of the walls representing the months of the year.

However, all of this would remain in the realm of the ‘symbolic’ or ‘representative’, if Time had not added its power to the Mother’s creative act. To make this clear I must again remind the reader of the singular importance of the Earth’s axial tilt and the extreme importance of the solstices in this planetary feature. We have then the very same directions emphasised in the solstices and equinoxes as in the chamber’s original plan. The solstices correspond to the vertical/time direction; the equinoxes to the horizontal/space. This is clear if we note what it is that happens at the equinoxes of March and September: the equatorial plane is level with the ecliptic extending from the Sun. That is, the horizontal expanse experiences this harmonisation by the convergence of these two planes. As for the Earth, this levelling results in an equal distribution of day and night.

In the vaster movement of the Ages, this equatorial plane serves another purpose. It is akin to the ascendant in a person’s horoscope – or the ascending/descending plane in the chart. Given a particular motion of the earth similar to the wobble of a spinning top, this slowly revolving plane traces a circle in the heavens. The equinoctial plane requires 25,920 years to trace one full circle in the heavens. It is drawn on the backdrop of the constellational sphere traditionally. The only difficulty is that no one is in agreement about what point to establish as the zero demarcation of that greater circle, or the beginning of the constellational wheel. Consequently, given this discrepancy of opinion, none can agree on the date of the beginning of our own period, the Age of Aquarius. For it is this slow gyration of the Earth’s equatorial plane measured on the constellational wheel that establishes which astrological age we are in and when that began or comes to an end.

In India the matter assumes great importance insofar as all calculations for horoscopes, festival timings, etc, utilise this constellational point or demarcator rather than the zero point of the tropical zodiac. I have dealt with this situation extensively earlier in this essay and elsewhere and its consequences for the civilisation. My point in bringing up the issue again is simply to explain how the Mother sought to reorient the focus of time reckoning in India via her original plan of the chamber. But if certain key features of her design are not appreciated, then no coherent body of knowledge is forthcoming from her plan, whose purpose it is precisely to bring about this reorientation and establishment of the Vedic Dharma.

Thus the Globe in her original design is equal to the Earth. The symbolism in connection with the ancient Veda and the Puranas is perfectly clear when this equivalence is known because then the point, (left void by the builders in Auroville) is exactly beneath that Globe and centred at the base of the closed pedestal (open in the Auroville construction); and this position is the One born of the Third, or Mars born of the Earth. It is perfectly in harmony with the Knowledge for the Point is then both centre of the circle as well as axis. That is, it is the end of the solar ray which is indeed the axis of the entire chamber. But it is a TIME-AXIS and by consequence a SOUL-AXIS. This is the extraordinary Knowledge the Mother was able to capture in her creation, simply because she designed a most faithful reproduction of the cosmic harmony centred and converging on the planet Earth.

Further, the true Globe, in contrast to the falsifying ‘crystal’ designed by the architect and builders of the pseudo-temple, should have been fashioned IN INDIA, insofar as the Globe is both the Earth and Bharat. (More on this most important aspect further on.) Germany, where the architect commissioned the crystal, was entirely inappropriate inasmuch as it was the seat of the Lord of Nations openly until just recently; and that power continues to operate, less obviously though still potently falsifying, through channels precisely centred on the Mother’s work. Again for the Seer there is no lie: the ‘choice’ was the right one. Nothing better explains the decline, and now the supremacy of the Falsehood than this aspect of the pseudo-temple’s history.

To be effective as an instrument for the reestablishment, all of this had to be executed faithfully and in full knowledge, unlike what actually came to pass in Auroville where commercial architects took over the project and blatantly destroyed the chamber’s Vedic content. Purposely, it would seem. For it is hard to imagine that without this premeditated design anyone ignorant of occultism, temple building or cosmology would have dared to interfere with the Mother’s creation. The architect-in-charge has made the statement that the completion of this project was ‘…a deep fulfilment, the purpose of my life realised’… (Auroville Today, January 1992). One is inclined to enquire what exactly that might mean, given the nature of what he finally constructed as the Matrimandir, and supposedly ‘faithful to the original’.

To return to the stairway and entrance and its singular importance, we must note that in any attempt to create a piece of sacred architecture, the observer’s first contact with the symbol is of foremost importance. It establishes the ‘seed’ of the experience.

The Mother was not unaware of this fact and she made sure in her original plan that this aspect would be respected. Time collaborated in full in the process because not only did she design the entrance at the specific SOUTH END of the room’s floor plan, she saw and measured the creation at the right time – that is, over the only few days in the year which would bear witness to and corroborate what I have written above regarding the chamber’s horizontal and vertical directions; the former of space, the latter of time.

Thus, in the plan the entrance was placed at the south point of the (equatorial) plane. This, in terms of the all-important axial tilt and the resultant Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn is equivalent to the southernmost sign of the zodiac, the nadir of the dakshinayana of Hindu astronomy, – Cancer. Its opposite pole is the most auspicious Festival of Light beginning at the December Solstice or the 0° of Capricorn, India’s own astrological ruler and the hieroglyph of which delineates the nation’s physical contours. Indeed, the Mother ‘saw’ this chamber exactly in the heart of the Festival of Light; and even more uncannily, exactly in the segment of zodiacal time which I have come to designate as the 5° (of celestial longitude) of the chamber. That is, from 10° Capricorn to 15° – or January 1^st to 5^th. This is also the period of perihelion, when the Earth moves closest to the Sun each year.

Two elements joined in the Mother’s creative act in this way. It was as if the Mother had indeed entered the room in the subtle dimension (indeed her description of the experience does seem to indicate this very physical act) and then recorded what she had ‘seen’. But this she could only do with Time’s collaboration. That is, as the Earth reached these particular degrees of celestial longitude of the chamber, a veil was drawn aside and the Mother in her subtle physical body entered that magical space, that ‘hidden chamber closed and mute’.

In the space of those 5 days/degrees, the act of Seeing and Measuring was completed. Thereafter, the Mother presented her original plan, especially drawn up for her by an Ashram engineer, to the disciple and architects. And that was the end of her extraordinary vision. From that point onward the story of its execution has been a devastating denial of all that her original plan embodied.

 

The Festival of Light covers an expanse of 15 degrees/days from the solstice of December 21/22 to January 5^th and the 15^th degree of Capricorn. Clearly the Mother sought to carry the seeker into the chamber focusing on this phenomenon: the increase of the Light. She did so by explicitly designing 15 steps into the chamber. And the seeker, while mounting these steps (days) and entering the room would indeed experience the increasing Light by virtue of the fact that his or her eyes would be riveted during the ascension on the descending central Ray of Light. This Ray would ‘increase’ before his or her eyes with every step taken, until the seeker would stand on the horizontal plane of the chamber, at the 15^th step (or the 15^th degree of Capricorn, Cosmic Midday) and the peak of the Festival of Light when the Sun ‘casts no shadows’. This culmination would signify the seeing of the full Ray descending onto the Globe which represents not only the Earth and India but his or her own soul.

The architects and builders of the Matrimandir deprived future devotees and seekers of this experience when they decided to eliminate that 15-step, south-end entrance from below. In the words of the presiding architect…

 

  ‘The existing structure has been made with the maximum respect for the Mother’s vision… The room today is as faithful to the original design as it can possibly be. Only one thing [!] couldn’t be respected: the underground entrance with direct access to the room at ground level. This particular aspect has been lost due to the room being 15 metres above ground level in the middle of the sphere.’ (Ibid)

 

Thus the architects succeeded in introducing their own ‘mixture’ (in the Mother’s own words) by eliminating this superb item of sacred Vedic symbolism and obliging visitors to enter the room through doors piercing the walls – expedient of course, but an architectural problem entirely resolvable if the will had existed to do so. What they have put in its place is totally devoid of ‘sense’. Contrasting with the Mother’s explanation that everything in her original design had a ‘sense’. As such, every detail was sacred and inviolable.

 

Ayodhya and the Mother’s Chamber

 

In the Special Issue of the December solstice (incorporated in TVN 6/5, December 1991), dedicated to the epiphany of the Ramlal idol in the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya exactly on the solstice of 1949, as another exercise in ‘rectification’, I discuss how attention was drawn to the same Festival of Light highlighted by the appearance of the Child Ram on that very night. Now we note that in a similar attempt at rectification through the channel of a divine Seeing, the Mother has also laid emphasis on the very same segment of time. Its importance lies in the fact that it is the true Makar Sankranti, or ‘gateway to Capricorn’. And this is the divine Measure which must be retrieved, symbolised in the Rigveda as the ‘lost Cow’, or in the more accurate translation, ‘the Lost Ray’.

But there are many more similarities between the Matrimandir as it has been constructed in Auroville and the Ram Janambhoomi/Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. In both places we have structures standing on hallowed spots which are in stark contrast to the essence of that sacredness. The mosque in Ayodhya is offensive to most Hindus because it represents the introduction of an alien concept right where it hurts mosts, so to speak. That is, on the location which is believed to have been the birthplace of Lord Ram, 7^th Avatar of Hindu tradition. Whether or not this is factual is really not the issue since the Moghul Emperor Babar’s intention was to strike a blow at that belief, regardless if it was actually the spot or not. It was believed to be, then and now; therefore he installed a mosque right there, as was the practice in those times. Understandably, Hindus have ever since been attempting to demolish the structure and erect a temple in its place honouring Ram.

This pertains to the 7^th Avatar of the Line. But what of the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th? Are they similarly embroiled in ‘controversy’?

Indeed, Sri Krishna, the 8^th, also experienced a squeezing out from his birthplace at Mathura. It was also overtaken by a mosque in a similar attempt to undermine the avataric belief. We must view these occurrences in their proper perspective and appreciate that such acts were the accepted practice for conquering armies in those days. And the buildings were intended to endure as a perennial reminder to the subject civilisation of the supremacy of the conqueror and his ability to demolish the cornerstones of the culture, demonstrating in the act the impotency of the populace and by consequence the superior strength of the invader.

History confirms this impotency by recording the contrasting Spanish expulsion of the Islamic conquerors (and the Jews) just before the time of Babar’s take-over in Ayodhya and the native population’s inability to react. But Spain, after close to 800 years of foreign rule, was able finally to expel the invaders because it was a nation on the rise, facing a brilliant colonising period. Indeed, it was Spain that in the very year the Jews were expelled, sponsored Columbus’s voyage in the discovery of the America’s (India?). On the other hand, India was a civilisation in full decline, at the nadir of her power and collective will. Whether the Spaniards were morally correct in what they did, or even Babar for that matter, is not the issue. My point is simply to demonstrate the ability of a nation to confront and expel foreign rulers after an 800-year occupation, in contrast to India’s incapacity to exert its will and force any definitive expulsion.

However, it is understandable that if something of a resurrection of the collective will begins to take place, attention will automatically be turned to these sore points such as Ayodhya and Mathura – and, right on time. They should be treated therefore as indications of that awakening by ALL sections of the society.

Thus, Ramlal made his ‘surreptitious’ appearance in the Babri Mosque exactly on time – both day and year. For it was precisely thereafter, in 1950, that Sri Aurobindo left his body and began the process of ‘giving form to the Point’ (that Will), or Agni, or Skambha via the Third Power of the Solar Line. Through Ramlal’s epiphany the focus turned decidedly on the Avatar, at the very time significant steps were being taken by him to bring the work of the Line to completion.

But similar to the Ram and Krishna sacred sites, we find Sri Aurobindo’s, the 9^th Avatar of the same Line, equally invaded by a building which stands in stark contrast to the original essence. Indeed, in Sri Aurobindo’s case the situation is far worse that in Ayodhya or Mathura. In Auroville the Mother’s plan was perverted though retaining its name, thereby duping the unsuspecting seekers. In Ayodhya and Mathura this is not the case. The invaders made no attempt to dupe. They were far too honest. They simply tore down and rebuilt according to their fervent beliefs. The defence of these ‘statements of conquests’ by sections of contemporary Indian society is equally honest in that it is a defence of beliefs and monuments which symbolise those beliefs accurately. They are not monuments pretending to be Hindu but perverting the symbolism in order to dupe the seeker.

This, lamentably, is what we find in Auroville. Hence the upside-down reflection of the seeker in the central crystal. But duping or not, the similarities between Ayodhya, Mathura and Auroville remain: to demolish and rebuild, or not to demolish and rebuild. And in each case the heart of the issue is the Avatar, the last four of the Puranic Line. To be exact, Sri Ram, the 7^th, Sri Krishna, the 8^th, Sri Aurobindo, the 9^th, and the 10^th – or Sri Aurobindo as the resurrected Will, as the One.

It can be appreciated that this is an extremely complex issue with numerous ramifications and consequences. We shall explore them all in the course of this study in time, cosmos and the Indian destiny. In the process, perhaps the conundrum – to demolish and build, or not to demolish and build – will be resolved.

 

The Atmosphere of Trickery, Negation and Falsehood

 

It would seem as if in the course of my work I have been channeling too much energy into an exposure of the architects’ distortions of the Mother’s original plan in the pseudo-temple in Auroville. But, insofar as they persist in calling it ‘the original’, and ‘as faithful as possible’ to her vision, any serious disciple or student of the Mother’s work would welcome such an exposure, for not to denounce it is the same as saying, ‘I prefer darkness and ignorance and to be an instrument thereof.’ Indeed, in this age of compromise, when it is considered dogmatic and intolerant to be precise in such matters, the powers-that-be have in fact labelled all attempts to bring the true position to light as bigoted, dogmatic and an attempt at ‘making a religion of Sri Aurobindo’s work’.

Ironically, the real method to convert a path of Knowledge such as his into a religion is by squeezing out of it that higher content. And this is precisely what has been done in Auroville with the Mother’s plan. Hence, inasmuch as there is no lie for the Seer, the crystal designed and installed by those architects and builders does indeed mirror this perverse inversion in that we are faced with a consciousness which cannot create forms of truth but can only usurp them and then call this travesty ‘truth’, or ‘faithful to the original’.

Lamentably, this has not only been done regarding the knowledge content of the Mother’s original plan. My own work based on that very Knowledge has been similarly disfigured by these very people.

In January 1991, Auroville Today, the official review of the city, published an article by a fledgling architect which was a comparative study between the Matrimandir and the Great Pyramid at Giza, based on material extracted from her thesis. Since I am the only person who has done any solid work on this subject, and in spite of the fact that I had refused permission for this person to use any of my material on this subject two years earlier, she blatantly ‘borrowed’ (read plagiarised) entire diagrams and subject matter from my book, The New Way, Volume 2, Chapter 12. Though this had been done without acknowledging the source, it would not have been so bad had the ‘borrowing’ been honest. Contrarily, it was done as an exercise in the same perversion which has become habitual in Matrimandir affairs involving the Mother’s original plan.

In this case, the very portion misused by the author and editor was, significantly, the section dealing with the inaccurately-rendered floor diameter. I presented geometric proof based on Sri Aurobindo’s symbol of this unacceptable inaccuracy which contradicts the Mother’s explicit request that ‘the 24 metres must end at the walls’ (they do not in the architect’s rendering). But instead of conveying this point, the author and editor preferred to make it appear as if my discoveries were applicable to what has been built in Auroville and that the building there conforms to my diagrams – i.e., the correct 24-metre diameter.

The true position however, as established in my original diagrams, is that Sri Aurobindo’s symbol cannot be ‘found’ in what they have built, given the inaccurate floor diameter. But in plagiarising my work in this way, my discoveries appear to CONFIRM their construction as ‘faithful to the original’.

But this blatant plagiarism and misrepresentation did not end there. In the subsequent June 1991 edition of the same paper, ‘Amrit’, the astrologer-in-residence in Auroville, was interviewed. This person was my student in the early 1970s. Again for this piece, one of my diagrams has been ‘borrowed’ without acknowledgement. Once more, this would not be so objectionable except for the fact that this ‘Amrit’ plagiarised my work called ‘the geography of the Gnostic Circle’ from The New Way, Vol.2, Chapter 9. He presents my discoveries as his. He also refers to 1926 as the beginning of the Aquarian Age, which is a date held only by me as such, and when the interviewer asks him why he had selected this date which was the year of Sri Aurobindo’s Siddhi, he replies. ‘It just happened that way! I have been experimenting with this date for some 17 years now and it has consistently worked…’. The interview continues in this vein.

Again what is demonstrated is a pick-and-choose attempt to utilise elements of my work which can boost their claim to a meaningful experiment in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s work, with some foundation in Knowledge, and in the process pervert that Knowledge. The result is nothing but a travesty of the Truth, a disfiguring, by which the public may be duped. It is exactly what has been done with the Matrimandir: to adopt, to distort, and then call the result ‘faithful to the original’. At least regarding the pseudo-temple the Mother’s inspiration was acknowledged – as a part of the ruse, of course. Regarding my work, even this amount of honesty was withheld. It is simply theft and misrepresentation of that stolen material to use it as a support for that falsehood. Lamentably, these are the ‘official’ spokespeople for the Mother’s work.

We have brought this situation to the attention of the Government of India which now ‘owns’ Auroville. A committee of prominent members of the academic and bureaucratic world has been constituted to oversee Auroville affairs. But ambition would appear to rule the day. For Auroville has, under the new dispensation, become an important international platform, the Avatar’s sanction in the bargain! India as a nation has been brought into that Cauldron and the effects are far-reaching, as I have been illustrating from time to time in these pages. It is indicative of the decline under discussion that the Government of India, through this involvement, has become a tool of the Lord of Nations and not an instrument for the establishment of the Vedic Truth. But the day of reckoning is close at hand.

 

‘States upon states are born, the coverer of the coverer awakens to the knowledge: in the lap of the mother he wholly sees. They have called to him, getting a wide knowledge, they guard sleeplessly the strength, they have entered into the strong city. The peoples born on earth increase the luminous (force) of the son of the White Mother; he has gold on his neck, he is large of speech, he is as if by (the power of) this honey wine a seeker of plenty. He is like pleasant and desirable milk, he is a thing uncompanioned and is with the two who are companions and is as a heat that is in the belly of plenty and is invincible and an overcomer of many.

Play, O Ray, and become towards us.’

                                                Rigveda V.19, translation: Sri Aurobindo

 

 

 

May of 1992

Aeon Centre of Cosmology

at Skambha                                                                                (to be continued)

 

 

 

 

In the New York Times of 9 February 1992, there was the following report under the heading, ‘Scientists Clash on Age of Sphinx’:

 

CHICAGO, Feb 8 (AP) – A geologist whose research findings suggest that the Great Sphinx of Egypt is thousands of years older than scholars generally believe clashed in a heated debate on Friday with a leading Egyptologist, who assailed the geologist’s conclusions as ‘pseudoscience’.

The debate took place at the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here, where several thousand scientists in many disciplines are meeting through Tuesday.

The exchange was to last an hour, but it spilled over to a news conference and then a hallway confrontation in which voices were raised and words skated on the icy edge of scientific politeness.

Situated on the Giza Plateau west of Cairo, the Great Sphinx, depicting a recumbent lion with the head of a man, is one of the largest limestone carvings in the world: 66 feet high and 240 feet long. Scholars of Egyptian history have long held that it was carved out of a solid limestone formation around 2500 BC, during what is called the Old Kingdom Fourth Dynasty.

But reiterating findings that he first reported last fall, the geologist, Dr Robert M. Schoch of Boston University, told his adversary on Friday that his seismic studies of the sphinx’s erosion suggested that it was carved sometime between 7000 and 5000 BC.

Dr Schoch noted that a nearby tomb, also carved out of limestone, was thought to have been built at the same time as the Sphinx. But, he said, his studies clearly show that the Sphinx was so much more weathered than the tomb that it had to be more than 2,000 years older, So if the tomb was dated at 2500 BC, the Great Sphinx had to be dated no later than 5000 BC, he said.

That assertion has enraged scholars of Egyptian history who say disputes generations of archeological research into the Great Sphinx and the civilisation that built it.

Dr Mark Lehner of the University of Chicago, a leading expert on the Sphinx, heatedly rejected Dr Shoch’s findings. “You don’t overthrow Egyptian history based on one phenomenon like a weathering profile,’ Dr Lehner said. ‘That is how pseudoscience is done, not real science.’

The major fact disputing Dr Schoch’s conclusion, Dr Lehner said, was the absence of any evidence that a civilisation advanced enough to carve the Great Sphinx existed in Egypt from 7000 to 5000 BC.

 

In the Solstice Special Issue (incorporated in TVN 6/5, December 1991), I reproduced a similar report from the same newspaper, dated 24 October 1991. No doubt Dr Schoch is a part of that same study team that first presented to the scientific world the startling news that the Sphinx is much older than commonly held by archaeologists. It is the last paragraph of the above report that contains the vital clue to the problem: the position held by science that no civilisation existed at the dawn of history which could have built such a monument. This is the block regarding Egyptian history. It is the block in India regarding the Vedic civilisation. And unfortunately, in India’s case, the refusal to accept that the Rigveda was a product of the soil of Bharat Mata and not an import, and in addition that it dates to a much earlier period than currently held, has gone to consolidate a divide-and-rule policy and fortified a north/south cleavage in the nation.

The hold these backward, biased ‘scientists’ have over academia in India and throughout the world is deplorable and insidious. Its purpose is simply to sanction a Mediterranean and Euro-centred dominance over world history. No matter what evidence is provided to contradict this notion, the researcher will invariably meet with the same cries of PSEUDOSCIENCE!

The Sphinx may one day escape this web of distortion, but this is hardly likely in India where the Rigveda is a closed book for the scientific and academic community. They persist in foisting upon it a parameter which is entirely foreign to its inspiration. The Rigveda is not an historical document of any sort. It is entirely YOGIC. And it is only a person of the highest yogic accomplishments who can ‘interpret’ the Rigveda rightly.

 

8 March 1992                                                                             Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet

Aeon Centre of Cosmology at Skambha

 

 

Cosmic Harmonies in Hindu Civilisation and Society

 

A few words must be said about a certain characteristic of planets in orbit of the Sun on the foundational plane of the ecliptic. They too bear axes similar to the Sun. But they are not central. They develop their axes and shapes, including their rotation on these axes and then around the sun, from their position on the ecliptic. That is, each planet’s distinctive nature evolves on the basis of its relationship to the luminary it orbits, given the location of that orbit on the ecliptic or foundational plane.

In the context of the Vedic foundation – which is the ecliptic extending from the Sun of gnosis, or Veda – the planets are akin to the numerous paths of Yoga or the philosophies which came to inhabit the vedic cosmos over the millennia. Each can boast indeed of its own ‘axis’, but it accepts its location on the Vedic base and realises that it owes its very existence to that base and can never deny the inherent oneness of their relationship. Moreover it knows that its own individualised existence ENHANCES the glory of the Sun by this process of multiplication but entirely individualistically. No two planets are the same, yet the essential laws of their being are the same. In other words, they vibrate to the same central Pulse.

A distinguishing feature of these civilisational ‘planets’ is an axis which implies a centre. That is, the planet itself expresses the fundamental Vedic principle of a central FULNESS, or a compact inner ‘seed’ by virtue of which the process of growth is evolutionary and organic. It is that innermost core which determines the contours, never the reverse. Thus, native to this civilisational expression is always a core of fulness. All aspects of Vedic culture display this basic law.

On the other hand, other cultures have moved into this cosmos and their principal characteristic is the absence of the innermost core or that principle of Fulness. They are founded on another principle, the ‘void’. This is the most marked difference or the clearest proof that the invading culture was indeed an EXTERNAL imposition, bringing into the Vedic cosmos a creation that did not draw from the foundational base for its evolution.

The Taj Mahal is an example. It is indubitably one of the world’s most renowned architectural creations and certainly one of the finest products of Islamic culture. Thus this adds substance to my premise that the special nature of the Vedic ecliptical foundation will compel anything that enters into its midst to produce the best of itself at some point in its development or its interchange with and in the base.

If the Taj Mahal were not a tomb and housed a core of Fulness rather than the void of death, we would be encouraged to believe that it had drawn into itself some of the ‘stuff of the Sun’ as it were. Since this is not the case, the Taj is a shell, an exquisite encasement around an inner void. For this is another feature of a creation which establishes its position within the whole in the act of defining leading to integration: its ‘purpose’ is enhanced and revealed. The extreme beauty and magic of the shell pins one to that exquisite surface. It does not draw within because there is no magnetic core of fulness to create this inward-bound attraction.

What then is the Taj expressing in terms of ‘purpose’, of principle? Its inspiration was, history records, a human love. In the echelon of existence human love is an experience of the heart centre or chamber. Deeper within, in the soul, there is a spark of what no human love can equal: Divine Love. In that innermost chamber, deeper within than the heart, the individual encounters a ‘spaceless’ point. That is, in that centremost inward ‘space’ there is no room for a dual expression of the Pulse of creation. There is only THAT, and it is the solitary experience of the seeker possessed of the Divine, in a perfect union of identity – a fusion similar to the operations in the core of the Sun.

As explained in the VISHAAL solstice Special Issue (included in TVN 6/5, December 1991), Sri Ram drew before the evolution of the species this acute problem or choice: the human or the Divine. India, as a civilisation, chose the divine. Because of that ‘choice’, made thousands of years ago, we can continue proclaiming that India is the ‘cradle of spirituality’, that spirituality, or even religion, is what makes the nation tick.

Indeed this is so, the proof is that the very next Evolutionary Avatar to appear after Lord Ram was Sri Krishna who mercilessly drove the race inward, ever deeper into the temple of Yoga until it could only dissolve its individualised being in the arms of the Divine Lover. As a race, a nation, a people, this was Bharat’s choice. The consequences of such a phenomenal civilisational concord are in evidence everywhere in modern India, in the accumulated expressions across the ages of that choice in the cultural body of the nation.

 

Distinguishing Features of the Hindu Temple

 

Every element of the Hindu temple is designed to draw the seeker into that sacred innermost precinct. We may compare this creation to the Taj Mahal in that regard and we realise that the massive profusion in the temple’s exterior has the paradoxical effect of driving us inward and away from the profusion in search of and compelled to seek that spaceless Point where there is nothing but the Divine in that ‘hidden chamber closed and mute’. The shell of the Taj never forces this penetration. Indeed, its irresistible magic lies in the singular fact that its beauty acts as an hypnotic potion which rivets one to that external sphere. It can only do so by not housing an inner core.

It may be argued that the Taj does not pretend to be a religious or spiritual expression and that it is simply a mausoleum and a memorial. This is only partially relevant because we are selecting items which reflect a cultural content. In India’s case, all art is religious, – or better, sacred. Music, dance, sculpture, architecture, painting, and so forth. What can be held as true expressions of the indigenous culture all have this ‘purpose’. And they all reveal a central Fulness – as well as an obsession with axes.

If we turn to the immediately religious symbols we may study the nature of the mosque in this light. The mosque appears essentially to be a prayer hall. That is, its central portions are filled not by any deity – indeed, Islam is vehemently opposed to idol worship of any sort. Rather, it is the congregation that provides an inner fulness. And then there is the question of alignment or direction which we must discuss. In the Christian church, to my knowledge alignment of the edifice does not follow a fixed prescription. Similar to the mosque, the church is the refuge of the faithful, the congregation. But there is a further revealing element in the Christian church which adds another dimension to the symbolism. It is the position of the raised altar, separate and apart; and the fact that there can be no service, no worship without the commanding presence of the priest.

In the Hindu temple the emphasis is entirely on the centremost idol because that alone must be the focus. The devotee or worshipper is not encouraged in any way to rely upon or to accept that the priest has any legitimate commanding place in the experience of the seeker. The murti or idol as the innermost Divine requires no mediators. Indeed, this is born out by Hindu culture in that no priest has any final authority over the devotee and he can be eliminated entirely when the devotee performs his own ritual or puja, as it is called, without the need of the priest at all. Even women are free to serve in this capacity. Nor is there any pulpit or any other symbol of an ecclesiastical or kingly power above the Divine. The Hindu is constantly thrown back upon the only true source of ‘authority’: his or her direct experience of the Godhead in whatever form this may take consonant with the temperament of the devotee.

In this too we see the third power of the individual Divine reflected, India’s inner ‘pulse’ of destiny. The inner Divine may be any one of the thousands of Hindu deities, for indeed there are thousands upon thousands of individual worshippers. The precise form it takes is not the issue. The real issue is described in the overall form or design of the Hindu temple. In other words, the temple is the Hindu’s Book of Knowledge. By ‘opening’ this special book in stone – which implies the practice of a yoga or discipline which opens centres normally closed and which then permits the seeker to ‘read’ this book – he or she can understand the single most important truth of Hinduism and compare this with all other cultural expressions: Fulness versus Void. The design or concept of the temple forces the devotee to live the Vedic experience each time he or she enters the temple. One is compelled to plunge deep inside to the core and into the precinct of the innermost Divine regardless of the particular form. This is expressly manifest in the preliminary circumambulation of the edifice, and then within the building around the sanctum sanctorum, and so on, ever moving INWARD, ever converging upon that central Point, that inner Divine. Thus again we observe that the Third Power or the Individual Divine is the foundation of even the  Hindu Temple. The form is manifold. The Vedic experience is one. And it is lived in the intimacy of the soul’s inner chamber, concentrated abode of the Third Power.

The very name given to the Hindu temple’s sanctum sanctorum reveals that it is the abode of the Third: garbhagriha or womb-house. This further emphasises the essential message of Hinduism – the triumph of fulness over the Void, or the birth (from that womb) that fills the void.

Let me quote from Prof. S.  K. Ramachandra Rao’s book, The Indian Temple: Its Meaning, IBH Prakashana publishers, for a concise description of the significance of the garbhagriha, albeit a rather exoteric one:

 

‘The sanctum is technically known as the ‘garbhgrha’ (‘the womb-house’)… It is insisted that this part of the temple must be constructed first, and before the construction a significant ceremony known an ‘impregnating’ (garbhadhana or garbha-nyasa) should be performed. This ritual involves letting into the earth a ceremonial copper pot, containing nine precious stones, several metals and minerals, herbs and soils, symbolising creation and prosperity. The building which contains this ‘womb’ is said to prosper, and not the one which lacks it… After the completion of this ritual, a stone slab (adhara-sila) is placed over the spot where the copper pot has been buried. This stone slab will be the foundation for the installation of the icon. The copper-pot symbolises the womb, and the icon the soul. The sanctum that is built round is the body. This is the significance of the sanctum being called ‘the womb-house’. Texts like Silpa-ratna, Tantra-samuccaya and Isana-siva-gurupaddhati give an elaborate account of this ritual.’ (pages 55-6)

 

To express this concept, which has become ritualised in the construction of the Hindu temple, in more esoteric language but far closer to the highest Vedic truth, the ‘fecundation’ of the Womb is equivalent to the VERTICAL direction described by the new cosmology. This is the penetrating shaft from the ‘other dimension’ whereby the Point comes into being, which is the ‘seed’, the sperm, if you will. In the above ritual the same process is conveyed using precious stones and metals and soils and herbs, – clearly all symbols of elements most material, most ‘earthly’. Revealed in this is the explicit Earth-orientation of the Vedic quest. Once that Womb is in place and its fecundation assured, the edifice develops from that central Fulness, never the reverse.

To render our study less abstract, I would like to relate this process and concept to two contemporary episodes revolving around temples. One is the Matrimandir in Auroville, and the other is the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Mosque in Ayodhya.

Regarding the construction of the former, it is to be noted that rather than follow the prescriptions of the Vedic culture, the Matrimandir construction observed the reverse: the architects started from the exterior, the four supporting pillars, and set in place a central Void. This was not even a camouflaged or esoteric symbolism. It was a hole measuring three metres in diameter. In addition, the inclusion of this centremost hole or void, which, it must be noted, did not exist in the Mother’s original plan, increased the cost of the construction enormously. It was set in place a few years after the Mother inaugurated the construction in 1971. From that time onward the history of Auroville and the Matrimandir has been anything but ‘auspicious and prosperous’. There were even accidents and one instance where a young woman, it appears, fell through that very hole and was paralysed completely. (She later suicided.) Auroville was finally taken over by the Government of India when internal disputes could not be solved otherwise. It would appear from this that regardless what those in charge of the construction put out, or how much of a stiff upper lip the residents of Auroville put to the Government take-over, these facts indicate that perhaps the ancient Vedic prescriptions were most profoundly wise. The construction of the Matrimandir has been entirely un-Vedic, and I shall deal with this in the next part of this essay. It may be argued that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo did not intend their work to follow the old patterns and that therefore the Matrimandir construction, even if it can be proven that it did not follow those ancient precepts, has every right to deviate from the norm. Further on in this series I will provide evidence to show that it was precisely through the plan the Mother gave for that temple that the Dharma was to be ‘reestablished’. I shall also discuss what exactly is implied in such an undertaking.

The other contemporary example of the ‘fecundated Womb’ vis-à-vis a temple refers to Ayodhya. The fear exists in certain quarters that soon construction will begin of the temple to Ram which is meant to replace the Babri Mosque. It is sustained by Hindus that the site of the mosque was formerly a temple which had been demolished in order for the Emperor Babar to build this mosque. Furthermore, it is held that the site is especially sacred insofar as tradition considers it to be the actual birthplace of Sri Ram.

I have dwelt on this to a certain extent in the Solstice Special Issue (included in TVN 6/5, December 1991). At this point I would simply like to refer to this question of Fulness versus Void and the hallowed formula for the proper construction of any Hindu temple which is that first the Womb (fecundated) must be installed and then all the rest arises out of that. In Ayodhya, if prevalent fears are to be played out, it would appear that the reverse has been the case: Hindus are preparing to start construction, it is believed, encircling the existent mosque and moving inward, pressing the mosque out perhaps. If such were the case, it could be held by the purists that the Vedic formulas are not being respected and misfortune will result. However, this state of affairs adds a deeper dimension to the surreptitious epiphany of the Ramlal idol in the mosque at the December solstice of 1949. The ‘void’ was then filled. The rest is academic.

It may also be pointed out that according to the true and profound Vedic tradition, the icon would not have ‘appeared’ where it did had there not been the prior womb-fecundation ritual in some form, as Prof. Ramachandra Rao describes, somewhere along the line. In my view this is the firmest proof that the site did indeed once hold a Hindu temple to that very God, or that the precise location was ‘fecundated’ by Ram’s very birth, corroborated now by the appearance of the icon. Given the nature of what we are treating, it is understandable that such matters are difficult to adjudicate in courts of law.

 

In addition to the above, there is then the question of measurements, proportions, and so forth, which conspire mathematically, geometrically, to create an atmosphere conducive to the lived Vedic experience. Foremost is the question of alignment. Every Hindu temple must respect a certain alignment. This is marked by the stumbha (skambha) or cosmic pillar positioned carefully before the garbhagriha. I do not intend to discuss this element in any great detail, though I would like to refer again to Prof. Ramachandra Rao’s text to illustrate that this Cosmic Pillar is perhaps the least understood of the adornments of the Hindu temple. He makes this clear when he writes… ‘The  symbolism of the flag-staff is not clear in the textual accounts, probably because it was a late innovation and not a necessary involvement of the shrine’… He goes on to state that the staff was perhaps an addition brought in by the royal families or patrons of the temple. But further on he writes… ‘The flag-post is also magical in its significance. The texts assign Siva to the bottom of the post, Brahma to the middle portion and Vishnu to the top.’ (Ibid, pages 106-109.) My position on this is that this ‘skambha’ is indeed the least understood of the temple’s symbols because it holds the key to the Rigvedic yoga of alignment – a knowledge long lost.

A hint is given in the text, it would appear, to a far deeper significance of the stumbha when Prof. Rao mentions its connection with the Hindu Trimurti or trinity. Let me add to this that these directions and alignments are COSMICALLY oriented, and that is the point I wish to make here. The entire science of temple building is cosmic or drawn from the cosmic harmony. Thus in this, above all else, is demonstrated the entirely universal character of the Vedic Dharma. The devotee is thrust into a cosmic alignment and harmony when he or she enters the temple. This is no earth-bound direction such as Mecca, one of the most important features of the Islamic mosque. The mosque must be positioned in such a way as to permit the worshipper to turn toward Mecca during his prayers; and even when he is not praying in the mosque, he is obliged to respect this direction. Thus, a worshipper west of Mecca would face eastward, while a worshipper east of Mecca, say India, would face westward. Only Mecca is important as a direction, and it has no cosmic connection. If we add to this the importance of the brotherhood, which the mosque concept emphasises, we observe that two features of Islam separate it from Hinduism. This is the prominence of the brotherhood, and the orientation toward Mecca whenever and wherever it meets for prayer – that is, a point on Earth. In this light it is quite simple to deduce that the goal would be a brotherhood across the globe directed to this hallowed location, in contrast to the Hindu temple which focuses not at all on the congregation or the clergy and  any earthly direction, sacred though it may be, but solely on the inner Divine, centre of the cosmos from any point in the universe where the individual stands who houses in his or her body a soul, a ‘garbhgriha’.

Thus we may very confidently state that the Vedic Dharma has spawned a galaxy of ‘exalted individuals’. Each such being is sacred. Each is holder of an inner ‘spark’ or Godhead, as the temple holds in its garbhgriha the divine Murti. On this basis alone it should be obvious that the Vedic Dharma is truly and compellingly universal by virtue of being so utterly riveted on the individual and the human soul. Similarly, to exclude a member of a caste or non-caste or foreigner or whosoever from entering such temples presents something of an incongruity. But even for the native of Bharat to fight for such a right is equally incongruous for the very reasons I have given above: in the Vedic Dharma ultimately there is nothing higher than the individual soul as the encasement of the Supreme. The Hindu temple simply reproduces this fact of existence. In one’s secret chamber, anywhere, any time, the Lover is one with the Beloved.

This is not to say that temples should be obliged to open their doors to everyone, that distinctions should be dissolved. The point is only that the right of distinction, while being a prerogative of the Third Principle, should not be exercised on the basis of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, ‘best’ or ‘worst’. They are simply manifestations catering to the great galaxy spawned by the Dharma. And finally, nothing is ‘higher’ on the horizontal circular plane of the Dharma’s ecliptic. Everything, in a perfect equality, converges on the Centre and owes its being to the single central Sun or ‘point’.

 

That Mysterious One, or the Axis Mundi

 

In all artistic expressions of India’s culture we observe the prominence of what I have called an ‘axial obsession’. This is to be noted in dance very clearly, in particular India’s purest expression, one of the most ancient forms of temple sacred dance still preserved on the subcontinent. This is Bharatnatyam, the ‘Dance of India’, native to Tamil Nadu where the dharma is ‘preserved’.

This special art form is obviously an enactment of certain specific alignments which are cosmos-inspired. That is, the human figure is used to express a certain relationship between the Earth and the heavens. But we cannot separate Bharatnatyam from sculpture in our analysis insofar as the human figure in dance takes the poses which we find to be the cosmic foundation of sculpture and adds to it movement. The two forms together offer a sort of complementation between rest and motion, essential components of the Truth-Consciousness whereby these opposites are harmonised in creation.

An interesting debate surfaces now and again in contemporary Indian society. It centres on what came first, dance or sculpture? That is, was it dance and movement that inspired the numerous sculptures we see gracing Hindu temples which are so obviously linked to dance, or vice-versa.

To illustrate, an article appeared in the Sunday Review of the Times of India, dated 5 January 1992, by Arahiya Sethi, entitled ‘Movement in Monument’. Reference is made by the author to an exhibition organised by a sculptor-dancer, Ramabali Kant. The issue the exhibition brought up was the above question. To prove that it was probably dance that inspired the sculptured sacred forms, the author refers to the Vishnu Dharmottara Purana in which Rishi Markandeya advises King Vajra ‘to learn first the laws of dancing before attempting sculpture, for only when the technique of movement in the living form is mastered can it be arrested in the plastic media.’ Sethi goes on to note that…

 

‘The sculptural quality of Indian dance is a reflection of the dancer’s aim of achieving the perfect balance as the climax to a series of movements. On the other hand, the profusion of dancing figures in Indian sculpture testifies to the sculptor’s fascination for the kinetics of Indian dance. In fact, one could go as far as to say that a relationship also exists between dance movements and poses, on the one hand, and architectural forms on the other. This view regards architecture as an extended form of sculpture. Hence while circular kinetics of Mohini Attam are mirrored in the rounded and squat temples of Kerala, the majesty of the gopurams of the temples in the south, is captured in the linear expression of Bharat Natyam. This brings up the question of inspiration – was it sculpture that inspired dance, or dance sculpture?’

 

I would like to state that the answer is not one or the other. Rather, we must inquire what spiritual realisation served to inspire not only dance and sculpture and architecture, but possibly every other facet of Indian culture and civilisation. This realisation, or yogic process to be more exact, is carefully noted down in the Veda; for example, in the hymns to Skambha, the cosmic pillar or axis mundi which I have quoted earlier from the Atharvaveda. But what is the reason for this ‘obsession with axes’? It is simply that axial alignment is the obsession of the Creator – or, as Hindu lore would have it, of Vishwakarma, the Divine Architect. We may be so bold as to state that being fashioned in His/Her image, it is only natural that a civilisation which has made the choice to live for that Principle and that alone, would seek to display this essential aspect of the Divine in all facets of its collective and individual existence. We note here a direct parallel with the philosophies of pre-Christian Europe and the Mediterranean area, for example Plato’s exclamation that ‘God always geometrises’ or that all is simply Number. Basing our analysis on the cultural works of the Vedic civilisation, the same conclusion must be reached.

To carry the analysis into wider vistas, we find that axial alignment, or indeed the coming into being of an axis in the first place, is the principal feature of the cosmic manifestation. This is to be verified in smaller cosmic bodies such as the planets, and in larger, i.e., the Sun. It is also the distinguishing feature of the very centre of our galaxy and indeed the supreme centre of all galaxies, in fact, wherever we find bodies in orbit of a central mass. This is simply because Skambha, that One, is the great secret of creation, the centremost principle of all that exists. It is, in fact, because of that centre, that Point, that any alignment came into being at all. Material creation begins with the Point which in turn is simply a crossing of cosmic directions. More specifically, it is the intersection of the vertical and horizontal dimensions. This means that it is the centre of the compressed 9/6/3 which forms the vertical direction and emerges in the material universe as the One from where that compressed essence extends, evolves, expresses itself in the material plane through time and space. More importantly, and this is the profound Secret of Secrets, or what in the Gita is called the ‘Secret Science’, the convergence and then the emergence of a centre indicates that a connection is made between this plane and ‘the other’, the Transcendent. The Point is thus the Immanent Transcendent, the Vast compressed to a point, a ‘seed’. The whole of material creation is then the organic evolution of That, of the triadic essence which is the basis of all material creation.

I shall quote some verses from the hymns to Skambha of the Atharvaveda to demonstrate the exactitude of the ‘science’ in those ancient times. The translation is Raimundo Panikkar’s and not having the original Sanskrit I must rely on his work. He has used the word ‘Support’ whenever ‘Skambha’ appears in the text:

 

‘…Toward whom does the rising Flame aspire?

Toward whom does the Wind eagerly blow?

On whom do all the compass points converge?

Tell me of that Support [Skambha] – who may he be?

 

‘Where do the half months and months together

proceed in consultation with the year?

Where do the seasons go, in group or singly?

Tell me of that Support – who may he be?

 

‘Toward whom run the sisters, day and night,

who look so different yet one summons answer?

Toward whom do the waters with longing flow?

Tell me of that Support – who may he be?

 

‘The one on whom the Lord of Life [Prajapati]

leant for support when he propped up the world –

Tell me of that Support – who may he be?

 

‘That which of all forms the Lord of Life

created – above, below, and in between –

with how much of himself penetrated the Support?

How long was the portion that did not enter?

 

‘With how much of himself penetrated the Support

into the past? With how much into the future?

In that single limb whose thousand parts he fashioned

with how much of himself did he enter, that Support?

 

‘Through whom men know the worlds and what enwraps them,

the waters and Holy Word [Brahman], the all-powerful

in whom are found both Being and Nonbeing –

Tell me of that Support – who may he be?

 

‘By whom Creative Fervor [tapas] waxing powerful

upholds the highest Vow, in whom unite

Cosmic Order [ritam] and Faith, the waters and the Word ‘’

Tell me of that Support – and who may he be?

 

‘On whom is firmly founded earth and sky

and the air in between; so too the fire,

moon, sun, and wind, each knowing his own place –

Tell me of that Support – who may he be?

 

‘In whose one limb all the Gods,

thirty and three in number, are affixed –

Tell me of that Support – who may he be?

 

‘In whom are set firm the firstborn Seers,

the hymns, the songs, and the sacrificial formulas,

in whom is established the Single Seer [the mystical sun] –

Tell me of that Support, who may he be?

 

‘In whom, as Man, deathlessness and death

combine, to whom belong the surging ocean

and all the arteries that course within him;

Tell me of that Support – who may he be?

 

‘Of whom the four cardinal directions

comprise the veins, visibly swollen,

in whom the sacrifice has advanced victorious –

Tell me of that Support – who may he be?

 

‘Those who know the divine in Man

know the highest Lord; who knows the highest Lord

or the Lord of Life knows the supreme Brahman.

They therefore know the Support also.

 

………………………….

 

‘The branch of Nonbeing which is far-extending

men take to be the highest one of all.

They reckon as inferior those who worship

your other branch, the branch of Being.

 

………………………….

 

‘Great are the Gods who were born from Nonbeing,

yet men aver this Nonbeing to be

the single limb of the Support, the great Beyond.

 

‘The limb in which the Support, when generating,

evolved the Ancient One – who knows this limb

knows too by that same knowledge the Ancient One [original Principle]

 

‘It was from this limb that the thirty-three Gods

distributed portions among themselves.

Thus in truth only knowers of Brahman

are also knowers of the thirty-three Gods.

 

‘Men recognise the Golden Embryo [Hiranyagarbha]

as the unutterable, the Supreme.

Yet it was the Support who in the beginning

poured forth upon the world that stream of gold…’

 

                                                                        (Athar.X,7)

 

Vedic civilisation is the only one in the world, from ancient times into the present, which has been audacious enough to strive to establish an entire society of this profound basis, this ‘support’, this Skambha. Panikkar’s translation of these splendid hymns lacks the insights the direct yogic experience gives which would permit a far more precise translation. Nonetheless, even a simple, literal version such as the above, suffices to help us in making the connections between the India of today and the ancient world as recorded in the Veda. As I am demonstrating, every aspect of India’s culture was a conscious, knowledgeable (and successful) attempt to reproduce, to recapture this axial fact of our existence in the numerous facets of collective and individual living. Everything else we know in the world is a lesser attempt, never having reached the purity of the Vedic inspiration. But preceding the actual visual, audial and plastic arts, there stands that supreme yogic achievement of Skambha and Agni, the axis mundi. This is the yoga detailed in the Rigveda. It is a knowledge long lost and which has resurfaced in this century with the appearance of the 9^th Evolutionary Avatar, Sri Aurobindo, who was to initiate with his birth the reestablishment of the Vedic Dharma – that is, the restructuring of Indian society on those eternal and indestructible foundations. For this the Avatar, as Sri Ram and Sri Krishna before him had done, had to LIVE THE YOGA. In other words, to imprint this eternal truth on the evolutionary matrix of this 9^th Manifestation. Sri Aurobindo had to rediscover that Vedic Yoga. His appearance as the 9 in the Solar Line was in the form of the Transcendent. His ‘sleep’ and awakening as the One is in the form of the Immanent Transcendent, or the Point, the One, the Centre, Agni. To render the realisation possible and complete, the powers of 6 and 3 were conjoined to the 9. And out of that Third the One was born.

This is the most profound mystery of creation. I have written earlier that it constituted the quest of the Alchemists of the West. This is clearly evidenced in the following Hermetic formula, taken from the dialogues between Maria Prophetessa and Aros (Isis and Horus?): ‘One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the One as the fourth.’ Translated into the formula of the new cosmology, this is the 9, 6, 3, and out of the 3 comes the l, who is the fourth in the Line.

The question therefore – What came first, dance or sculpture? – is meaningless. It is that yogic process of alignment and creation of a centre that is the seed-realisation and inspiration of everything we know in the Vedic universe. Similarly, when measures are lost and knowledge is obscured, it has to be the same Vedic process re-lived within the circumscribing conditions of this 9^th Manifestation which is to form the basis for any correction or renewal of the things distorted or lost over the ages in between this 9^th and the last, the 8^th Manifestation of Sri Krishna, when he graced this planet in order to carry out a similar process. When there is talk of renewal in music or any of the other art forms in India, it must be understood that if we are to undertake a renewal, respecting the cosmic structure and processes of old which were the foundations of the things desired to be remade, then we can only do so by first living the Yoga of the Veda. We cannot expect to ‘put the cart before the horse’.

And inasmuch as alignment and centre arise from the fulness of that compressed Seed, again I must repeat, Indian civilisation, founded on the Veda, must struggle to fill the void ever and always. It means that in order to be in a position to function as a true civilisation held together by that mysterious and elusive Point (as ever it had been until the onset of this 9^th Manifestation), it must accept that the Yoga of the 9, and 6, and 3, leading to the birth of the One who ‘fills the void’, is the essential ingredient for that to come about.

It is in this light that we are obliged to assess the condition of contemporary Indian society and the realistic possibility of ‘holding together’ when we are faced with a series of expressions on the subcontinent which cannot, by the rightful law of their being, find any point of convergence in the stream of the Vedic foundational plane. The question is then, Do we abandon that plane in view of the fact that there exists this apparently unreconcilable situation as a product of history which cannot be erased? Or do we proceed a step further and ‘put each thing in its place’?

To do this effectively we must recognise what is truly indigenous and what has come ‘from outside’ in, for example, some of the more popular expressions of dance and other forms of art. Kathak, for instance, is remarkably reflective of certain aspects of Spanish Flamenco Dance. Spain, as we know, was greatly influenced by Arabic/Islamic culture, Flamenco being perhaps one such product. It is not surprising therefore that, to a careful observer, Kathak of northern India, also influenced by Islamic culture, should bear some profound resemblance to Flamenco, both have been exposed to the same stream of inspiration. Or else we may take Hindi, officially adopted at the time of Independence as India’s national language. I have always felt that Hindi is to the subcontinent what Spanish is to Europe. They both give evidence of a certain virility and vital quality which distinguishes them from the other languages of their respective areas. The aspirated ‘j’ (jota) of Spanish recalls certain sounds of Arabic, for instance. We find similar sounds in Hindi which sets it apart from the languages indigenous to the subcontinent such as Tamil and Sanskrit.

But what exactly is the distinguishing feature of these particular modifications and influences, brought about by an Islamic wave which moved into the two countries at about the same period? It is that the expression is centred in the vital being (collective or individual, in the yogic sense) rather than the mental or even the physical. This indeed is the quality of Islam, and it can be traced to the Old Testament and the story of Abel and Cain, or the mental and vital principles and their eternal struggle for supremacy. Sri Aurobindo has expressed something of this order in his Thoughts and Aphorisms…

 

‘Christ came into the world to purify, not to fulfil. He himself foreknew the failure of his mission and the necessity of his return with the sword of God into a world that had rejected him.

 

‘Mahammad’s mission was necessary, else we might have ended by thinking, in the exaggeration of our efforts at self-purification, that earth was meant only for the monk and the city created as a vestibule for the desert.

 

‘When all is said, Love and Force together can save the world eventually, but not Love only or Force only. Therefore Christ had to look forward to a second advent and Mahammad’s religion, where it is not stagnant, looks forward through the Imams to a Mehdi.’

 

But we need not hark back to remote history or legend or scripture to assess the prominence of the vital centre in Arabic/Islamic culture. The contemporary scene is perhaps a better verification. For there is the question of energy, for example, the prime ‘purpose’ of the vital centre in the being of civilisation or in the individual constitution. This is clearly borne out by contemporary Arabia’s contribution to the world economy, its abundance of oil and the role this creates for it in international affairs. But for this commodity, Islamic civilisation would have been forced to play a far less significant role in this 20^th Century. Thus, oil (energy) is vital to its international persona.

But there is another example of the vital-oriented structure of the civilisation, far purer and closer to the realm of the symbolic and the ‘symbol being the thing symbolised’. I refer to the Horse which is the animal symbol in almost all occult and esoteric traditions most expressive of the qualities the vital contributes to creation. The Veda makes this symbolism abundantly clear. Indeed, in ancient times the Horse was as sacred as the Cow, since together they represent the basic pillars of creation: Consciousness(Cow)-Force(Horse).

For the horse to fulfil its symbol role it must express its essential nature or its true dharma. This is speed, movement. In the cosmic harmony it is that formidable motion of all creation, because of which forms emerge and are held together. Thus speed is its attribute. There is no finer example of that quality than the English Thoroughbred, for centuries the only horse used for high-quality racing, – the ‘sport of kings’. But it must be noted that the foundation stock of the thoroughbred was entirely Arabian. The horse we know by that name today can be traced to a breeding experiment involving three of the finest Arabian horses in the second half of the 18^th Century. It is also worth noting that this inter-civilisational mix which went into the production of this superb animal and highest expression of the Horse Dharma, was the same combination that entered the Vedic plane, Arabic and English. I may add by way of a clue to the future denouement, the Horse symbol and the vital centre hold the key to the resolution of the conundrum India faces in seeking to integrate these strands from beyond her borders.

 

Defining Hinduism, an exercise long overdue

 

Scholars and theologians have great difficulty in describing or defining Hinduism. We are all agreed that it does not follow the patterns all other religions follow, hence the difficulty in even labelling it a religion. But we persist in doing so simply because there is no other term or bracket in which to fit this unique manifestation of the human spirit. Most authorities on the subject offer banal definitions, in the West emphasising the Hindu belief in reincarnation as being one of the chief feature of the religion. This is entirely misleading but it is understandable since the yardstick for the assessment is always the known and well-structured Middle-Eastern religions, Judeo-Christianity and Islam, with which Hinduism has little in common and none of which believe in reincarnation. Hinduism is thus measured on that limited yardstick. In the process nothing of its true character is known. This is not only a problem in the West. In India itself one has difficulty in locating a real authority on the matter, for the reasons which I have been describing in this series: the principal features of the Vedic Dharma have become quite obscured over the centuries.

 Sri Aurobindo stands perhaps alone in this century in giving a nearly perfect description of Hinduism, but not many have appreciated his work in this area or its import for the reestablishment of the Vedic Dharma. This may be due to the fact that his revelations reach back to the true Vedic foundation which is now to be rediscovered before anything of his writings can be properly comprehended. I shall quote portions from his Foundations of Indian Culture, Part III, Chapter l, where he defines Hinduism. It will then be more than evident that his definition follows meticulously the basic formula of the new cosmology, 9-6-3-0/1, which in turn is the formula revealing the birth-pattern of the Solar Line of which he is the initiator.

His definition begins with the overall unifying Principle, the Transcendent, which in this cosmology is the 9; from there he passes on to the Cosmic Divine, the number 6 in the cosmological formula, and then finally all converges on the Individual Divine, the 3. For Sri Aurobindo the core of Hinduism consists of this ‘formula’ and constitutes what he describes as a… ‘synthetic character and embracing unity’ which, if it is not grasped impedes us from understanding… ‘the whole meaning of Indian life and the whole sense of Indian culture’:

 

‘…And if we are asked, “But after all what is Hinduism, what does it teach, what does it practise, what are its common factors,” we can answer that Indian religion is founded upon three basic ideas or rather three fundamentals of a highest and widest spiritual experience. First comes the idea of the One Existence of the Veda to whom sages give different names, the One without a second of the Upanishads who is All that is, and beyond all that is, the Permanent of the Buddhists, the Absolute of the Illusionists, the supreme God or Purush of the Theists who holds in his power the soul and Nature, – in a word the Eternal, the Infinite. This is the first common foundation; but it can be an endless variety of formulas by the human intelligence. To discover and closely approach and enter into whatever kind of degree of unity with this Permanent, this Infinite, this Eternal, is the highest height and last effort of its spiritual experience. That is the first universal credo of the religious mind of India.
‘Admit in whatever formula this foundation, follow this great spiritual aim by one of the thousand paths recognised in India or even any new path which branches off from them and you are at the core of the religion. For its second basic idea is the manifold way of man’s approach to the Eternal and Infinite. The Infinite is full of many infinities and each of these infinities is itself the very Eternal. And here in the limitations of the cosmos God manifests himself and fulfils himself in the world in many ways, but each is the way of the Eternal. For in each infinite we can discover and through all things as his forms and symbols we can approach the Infinite; all cosmic powers are manifestations, all forces are forces of the One. The gods behind the workings of Nature are to be seen and adored as powers, names and personalities of the one Godhead… One may approach the Supreme through any of these names and forms with knowledge or in ignorance; for through them and beyond them we can proceed at last to the supreme existence.

‘One thing however has to be noted that while many modernised Indian religionists tend, by way of an intellectual compromise with modern materialistic rationalism, to explain away these things as symbols, the ancient Indian religious mentality saw them not only as symbols but as world-realities, – even if to the Illusionist realities only of the world of Maya. For between the highest unimaginable Existence and our material way of being the spiritual and psychic knowledge of India did not fix a gulf as between two unrelated opposites. It was aware of other psychological planes of consciousness and experience and the truths of these supraphysical planes were no less real to it than the outward truths of the material universe. Man approaches God at first according to his psychological nature and his capacity for deeper experience… The level of Truth, the plane of consciousness he can reach is determined by the inner evolutionary stage. Thence comes the variety of religious cult, but its data are not imaginary structures, inventions of priests or poets, but truths of a supraphysical existence intermediate between the consciousness of the physical world and the ineffable superconscience of the Absolute.

‘The idea of strongest consequence at the base of Indian religion is the most dynamic for the inner spiritual life. It is that while the supreme or the divine can be approached through a universal consciousness and by piercing through all inner and outer Nature, That or He can be met by each individual soul in itself, in its own spiritual part, because there is something in it that is intimately one or at least intimately related with the one divine Existence. The essence of Indian religion is to aim at so growing and so living that we can grow out of the Ignorance which veils this self-knowledge from our mind and life and become aware of the Divine within us. These three things put together are the whole of Hindu religion, its essential sense and, if any credo is needed, its credo.’

Reestablishment of the Dharma

 

Similar to the difficulty in defining Hinduism, we encounter a similar problem when assessing the true nature of what is known as a reestablishment of the Dharma, considered by Hindu tradition to be the work of the Ten Avatars. After this review of the foundational base of the Veda, it becomes easier to understand this most important feature of the tradition. Most assess the issue in moralistic or religious terms, according to the standards set by the structured religions of the world – a better human being and a better society, law-abiding, dutiful, responsible, caring, compassionate, and all the rest. But these qualities are not the issue at all when the time comes for this very special ‘reestablishment’. Indeed, the moralistic assessment is the way Mohandas Gandhi came to look upon the ‘Ramrajya’ (‘rule or reign of Sri Ram’) which he aspired to establish in India. Or else the present political and cultural organisations which have also adopted the Ramrajya slogan as their platform.
But none of this is pertinent to the reestablishment of the Vedic Dharma; and, to be more precise, there can never be an establishment of the reign of Sri Ram since his period was the 7^th Manifestation of 10,000 years ago. Time does indeed move on. The reestablishment must take place in the soil of the contemporary India we know and in consideration of the accumulated experience of the civilisation over the past 2,000 years.

Neither Ram nor Krishna had to face the question of Fulness versus Void. In their respective Manifestations, this was not the central issue. After the rise and supremacy of Buddhist and Mayavadist philosophies and spiritual realisations, this acute problem lies at the root of the reestablishment simply because these avenues of experience have struck a blow at the very heart of the Veda itself, – that Core of Fulness upon which the entire edifice of the civilisation was built.

Whenever we encounter a target or goal that is ‘otherworldly’, then we know the void is its sustenance and it is an expression un-Vedic in essence. Every religion in existence today houses this Void by the mere fact that the goal is a heaven ‘above’, or ‘beyond’, and that life on this planet is but a passage through the fire, as it were, in order to reach that supreme Heaven. The position is one of a denial of the Earth herself, contingent upon which is a denial of the Goddess. Thus the movement is not inward, converging on the Core of fullness or garbhagriha. It is outward, dissolving in the Beyond. Hence we say that all these religious and spiritual postulations and realisations harbour the Void. And there is only one which does not. It is the Vedic Dharma.

For India, when the time of the appearance of the 9^th (and 10^th) Evolutionary Avatar arrives, it is the signal that the civilisation has reached a momentous crossroads and that the work to be done will not resemble that of the former Evolutionary Avatars but will conform to the demands of the Time-Spirit and the circumscribing conditions of this 9^th Manifestation. Furthermore, and this is the most important point, we have reached the end of the Line. We are at the 9^th and 10^th stages of the Puranic Line of Ten. We understand by this that the Dharma has come full circle. All that has intervened from the time the first OM was chanted until today has resulted in a joining of the Serpent’s head and tail. That is, the reestablishment now, unlike in Ram and Krishna’s time, involves the very heart and soul of the Dharma. It lives on if the reestablishment is done and the real Satyayuga or Age of Truth (not Ramrajya) begins for the civilisation, or it perishes. There are only these two ‘possibilities’.

It must further be stated that a work of this order is carefully arranged. Nothing is left to chance. All is controlled, planned, foreseen. Let us then explore the avenues which have been given to the civilisation and its wisemen and women in order to secure the Victory. In so doing we must bear in mind that this closing of the circle implies that the reestablishment hinges in part on the resurrection of the Yoga detailed in the earliest Veda, and that without the successful accomplishment of that process there can be no question of any reestablishment. For India’s destiny is spiritually oriented, which means that it is on the basis of these yogic achievements first and foremost that anything beyond that can begin to express itself in the civilisation and society. I have demonstrated this regarding the arts and the necessity of a basic yogic realisation if any form of renewal is to come about in the ‘limbs’ of the yogic civilisational Body. The same may be said of any aspect of contemporary Indian life. And if a crossroads has been reached and we stand amidst tumbling ruins of all that appeared to be the ‘solid’ edifice of the new India, we must accept that what is collapsing is not founded on that original and indestructible Base. Therefore, we must make contact with That and allow it to reveal the contours of the true new India.

I propose in the next part of this series to dwell exclusively on the strategy and mechanism arranged for India in this 9^th Manifestation to ‘reestablish the Dharma’. In the process we will explore more thoroughly the question of Alignment and Measure, by virtue of which ‘all things are made new’, to use the Biblical phrase.

 

 

 

February of 1992

Aeon Centre of Cosmology

at Skambha

 

(to be continued)