Circumsolatious

The Maya 2012 - Is it Relevant?

2012-01-21T09:18:00.000-08:00

Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea) discusses the Mayan calendar, evolutionary cycles, the significance of 2012 in terms of evolution of consciousness, Carlos Casteneda, and the new world:

Evolving Towards a Consciousness of Unity - Sri Aurobindo's Teachings & Lineage

2012-01-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven (The Empyrean);
from Gustave Doré's illustrations to the Divine Comedy, Paradiso Canto 31

[I wrote this article for Parabola magazine back in July. They were inviting submissions on the subject 'One Truth, Many Paths'. It didn't get published and I almost forgot about it. But here it is, an offering for the New Year.]

In 1908-1909, while spending a year in jail for being a seditionist against British rule in India, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) came to the conclusion that the time had come for an entirely new stage of evolution to unfold on planet Earth. So far in our history, out of seemingly inert matter evolved life and out of matter-life evolved mind. The next logical question that arises is, ‘What is next for us? … What exactly are we to become or evolve into?’ The answer, according to Sri Aurobindo and the authors of the Rig Veda, is that we are to become conscious of the One Self that contains and pervades all-selves and all variations throughout all of time and space. Another way of putting this is that our limited mind and fragmented mental-egoic formations are evolutionarily bound to give way to a supramental, or higher-than-mental consciousness of eternity, immortality and unity. Like the seed of a flower is inherently designed to grow through various stages and to bloom, mankind is inherently designed in the course of evolution, to become Gnostic or knowledgeable of the whole living macrocosm of which each individual is a microcosm. As our consciousness evolves in that direction, life on Earth becomes correspondingly luminous, harmonious and divine.

In his magnum opus The Life Divine, which describes this evolutionary vision, Sri Aurobindo begins his description of the ‘Gnostic Being’ with a selection of verses from the Rig Veda that give readers an idea of the eternal Truth of Oneness that lies in wait to illuminate the shadowy mind of Man.

O Flame, O Wine, your force has become conscious;
you have discovered the One Light for the many.
Rig Veda I. 93. 4
O Truth-Conscious, be conscious of the Truth,
cleave out many streams of the Truth.
Rig Veda V. 12. 2

A perfect path of the Truth has come into being for our
journey to the other shore beyond the darkness.
Rig Veda I. 46. 11

‘Mental nature and mental thought,’ Sri Aurobindo goes on to explain, ‘are based on a consciousness of the finite; supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and power of the Infinite. Supramental Nature sees everything from the standpoint of oneness and regards all things, even the greatest multiplicity and diversity, even what are to the mind the strongest contradictions, in the light of that oneness; its will, ideas, feelings, sense are made of the stuff of that oneness, its actions proceed on that basis. … the supramental, the life divine is a life of essential spontaneous and inherent unity.’

The eye-opening gist of this many-faceted Oneness as discussed by Sri Aurobindo and the Vedic rishis is that whatever we may think we are doing or accomplishing as individuals and whatever individual paths we may indentify with, we are actually carrying out, in unison, one great evolutionary mission or journey. The Vedic rishis described this unified evolutionary progression as a ‘sacrifice’ (yajna) ‒ a ritual and cyclical journey which is upheld, powered by and compelled by the sacred solar fire and divine will (agni).

'By the Truth they hold the Truth that holds all,
in the power of the Sacrifice, in the supreme ether.'
Rig Veda V.15. 2

In 1914 Mirra Alfassa, later to be known as ‘the Mother’, joined Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, India where she worked continuously towards the establishment of a unified, supramental consciousness on Earth until her passing at age 95 in 1973. In 1958, after reading from The Life Divine, she told her students, ‘As soon as one is convinced that there is a living and real Truth seeking to express itself in an objective universe, the only thing that seems to have any importance or value is to come into contact with this Truth, to identify oneself with it as perfectly as possible, and to no longer be anything but a means of expressing it, making it more and more living and tangible so that it may be manifested more and more perfectly. All theories, all principles, all methods are more or less good according to their capacity to express that Truth; and as one goes forward on this path, if one goes beyond all the limits of Ignorance, one becomes aware that the totality of this manifestation, its wholeness, its integrality is necessary for the expression of that Truth, that nothing can be left out, and perhaps there is nothing more important or less important.’

The Mother was well aware that this Truth of Oneness was deeply encoded and embedded in the Vedic foundations of India, and hence, like Sri Aurobindo, she believed that India would necessarily be the ‘guru’ or teacher of the world once the nation recovered the true sense of its own ancient wisdom tradition. ‘There is only one country in the world,’ the Mother said in 1969, ‘that knows that there is only one Truth to which everything should be turned, and that is India. Other countries have forgotten this, but in India it is ingrained in the people, and one day it will come out. We must all recognize this and work for this. India is the cradle of the Truth and will lead the world to Truth. India will find its real place in the world when it realizes this.’

Harmonizing the Whole

‘The whole is brought with lightening speed toward the consciousness that will be this Consciousness of the point and the whole at the same time.’
– The Mother, 19 November 1969

Practically speaking, if human beings across all borders do not learn to cooperate and care for the quality of life of all beings, Earth will continue to become an increasingly difficult place to live. So our survival necessitates that we at least acquire a certain tolerance of, and perhaps even an appreciation of the diversity of form and divergent paths that make up the whole. But, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, such tolerance and appreciation is only one step in the right direction. Achieving a true harmony amongst the Many requires a greater gnosis or direct knowledge of the One Truth of our being.

‘The one thing that seems necessary,’ the Mother continued in her above discussion of The Life Divine, ‘is a harmonization of everything which puts each thing in its place, in its true relation with all the rest, so that the total Unity may manifest harmoniously. If one comes down from this level, according to me one no longer understands anything and all arguments are of equal worth in the narrowness and limitation which take away all their real value. Each thing in its place, in harmony with all the rest, and then one can begin to understand and live.’

‘All will be seen in its relation to the whole,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo of the gnostic point of view, ‘so that each step will be luminous and joyous and satisfying in itself because each is in unison with a luminous totality. This consciousness, this living in the spiritual totality and acting from it, a satisfied totality in essence of being and a satisfied totality in the dynamic movement of being, the sense of the relations of that totality accompanying each step, is indeed the very mark of a supramental consciousness and distinguishes it from the disintegrated, ignorantly successive steps of our consciousness in the Ignorance. The gnostic existence and delight of existence is a universal and total being and delight, and there will be the presence of that totality and universality in each separate movement: in each there will be, not a partial experience of self or a fractional bit of its joy, but the sense of the whole movement of an integral being and the presence of its entire and integral bliss of being, Ananda.’

It is clear in their many writings that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew in their heart and soul that a ‘living and real [Supramental] Truth seeking to express itself in our world’ would, in due time, impose a ‘dominant principle of harmony … on the life of the Ignorance.’ But admittedly they did not fully foresee exactly how this Truth would proceed to effectively organize the dynamic relationships between all the parts of the whole in time and space in a way that could be directly witnessed and experienced by individuals.

This question of the Supramental organization and effective action in the world was taken up by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (also known as Thea) who moved to Pondicherry in 1971 at the age of 33, two years before the Mother passed away. Drawing on her own cosmological knowledge and on the sacred geometry of a Vedic temple that the Mother had envisioned as her final legacy, Ms. Norelli-Bachelet began to understand the harmonies of the whole, and how the individual would come to know and participate in that harmony. In 1975 she published The Gnostic Circle, wherein she laid out the circular, spherical and cyclical structure/nature of our unified field of time and space. The book is a manual, in a sense, to instruct individuals as to how they might learn to see and be witness to the control or force of an all-unifying, all-encompassing Supermind as it expresses itself in the course of our individual and collective evolution. ‘Our goal during this Age,’ she explains, ‘… is to enlighten the masses and render them capable of seeing the Reality. We are faced with the task of eliminating the Ignorance, and this can be done only by first seeing properly.’

The first and most fundamental lesson in learning to see and appreciate the ‘unity, harmony and structure of the One and the Many,’ according to Ms. Norelli-Bachelet, is to meditate on the Circle and Dot, also known as the sun symbol: . In the first pages of The Gnostic Circle she explains, ‘This symbol represents the unified multiplicity. By the living experience of the Circle we can come to know the play of the Multiple as the indispensible ingredient in the question of Unity. We can say the Circle represents unity for us, but only because it is at once the representation of multiplicity; without this, its aspect of unity would be impossible to realise.’

In her subsequent book entitled, The New Way – a study in the rise and establishment of a gnostic society, Ms. Norelli-Bachelet underscored the importance of understanding the relationship between the One and the Many: ‘The new synthetic vision … views everything always in terms of relationships between units: an individual is not just an isolated entity but an element in a complex whole and his existence is ever viewed in connection with the totality of the whole of which he is a part. There is always present in this manner of seeing the consciousness of the one and the many, the unity and the multiplicity. All things are looked upon on the basis of their connection to the whole and the vision flowers in terms of a constant awareness of interrelatedness. Hence its principle feature is Harmony.’

Happily the mind can digest the above symbol and description of unity consciousness without too much resistance. Our minds may even be inspired by the idea of experiencing a harmonious inter-connectedness, it sounds nice enough after all. But where Ms. Norelli-Bachelet’s teachings quickly jump ‘out of the box’ of our normal range of consciousness, normal thought processes and the standard modern-day fare of spiritual offerings and become somewhat challenging, is when she introduces the cyclical structure and geometry of time as an essential key to seeing, experiencing and knowing the One Truth that is the ‘architect’, so to speak, of our evolution towards gnosis. If not shrugged away or blown off by the puzzled mind, this key (when properly understood and applied) is intended to illuminate one’s entire understanding of reality, of evolution and of what needs to be included in the integral study of the One Self.

The Geometry of Time, she writes, ‘is a method by means of which it is possible to measure the movement of time over a given area of space; and because the area contained therein for the purpose is one that expresses a Gnostic relationship between these two dimensions ‒ due to the nature of the measure itself ‒ and accomplishes in the totality of its expanse a certain process of harmonisation, the initiate is able to read therein a number of related destiny patterns that are arranged in the higher dimensions of Time. … For a collectivity dedicated to assisting in the manifestation of the supreme reality, the recognition of the harmonic laws of its being in Time is all-important, for by this it understands that the collective soul uses this field for its progressive self-expression; it understands that the collectivity must in some way find its harmony with this power and bring that force into the core of its structure, must organize itself around this flow in as perfect a manner as possible.’

When considering how this can be true and if the laws of time really need to be incorporated into the study of our simultaneously spiritual and material reality, it is useful to remember the Mother’s discussion of The Life Divine above. She wrote, ‘one becomes aware that the totality of this manifestation, its wholeness, its integrality is necessary for the expression of [the living and real] Truth, that nothing can be left out.’ [emphasis added] If that is true, and we want to advance towards gnosis that is applicable and effective in our world, then an understanding of the force of Time should not continue to be left out of our idea of what constitutes knowledge of the One Self, One Truth.

Proof that the Vedic seers understood the unifying power of the 360° circle in terms of harmonizing the measurements of time and space abound in the Rig Veda as well as the Puranas and Upanishads. Sri Aurobindo clearly stated in The Secret of the Veda, that the Vedic Sacrifice (yajna), which was a central figure and foundation of Vedic civilization, is only properly understood in terms of the Earth’s year divided into twelve months. He writes of the twelve months and the ‘fixed seasons’ of the year as ‘the ordered gradations of the Truth’ by which the full unifying Truth ‒ the veritable Point and sustaining power of our existence and evolution ‒ is found or realized.

Are We There Yet?

The implications of Sri Aurobindo’s insights into Vedic wisdom are that our cyclical evolutionary journey and its stages can be plotted out and tracked. And this realization has been the basis of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s supramental yoga and teachings for some 42 years. She has mapped out our collective evolutionary journey using the Vedic measure of the year and the Precession of the Equinoxes (the Great Year), and gives individuals the tools to map out their own evolutionary journey so that each person can know more accurately what stages they have been through, what stage they are presently traversing, and what stages are to come. This knowledge has an orienting effect, as one can begin to sense and see an organizing truth behind the circumstances of one’s life. But even more importantly, the knowledge gives individuals the real sensory experience that EVERYTHING is being organized by the same One Truth of existence, which is an essential cue for the divisive mental consciousness to begin giving way to an all-encompassing supramental consciousness.

On any journey, children are likely to ask their parents over and over again the burning question, ‘Are we there yet?’ As children mature, they learn to pick up a road map and see exactly where they are and how far they have to go. The same goes for learning to read the map of our evolutionary journey. Until such temporal literacy develops we will be blindly (unconsciously) carried towards gnosis of the Truth ‘that holds all’ and organizes all individual paths and forms. We will know we have arrived at our destination when our individual and collective impulse to diverge, separate, differentiate, subjugate, out-perform, out-wit, abuse and dominate others has fully transformed into the impulse to converge upon, orbit around, celebrate, illuminate and focus upon THAT which we share in common. Our abundant energies will be used to uplift the whole rather than to isolate and protect our limited personal and national interests. It is clear from our Earthly woes that the majority of us on planet Earth are ‘not there yet’; but it is hopeful to think that we are evolutionarily programmed to, in the years, decades and centuries to come, progressively converge upon our shared Truth and celebrate our common journey in time and space.

‘… by the truth, in the revolution of the year, they broke Vala.’
Rig Veda X.62.2

Spirit’s Progressive Self-Expression in Life - from Sri Aurobindo's 'The Life Divine'

2011-11-26T11:07:00.000-08:00

'It is true that the soul can ascend into worlds of a greater consciousness beyond the earth, but it is also true that the power of these worlds, the power of a greater consciousness has to develop itself here; the embodiment of the soul is the means for that embodiment. All the higher powers of Consciousness exist because they are powers of the Supreme Reality. Our terrestrial being has also the same truth; it is a becoming of the One Reality which has to embody in itself these greater powers. Its present appearance is a veiled and partial figure and to limit ourselves to that first figure, to the present formula of an imperfect humanity, is to exclude our divine potentialities; we have to bring a wider meaning into our human life and manifest in it the much more that we secretly are. Our mortality is only justified in the light of our immortality; our earth can know and be all itself only by opening to the heavens; the individual can see himself aright and use his world divinely only when he has entered into greater planes of being and seen the light of the Supreme and lived in the being and power of the Divine and Eternal.

'An integration of this kind would not be possible if a spiritual evolution were not the sense of our birth and terrestrial existence; the evolution of mind, life and spirit in Matter is the sign that this integration, this completed manifestation of a secret self contained in it is its significance. A complete involution of all that the Spirit is and its evolutionary self unfolding are the double term of our material existence. There is a possibility of self-expression by an always unveiled luminous development of the being, a possibility also of various expression in perfect types fixed and complete in their own nature: that is the principle of becoming in the higher worlds; they are typal and not evolutionary in their life principle; they exist each in its own perfection, but within the limits of a stationary world-formula. But there is also a possibility of self-expression by self-finding, a deployment which takes the form and goes through the progression of a self-veiling and an adventure of self-recovery: that is the principle of becoming in this universe of which an involution of consciousness and concealment of the spirit in Matter is the first appearance.

'An involution of spirit in the Inconscience is the beginning; an evolution in the Ignorance with its play of the possibilities of a partial developing knowledge is the middle, and the cause of the anomalies of our present nature,—our imperfection is the sign of a transitional state, a growth not yet completed, an effort that is finding its way; a consummation in a deployment of the spirit’s self-knowledge and the self-power of its divine being and consciousness is the culmination: these are the three stages of this cycle of the spirit’s progressive self-expression in life. The two stages that have already their play seem at first sight to deny the possibility of the later consummating stage of the cycle, but logically they imply its emergence; for if the inconscience has evolved consciousness, the partial consciousness already reached must surely evolve into complete consciousness. It is a perfected and divinised life for which the earth-nature is seeking, and this seeking is a sign of the Divine Will in Nature. Other seekings also there are and these too find their means of self-fulfilment; a withdrawal into the supreme peace or ecstasy, a withdrawal into the bliss of the Divine Presence are open to the soul in earth-existence: for the Infinite in its manifestation has many possibilities and is not confined by its formulations. But neither of these withdrawals can be the fundamental intention in the Becoming itself here; for then an evolutionary progression would not have been undertaken,—such a progression here can only have for its aim a self-fulfilment here: a progressive manifestation of this kind can only have for its soul of significance the revelation of Being in a perfect Becoming.' - Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 707-709

[Bold emphasis added]

World Tension & a New Principle of Force, Consciousness & Power

2011-11-21T19:34:00.000-08:00

from

The Mother's Agenda
June 1958
PDF available

One thing seems clear: humanity has reached such a generalized state of tension – tension in effort, tension in action, tension even in daily life – with such an excessive hyperactivity, such an overall restlessness, that the species as a whole seems to have reached a point where it must either burst through the resistance and surge forth into a new consciousness, or else sink back into an abysm of obscurity and inertia.

This tension is so total and so generalized that obviously something must break. It cannot go on like this. Yet all this is a sure sign that a new principle of force, consciousness and power has been infused into matter and by its very pressure has produced this acute state. Outwardly, we might expect to see the old habitual means used by Nature whenever she wants to bring about an upheaval; but here there is a new phenomenon, which is evidently visible only in a select few, although even these few are widespread enough – this phenomenon is not localized in one point or one place in the world, for the signs are to be found in every country all over the earth: the will to find a new, a higher, an ascending solution, an effort to surge forth into a vaster, more encompassing perfection.

Certain ideas of a more general, more extensive, more collective nature, as it were, are being worked out and are at work in the world. And the two go together: a greater and more total possibility of destruction and an inventiveness that unrestrainedly increases the possibility of catastrophe, a catastrophe that would be much more massive than it has ever been; and at the same time, the birth, or rather the manifestation, of much higher and more comprehensive ideas and wills which, when heard, will bring a vaster, more extensive, more complete and more perfect solution than before.

This struggle, this conflict between the constructive forces of an ascending evolution, of an increasingly perfect and divine realization, and the more and more destructive forces – powerfully destructive, forces of an uncontrollable madness – is becoming more obvious, unmistakably visible, and it is a kind of race or battle as to which will be first to reach its goal. All the hostile, anti-divine forces, these forces of the vital world, seem to have descended upon earth and are using it as their field of action; and at the same time, a new, higher, more powerful spiritual force has also descended upon earth to bring a new life to it. This renders the battle more bitter, violent and visible, but apparently more decisive, too, which is why we may hope to arrive at an early solution.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when man’s spiritual aspiration was turned towards a silent, inactive peace, detached from all the things of this world, an evasion of life to avoid the struggle, precisely, to rise above the battle, to be liberated from effort. It was a spiritual peace where, along with the cessation of tension, struggle and effort, suffering in all its forms also ceased, and this was considered the true and unique expression of the spiritual and divine life. This is what was considered divine grace, divine succor, divine intervention. And even now, in this age of anguish, tension and hypertension, this sovereign peace is of all help the best received, the most welcome, the relief asked and hoped for. For many, it is still the true sign of divine intervention, of divine grace.

In fact, no matter what you wish to realize, you must begin by establishing this perfect and immutable peace – it is the necessary basis for any work; but unless you are thinking of an exclusive or personal and egoistic liberation, you cannot stop there. There is yet another aspect to the divine grace, the aspect of progress that will be victorious over all obstacles, the aspect that will propel humanity into a new realization, open the doors unto a new world, enable not only a select few to benefit from the divine realization, but through their influence, their example and their power, bring a new and better condition to the rest of humanity.

It opens vistas of realization into the future and already foreseen possibilities through which an entire section of humanity, which is consciously or unconsciously open to the new forces, will be lifted up, as it were, towards a higher, more harmonious, more perfect life ... and even if individual transformations are not permissible nor possible in all cases, at least there will be a kind of uplifting of the whole, a harmonization of everything, enabling a new order, a new harmony to be established and the anguish of disorder and the present strife to disappear and be replaced by an order that will allow for the harmonious working of the whole.

There will be other consequences that by opposite means will tend to eradicate the perversion and ugliness created in life due to the intervention of the mind, a whole range of deformations that have aggravated suffering, misery, moral poverty, a whole zone of sordid and repugnant miseries that makes an entire portion of human life so hideous. That must disappear. That is what in many respects makes humanity infinitely inferior to animal life, with its simplicity and its natural spontaneity, and which in spite of everything is harmonious. Suffering among animals is never as miserable and sordid as it is in a whole section of humanity perverted by a mentality exclusively turned towards egoistic needs.

One must rise above, surge forth into the Light and the Harmony, or sink back down into the simplicity of a wholesome, unperverted animal life.

(After a moment of silence, Mother adds)

But those who cannot be lifted up, who refuse to progress, will automatically lose the use of the mental consciousness and fall back into an infrahuman stage.

- The Mother

[bold emphasis added]

_____________________

Related Posts:
Sri Aurobindo on Evolution and Spiritual Revolution
Updating the Vedic Altar - a series discussing the Mother's Supermental Gnosis and vision of universal harmony.

Essential Purpose of the Study of Cosmic Harmonies

2011-11-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

The following excerpts are from p. 3 of The Gnostic Circle (the 1st page of the text):

‘… it is our intention to give as clear a picture as possible of the true purpose of astrology, and in which way it can be an asset in the development of the spirit.’
‘Cosmic harmonies give us the understanding of the movement of progression within the eternal. The art in its totality is transmitted so that man may have a clear vision of the process of evolution, and above all, of its ultimate goal for any particular Age. That is, these designs and patterns which are based on the deep understanding of the workings of the Cosmos, contain the history of the evolution, past, present and future.’
‘The zodiac gives us a picture of this outer movement of evolution which has as its support the inherent spirit.’

-- Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet

For readers interested in better understanding how the zodiac is a map of the evolutionary development of the spirit, please join:
The Gnostic Circle Study group
Theosophy.Net

Note: I made the above image, based on PNB's 'Gnostic Circle'.

Reflections on Sri Aurobindo's Aphorism 71 & the Gnostic Circle

2011-11-08T13:20:00.000-08:00

by Rose Marion Williams October 2010 Orlando Fla.

Aphorism #71

'A thought is like an arrow shot at the truth;
it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target.
But the archer is too well satisfied with his success
to ask anything farther.'

Sri Aurobindo wrote this aphorism in the early 1900s.

This is what we, especially ones who consider ourselves to be on a spiritual path, do when we hit the target with what we think of as the truth. Many get their complete satisfaction from the one hit and, as Sri Aurobindo wrote, do not look any farther. The object of this statement, as the Mother expounded on it, is to raise above the one arrow that was shot and see the whole target which is Truth itself.

Many have formed entire religions or devised whole philosophies from their one hit at a truth or a half-truth and called it realization. Thus, roping in as many followers as they can in order to crystallize this form and call it Truth. Then, when someone else comes along with their own hit at the truth, they become closed to any ideas that deviate from their own. When this happens, usually, neither are able to take in and assimilate the others ideas for one or both of them might have to break down their cemented mold and admit the possibility for change. Most often, there is no room for wideness, expansion, discussion or discernment to explore another part of the larger truth.

In my studies over the years I have read many renditions of people's truths but have found only one course of study which covers the whole target of spirituality. That is: the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Briefly, this yoga was clearly and extensively documented in the many volumes he wrote, such as The Synthesis of Yoga, The Life Divine, Savitri, hundreds of letters compiled into several books plus the articles he wrote in the early 1900s published in The Arya, a philosophical monthly. Later, in 1926, he retired to his room to do an intense yoga until his passing in 1950. His process of the Integral yoga during those years culminated with the Supramental Manifestation in 1956. As a brief explanation of his yoga he wrote the following in The Object of Our Yoga:

'The world is a movement of God in His own being: we are the centers and knots of divine consciousness which sum up and support the processes of His movement. The world is His play with His own self-conscious delight, He who alone exists, infinite, free and perfect; we are the self-multiplication of that conscious delight, thrown out into being to be his playmates. The world is a formula, a rhythm, a symbol system expressing God to Himself in His own consciousness, -- it has no material existence but exists only in His Consciousness and self-expression; we, like God, are in our inward being That which is expressed, but in our outward being terms of that formula, notes of that rhythm, symbols of that system. Let us lead forward God's movement, play out His play, work out His formula, execute His harmony, express Him through our self-fulfillment; to this end we who transcend and exceed the universe, have entered into universe-existence.
'Perfection has to be worked out, harmony has to be accomplished, imperfection, limitation, death, grief, ignorance, matter, are only the first terms of the formula – unintelligible til we have worked out the wider terms and reinterpreted the formulary; they are the initial discords of the musician's tuning. Out of imperfection we have to construct perfection, out of limitation to discover infinity, out of death immortality, out of grief to recover divine bliss, out of ignorance to rescue divine self-knowledge, out of matter to reveal Spirit. To work out this end for ourselves and for humanity is the object of our Yogic practice.'

In these words he uses: 'the terms of the formula'; 'notes of the rhythm'; and 'symbols of that system'. These terms became the foundation for the design and blueprint formulated and laid down first in the Matrimandir: the Mother's Temple. This was seen during the first 17 days of 1970 by Sri Aurobindo's collaborator, the Mother, of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India. Her vision was that of the inside chamber of a temple, the Matirimandir, the Mother's Temple. It was designed to be a focus of energy which would hasten the Supramental Manifestation that is the Spiritualisation on earth. This temple, if built properly, would equal the impact the Pyramids had on the earth 12,000 years ago in Egypt.

At that time, the pyramids were built in order to align certain cosmic energies as a focus for the transformation of the initiates in that time. Whereas, the pyramids were built for a small group, who were able to be made ready to receive and to withstand those higher energies for their own individual spiritual fulfillment, the Mother's plan was for the upliftment of all humanity. But mankind was not ready for this modern edifice and so the plan was pirated and perverted by the very architects of the Ashram, who she put in charge of the actual physical building. The design and especially the measurements by the Mother were so important that she had the engineer, not the architects, put them down in a blueprint, for it was symbolic in every part down to the very last millimeter. She emphasized that these measurements were for the inside of the temple and that the globe would be translucent not transparent. The present construction, Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet has labeled 'the Shadow Temple', for the temple that has actually been built is also the symbol of the thing symbolized, the shadow of the real temple. But from the moment the Mother's design was documented, the symbol was born and it lives on; it can be embodied and lived as a focus for the Supramental to manifest on earth in each of us. Everyone who pictures it, can carry it within themselves everywhere they go.

As Robert Wilkinson wrote in a letter: ‘The formula (of the Matrimandir) remained a mystery until 1975 when Thea, Third in the Line, unveiled the Supramental knowledge contained in the Mother's plan for her temple and published her discoveries about the nature of Time (the months and the years) in a cosmological framework known as the Gnostic Circle.’ This formula was revealed by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea) after the Mother's passing which she developed in a different form documenting it in the Gnostic Circle. (See diagram below from The Gnostic Circle, do not reproduce without permission of author)

The Gnostic Circle, as discovered by the author, is based on two ancient symbols, the Zodiac, a circle of 12, which she then expanded further by incorporating the Enneagram, a circle of 9. They are both all about time combined in one Truth that has been carried over the centuries, possibly over millennia, in the form of a Symbol; teachings that were passed down through secret groups and Mystery Schools of the past. Many since that time have shot their arrows hitting part of this target but were satisfied with their partial understanding of it.

Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea) is the only one who has seen that whole target and has been able to give it a language which can be understood by those who want to understand. Others have explained the Enneagram and the use of it in their own way, such as, Gurdjieff/Ouspensky's, In Search of the Miraculous. But Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet has defined it and expanded on it in such detail through The Gnostic Circle that there is nothing left to explain. Now, the burden of true understanding lies with the student.

During the study of the Gnostic Circle as a symbol, there is a process which one must go through in order to get it. On the first reading, it is found to be a very interesting concept which explains astrology in its global aspects, the solar system, the universe, as well as the individual's life in the cycles of time thus making all the necessary facts and diagrams available to study the work with. (see diagram above)

On the next reading, the student goes deeper into the blueprint where one tries to remember/memorize the specific points, the many functions and mechanics depicted in this construction. One's gaze must first see it as a whole then as your eye travels around this symbol one sees all the straight lines with their numbers, following them up and down 1>4>2>8>5>7; another formation in the separate inner triad of 0>3>6>9; then the enclosure of the concentric circles 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. Further addition of the central point and the inner circle brings the number to 9 as she explains, is the number that represents material creation, the cell or matter; 9 is the number of completion. At the apex of the triangle, this 9 point is aligned with the 0 point, which represents spirit, the Seed/potential. From the beginning of the circle the 0 point of spirit travels around the circle, developing the seed only to meet the 9 point of material manifestation just as from conception an embryo gestates and is born completing circle. This in effect, is not a final ending, rather it is a point of transition to start another round towards a new level of becoming. For in the Gnostic Circle we are not working in linear Time where the end is a cut off point. We are working here in circles, cycles of time, just as the Moon circles the Earth with out fail and the Earth rotates every day from Sunrise to Sunrise, never ending its orbit of the Sun from year to year. This work is used for the measurement of time in order to understand the cycles of our lives.

Continuing to look at the Gnostic Circle, as seen below, the next step in the study is to begin to see these circles and lines in motion for they are actively moving energies, circles going round and round in their calculated timings; lines going up and down in their progressed order. Now, again seeing it as it emerges from a two dimensional flat figure circling to its three dimensional global movements, much like a gyroscope, dynamic, alive, it is then a symbol of perpetual motion. As your perceptions slowly change, you are able to transform your vision of this phenomena from out there to in here, embodying it and realizing that it can be lived. A living symbol, a Book of Knowledge, for that is exactly what it is. As Sri Aurobindo has written, 'A symbol is the thing that is symbolized.' Sri Aurobindo once posed the question: 'What is there new that we have yet to accomplish?.... 'In a word, godhead; to remake ourselves in the divine image.' When I look at the Gnostic Circle I see it as the image of God.

In order for me to reach this depth of seeing, I have had to take many steps over many years, in the process, breaking down multiple barriers or veils within myself to be open to that Point of understanding, still knowing that I have a long way to go. During this time, I have focused on the Gnostic Circle as a way of healing first by seeing this blueprint as the tapestry of my life and then further learning how to analyze, then redesign it. You can see how the tapestry of your own life works if you will look at the diagram of the Gnostic Circle below. Starting with all the concentric circles/cycles of time you will also see the 360 straight lines fanning out from the center marking out segments of time. These lines are like the warp threads strung on a loom, the loom of your life. As the days go by the weft thread fills in with the lessons learned day by day with relationships and events, big and small; good and bad. The colors weave in and out; but one thread is steady and unchanging like the drone note in a musical chord, holding the underlying timbre of your life; others vibrant; some intertwining for long stretches; some brief; some knots occur as it weaves its way around and around. This tapestry is a record of every minute of your life, imprinted year by year.

Now, for the healing process: The events themselves in one’s life can not be erased, however, they can be healed. The Mother said in the Agenda: ‘The past can be completely purified and abolished, on condition that one does not keep making it into a perpetual present. I have said it there in one sentence, but I didn’t want people to believe that they can continue making the same stupid blunder indefinitely and have the Grace indefinitely annul all the consequences. It isn’t like that! The past can be cleansed to the point where it has no effect of any kind on the future, but only on condition that you stop the wrong vibration in yourself, that you don’t reproduce the same vibration indefinitely.’

I have found that by following the threads back through the past as Reshad Feild has said, 'can be redeemed'. We can look at these events, review the negative painful, hurtful events. We can review the rules and regulations embedded in our psyche that we may still live by which are no longer helpful to us, for these often distort our thinking, our relationships, our actions and reactions. When we go back and detect these knots and blockages we can then change our perceptions, releasing the chains that have molded our character; who we think we are and who we think we should be. Lessons learned as children were necessary to socialize us once born into the world. Many that were helpful to us in the past are now hurtful to us in the present. It is possible to change the past in this way by redeeming it and in many ways, the harm it is doing to us even now. As Sri Aurobindo once wrote: 'What was once a helper, is now a hurter.' What do we need to leave behind or release from our past? For by changing the past we are actually able to change the future by not living with what William Blake called, 'Our mind forged manacles'.

‘It is possible by a certain psychological discipline to remove this veil of separative consciousness and become aware of the true Self, the Divinity within us and all.’ Which is not to say the psychology as it has been seen with the influence of Freud and Jung. It is the psychology based on the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo.

For me, at first, this process started with the intellect while slowly over time, taking it in piece-by-piece, until a fuller understanding was reached; was embodied and lived as a Book of Knowledge, pages turning one after the other. This is a process which does not happen in a day, for it is perceived only in flashes as each piece comes into play, one piece or flash after another. It is much like the ocean's waves coming onto the shore, receding each time but coming closer until the waves reach their peak at high-tide. The ocean does not stay at high-tide but then as the waves recede we can wade out into the water and become a part of it. We can become the Gnostic Circle, use it, live it, to become an element in the Supramentalisation of the Earth, of humanity. We cannot sustain our high-tides of realization but with each influx it raises us up in a spiral, ever widening to higher levels of understanding. Even with this, I know that I still have a long way to go.

'From Truth to greater Truth.'

The Gnostic Circle Study Group

2011-11-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

Robert Wilkinson and I are hosting a Gnostic Circle study group on Google Groups focusing on Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet's book 'The Gnostic Circle - a synthesis in the harmonies of the cosmos' (1975). This book discusses the supramental order and sacred geometry of Time and Space, inviting readers to partake in a profound initiatic and all-integrating journey/yoga in which secrets to the proper understanding and use of the Tropical Zodiac and the Enneagram are revealed. Mahayogis Sri Aurobindo and the Mother spoke of a need for a Supramental Vision of Time and for knowledge how the Supramental consciousness-force would be applicable and visible in the material world. This book and Ms. Norelli-Bachelet's body of work is a full revelation of these looming needs/questions, and if understood correctly, is portal into unity consciousness, by which all is seen with new eyes ... all-integrating eyes. Readers are invited to discover for themselves the keys to seeing the myths, symbols, religions, and cultures of the world within the context of the Whole evolution of matter and consciousness. And if all goes well, readers will directly see how the stages of an individual's evolution and the stages (ages) of collective/Cosmic processes are intimately related as micro and macro versions of the same Vedic Journey, eternally supported by the Divine Agni/Fire/Soul.

Group Requisites: Before requesting to join the group, please obtain a copy of The Gnostic Circle and be prepared to read and to interact with the group via comments, questions, and insights you may be having about your reading. Sincerity in study is requested.

To Request Membership: CLICK HERE

Sri Aurobindo on Evolution and Spiritual Revolution

2011-10-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

[The following excerpt, from Sri Aurobindo's Thoughts and Glimpses, is a good reminder for those who are ready for a new Revolution]

Occupy Oakland, 26 October 2011, Jim Wilson/The New York Times

'Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

'The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity.

'All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature mental and vital and physical is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfections.

'The Spirit is the truth of our being; mind and life and body in their imperfection are its masks, but in their perfection should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither is a compromise the way of salvation.

'The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings.

'If the triple change could coincide in a perfect correspondence, a faultless work would be done; but the mind and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much of the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual and physical upturnings of our soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing.

'Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way.

'All religions have saved a number of souls, but none yet has been able to spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution.

'The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretation of present happening and forecast of man's future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity.

'And what is the end of the whole matter?

'As if honey could taste itself and all its drops together and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be with God and the soul of man and the universe.'

- Sri Aurobindo (15 August 1872 - 5 December 1950)

Exploring the Etymology of Kali, Kamakhya and Makar

2011-10-20T17:13:00.000-07:00

I am wanting to elaborate more on the quote in my last post, from Kamakhya Tantra:

"It is certainly well known that Kamakhya is truly none other than that mother goddess Kali, who is in all things the form of wisdom."

Before October 6th, I had never heard of Kamakhya as a name of Kali, and I had also never heard Kali described as being 'in all things the form of wisdom'. It begs the question, how exactly is it that the 'mother goddess' Kali is 'in all things the form of wisdom'? What does that mean practically? Is this some romantic description or does it point to some applicable wisdom or knowledge?

Why is the form of Kamakhya known to have 12 arms, just as Aditi has 12 sons and just as the Zodiac has 12 months/rays? Why is the form of Kali traditionally depicted with 4 arms, one which carries a 3-pronged weapon (trident)? What is the practical and applicable wisdom that we are suppose to realize in these forms? Or are these forms of the Mother/Goddess just meaningless and applicable/useful in no way whatsoever?

The truth is that we cannot fully apply, utilize, appreciate and enjoy that which what we don't understand. And often, humans set out to ridicule, destroy or demonize that which we don't understand ... as exemplified by Judeo-Christians who have made a habit of destroying the 'false idols' of Hindus and other ancient wisdom traditions. The obvious question to be asked by honest seekers of a universal Divine-Consciousness and by sincere scholars is whether or not the symbolic and precise forms/icons celebrated by Hindus and other ancient wisdom traditions are indeed 'false' or are simply not understood.

After a few thousand years of mass mis-understanding, it is time for our civilization to wake up to the realization that the REAL FORM, measures, geometries and mathematics of the Cosmic Mother, and hence of our own material matrix, are inseparable from our knowledge of the Divine Self. Systems of 'knowledge' (religious, scientific or academic) that do not integrate this universal realization, will continued to be crippled and blinded in a real sense ... separated in heart and mind from the whole operating system.

I will offer a couple of etymological intrigues for those who find themselves interested or engaged in this 'waking up' process.

In Sanskrit, ka means many things, including, 'the body', 'the sun', 'time', 'the soul', 'fire', 'light' and 'a peacock'. Remembering that ma means 'measure', the root word kama of the 'mother goddess' Kamakhya can be understood as the measure of the body, the measure of the sun, the measure of time, ect. The peacock's tail is an apt symbol for honoring and celebrating the 360 degree form and measure of time and space as the peacock unfolds its seemingly linear tail feathers into a beautiful 360 degree display.

Khya means to 'be known', 'make known', 'declare' or 'praise'. So, in these terms Kamakhya, the goddess, who is also known as Kali, means something on the order of 'to make known and praise the measure of the body of time, the body of the sun, the body of the soul'.

The li root of Kali has many meanings, most pointing to connotations of 'concealed in', 'lurking in', 'absorbed in', 'linked together', 'sitting on' or 'hidden'. When combining ka, as defined above, with li, the result is something to the effect of 'hidden in the body', 'linked with time' or 'sitting on top of the body', just as Kali stands on top of Shiva. She stands 'on top of' Time. She dwells in Time. Her force and Her truth are hidden in the body, in the sun, in the soul.

The original purpose of these words, and the realities they express, need to be remembered. The original sense of our own language, mathematics and symbols needs to be remembered. We need to remember that our own systems of measure ... our mathematical language as well as our written and spoken language (our verse) hails from a Vedic civilization who truly knew the Mother. Her measures, Her math, Her geometries and Her harmonies were the basis of the Vedic civilization's language and measure. Their verse was not something separate from the Mother's verse and measure ... not separate from Her dynamics and form ... not separate from Her math and Her mandalas. There is the common saying 'to be versed in' ... well the Vedic seers were extremely well-versed in the language of the Matrix/Creatrix. In our modern-day civilization, not only are we not well-versed in the sacred measures of material creation (including the Geometry of Time), but most have a truly poor idea what it means to recognize and praise the Divine Mother. Her SONG remains hidden in the body, hidden in time ... not heard or seen by most.

As a small example of that which we do not typically 'hear' or 'see', consider the English words 'make' or 'maker'. Reference to 'the Maker' – as in 'meeting one's Maker' – usually drums up images of a masculine God. Most would not think 'maker' refers to a feminine principle or that we have inherited the word from our Vedic ancestors. But when we consider that in Sanskrit ma means … to measure out, mete or mark out, it is clear that the English words 'make' and 'maker' are firmly associated with matri/mother/matriarch rather than with pati/patriarch/father.

In English, as a noun make means: 'structure, texture, constitution of parts; construction; shape; form'. As a verb it means: 'To find, as the result of calculation or computation; to find the number or amount of, by reckoning, weighing, measurement;' and 'to cause to exist; to bring into being; to form; to produce; to frame; to fashion; to create; to construct. To bring about; to bring forward; to be the cause or agent of; to effect, do, perform, or execute.' And the word 'maker' means: 'One who makes, forms, or molds; a manufacturer; specifically, the Creator. One who writes verses; a poet.'

If we look to the above connotations of the Sanskrit roots ma and kyha, makhya (of Kamakhya) would mean 'to make measure known'. Such is the original essence of the English word 'make'. Makhya also seems to be related to both the Sanskrit word makar and the English words 'maker' and 'mark'. In India Makar Sankranti marks the December Solstice, wherein the Earth passes into the 10th sign of the Zodiac Capricorn or the 10th month of Makar as it is known in India, signifying the return of the Light.

Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Secret of the Veda circa 1920's that it was not known (he did not know!) what the 'precise significance' (nor the usefulness) of the Vedic Rishis' special exultation of and special expectations for the passage between the 9th and 10th months of the Vedic journey (i.e. the Tropical Year).

‘This victory [the recovery of the lost Sun/Truth-Consciousness] is won in twelve periods of the upward journey, represented by the revolution of the twelve months of the sacrificial year, the periods corresponding to the successive dawns of a wider and wider truth, until the tenth month secures the victory . . . What may be the precise significance of the nine rays and the ten is a more difficult position which we are not yet in a position to solve.’ – Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda

But as a natural consequence of the evolution of consciousness and the continued descent of supramental knowledge via the Mother of Pondicherry and Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, the 10th month of the Vedic year (Capricorn/Makar) has been remembered/recognized as the victory or full illumination of the Divine Mother (Aditi), wherein her true face and form is no longer hidden and the individual and collective is REBORN in the 'true form of wisdom', in the true form and knowledge of the Divine Mother.

Upon this realization, humans can collectively know and celebrate the December Solstice as the point in our evolution of consciousness wherein the Truth of the Mother – the truth of her Divine Measure (geometry, form, mathematics, etc.) – is remembered ... including the truth of the Tropical Zodiac itself, which is absolutely a true form of HER wisdom. As long as the true importance (the 'precise significance') of arriving at that MARK and making that essential SHIFT or PASSAGE in consciousness is not understood, humanity is in effect a Motherless Child, cut off from that which would love nothing more than to nourish us to full maturity/self-knowledge.

The Mother's Symbol
[Discussed/featured in Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet's latest series
'Updating the Vedic Altar']

The Mother - Supporter, Creatrix & Revealer of Truth

2011-10-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

'She Who Protects'
[as published in Times of India, 3 October 2011]

The Goddess is the power expressed through all the gods,
They are united in her, who shines with consciousness,
Her presence is all-pervading; she supports all of creation,
She is the source of righteousness and the revealer of truth,
She is the source of all worlds; she shines transcendent beyond them.
‒ Rig Veda 10.125
*
You destroy the wicked; you sustain and uphold the universe.
As Saraswati, Lakshmi and Kali you are a mysterious
and unique reservoir of immeasurable power .
‒ Ma Santoshi Chalisa
*
In dangers, in doubts, in difficulties, think of Mary,
call upon Mary...under her protection you have nothing to fear.
‒ St Bernard of Clairvaux
*
There is one divine Force which acts in the universe
and in the individual and is also beyond the individual and the universe.
The Mother stands for all these. ‒ Sri Aurobindo

"It is certainly well known that Kamakhya is truly none other than that mother goddess Kali, who is in all things the form of wisdom." ‒ Kamakya Tantra

Kamakhya - the maternal womb of the Universe

In my last few posts, ('Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas' - 24 Sept 2011, 'Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas, continued' and 'What Does Kali Yuga have to do with Kali, the Goddess?', 2 Oct 2011) I discussed the miscalculation of the Kali Yuga. In the latter, I discussed the need to understand the Kali Yuga in terms of Kali the Goddess and the attributes given to her persona. A day later the above quotes/article appeared in the Times of India, discussing the divine force of the Mother which pervades the individual and the universe.

One of the quotes above celebrates the Tridevi: Saraswati, Lakshmi and Kali. Tri means 3 and devi means goddess, and these 3 faces of the Goddess describe the One Devi, the One Mother ... 'the one divine Force divine Force which acts in the universe and in the individual and is also beyond the individual and the universe'. Sri Aurobindo's description of the Mother itself points to the triadic nature of the Mother's power. She simultaneously pervades the Transcendent, Cosmic, and Individual.

So the question looms, how is the Kali Yuga not readily seen or understood as part of a TRIADIC whole (as Kali herself is understood as part of a triad)? ... Why is it so challenging for people to correct the errors and miscalculations of the past and see the Kali Yuga as precisely ONE THIRD of the Precession of the Equinoxes (as 432,000 seconds of degrees of celestial arc)?

The answer is simple: the Mother/Divine Feminine has been epically misunderstood in our day and age. She has literally been mis-figured and miscalculated. I am speaking of the Mother not only in terms of the Vedic Devi, but also as she has been cast in other religious/spiritual traditions, including Mother Mary in Christianity.

The Sanskrit root of 'mother' and 'math' are one and the same: ma - meaning 'to measure, mete out, mark off'. And yet the Mother/Goddess/Mary is hardly known in terms of the geometries and the harmonies that SHE measures out and marks off in the course or field of time and space.

She is not widely recognized as the Point and the Circle (the Sun Symbol), nor as that which becomes all divisions of the 360 degree Circle containing infinite creation. She is not recognized as the Zodiac ‒ the circle of life. Some who are concerned with Vedic cosmology, do recognize Aditi (the Universal Mother of Light) and her 12 sons as the Zodiac with its 12 months; but typically, most do not associate the Mother/Goddess with the design and function of the Zodiac. And hence the Divine Mother is hardly known as the Mother or source of all sciences.

Of course, science could not exist without the mathematics, measures, harmonies, geometries and dynamics of the Mother/Matrix which exist whether or not there are creatures advanced enough to recognize Her formative powers or not. Yet few in our modern times are ready to admit that the Zodiac is a real and eternal symbol of the Mother’s formative power ... a real symbol of Her eternal geometries and harmonies. If this simple fact were seen, then the human collective would be at the at doorstep of recognizing our common Divine Mother/Matrix as the original basis of not only all our sciences, but all our religions as well.

But, as it is, ignorance of the Mother (the Divine Feminine principle) has reached epic proportions in our civilization. She is a colossal and disastrous blind spot in our collective consciousness. Her function as the universal and eternal cause and force of measure, division, mathematics, geometry and harmony is long forgotten. We may have some romantic idea of who the Divine Mother is, but most have NO IDEA whatsoever what roll She actually plays in our existence and how real knowledge of her geometries and dynamics might alter the entire course of civilization for the better. Most ignore Her entirely in their spiritual, scientific or academic pursuits.

Human’s have accomplished so much in ignorance of the Divine Mother. It is encouraging to imagine what we will be able to accomplish once this long-standing ignorance is corrected. The most important and basic accomplishment being the accomplishment of a unified consciousness, no longer distorted, contorted and fragmented by ignorance of the Mother.

__________________

Acknowledgements: The above thoughts are inspired by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet's new series 'Updating the Vedic Altar' ... which for me had 'updated' and deepened my love, appreciation, and understanding of the Divine Mother. The series discusses, among other things, the Vedic measure and gnosis which was the foundation of the Mother's temple (the Matrimandir), which was predictably mis-measured, and mis-figured by the students and builders who did not understand the geometries of the Divine Mother.

What Does Kali Yuga have to do with Kali, the Goddess?

2011-10-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

[The following is an addendum to 'Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas' and
Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas, continued]

‘Religious movements and revolutions have come and gone or left their mark but after all and through all the Veda remains to us our Rock of the Ages, our eternal foundation.... The Upanishads, mighty as they are, only aspire to bring out, arrange philosophically in the language of later thinking and crown with the supreme name of Brahman the eternal knowledge enshrined in the Vedas. Yet for some two thousand years at least no Indian has really understood the Vedas.’ – Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth (emphasis added).

It is worth considering that the 2,000-year extended lack of understanding of the Vedas that Sri Aurobindo points out, extends our modern-day understanding of the Yuga cycles. I have been reading up on the characteristics of Kali the Goddess, figuring there must be clues to the true nature of the Kali Yuga as a measure of the Precession of the Equinoxes in the mythology and iconography of the goddess. As pointed out in a previous note, Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet describes the Kali Yuga as a unit of measure covering 4 astrological ages of the 12-age Precession. 3 Kali Yuga (Treta Yuga) equals a full Precessional cycle. In this seeing of the Yugas, Kali Yuga is a measure, not a manifest age. Interestingly enough the goddess Kali is traditionally known to have 4 arms and to carry the 3 pronged Trident as her weapon. She is also known as an incarnation of Shakti/Parvati who is the wife of Shiva (a member of the Trimurti or Trinity of Vedic Gods: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva). I read this about her on Wikipedia:

‘She is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti. She is shown as very dark as she is brahman in its supreme unmanifest state. She has no permanent qualities — she will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to her — she is the pure, un-manifested energy, the Adi-shakti.’

With these characteristics in mind, is not too farfetched, to see Kali Yuga as ‘unmanifest’ and to understand the Goddess and the Yuga as inseparable from the Trinity that is so fundamental to Vedic mythology and gnosis. [See 'Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas, continued'] The mathematics of Kali’s persona do beg some consideration … the 4 arms and a 3 pronged trident are the very essence of the 12 month Zodiac, which is divided into 4 seasons of 3 months each, and is also based on the 4 elements (fire, water, air and earth) and 3 gunas (rajas, sattva, tamas or creation, preservation, destruction/dissolution). Also Kali wears a garland of 108 human heads. The sacredness of the number 108 is literally a product of its factors 9 and 12 (9 x 12 = 108). These are the formative numbers of our cyclical-circular 9/0 number system and our 12 month year inherited from Vedic civilization. Learning to see these two numbers as formative divisions of the One Circle of life, just as the 3 and the 4 are formative divisions of the One Circle of life is an important key to developing some understanding of the Vedic cycles of time (as discussed in The Gnostic Circle).

Trying to understand the Yuga cycles without these keys, I truly think, is something of a wild goose chase … trying to decipher, read and accurately interpret an ancient sacred code with the wrong cipher.

Shakti (part of the Tridevi of Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati/Shakti) is known as the source of all forms (sarvarupe) and as the power that mobilizes the immobile. In other words, she informs the geometries and dynamics of time and space. The whole matrix comes to being and into motion through her geometries and dynamics. Shakti’s incarnation as Kali, ‒ the dark one, associated with death and the destructive nature of time ‒, can better be understood in terms of how the Mother/Material Creation seems when TIME IS NOT SEEN and EXPERIENCED in its proper measures and proper light … i.e. She is seen and experienced by our ‘darkened’ consciousness as fearsome and destructive … as a killer. But this is not Ma Shakti’s (Parvati’s) true nature. The fact alone that our Vedic ancestors structured their gnosis and hence their civilization firmly on a vision of a Triadic-Oneness, should give students of the Yugas reason enough to seriously consider that our Vedic ancestors also measured the Precession of the Equinoxes in terms of a Triadic-Cycle – i.e. one great cycle made up of 3 Yugas (TretaYuga), each Yuga consisting of 432,000 seconds of degrees of celestial arc.

[Discussion Continued in 'The Mother - Supporter, Creatrix & Revealer of Truth']

Related Links:

'Updating the Vedic Altar' (a series by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet on Puranic Cosmology Updated)

Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas, continued

2011-10-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

Below is more commentary on Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas ... after being asked about the full measure of the Yugas, An inquirer made calculations, using Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet's seeing of the Kali Yuga as a THIRD (120°) of the 360° Precession of the Equinoxes (432,000 seconds of degrees of Arc of the Circle = 120°), and figured that adding Kali Yuga + Dwapara Yuga + Treta Yuga + Satya Yuga = 10 Yugas, which would in turn equal 3 and 1/3 Precessional Cycles.

Hi X, you should get a hold of The Gnostic Circle if you can, it is a powerful initiation into these matters. It builds this knowledge more organically and thoroughly than I can manage here.

Regarding the 3 and 1/3 Precessional Cycles ... well here's the thing about that:

According to Ms. Norelli-Bachelet, the Kali Yuga functions as a Unit of Measure, like the integer ONE is a unit in the circle of Nine. If the Kali Yuga is understood as a unit, and not an Age itself, then the Dwapara (2) + Treta (3) + Satya (4) Yugas = 9 Yugas = 3 Precessional Cycles (i.e. 77,760 Years or 36 Astrological Ages). When we remind ourselves of the numbers for Kali Yuga/Radius of the Sun 432,000 ... and remember the function and potency of the circle/cycle of the 9/0 number system of Vedic origin, this understanding of the Yugas makes much sense.

Patrizia writes: 'In truth, mankind is in the 'dark' simply by not realising that there is no such thing as a Kaliyuga, and that in effect the Age of Darkness is only determined by an ignorance of Truth, which can come about in any Age. Man has believed himself to be in an age of darkness, which is only the illusion of Time, and consequently Time is illusion only in so far as vision is fragmentary. When one breaks through to a full vision of Truth, Time then is the key and saviour, not the bondage.’ (The Gnostic Circle)

According to her, we have been in Satya Yuga since 0 degrees Leo of the previous Precession (some 10,800 years ago), and have 11 Ages in the 25,920 year Precessional Cycle ahead of us. If you look at the the Map of the 12 Manifestations, look for the Age of Aquarius in the outer ring … that is where we fall.

Image from The Gnostic Circle,
as found at www.aeongroup.comhttp://www.aeongroup.com/mani.htm

The ‘Manifestations’ in this map are 3-Age ‘Seasons’ or ¼ of the Precessional Year. It is interesting to think that perhaps the Sphinx of Giza was built in the Age of Leo as a marker for the Earth’s passage into Satya Yuga. Patrizia points out the fascinating coincidence that the Lion body of the Sphinx was not excavated/unburied from the sands of Giza until 1926, the beginning of the Age of Aquarius ... half a Precession, perhaps, from when it was built as a monument to the Leo-Aquarius (Lion-Man) axis of the Zodiac.

In an even larger cycle, the 3 Precessional Cycles formed by the Dwapara, Treta and Satya Yuga (MahaYuga) form a Season of an even greater Year. Four of such seasons would be 311,040 years (77,760 x 4) or 12 Precessional Cycles (144 Astrological Ages). In THAT macro cycle. Ms. Norelli-Bachelet writes that we are 9 ‘months’ into the last Season (77,760 years) of this macro cycle, which corresponds to the 9th Astrological sign Sagittarius.

This is a lot to take in, and I think it all REALLY needs to be read within the larger context of The Gnostic Circle. It is all laid out there with pictures and better explanations of the measures, geometries and forces at work. Also in Secrets of the Earth, Patrizia discusses the way the Vedic lore of the 10 Avatars of Vishnu (the Preserver) plays out in the Manifestations, as incarnations in the astrological ages corresponding to the PRESERVATION or fixed signs of the zodiac. It is very intriguing and eye opening reading … making sense of these ancient myths and measures.

[Discussion continued in 'What does Kali Yuga have to do with Kali, the Goddess?'
& The Mother - Supporter, Creatrix & Revealer of Truth]

Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas

2011-09-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

[The following is a re-posting of something I wrote in a forum on The Theosophy Network regarding the measurements of the Yuga Cycles.]

From what I've been studying, the measure of the Yugas has been misunderstood for quite some time ... perhaps for thousands of years. Ms. Norelli-Bachelet teaches that the figure for the yuga (432,000) was never meant to be understood in terms of years, but in terms of seconds of degrees of arc in the 360 degree circle. 432,000 seconds of degrees of arc equals ONE THIRD of the 360 degree circle.

432,000° = 120° x 60′ x 60″
864,000″ = 240° x 60′ x 60″
1,296,000″ = 360° x 60′ x 60″
1,728,000″ = 360° x 60′ x 60″

Thus, the sacred measure of the Yuga (which is also the measure of the radius of the Sun in miles) is known as a measure of the Earth’s 360° Precession of the Equinoxes, in harmony with the 12 astrological ages. 432,000″ = one third of the Precession = 4 Astrological Ages.

432,000″ = 120° x 60′ x 60″ = 8640 years = 4 Ages
864,000″ = 240° x 60′ x 60″ = 17,280 years = 8 Ages
1,296,000″ = 360° x 60′ x 60″ = 25,920 years = 12 Ages (1 Precessional Cycle)
1,728,000″ = 480° x 60′ x 60″ = 34,560 years = 16 Ages

Note that the measure of the Ages in this ancient system of measure is 2160 years, and that 2160 happens to be our measure of the diameter of the Earth’s moon in miles. These correspondences between measures of Time and Space should give the modern mind pause to consider how such ‘coincidences’ came to be, and what is the significance behind such coincidences. People do not normally stop to notice or think about why the 360 degree measure of the Circle, shows up in the measure of our Sun (360 x 1,200 mile radius), Moon (360 x 3 mile radius) and our Earth (360 x 11 mile radius) as well as the measure of the Yugas/Ages. Being multiples of 360, these important measures are also naturally multiples of both 9 and 12. It is a wonder that few take the time to wonder about.

The standard belief about the Zodiac is that it came to us through Babylonia, but serious study of the matter reveals that, along with the Circle divided by 9 which is the basis/framework of our 0/9 number system, our civilization has also inherited the 12-rayed Zodiac from our Vedic ancestors. There are passages in the Rig Veda (thought to be at least 5,000 years old) which clearly describe Vishnu the Preserver as traveling through the ages of the Zodiac/Precession of the Equinoxes. Vishnu rides on an Eagle (Scorpio), backwards through the Preservation signs of the Zodiac to the Lion (Leo), to the Bull (Taurus), and to the Friend (Aquarius). This backward order corresponds exactly to movement through the Precessional cycle. [See RV 1.154]

So if these connections are SEEN, then the Vedic Yugas are known are measurements of the Earth’s Precession, calculated in terms of the 12 ages of the Zodiac and in terms of the Circle of 9/0 (of which the circle of 360° is just an expansion). The Gnostic Circle (1976) by Ms. Norelli-Bachelet gives readers a thorough background in these matters and conveys the importance of restoring our civilization’s understanding/knowledge of the spherical and cyclical geometries and dynamics of material existence and time that have been encoded in the Vedas for many thousands of years.

The grand theme that comes across in her teachings is that the evolution of our consciousness and our material experience on Earth includes the evolution of a Supramental Gnosis/Knowledge of Time; and that such knowledge of Time illuminates the connection between our own soul and our 360° journey in Time and Space. Such an illumination must necessarily include a seeing of the real geometries that arise from the ZERO POINT/Sun/Soul and extend into our 360° field of Time and Space … including the geometries of the Earth’s Day, the Earth’s Tropical Year, and our Precessional cycle.

Some Related Links:
The Yugas & the Precession of the Equinoxes
234 and 432 - the Basic Numbers of the Zodiac, Radius of the Sun ...
'Fractals and the Divine Matrix'
'Updating the Vedic Altar' (PNB's latest series)
Map of the Manifestations (as found in The Gnostic Circle)

___________________

Subsequent Comments:

In a subsequent comment, I was thanked for the post, with the exclamation 'Brilliant Work!'; but since the original seeing of the correct measurement of the Yugas is not mine at all, I responded:

Your so welcome, ... Ms. Norelli-Bachelet really deserves the credit. I would have little to NO understanding or interest in these matters if not for her work. Reading The Gnostic Circle at the age of 31 was like entering into a whole new level of understanding of what KNOWLEDGE is (like entering into a true UNIVERSITY). From that point it became clear to me that true knowledge must have true power to Unify and Integrate and Harmonize the whole field, just like the true power of the Sun.

[Regarding X's mention of the importance of the date 3100 BCE:]

I meant to mention to you (and anyone interested in these issues), that Ms. Norelli-Bachelet sees the start of our current Precessional cycle (0 Degrees Aries) as 234 BCE. Meaning the Age of Pisces lasted from 234 BCE to 1926 CE, and the Age of Aquarius began in 1926 CE. [See 'The New era has dawned'] Several years ago I wondered what the significance of 3114 BCE was in terms of using 234 BCE as the Zero Point of the Precession (Because of the importance of 3114 BCE in the Mayan calendar). Well the span from 3114 BCE to 234 BCE equals 2,880 years. And amazingly it just so happens that 2,880 years is EXACTLY 1/9th (40 degrees) of the Precession of the Equinoxes. I find that to be quite amazing. In terms of seconds of degrees of arc, 1/9th of the Precession, or 40 degrees of the circle equals 144,000". This makes me wonder if the sacred significance of the number 144,000 as it shows up in the Vedas, the Bible, the Mayan Calendar and in various religious or spiritual traditions has been misunderstood, just as the measure of the Yugas has been misunderstood.

As 1/9th of the circle, 144,000" is equivalent to ONE integer of our 9 number system. Does this make sense?

Just as 1 x 9 makes up the full circle of 9, and 40 degrees x 9 = a full 360 degree Circle .... 144,000" x 9 = 1,296,000" equals the full measure of the 360 degree circle (the measure of 3 Yugas or Treta Yuga). Or in terms of years, 2,880 years x 9 = 25,920 years or the full measure of the Precession of the Equinoxes. For more information on the circle of 9/0, see 'The Vedic Circle of 9 and 0' and 'The Circle and the Point'.

It seems to be an amazing 'coincidence' that 3114 BCE - 234 BCE marks off ONE integer of the Precession of the Equinoxes, especially in light of the fact that the Mayans Ages seem to correspond to 1/5th of the Precession of the Equinoxes (5184 years). Perhaps the Mayans were aware of other divisions of the Circle/Precession. Or perhaps the coincidence has been organized 'Supramentally', i.e. not mentally, but played out in time via the consciousness-forces at work through out the whole journey, regardless of human ignorance. Who is to say, really, how this correspondence/precision regarding the measure of the Mayan Calendar, the Ages of the Zodiac and the beginning of the Great Year as measured from 234 BCE came to be ... but it certainly invites us to take notice of and contemplate the geometry of time.

More on this subject:

Revisiting the Measure of the Yugas, continued
What Does Kali Yuga have to do with Kali, the Goddess
The Mother - Supporter, Creatrix & Revealer of Truth

Geometry and the Superstructure of Time

In Harmony's Way
Why Is the Year Divided into 12 Parts?

CIIS, Sri Aurobindo & the Practical Transformation of Human Consciousness

2011-08-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Robert McDermott, Part III

Robert McDermott is president emeritus of CIIS, author of The Essential Aurobindo (1973), & program chair of CIIS's 'Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness' department.

[Link to Part I or Part II]

30 August 2011

Dear Robert, Thanks for taking the time to reply to my 2nd letter. [Link to RM's response] I was left wondering why you wrote ‘NO’ regarding Haridas Chaudhuri being a Sri Aurobindo student. Perhaps you misread that part of my letter. He was a student of Sri Aurobindo and I was not implying that Sri Aurobindo knew anything about CIIS (especially considering his Mahasamadi was 5 December of 1950). I did find in my research that, as you write, Sri Aurobindo recommended Chaudhuri to Speigelberg for a position at the American Academy of Asian Studies (AAAS) in San Francisco. I also found an excerpt of a letter that Speigelberg wrote to Chaudhuri:

‘Aurobindo is the guiding spirit of this earth and the prophet of our age. I believe that the last most important contribution that Sri Aurobindo made before passing was to send you here.’

I did read directly from the CIIS website that CIIS was originally established as a branch of the Cultural Integration Fellowship (CIF) which was known as California Institute of Asian Studies (CIAS) until 1980.

Here is some more history on that matter for you or anyone else interested in the back story of CIIS: ‘… a disagreement arose between some students and faculty who wanted to seek accreditation for the Academy, and others who opposed accreditation in the belief that it would limit their freedom of expression. Haridas Chaudhuri sided with the former group, and in 1968 he left the Academy [of Asian Studies], taking many of its students with him to continue studying at his Cultural Integration Fellowship. The Academy could not withstand this split, and soon collapsed. Meanwhile, the Cultural Integration Fellowship continued its educational activities with many students who had been at the Academy, and began to call its educational branch The California Institute of Asian Studies. In 1974 The California Institute of Asian Studies was incorporated separately as a private, non-sectarian, non-profit graduate school.’ (Excerpt from ‘The American Academy of Asian Studies’, CIIS Archives)

So I guess what I do not fully understand yet is how CIIS, being in its origin the ‘educational branch’ of CIF, has lost its close ties with CIF…. and also how CIAS/CIIS so quickly lost the sense expressed by Speigelberg that Sri Aurobindo ‘is the guiding spirit of this earth and the prophet of our age.’

Clearly this sense has not made it into CIIS’s current community as was spelled out in your words to me, ‘… I WISH YOU COULD UNDERSTAND THAT TO THE EXTENT THAT THERE IS INTEREST IN SRI AUROBINDO AND THE MOTHER AT CIIS IT IS DUE TO OCCASIONAL LECTURES ON THE FOUNDING VISION AND BASED ON BOOKS IN COURSES FOCUSED ON INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY.’

I suppose I have suspected for quite some time that there is little true interest in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s yoga at CIIS. Certainly the majority of the guiding faculty and staff of CIIS has not shared Speigelberg’s original sense (and perhaps Chaudhuri’s) of the importance and magnitude of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga.

You write, ‘… FROM ITS FOUNDING CIIS HAS BEEN PLURALISTIC, HONORING AND TEACHING MANY TEACHERS AND TRADITIONS.’

I see that is true. Alan Watts gives an interesting description of the original atmosphere in which CIAS/CIIS immerged, which gives a sense of this pluralism and of the transformation of consciousness which was the eclectic faculty’s and community’s concern.

‘The entrepreneur [Louis Gainsborough] who gave the initial funds for this project [AAAS] leaned to the view that it should be an information service at the graduate level. At the time this made sense, because American universities were largely ignoring Asian studies; their offerings at the undergraduate level were almost nil, and at the graduate level were mainly preoccupied with research. But Spiegelberg and I had no real interest in this nonetheless sensible idea of an information service about Asian culture, nor was this what really concerned Chaudhuri, Aiyar, and Tyberg. We were concerned with the practical transformation of human consciousness, with the actual living out of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist ways of life at the level of high mysticism: a concern repugnant to academics and contemptible to businessmen, threatening to Jews and Christians, and irrational to most scientists. Two professional fund-raisers cost us more than they raised, and the Ford Foundation shrugged us off with a shudder. Clearly, we were just another California cult trying to assume the mask of a respectable educational institution. But then ‒ only twenty years ago ‒ it was not as easy to see as it is today that when you make a powerful technology available to human beings with the normal form of egocentric consciousness, planetary disaster is inevitable. Moreover, the point had to be made that the egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be corrected by willpower, but a conceptual hallucination requiring some basic alterations of common sense; a task comparable to persuading people that the earth is round rather than flat.

‘This was very largely the subject of discussion at the weekly colloquium of the Academy's faculty, at which Spiegelberg was the invariably provocative moderator, and which became an event increasingly attractive to San Francisco artists and intellectuals.’ ‒ Alan Watts (‘The American Academy of Asian Studies’, CIIS Archives)

It is just endlessly curious to me that this search for ‘the practical transformation of human consciousness’ did not take more advantage of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s teachings on the matter. I am now wondering if the faculty of AAAS, CIF, or CIAS interacted with the Mother at all before her passing in 1973. I have not seen any records on this. I have recently been reading from the Mother’s 1961 Agenda about her assessments of an organization called World Union, which makes me imagine that she would have felt similarly about the pluralistic mixture of teachings at AAAS and CIAS.

4 March 1961

‘Z was saying, ‘Nothing can be done unless we base ourselves EXCLUSIVELY on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and they are behind us giving support.’ And J. said, ‘No, no! We are not sectarian! We accept all ideas, all theories, etc.’ I replied, and as it happens, I said that Z was right, though with one corrective: he had been saying that people had to recognize us as their guru. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s absolutely useless – not only useless, I refuse. I don’t want to be anybody’s guru. People should simply be told that things are to be done on the basis of Sri Aurobindo’s thought.

‘Y asked me some direct questions, without beating around the bush, and I replied directly: ‘World Union is an entirely superficial thing, without any depth, based on the fact that Sri ‘Aurobindo said “the masses” must be helped to follow the progress of “the elite” – well, let them go ahead! If they enjoy it, let them go right ahead!’ ... I didn’t say it exactly like that (I was a bit more polite!), but that was the gist of it.

‘Now it has all fallen flat. They are carrying on with their little activities, but it’s absolutely unimportant.

‘These people aren’t even asked to understand what Sri Aurobindo has said but simply to participate. It’s a different matter for those in World Union, who are working for an ideal: they want to prepare the world to receive (laughing) the Supermind! Let them prepare it! It doesn’t matter, they will achieve nothing at all, or very little. It’s unimportant. That’s my point of view and I have told them so.

‘… at World Union they asked me what their mistake had been (they didn’t state it so candidly, but in a roundabout way), and I replied (not so candidly, either – not exactly in a roundabout way, but in general terms). I told them their mistake was being unfaithful and I explained that to be unfaithful means to put everything on the same level …. I told them, ‘Your error was in saying: “One teaching among many teachings – so let us be broad-minded and accept all teachings.”’ So along with all the teachings, you accept every stupidity possible.

‘But if someone is taken in, it proves he’s at an elementary stage and unready.’

Ten years later (30 June 1971), she wrote in the same vein:

‘We’re receiving letters from all over with the “true knowledge” of what should be done according to Sri Aurobindo, and.... There’s such a mixture, things are all scrambled, oh!...

‘It is Falsehood putting on a mantle of truth in order to appear credible.’

For many years, I have had the idea in my head that CIIS was originally founded on Sri Aurobindo’s teachings and then veered off. But it seems from what you are saying and from what I have gathered in my research, that CIAS/CIIS was, pretty much from the beginning, like this ‘World Union’ endeavor described by the Mother in that CIIS founders simply mixed a limited understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s yogic ideals with the ideas other teachings and teachers that were considered the cutting edge of the transformation of consciousness at the time.

So from that point of view it does seem highly unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that CIIS would somehow now, after all these years of academic and intellectual pluralism/freedom, begin to give the Integral Gnosis/Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet any central importance.

But still, if the issues of the ‘practical transformation of human consciousness’ and developing an Integral perspective of world existence remains in the interests of the CIIS community, I am fairly certain that Patrizia’s teachings on Integral Gnosis, Supramental Truth-Consciousness, Vedic Wisdom, Sacred Geometry, the Enneagram, the Zodiac, Evolution, Geo-Cosmology and the Supramental Vision of Time would add much to CIIS’s knowledge base.

You asked where Patrizia lives and where I live. She is in the Palani Hills near Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu (Southern India) and I live in Marin County, 20 miles from CIIS. Whether Patrizia would actually be able to make the long trip from India to California to present at CIIS, I do not know. All I know is that if CIIS wants to maintain some real and meaningful connection with the Integral and Supramental yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (no matter how tangential), Patrizia should be invited to share her knowledge on the matter. If she cannot make the trip, then perhaps other means of transmission of knowledge can be arranged.

Wishing you the Best of Light in your pursuits, Lori

[Additional Note] I forgot to address above, regarding the bit in my Letter #2 about 'Sri Aurobindo’s perspective that these incarnations [Christ and Buddha] were indeed evolutionary forces, in a sense, errors in consciousness that plunged humanity deeper into darkness and encouraged an escape from the material woes of the world for the past 2,000 years.' I was referring to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's perspective not yours. My thought was that this contrasted or didn't match your own perspective. I would like very much to read your introduction to The Bhagavad Gita and the West.

A Response from Robert McDermott RE: CIIS, Sri Aurobindo & the Supramental Descent

2011-08-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

Robert McDermott is president emeritus of CIIS, author of The Essential Aurobindo (1973), & program chair of CIIS's 'Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness' department.

[Here are the links to my first two letters to Dr. McDermott:
Letter #1 , Letter #2. A 3rd response will follow]

Dear Lori, I have replied below, in CAPS for easy spotting. Warmly, Robert

22 August 2011

Dear Robert, I will of course honor your request not to publish your responses to Robert Wilkinson and Patrizia and myself these past weeks.

>>THANK YOU.

I have been doing some research of my own to try to understand the lineage and affiliations of CIIS. I learned that CIIS was originally established in 1968 as branch of the Cultural Integration Fellowship (CIF) which was established by Sri Aurobindo

>>NO. SRI AUROBINDO RECOMMENDED HARIDAS CHAUDHURI (AFTER K. D. SETHNA'S WIFE REPORTEDLY REFUSED THE OPPORTUNITY) BUT PROBABLY KNEW LITTLE OR NOTHING ABOUT THE INSTITUTION.

student Haridas Chaudhury in 1951 (the year after Sri Aurobindo’s Mahasamadhi).

>>HARIDAS AND HIS WIFE BINA LIVED IN CALCUTTA; HARIDAS WAS A YOUNG PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AND A DISCIPLE. I BELIEVE HE MET SRI AUROBINDO ONCE. HE CAME TO THE SAN FRANCISCO ACADEMY OF ASIAN STUDIES, AT THE INVITATION OF FREDERICK SPIEGELBERG. THIS INSTITUTION, THE PREDECESSOR OF CIIS, WAS FOUNDED BY LOUIS GAINSBOROUGH, A GANDHIAN BUSINESSMAN. IT COLLAPSED IN THE MID-50s; HARIDAS AND BINA FOUNDED A NEW INSTITUTION, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF ASIAN STUDIES, IN 1968, WHICH THEN CHANGED ITS NAME IN 198I TO CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES.

CIF maintains close ties with CIIS

>> NOT SO CLOSE BUT WE ARE TRYING TO IMPROVE COLLABORATION.

and the Sri Aurobindo Association (a.k.a. http://www.collaboration.org>) presided over by Lynda Lester.

>> PROBABLY, DEPENDING ON WHO IS TRYING TO LEAD CIF.

Lester, who you report that you do not know of,

>> I HAD NOT HEARD HER NAME UNTIL YOU MENTIONED HER.

spoke at the 2007 AUM conference that was co-hosted and co-organized and co-promoted by CIIS, wherein she lumped Patrizia in with fundamentalists who somehow retard the ongoing evolution of the Integral Yoga.

I see that you went to Pondicherry on a Fulbright scholarship in 1966 and in 1972 organized an ‘Auroville-inspired experimental community’ in upstate New York which was attended by, amongst others, Auroville founding member and author Robert Lawlor.

>> I WENT TO INDIA IN 1966 BUT HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF SRI AUROBINDO AT THAT TIME.I WENT AGAIN IN 1970 AND AT THE END SPENT TWO SEEKS AT THE ASHRAM AND VISITED AUROVILLE. I MET BOB LAWLOR AND HIS WIFE DEBBIE IN FORECOMERS AT THAT TIME.

Lawlor attended classes of Patrizia in Pondicherry, and yet despite his interest in sacred geometry/architecture, he did not, as far as I know, use his knowledge to speak out against the distortions of the Mother’s Temple design. Instead, he abandoned ship so to speak and went his own way.

>>BOB THEN STUDIED SACRED GEOMETRY AND THEN ANTHROPOLOGY; I LOST TRACK OF HIM.

The 1972 New York group also was attended by Julian Lines, the current east-coast coordinator of AVIUSA (Auroville International USA).

>> JULIAN AND I HAVE BEEN FRIENDS SINCE 1972.

On the AVIUSA board I also recognize ‘Constance’ (David Walker) from his dismissals of Patrizia’s work that I encountered from the Auroconf group en mass in 2006 (including the dismissals by Lynda Lester). Not just dismissal based on disinterest as you have suggested … there was slander and contempt in the mix, including the supposition that Patrizia is delusional, schizophrenic and such. In 2007, you were a panelist for the AUM conference with AVIUSA president Mary Alexander, Sri Aurobindo Ashram ‘educator and scholar’ Sraddhalu Ranade and CIIS president Joseph L. Subbiondo. This panel discussed the topic of ‘An Educational Curriculum for a Transitional Species’.

>> YES. THIS IS ALL I ATTENDED, JUST LONG ENOUGH TO EXPERIENCE AND FLEE FROM SRADDALU'S DOGMATISM, PRESUMPTION, AND ARROGANCE.

It seems from what you have written to Patrizia, Robert Wilkinson and me over these past weeks that you also, for reasons of your own, took your leave of the Aurobindo-Mother ship, circa 1976 and gave your attention fully to Steiner and Anthroposophy.

>> THE REASON WAS KARMA; WHEN I FOUND THE WRITINGS OF RUDOLF STEINER IN SPRING 1975 I RECOGNIZED A DEEP SPIRITUAL CONNECTION AND HAVE TRIED TO GROW IN THIS TEACHING SINCE THEN.

I write 1976 because you wrote Patrizia that you have given the last 35 years of your life to Steiner’s teaching and influence. I believe you gravitated more towards Steiner’s experience of ‘the centrality of Christ ‒ in cooperation with Buddha and other spiritual beings in service of humanity and the earth’ [from ‘Anthroposophical and Transpersonal Worldviews’] rather than Sri Aurobindo’s perspective that these incarnations were indeed evolutionary forces,

>> YES

but represented, in a sense, errors in consciousness that plunged humanity deeper into darkness and encouraged an escape from the material woes of the world for the past 2,000 years.

>> NO. WHERE DID THIS COME FROM? I HAVE NEVER HAD SUCH THOUGHTS. SEE MY 80 PAGE INTRODUCTION TO THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND THE WEST (STEINERBOOKS 2009).

You write to Patrizia that there is no rejection at CIIS regarding her work, only ‘disinterest’, and you feel that hypocrisy is too strong and harsh of a word for your and CIIS’s failure in general to investigate as scholars and remain open to Patrizia’s teachings and integrate them into the CIIS curriculum (as you have done for so many others with far less credentials in the field of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga). But I feel that you are not fully taking into account the web of interconnections that ties you and CIIS to other groups who have intentionally ignored and dismissed Patrizia’s writings because they do not want their own Aurovillian ideal and their own understanding of the Integral Yoga to be challenged.This rejection has included book burning, defamation, blatant lies, and lies by omission.

>> I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THIS. ARE THEY THE SAME FANATICS WHO WANT TO BURN PETER HEES'S BOOK OR IS THERE ANOTHER GROUP OF FANATICAL AUROBINDO DISCIPLES?

You and CIIS are, involuntary as it may be, linked to these people in the web of time and space … and you are thus involved in the whole unfolding sequence and consequence.

>> I COULD GET INVOLVED IN THIS DESPITE LOW APTITUDE IN SACRED GEOMETRY AND COSMOLOGY OR I COULD CHAIR MY DEPARTMENT, TEACH MY STUDENTS, AND TRY TO FINISH MY BOOK, UNIQUE NOT ALONE: STEINER AND OTHERS.

And CIIS could play a progressive and proactive role in helping students consider the issues at hand for themselves, rather than continuing to foster an un-academic stance of disinterest. That is why I sent you Patrizia’s books in the first place and why I have sent you notes and links from time to time.

>> PERHAPS BUT I WISH YOU COULD UNDERSTAND THAT TO THE EXTENT THAT THERE IS INTEREST IN SRI AUROBINDO AND THE MOTHER AT CIIS IT IS DUE TO OCCASIONAL LECTURES ON THE FOUNDING VISION AND BASED ON BOOKS IN COURSES FOCUSED ON INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY.

You were ‘there’ (in the Integral Yoga field) in the last years of the Mother’s life and in the beginning of the choice made in Auroville to basically discard the Mother’s Supramental Gnosis and to build a community centered around a distortion of her temple vision. The Mother’s Temple was never actually built, yet to this day the community, including guiding members of CIF, AVIUSA, AUM and CIIS remain ‘disinterested’ in Patrizia’s attempts to share the Vedic measure and full meaning of the Mother’s original temple design. In 2005 CIIS offered a course abroad entitled ‘Auroville: Spirituality, Community, and Multiculturalism in South India’. The instructors – one of whom I knew via an unrelated course of study and who I had previously sent information regarding Patrizia’s Supramental Yoga – did not think it important to include any of the written works by Patrizia which expose the unpleasant truth that Aurovillians have distorted the Mother’s Temple and therefore simultaneously distorted the Integral and Supramental Gnosis. As far as the syllabus and the recommended reading is concerned, there is no indication that someone name Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet exists and presents her work as a continuation of the descent of Supramental Knowledge. Your book The Essential Aurobindo, however, did make it onto the required reading list.

What I am trying to bring into view is that whether your disinterest in investigating Patrizia’s work stems only from your devotion to Steiner, or also from some trace of bias that you carry on from your earlier associations/affiliations with people who still to this day are invested in shoving her work under the proverbial rug, the result is the same.

>> PERHAPS BUT IN THE REALM OF CONSCIOUSNESS, MOTIVES ARE IMPORTANT.

The result is that CIIS ‒ a school that is suppose to be founded on Sri Aurobindo’s yoga

>> THIS IS MISLEADING. FROM ITS FOUNDING CIIS HAS BEEN PLURALISTIC, HONORING AND TEACHING MANY TEACHERS AND TRADITIONS.

‒ has mirrored your own disinterest in actively pursuing Truth in matters of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Supramental and Integral Yoga. I’m not at all saying this is all your fault. I do know it is not. I am just saying that perhaps if you had been more interested in actively investigating the Supramental Descent, which would be fitting for anyone occupying leadership positions at CIIS, then perhaps students of CIIS would have already had access to courses on subjects such as the Supramental Cosmology and Vedic Gnosis, the Sacred Geometry of the Mother’s Temple, and the Geometry and Integral/Supramental Vision of Time.

>> PERHAPS. I WILL TRY TO BE OPEN TO THIS KNOWLEDGE.

To close I will say that I certainly wish your exchange with Patrizia had gone better

>> PATRICIA'S EMAILS WERE QUITE ACCUSATORY DESPITE BEING UNINFORMED. IN FACT, THEY SHOW AN ALARMING LEVEL OF PARANOIA. I AM NOT INTERESTING IN CORRESPONDING WITH HER.

and I do appreciate your offer to meet with me. But for now I will have to decline because I feel that despite your personal disinterest, and despite the disharmonious exchange that just took place, it is Patrizia who you should invite to CIIS to explain her position and to discuss her work as an advance in Supramental and Integral Gnosis. If there is disinterest and nobody shows up for her talks,

>> WHERE IS SHE, AND WHERE ARE YOU?

then that will be that! But considering that CIIS has offered classes and hosted events of people that are unaware of, ignoring or denying her side of the story for many decades, it should ‒ in the spirit of fairness and academic interest ‒ host an event, perhaps a weekend or week of talks, wherein she is given space to share her story.

>> BUT NOT IF SHE WOULD RANT AND ACCUSE AS SHE DID IN HER EMAILS TO ME.

Respectfully, Lori Tompkins

>> YES, I SENSE YOUR RESPECT AND I FULLY RESPECT YOUR POSITION. THANK YOU FOR TRYING TO UNDERSTAND MY POSITION AND THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG CIIS, CIF, AND SOME AUROBINDO DISCIPLES.

[I am publishing this on my blog as an open letter]

>> YOU MAY PUBLISH MY REPLY IF YOU WISH.

[Link to Open Letter #3]

CIIS, Sri Aurobindo & the Ongoing Evolution of the Integral Yoga

2011-08-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Robert McDermott, Part II

Robert McDermott is president emeritus of CIIS, author of The Essential Aurobindo (1973), & program chair of CIIS's 'Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness' department.

[Link to Part I]

22 August 2011

Dear Robert,

I will of course honor your request not to publish your responses to Robert Wilkinson and Patrizia and myself this past week.

I have been doing some research of my own to try to understand the lineage and affiliations of CIIS. I learned that CIIS was originally established in 1968 as branch of the Cultural Integration Fellowship (CIF) which was established by Sri Aurobindo student Hardas Chaudhury in 1951 (the year after Sri Aurobindo’s Mahasamadhi). CIF maintains close ties with CIIS and the Sri Aurobindo Association (a.k.a. http://www.collaboration.org) presided over by Lynda Lester. Lester, who you report that you do not know of, spoke at the 2007 AUM conference that was co-hosted and co-organized and co-promoted by CIIS, wherein she lumped Patrizia in with fundamentalists who somehow retard the ongoing evolution of the Integral Yoga.

I see that you went to Pondicherry on a Fulbright scholarship in 1966 and in 1972 organized an ‘Auroville-inspired experimental community’ in upstate New York which was attended by, amongst others, Auroville founding member and author Robert Lawlor. Lawlor attended classes of Patrizia in Pondicherry, and yet despite his interest in sacred geometry/architecture, he did not, as far as I know, use his knowledge to speak out against the distortions of the Mother’s Temple design. Instead, he abandoned ship so to speak and went his own way. The 1972 New York group also was attended by Julian Lines, the current east-coast coordinator of AVIUSA (Auroville International USA). On the AVIUSA board I also recognize ‘Constance’ (David Walker) from his dismissals of Patrizia’s work that I encountered from the Auroconf group en mass in 2006 (including the dismissals by Lynda Lester). Not just dismissal based on disinterest as you have suggested … there was slander and contempt in the mix, including the supposition that Patrizia is delusional, schizophrenic and such. In 2007, you were a panelist for the AUM conference with AVIUSA president Mary Alexander, Sri Aurobindo Ashram ‘educator and scholar’ Sraddhalu Ranade and CIIS president Joseph L. Subbiondo. This panel discussed the topic of ‘An Educational Curriculum for a Transitional Species’.

It seems from what you have written to Patrizia, Robert Wilkinson and me over these past weeks that you also, for reasons of your own, took your leave of the Aurobindo-Mother ship, circa 1976 and gave your attention fully to Steiner and Anthroposophy. I write 1976 because you wrote Patrizia that you have given the last 35 years of your life to Steiner’s teaching and influence. I believe you gravitated more towards Steiner’s experience of ‘the centrality of Christ ‒ in cooperation with Buddha and other spiritual beings in service of humanity and the earth’ [from ‘Anthroposophical and Transpersonal Worldviews’ (2001)] rather than Sri Aurobindo’s perspective that these incarnations were indeed evolutionary forces, but represented, in a sense, errors in consciousness that plunged humanity deeper into darkness and encouraged an escape from the material woes of the world for the past 2,000 years.

You write to Patrizia that there is no rejection at CIIS regarding her work, only ‘disinterest’, and you feel that hypocrisy is too strong and harsh of a word for your and CIIS’s failure in general to investigate as scholars and remain open to Patrizia’s teachings and integrate them into the CIIS curriculum (as you have done for so many others with far less credentials in the field of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga). But I feel that you are not fully taking into account the web of interconnections that ties you and CIIS to other groups who have intentionally ignored and dismissed Patrizia’s writings because they do not want their own Aurovillian ideal and their own understanding of the Integral Yoga to be challenged. This rejection has included book burning, defamation, blatant lies, and lies by omission. You and CIIS are, involuntary as it may be, linked to these people in the web of time and space … and you are thus involved in the whole unfolding sequence and consequence. And CIIS could play a progressive and proactive role in helping students consider the issues at hand for themselves, rather than continuing to foster an un-academic stance of disinterest. That is why I sent you Patrizia’s books in the first place and why I have sent you notes and links from time to time.

You were ‘there’ (in the Integral Yoga field) in the last years of the Mother’s life and in the beginning of the choice made in Auroville to basically discard the Mother’s Supramental Gnosis and to build a community centered around a distortion of her temple vision. The Mother’s Temple was never actually built, yet to this day the community, including guiding members of CIF, AVIUSA, AUM and CIIS remain ‘disinterested’ in Patrizia’s attempts to share the Vedic measure and full meaning of the Mother’s original temple design. In 2005 CIIS offered a course abroad entitled ‘Auroville: Spirituality, Community, and Multiculturalism in South India’. The instructors – one of whom I knew via an unrelated course of study and who I had previously sent information regarding Patrizia’s Supramental Yoga – did not think it important to include any of the written works by Patrizia which expose the unpleasant truth that Aurovillians have distorted the Mother’s Temple and therefore simultaneously distorted the Integral and Supramental Gnosis. As far as the syllabus and the recommended reading is concerned, there is no indication that someone name Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet exists and presents her work as a continuation of the descent of Supramental Knowledge. Your book The Essential Aurobindo, however, did make it onto the required reading list.

What I am trying to bring into view is that whether your disinterest in investigating Patrizia’s work stems only from your devotion to Steiner, or also from some trace of bias that you carry on from your earlier associations/affiliations with people who still to this day are invested in shoving her work under the proverbial rug, the result is the same. The result is that CIIS ‒ a school that is suppose to be founded on Sri Aurobindo’s yoga ‒ has mirrored your own disinterest in actively pursuing Truth in matters of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Supramental and Integral Yoga. I’m not at all saying this is all your fault. I do know it is not. I am just saying that perhaps if you had been more interested in actively investigating the Supramental Descent, which would be fitting for anyone occupying leadership positions at CIIS, then perhaps students of CIIS would have already had access to courses on subjects such as the Supramental Cosmology and Vedic Gnosis, the Sacred Geometry of the Mother’s Temple, and the Geometry and Integral/Supramental Vision of Time.

To close I will say that I certainly wish your exchange with Patrizia had gone better and I do appreciate your offer to meet with me. But for now I will have to decline because I feel that despite your personal disinterest, and despite the disharmonious exchange that just took place, it is Patrizia who you should invite to CIIS to explain her position and to discuss her work as an advance in Supramental and Integral Gnosis. If there is disinterest and nobody shows up for her talks, then that will be that! But considering that CIIS has offered classes and hosted events of people that are unaware of, ignoring or denying her side of the story for many decades, it should ‒ in the spirit of fairness and academic interest ‒ host an event, perhaps a weekend or week of talks, wherein she is given space to share her story.

Respectfully,

Lori Tompkins

[Link to RM's response]

[Link to Open Letter #3]

An Open Letter to Robert McDermott Regarding the Supramental & Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the Mother & Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet

2011-08-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

[Robert McDermott is president emeritus of CIIS, author of The Essential Aurobindo, & program chair of CIIS's 'Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness' department.]

Hi again Robert, It was I who sent you several books of Patrizia's way back when. I believe my contact information came with them. I never heard from you and I have always wondered why I got no response and what happened to those books. I believe I requested that if you did not want to read them that they make their way to the CIIS library. I hope they did. Anyhow, I have approached CIIS in various ways (including through you) to try to open up a dialogue about her work, because I thought it would be appropriate for a school based on Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga to discuss a body of work that adds incredible depth and dimensions and new significance to the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I actually offered to teach a course at CIIS on the subject because I do have a master’s degree in Education and Curriculum development and I am one of the folks on the planet who is fairly knowledgeable about what it is Ms. Norelli-Bachelet has introduced in terms of the Supramental Descent. But alas no friendly doors seemed to open.

Then in 2007 CIIS co-hosted, co-organized and promoted the AUM conference concerning the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother held at the Institute of Noetic Sciences that was billed as an effort to ‘identify, heal, and clear unconscious divisions and blockages; foster deep listening, mutual learning, and the cross-pollination of knowledge streams; expand boundaries, build bridges of trust and collaboration; develop a more integrated, effective, and applied sense of the term “integral”.’ Not only was no representative of Patrizia’s yogic knowledge invited to sit on a panel at the event (I would have been the likely candidate as I live in Marin County, close to both CIIS and IONS), but as far as I can gather, the only reference to her work were derogatory remarks by Lynda Lester ‒ a member of Auroconf and of the AUM Continuity Committee. In a panel discussion entitled, “Facing the Challenge of Fundamentalism and other Shadow Issues in the Ongoing Evolution of Integral Yoga”, Lester portrayed Patrizia and those who acknowledge the importance of her Supramental yoga ‘a small but aggressive group’ of fundamentalists ‘who are into esoteric numerology’; and there was conveniently no one invited to the panel to discuss/challenge the prevailing bias and ignorance on these matters. [See Lester's remarks in Collaborations, p. 22]

So it has been frustrating and deeply disappointing, to say the least, that no one at CIIS has wanted to open up classes or dialogue about Patrizia's 40 plus years of Supramental and Integral Yoga. One would think that if CIIS were true to its original mission, that its faculty, directors and associates would go out of their way to invite Patrizia, or those knowledgeable of her work, to discuss her position and her teachings. But that has not happened. Rather the CIIS community has reflected a yawning DISINTEREST. If you understood Patrizia's teachings and how essentially and absolutely important they are in terms of the Supramental Descent and Integral Gnosis, you would understand how such disinterest puts CIIS in a hypocritical position ‒ i.e. promoting the idea of Integrality and such, but having little real connection to Sri Aurobindo's Integral yogic vision and consciousness-force. I realize more clearly now from your latest emails that you really do not understand Patrizia's teachings at all and so naturally you have not been in a position to see the extensive damage ALREADY DONE over the past four decades by those who have distorted the Mother's Temple vision and by those who have chosen to bar or slant any mention of Patrizia's teachings on their Integral Yoga sites, curriculums and in their discussions about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

When I traveled to Pondicherry for the first time in January of 2000, within the first hour of my arrival I took a self-guided tour of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Visitor's Center which led me in chronological order through pictures and blurbs about the lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The tour ended with portraits of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in their old age and at that moment, while standing there at the END of the line, I was literally struck with the realization that their work was far from being done, and there was a third stage of the Supramental Descent to be carried out. I saw that a third picture was missing from the wall! I simultaneously realized the immense and epic difficulty that this third person/stage would have in overcoming the calcified story/religion that had already been created around Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I sat in the courtyard and cried as if someone in my family had just died. All this was completely unexpected. I had no previous judgments or thoughts about the yoga having become calcified or stagnant, or about a third stage of the descent until that moment. I spent two weeks in Pondicherry, which sadly felt to me more like a tourist destination centered around the tombs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother than a place of serious and living yoga.

Then I moved on, by complete 'chance', to Kodaikanal. There I had some of the clearest revelations and most powerful spiritual experiences of my life, having no idea whatsoever that Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet existed or that she lived a few miles from where I was staying. When I arrived back in the USA a few months later, in San Francisco I found her book The Gnostic Circle on my sister's bookshelf. As I read it, it was astoundingly clear to me that the third stage of the descent was already in motion, and had been since the early 1970s, and true to my experience in Pondicherry, this ‘third’ had been thoroughly shut out of the Aurobindonian story. I knew that recognizing and experiencing the Supramental consciousness-force of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the work of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet meant that I was bound to be something of a whistle-blower, drawing attention to the lie in the story of the Supramental Descent/Yoga that was being told in Pondicherry, Auroville and across the world. I am happily not a person who could simply sit on such game-changing information or continue on with my life/yoga as if nothing monumental had happened.

Predictably, those who want their organizations and mindsets to continue on, undisturbed by this new and/or incriminating information, have labeled me ‒ along with anyone who recognizes Patrizia's yogic lineage ‒ as a deluded cultish fanatic. Nonetheless, I attempt in my own ways to expose the lie that the Supramental Descent ended with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and to expose the lie that the Auroville temple is a faithful representation of the Mother's Supramental Vision for Her Temple ... mostly by attempting to bring greater exposure to the Supramental Gnosis that has streamed in through Patrizia's being for decades. It is impossible to expose the Gnosis without exposing the lies; and therefore it is impossible to discuss what I have learned of the Supramental Yoga without challenging or upsetting those who do not at all agree with what I have found to be true. But that is just how it is; and I know that these things will be duly sorted out in time, with the help of the Supramental Shakti and whoever She compels to stand up and discuss and debate the Supramental Knowledge as it has been presented. One thing that has become quite clear to me in the past decade is that arriving at the Truth of Sri Aurobindo's lineage and consciousness-force in the world is not a democratic process or a popularity contest.

I have sent you books and articles over the years, hoping you might be interested in the important issues at hand, or that you might somehow invite or encourage discussion of the topic of the continuing Supramental Descent at CIIS. I do understand now, from what you have written Robert Wilkinson, that you are not personally interested in the topic of the Supramental Descent at all ... which actually surprises me due to your position at CIIS, your authorship of The Essential Aurobindo, and the talk you are giving today on the 14th of August 2011 on ‘The Significance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’ (billed as a celebration of Sri Aurobindo’s 139th birthday). But even putting personal interest aside, I believe those such as yourself who do somehow influence CIIS's philosophies and activities should make a sincere effort to incorporate the topic of the Supramental Gnosis and its most recent developments into CIIS's curriculum/field. Otherwise, CIIS’s connection to Sri Aurobindo continues to become ever more tenuous, inconsequential and disingenuous.

Please let me know if, in the spirit of open and honest debate, you are willing for your recent emails to Robert and your response to Patrizia’s email to be published on the PNB Questions and Answers blog, along with their own responses.

Warm Regards,
Lori Tompkins
San Anselmo, CA

Link to Open Letter #2:
'CIIS, Sri Aurobindo & the Ongoing Evolution of the Integral Yoga'

Have Auroville’s Failures made it a Danger to India and the World?

2011-08-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

‘Thousands of years ago we were already being promised the advent of a new consciousness, a new world, something divine that would manifest on Earth, but all that was really said was, “it will be, it will be.” [Well]… the Miracle has happened... A new world, yes, a completely new world is born and here. Yet even now, there are very few people who are aware of its birth and of the difference it brings into the world.’ The Mother

As the Age of Pisces drew to a close the Mighty God Vishnu, preserver of the universe, took human birth as the 9^th in his Line of Ten Avatars. Under the impeccable control of Mahakala, the Time Spirit, his Avatar was born in Calcutta, India on August 15^th, 1872. The birth of Sri Aurobindo, as he was later known, marked the beginning of the most important series of events in the history of our planet. It was, said the Mother, ‘a decisive action direct from the Supreme’ heralding the advent of a new consciousness and a completely new world.

During their time on earth, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother worked tirelessly to bring down this new consciousness and create appropriate forms for its physical manifestation. The most important of these forms was the Mother’s plan for a Vedic Temple which was to be built according to the ancient science of ‘Vaastu Vidya’ at the center of the microcosmic world, which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had founded in Pondicherry; the point where its axial power could establish itself and bring harmony to the earth. But owing to the ignorance and bad faith of her disciples the Mother’s plan for her temple was systematically destroyed. One by one the elements of its sublime design were altered until not one was left intact.¹ And when this abomination began to take form in concrete and steel, its mutilated dimensions began to produce calamitous effects in the field of its occult influence generating disunity and a palpable distortion of consciousness that continues on to this very day. The disciples who rejected the Mother’s plan and those who continue to live under the toxic influence of the aberration built in her name, express an almost blind resistance to the new Supramental consciousness. And because of the tamasic intransigence of these so-called devotees who have usurped control of Sri Aurobindo’s work and message, Vishnu’s Line remains unrecognized and unacknowledged and its incomparable influence on the earth’s evolution is virtually unknown.

Today the ‘City of Dawn’, named for Sri Aurobindo and designed by the Mother to be the living embodiment of this new consciousness, has failed utterly to live up to its promise. Rather than being a microcosm of human unity under the governance of the Divine, Auroville has become a botched experiment, a ward of the State and a stronghold of dogma and orthodoxy working at cross purposes to Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s express commands. What was intended to be the soul of their New Creation and cradle of the Supramental Being has instead become a wasteland of consciousness radiating confusion, distortion and disunity throughout India and the World. And if Sri Aurobindo has said, ‘whenever a single soul is realized, there is a tendency to an extension of the same divine self-consciousness in other individual souls of our terrestrial humanity’, what kind of extended terrestrial effect might we expect from Auroville’s obfuscation of the Gnostic realization for the last 43 years? Anyone familiar with the occult principles which the Mother observed throughout her life, and of which she was the greatest adept, will immediately recognize why Auroville’s continuing failures have made it a danger to the world and a willful impediment to Indian unity.

As we explore the genesis of Auroville’s failures we find that it follows an old and familiar pattern found in many spiritual communities. It is a well known fact that lesser mortals rush to fill the void and absence of authority once the guru departs. What inevitably follows is the formation of a cult that seizes the guru’s teachings and crystallizes them into a rigid mental dogma over which they preside as ‘owners’ of the new truth. It is widely known that this is exactly what took place after the passing of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. What was intended as a place for the realization of human unity, unending education and an aspiration for the highest truth quickly became a closed camp. Realization soon gave way to dogma and instead of the hierarchy of consciousness that the Mother envisioned, rule by the many of the lowest calibre became the norm. Qualities of goodwill, sincerity, a constant aspiration to know the truth and a willingness to submit to it, aptitudes demanded by the Mother of those living in Auroville, were supplanted by a rigid mental tyranny stamping out any opposition to the orthodoxy imposed by the usurpers.² Under this cultish oppression all discussion stopped, thoughtful challenges to the ills of orthodoxy were rejected out of hand with the added insult that whoever disagreed with them was ‘deluded’, ‘schizophrenic’ or worse.

To illustrate just how intolerable this situation has become, one of Sri Aurobindo’s more thoughtful devotees, Harish Kumar, wrote an Open Letter to the entire Aurobindonian community asking why there is such a lack of meaningful discourse among serious students of Sri Aurobindo’s life and Yoga. Citing an article by Thea (Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet) regarding the revelation of the Supramental Formula contained in Sri Aurobindo’s very own symbol, Kumar writes:

‘…Thea's cosmology has proven empirically that Sri Aurobindo is Vishnu's 9th Avatar according to rigorous Vedic prescriptions, she has proven that Sri Aurobindo's most conclusive victory was the process of his death and return, what exactly that means in the Supramental Manifestation, and why it was necessary. She has presented the Formula he cemented in his own symbol and shown how it has worked meticulously in India particularly through two Lines, Solar and Lunar, and how the entire development of the new independent India has taken place according to His Formula.

Yet, we neither see an enthusiastic acceptance nor an informed criticism of her works. Why exactly are her prescriptions wrong? What exactly is the mechanism of the operations of Supermind, if not the one explained by Thea? We do not hear anything on these lines. Instead all we hear is mindless accusations levelled against her, ad hominem attacks, false charges and accusations of self-glorification from self-styled spokespersons of the community…’

To read the Full Text of Harish Kumar’s
‘OPEN LETTER TO THE AUROBINDONIAN COMMUNITY’

http://www.the-mountaintop.blogspot.com/

To date, there has been no response to Harish Kumar’s letter. His important observations and questions have been answered by the Aurobindonian community with a stunning silence. Of course, having rejected the existence of a Supramental empiricism and its attendant symbol language the community of devotees has NO UNDERSTANDING and NOTHING TO REPLY. This is the pathetic state of those claiming to be at the forefront of the most important spiritual work in human history. Yet these same people continue to hold themselves out as the final authority on Sri Aurobindo’s work and message.³ Their unexamined self-importance proceeds from an arrogant intellectual egoism that sees nothing yet thinks it knows all. It is the same brand of mental hubris that provoked the Mother to write the following about the disciples who rejected her temple plan:

“…what they see is all mental, They do not know. Who is there that knows? It is only when one sees. There is not one of them who sees...’ The Mother, Matrimandir Dialogues

It goes without saying that nothing has changed since January 1970 when the Mother made this remarkable observation. Today, no one in Auroville SEES and to disguise this self-evident fact, they have closed ranks and adopted a strategy of stonewalling and denial. And since the takeover by the Indian government in 1988, they are now accountable to no one. But the predictable fate of any ‘closed system’, as Auroville has now become, is a terminal collapse. Like a stagnant pond, its atmosphere has become toxic and grows more poisonous every day. And without the constant aspiration for and vibrant exchange of knowledge that the Mother demanded, it is simply impossible to keep the surrounding environment alive. The most poignant example of this stagnation malaise is revealed through Auroville’s failure to its children. In a 2010 report written on the youth of Auroville by Carissa Devine, a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, we find the following statement:

‘…Auroville has not reached where it is supposed to be, and despair is a constant threat to its citizens, especially to its own children. Children are amenable; they are curious and teachable. That being said, they are a vivid reflection of the living culture in which they grow. But instead of having faith in Auroville, it seems that most of its offspring are barely holding on to hope… The old won’t let go, they won’t let the youth make their mistakes...Workshops and dialogue seem futile, we have done this. It is something bigger. We have gone through this process and the stubborn dogmatic attitudes stay....Even if you have six months training [to join an influential committee], they dogmatize you; if you don’t understand like them, you’re out!” Instead of feeling empowered and encouraged to express their creative will, they are feeling the weight of bureaucracy, a deadly stagnation for any society.’

‘Losing faith in faith: A brief examination of the youth in Auroville’,
Carissa Devine - Fulbright Nehru scholar, 2009‐2010
[bold emphasis mine]

The thoughtful comments of this exceptional scholar testify to the unhealthy atmosphere in Auroville that is afflicting its children with hopelessness and despair. But Ms. Devine’s honest and objective appraisal of the situation barely scratches the surface of the underlying problem because the author does not have the keys to that Gnosis which would allow her to understand the situation at its core. For the most thorough analysis of Ms. Devine’s observations I have included a link to Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s commentary for students of the New Way.

A Commentary for students of the New Way on:

LOSING FAITH IN FAITH:

a brief examination of Carissa Devine’s report on the youth in Auroville

To read the Full Text of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s commentary

http://pnb-questions-answers.blogspot.com/2011/07/auroville-gropes-in-dark-after-having.html

One could go on and on cataloging the problems of Auroville, its lies, fraud, and disobedience but the basic facts remain that after the passing of the Mother in 1973, there was a complete breakdown of order. Unremitting conflict between the SAS (Sri Aurobindo Society) and other factions led to charges of fraud, misuse of funds and lawsuits that finally concluded with the management of Auroville being taken over by the Indian government through a 1988 act of Parliament. This was against the explicit wishes of the Mother who had written earlier:

‘I do not know who told you that – but there is a misunderstanding somewhere because to hand over the Management of Auroville to any country or any group however big it may be is an absolute impossibility.’ The Mother, in a handwritten note, 1970, Chronicles of the Inner Chamber, p. 10.

But by this time, the Mother’s wishes were routinely ignored and Auroville was fully under the control of forces of deception, distortion, and misdirection that had lodged themselves at the heart of her new creation. In the years that followed every publication that issued from the Ashram or Auroville misrepresented the epochal work that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had come to achieve. And because it represented such a dire threat to their pretentions of authority, Auroville’s new rulers vehemently denied the continuation of Sri Aurobindo’s line and fostered the perception that He and the Mother had failed in their missions. In spite of their irrefutable bona fides, any mention of a Third and a Fourth in their line were and continue to be denied, suppressed or ridiculed by the Auroville elites. With only the blind to lead the blind the ignorance and toxicity of the community grew progressively worse. This fact was recently highlighted by the controversial book written in 2008 by Peter Heehs entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. In the pages of this shameful text the author reduces his Guru to a ridiculous caricature and de-contextualizes his life and work in virtually the same manner that the Mother’s disciples systematically destroyed her temple.⁴ This has made it abundantly clear that nothing of truth or value can emerge from the black hole of consciousness that Auroville has now become.

On February 28, 1968, over 5000 people from 121 countries and 23 Indian states assembled in what was then the outskirts of Pondicherry and listened to the Auroville Charter being read out by the Mother. Today, the utopian township that was designed for 50,000 citizens has now dwindled to an adult population of barely 1,700 residents.⁵ We must ask ourselves WHY has a community that began with such promise failed so miserably? WHY are the children of Auroville suffering from hopelessness and despair? WHY were the disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who so generously supported their work defrauded of over 35 crores of rupees ($8 million USD) poured into the construction of a Matrimandir which was knowingly misrepresented to the public as faithful to the Mother’s original design? And WHY were the repeated attempts by persons of knowledge to correct this travesty and hold open and transparent hearings on the sacred dimensions of the Mother’s temple stonewalled and denied by the Auroville elites; people with vested interests who feared having their deceitful activities exposed to the light of day? The unavoidable answer to these questions is that for 43 years Auroville has been under the influence of ignorant forces hostile to the success and fulfillment of the Mother’s vision. If it were otherwise, given the incomparable wisdom that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought into the world, Auroville would be the most successful spiritual center on earth. But the facts do not lie, what we see in Auroville today is the truth of WHAT IS. And this leaves us no option but to agree with the Mother’s disgust and the statement she made about Auroville shortly before her passing.

‘Auroville will become what it must be: only if and when the people living there will stop lying.’ The Mother, Mother’s Agenda, 1973.

One of the great Sufi teachers of our time made a prescient statement that goes to the very heart of the issues raised in this paper. Describing the complex challenges of our times, Bulent Rauf, known to his students as Hamid wrote:

‘...It is those who have reached the knowledge of their essential unity with God who will forge the way and build a new world. Before this new world can be brought into being, however, it is said that there are to be two confrontations. The first confrontation will be between those who know and those who do not want to know and the second will be between those who know and those who will have to know.’ Hamid [bold emphasis mine]

The first of Hamid’s confrontations between those who know and ‘those who do not want to know’ is going on now with Auroville and the Aurobindonian community. The second confrontation, with those ‘who will have to know’ must be with the leaders of India.

As one of the greatest seers of all time, the Mother had a unique insight into the occult realities of India and the godhead that it represents. India is the natural habitat of Vishnu’s avatars and, as the center of our Aquarian age, the one place on the earth that could extend their yogic achievements out into the world. Looking deeply into India’s soul the Mother wrote the following:

‘INDIA is a divinely chosen country with a unique spiritual heritage. She is not the earth, rivers and mountains, nor simply the collective name for the inhabitants of this land. India is a living being, conscious of her mission in the world and waiting for the exterior means of its manifestation… India alone can lead the earth to peace and a new world order.’ The Mother: Words of the Mother. [bold emphasis mine]

But for India to realize this unique destiny and embrace her mission as light of the world, her leaders must be willing to open themselves to the incomparable wisdom that Sri Aurobindo and his line have unveiled. They must also discover the truth of India’s more esoteric realities and apply this knowledge toward the recovery of her true dharma. The first step of this journey must begin with a clear understanding that the origin of India’s destiny and the means of its external manifestation is written in her ancient Soul. As Thea, third in Sri Aurobindo’s line explains:

‘The destiny of India is guided by a power that descends directly from the world of the Truth-Consciousness; but unless the nation recognises this, it can only respond to a leadership of a lesser force and suffer the ensuing consequences.’ Thea, The New Way, 1981.

An indispensable part of the recognition that Thea mentions is an appreciation of the principles of a new Indo-centric Cosmology by which India is revealed as the Soul of the Earth. When the dynamics of this New Cosmology are understood, Auroville and the Ashram will immediately be recognized as microcosmic examples of the disunity and corruption that presently afflicts India herself. Moreover, they will be SEEN as a cautionary tale of the fate that befalls an individual, state or nation who rejects the truth and imperatives of their own Soul. If this degradation is to be corrected, Auroville must be brought into line with the demands of Truth and the needs of Indian Unity. There must be an immediate end to the obstruction and lies and full and open hearings must be held on the Matrimandir that has been so disingenuously put forward as true and faithful to the Mother’s original Vedic plan. The consequences of continuing inaction in these matters raises the spectre of a wider calamity for Auroville, India and the World. As the Mother warned:

‘Before dying, falsehood rises in full swing. Still people understand only the lesson of Catastrophe. Will it have to come before they open their eyes to the truth? I ask an effort from all so that it has not to be. It is only the truth that can save us; truth in words, truth in action, truth in will, truth in feelings. It is a choice between serving the truth or being destroyed.’ A message issued by the Mother on 26 November, 1972

Any thoughtful person cannot help but recognize that we have reached a major evolutionary turning point. We are living through the terminal stages of an old and dying world. But the New World is born and here, just as the Mother said, only it remains unknown, unrecognized and unattainable for most because the obscurantists in Auroville have suppressed the very knowledge that makes that New World visible. What is required for its realization is a determined effort from all to secure this new knowledge and move joyously into the future as conscious collaborators with Earth's emerging Soul.

******

For a full and comprehensive analysis of the New Cosmology, India’s unique role in the world and the means of its global manifestation, I have included a link to my article:

INDIA & The New Cosmology

An Analysis of Critical Present Events in the Light of Gnosis

To read the Full Text of Robert E. Wilkinson’s essay:

http://indiacosmology.blogspot.com/

Notes & Comments:

¹ The Matrimandir and the History of its Deformation: - The Matrimandir Dialogues 31.12.69-17.1.70: http://www.aeongroup.com/momtem.htm While the facts of the destruction of the Mother’s Vedic Temple plan are beyond dispute, her devotees continue to hide behind a wall of impenetrable dogma refusing to discuss the issues that are indispensible for and provide access to the entire Supramental revelation.

² Tyranny of Orthodoxy: In 1971 Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet moved from Rome to Pondicherry where she worked in close proximity to the Mother absorbing the supramental knowledge that She was giving out and that finally culminated in the plan for Her Temple. Patrizia was an active member of the Ashram, writing books, teaching classes, contributing articles to Mother India magazine and developing important relationships with many of the older sadhaks involved in Sri Aurobindo’s work. After the Mother’s passing in 1973, Patrizia became intimately involved in the activities surrounding the construction of the Matrimandir and in 1977 she wrote a 48 page memorandum for Ashram circulation only entitled ‘What is wrong with Matrimandir – A survey of its first six years, the effects it has produced and their world wide implications’. This memorandum detailed the entire Matrimandir saga from its inception with the Mother’s explicit instructions as to its meaning and construction as well as a chronology of Her followers systematic destruction of the Mother’s plan. Patrizia’s refusal to accept the distortions to the Mother’s true design earned her the enmity of the Auroville elites who, to this day, have done everything in their power to eliminate any mention of Patrizia from the ‘official’ historical record. In spite of her 16 books and hundreds of articles on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Supramental Cosmology, Sacred Architecture and the Vedic scriptures, many of which have been warmly received by the Ashram Trustees and made part of the permanent record of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, you will find no mention of Patrizia on any of the Sri Aurobindo websites or the lengthy historical record of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s work carried on Wikipedia. After numerous attempts to correct the Wikipedia record and cite Ms. Norelli-Bachelet’s indispensible and ongoing contributions to their work, her students discovered that their carefully documented and respectful postings were systematically deleted by Wiki editors. In discussions that followed it was learned that members of the Auroconference group openly hostile to Ms. Norelli-Bachelet and her work had influenced much of this dismissive activity with regard to postings about Ms. Norelli-Bachelet.

³ Example of Authoritarian Hypocrisy: In 2007 Lynda Lester, president of the Sri Aurobindo Association and a member of the All USA Meeting (AUM) Continuity Committee co-hosted a panel discussion at the California Institute of Integral Studies entitled ‘Facing the Challenge of Integral Yoga Fundamentalism’. Her opening remarks read as follows, ‘Sri Aurobindo and [The] Mother did not want to found a new religion… but we do see a few examples of fundamentalism …’. Lester then proceeded through a list of four offenders the last of which is ‘a small but aggressive group of people following Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet who are into esoteric numerology and claim the Matrimandir is a temple of falsehood because the measurements are wrong.’ A conference billed by AUM as an opportunity for greater transparency to heal divisions, and build bridges of trust became yet another occasion to demean, denigrate, and deny anything that would reveal their long standing incompetence and bad will. Ignoring the Mother’s own criticisms that her followers, ‘… do not know... There is not one of them who sees’, Lester continued in that tradition by glibly rejecting an entire field of knowledge that the Mother singled out in her Agenda as essential to making the Supermind knowable. When the Mother wrote in her Agenda of the Supermind being intelligible through ‘Number, Planets and Principles’, she was referring of course to the ancient language of cosmology. But today, those of us who have bothered to study Plato and Pythagoras and appreciate how PNB has raised this sublime knowledge of measure to the level of a non-speculative Supramental empiricism, are considered by Lester and her cronies to be ‘fundamentalists’ and outside the bounds of Aurobindonian orthodoxy. It should also be noted that Number theory, while important as the Mother suggested, does not constitute the whole of PNB’s work as Lester tries to imply. Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet is the most prolific and widely published author on the subject of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the world today. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Rig Veda and has published 16 books and hundreds of articles on Yoga, Myth, Time, Cosmology, Geo-politics, Sacred Architecture and the Vedic scriptures, many of which have been carried in India’s most prestigious newspapers and journals. She has been a keynote speaker at conferences around the world and also at a number of Indian national conferences on Vedic Culture and Cosmology, most recently the 2010 First National Conference on Panchanga Ganitam, sponsored by the Hindu Dharma Archarya Sabha. This is hardly the CV of a fundamentalist as Lester would have us believe. For Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s full curriculum vitae see: http://patrizianorellibachelet.com/TNWblog/?page_id=42

⁴ The Heehs Betrayal: In an attempt to defend the shoddy scholarship behind The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, Peter Heehs excuses himself from what should have been the only genuine concern of his biographical research by claiming that the revelation of Sri Aurobindo as the 9^th Avatar of Vedic tradition was a distracting hagiographic idealization in which he had no real interest.

‘…What about the assertion that Aurobindo was an avatar? I can’t say that the question interests me very much. Aurobindo never claimed the distinction for himself, and I don’t think anyone alive is in a position to say one way or the other…’ (Peter Heehs, from the Columbia website)

For persons of knowledge, the arrogance of this statement is simply breathtaking. Unfortunately it reflects a long standing attitude of the Auroville Brahmin who claim to ‘adore Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’ while simultaneously suppressing their work. It is as if the Vedic tradition of the Avatar is meaningless, even though it is sanctified by the Gita in Sri Krishna’s own words, and Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s as well. Moreover, Heehs’ contention that no one alive today is in a position to say one way or another belies an embarrassing lack of research on his part or, more likely, a calculated decision to ignore the volumes of objective proofs that have been published by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet and accepted as part of the permanent record of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives; an organization which lists Heehs as one of its founding members.

Given the voluminous and non-speculative proofs of Sri Aurobindo’s Avataric credentials on file in the Ashram Archives and Heehs ready access to this material, his only reason for making such a disingenuous statement is that he, like his cronies in Auroville, know that the Supramental proofs of Sri Aurobindo’s avatarhood also include the irrefutable credentials of the Third in the line as well as the details of Sri Aurobindo’s rebirth as the Fourth. Moreover, they know that any acknowledgement of these objective proofs would mean an immediate end to the rule of orthodoxy and its stultifying dogma that has reduced this most important spiritual work of the age to an arrogant, fundamentalist and elitist cult.

It is as if a cadre of hard line Tibetan Buddhist fundamentalists had taken over the Potala Palace and refused to acknowledge the rebirth of the next Dalai Lama so they could continue to indulge their self-important pretentions as the unchallenged leaders of their faith.

It is clearly time for this ignorance and hypocrisy to come to an end. For a detailed introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s Avataric credentials, see: http://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2011/06/sathya-sai-baba-counterfeit-avatar.html
⁵ Census: - Auroville population June 2011 - http://www.auroville.org/society/av_population.htm

Heliocentricity and a Return to Ancient Truths

2011-07-30T20:53:00.000-07:00

Copernicus's picture of our solar system, 1530 CE.

A friend of mine recently passed along a fascinating article called, 'The Day the Earth Stood Still: Galileo and the secrets of Hermeticism' by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, authors of The Forbidden Universe - The Occult Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God.

I have yet to read the book, but I highly recommend the article. It is a good reminder not only of how wrong our collective agreements about our world and our existence can be, but also a reminder of how difficult it is to introduce truth into a field of ignorance. On top of that, it points to the ancient wisdom that still awaits restoration and new applications so that we might raise our collective game to new heights. I do not know if in the book Picknett and Prince have traced Hermeticism back to the ancient Vedic civilization which was seemingly well aware of the Sun's centrality and of the parallels between the macro and the microcosmos ('as above, so below'). If not, they have some more digging to do.

INDIA and the New Cosmology

2011-07-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

An Analysis of Critical Present Events
in the Light of Gnosis

by Robert E. Wilkinson

Introduction:

‘The times are truly potent with an energy never before felt. Truly, the time has come for really enormously significant changes… The Earth stands on the brink. The nuclear play-out is upon us. Her most dire moment has begun.’ Thea, [vishaalstudygroup], Subcontinental Issues, December, 2007.

_____________________________________

‘Before dying, falsehood rises in full swing. Still people understand only the lesson of Catastrophe. Will it have to come before they open their eyes to the truth? I ask an effort from all so that it has not to be. It is only the truth that can save us; truth in words, truth in action, truth in will, truth in feelings. It is a choice between serving the truth or being destroyed.’ A message issued by the Mother on 26 November, 1972, just before a major cyclone hit Pondicherry on 5.12.1972.

Thea (Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet) is one of the world’s most prescient seers. Over the last forty years she has produced a body of knowledge unequalled in its scope and specificity and thoroughly grounded in a non-speculative and verifiable cosmology. The evolutionary knowledge she has given out is the product of that most coveted and long sought ‘philosopher’s stone’ that unites the principles of Time and Space in a cosmological model which reveals the primacy of certain eternal and purposeful patterns. With this ‘key of knowledge’ man can, at long last, rise above mere belief and gain a direct experience of the Supreme acting within the physical manifestation. One of the fruits of this ‘Divine Seeing’ or Gnosis is the ability to observe the unfolding of present events within an objective cosmological framework. This provides a back-ground of what might be described as ‘Higher Patterns of Destiny’ within which certain evolutionary objectives are played out on the global stage. Clearly this is a farsighted consciousness with access to the unfolding of future events but not so distant that we cannot observe the super-logic behind what is happening in the present to bring these evolutionary necessities into a meaningful focus. It is only through an integral synthesis of this kind that we are able to under-stand the troubling events that are pushing our planet to the brink of catastrophe.

For the Seer, the key and ‘centre’ of this integral vision is INDIA that plays a unique role in the world as an Avatar of Nations. She is the one country that can lead the earth to peace and a new world order. But in order to accomplish this goal India must first be made whole and the present artificial divisions of her sacred landmass must be erased so that she may fulfil her dharma and uplift the world. The most troubling impediment to India’s wholeness is the country of Pakistan which was carved out of India in 1947 as an independent Muslim state and which has been at war with her mother country ever since. The growing instability of this nuclear-armed nation represents the greatest threat to world peace that has ever existed. With the escalating violence and chaos in Pakistan, chances of Al-Qaeda, Taliban or other Muslim extremists obtaining a nuclear weapon grow stronger every day. It is increasingly evident that Pakistan, not the Middle East, is the stage where the long feared nuclear showdown is destined to occur. Thea confirms this view, saying: ‘The Earth stands on the brink. The nuclear play-out is upon us. Her most dire moment has begun.’

What most do not know is that this critical situation has been foreseen and discussed in its particulars since 1947 by India’s greatest seers, Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Thea. Their comments and predictions follow the same pattern as the order and scope of their written works; Sri Aurobindo provides the broad evolutionary overview, the Mother’s Agendas reveal what she heard and saw on the occult planes with her outstanding capacity to measure the Infinite and the Eternal. But it isn’t until the third level and Thea’s work that we are given the precise details of this situation because here the action is observed from the most intimate dimension the human consciousness can experience, the 'centre' or individual Soul. It is from this central ‘Point’ that one acquires the ability to ‘see’ the perfect control in the unfolding of events that accompany the Supramental Creation.

‘The best way to describe my 'prophetic tendencies' is by the word Super-logic…it is always through a process of INTEGRATION…

‘There can be no pretence in these gnostic matters. One cannot IMAGINE this or that. I let the play of circumstances guide me, but poised CENTRALLY, and from that position an integration becomes possible…

‘Therefore, before I draw a conclusion regarding an observation I have to have it confirmed variously. Imagination has no role here. When it is the Supermind at work and operations are carried forward by the Supramental Shakti, TRUTH IS THE FOUNDATION...

‘It is fundamental to note the difference between the known predictive arts and the Gnostic Circle. The latter can best be described, as I have often done, as a sort of SUPER-LOGIC. This would be an attribute that the Mind of Light, of Sri Aurobindo’s yogic lexicon, makes possible. It is far from prediction or even prophesy. This is because the seeing depends on interrelatedness, oneness, integration of the parts within the whole. And more. It is the parts among themselves, and then as a whole to the Centre. The latter holds the key to the ability: without that Centre established in one’s being this Super-Logic cannot come about because the integration of the Being and the Becoming is lacking and cannot take place.’

Thea, Private correspondence,
More on the GC and World Events, October, 2008.

In the following pages we will present an analysis of certain critical issues brought to light in a selection of quotations from the collected works of Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Thea. The observations of these unique seers surpass all others given their ability to see into the more occult dimensions of what is presently taking place between India and Pakistan. Through the use of an ‘Indo-centric Cosmology’ we are able to observe each participant and event in its proper context and evaluate the unfolding of seemingly catastrophic circumstances from a height that confers an optimistic evolutionary vision.

On India

‘…God always keeps for himself a chosen country in which the higher knowledge is through all chances and dangers, by the few or the many, continually preserved, and for the present, in this Chaturyuga at least, that country is India’. Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, September.

The Mother seated in front of the spiritual map of India on 21 February 1952

‘INDIA is a divinely chosen country with a unique spiritual heritage. She is not the earth, rivers and mountains, nor simply the collective name for the inhabitants of this land. India is a living being, conscious of her mission in the world and waiting for the exterior means of its manifestation… India alone can lead the earth to peace and a new world order.’ The Mother: Words of the Mother.

‘Mother India is not a piece of earth; She is a Power, a Godhead, for all nations have such a Devi supporting their separate existence and keeping it in being. Such beings are as real and more permanently real than the men they influence but they belong to a higher plane, are part of the cosmic consciousness and being and act here on earth by shaping the human consciousness on which they exercise their influence. It is natural for man who sees only his own consciousness individual, national or racial at work and does not see what works upon it and shapes it, to think that all is created by him and there is nothing cosmic and greater behind it.’ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 1946.

‘India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an Anglicised Oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the Occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma. We do not belong to the past dawns but to the noons of the future.’ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita.

‘The end of a stage of evolution is usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution.’ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: The Process of Evolution, September.

‘It is clear that the earth's many latent diseases must come out in the open and find a focus somewhere, as an abscess is the focal point for the disease of the body, our earth body… There is but one place in the world where the issue is being played out really and symbolically – that is India. That is where, therefore, the disease of the earth must be focused. … When Pakistan and China attacked India [in 1965], I had a sort of very clear intuition that the conflict, if there is to be one, that must decide the fate of the civilisation, can only be played out in India... It is in the order of things that the last Asura should come and die at the feet of the Mother. The issue isn't being played out anywhere else.’ The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda, July, 1967.

‘The truth of the old Satya that is dead was not different from the Truth of the new Satya that is to be born, for it is Truth that restores itself always and persists. In India, the chosen land, it is preserved; in the soul of India it sleeps, expectant of that soul’s awakening, the soul of India leonine, luminous, locked in the closed petals of the ancient lotus of strength and wisdom, not in her weak, sordid, transient and miserable externals. India alone can build the future of mankind; in India alone can the effective Avatar appear to the nations. And until He appears, it is for India to gather herself up out of her dust and degradation, — symbol of the shattered Satyayuga — commune with her soul by Yoga and to know her past and her future.’ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human.

The Capricorn Hieroglyph

In the preceding pages we have it on the very highest authority that India is a Power, a Cosmic Godhead, destined to uplift the whole world. Pronouncements such as these can only come from individuals with an impeccable knowledge and realisation of the planes of Truth Consciousness. Those who possess this knowledge and vision are also aware that the laws and principles seen on that plane of Truth have exact physical correspondences and equivalencies on the earth. ‘As Above, So Below’ proclaims the sage; the principles of order and harmony which exist on the higher spiritual planes may also be found in the material domain. These eternal principles manifest first as Cosmic and Planetary harmonies before reaching a highly specific individuation in the physical. And it is through these laws of correspondence and equivalence that one can obtain OBJECTIVE evidence and confirmation of India’s unique role. This is the very essence of the Cosmological principles expressed in the Rig Veda.[1]

‘The whole earth and everything it contains is a kind of concentration, a condensation of something which exists in other worlds invisible to the material eye. Each thing manifest here has its principle, idea or essence somewhere in the subtler regions.’ The Mother

‘The features of the Capricorn Hieroglyph superimposed upon the geography of India can only be understood properly by those who know exactly what Capricorn indicates in the harmony of the twelve zodiacal signs. Astrologers from the most ancient times have unanimously considered Capricorn to be India’s ruling sign. But no one to my knowledge, had ever seen that this hieroglyph actually delineates India’s physical boundaries. But of course it is an India whole and intact, as she was before the devastation of Partition. This too was a profound verification: India’s true form is delineated by the hieroglyph of the zodiacal sign that is her ruler. That glyph in ancient tradition is called ‘the name of God’, this I knew; but I also knew that everything that I had been seeing concerning India’s central position as the Earth’s Soul is contained in the inner and esoteric experience of Capricorn. In that secret dimension its real mystery was disclosed, its deepest truths… and this could only be understood by someone initiated into the secrets of Capricorn. When this ‘sign’ had been given to me it was as though a seal and sanction had been set upon this work and that Seal would be the everlasting ‘philosopher’s stone’ as it were. With it I would always have an element of objective knowledge to verify what my yogic experiences were revealing.’ Thea, The Capricorn Factor – India’s Lost Measure and its significance for the world, October, 1987.

The New Way, Volume I, p. 154
Thea, Æon Books, 1981

It must be understood that the overlay of the zodiacal sign Capricorn on the Indian land-mass is not a matter of coincidence or simply an ‘imposed’ correspondence. This astonishing fact becomes self-evident by overlaying the ‘map’ of the heavens upon the earth. With the 360 degree zodiac laid on the globe at the zero point of the Greenwich meridian, we will observe that the sign Capricorn starts exactly where the Indian landmass begins.

(Ibid)

The sign's 30 degrees begin at 60/61 degrees east and continue to the mouth of the Ganges in the Bay of Bengal. The ‘tail’ of the sign is carried over to encompass Burma, and from there swings back toward the central body. Through these cosmo-geographical correspondences we discover that India IS the sign Capricorn. In fact, one can readily ‘see’ that the ancient hieroglyph forms an exact overlay of the Indian subcontinent. Its perfect alignment with this cardinal point identifies India as the ‘Soul of the Earth’ and thus the point of the clearest spiritual vision. What is revealed in these correspondences is an earthly expression of an eternal Divine principle.

The New Way, Volume II,
Appendix VII, facing p. 376
Thea, Æon Books, 1981

In the above map of the world with the addition of the zodiac (360 degrees) laid across the longitude and latitude coordinates starting at Greenwich, India’s Capricorn rulership has been confirmed in both directions. To demonstrate how accurate the geo-cosmology of the New Way is, we note that India falls in the sign Capricorn both in longitude (horizontal) and latitude (vertical) measurements.

‘The Supramental Yoga foresees the possibility of a material union with the Divine. It is the union of the “Earth” of the Veda with the divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas hardly recognise the possibility of a material union with the Divine.’ Sri Aurobindo, Letter to the Mother, The Mother’s Collected Works, 1915.

‘When a new Age dawns, as Sri Aurobindo announced and cosmology confirms, it means that we have entered a transitional period and a new language must evolve to express more adequately the contemporary condition and demands. We know that the Vedic and Puranic Gods and Goddesses are expressions of cosmic energies. We must also realise that the cosmos is impersonal. Everything we know, every crystallisation of form is that same Energy, however we wish to label it. Indeed, “Truth (that Energy) is one, the wise know it by many names.” Therefore, the new cosmology is simply a tool for drawing aside the veils covering that truth and rediscovering the original Pulse of the civilisation as the unifying factor of a common destiny.’ Thea, The Burden of a Destiny, December, 2000.

‘The cosmological model used in this exposition is the same known in ancient Vedic times. Hence so much importance was given then, as we note from the Hymns and Scriptures that have been handed down, to the phenomenon of the seasons, the measure of the Day and of the Year. Particularly revered was the shortest day of the year, or the beginning of the Winter Solstice, Capricorn (Makar). A scrutiny of the Shastras discloses various formulae specifically for determining this special point in time. We can safely say that the ancient Rishi was obsessed with Time, for Time regulates these movements which find their perfect harmony in the figure of the Year. Thus the sacrifice is known to be experienced in twelve stages, culminating in the Tenth, which is the 10th month, Capricorn, the period of the victory of the Aryan Warrior. Capricorn from most ancient times has been considered by all schools of astrology to rule India. It is this same tenth-month victory that we celebrate this year, 1999, as the culmination of the centenary Navaratri. In the Map we see that the hieroglyph of the tenth (month) zodiacal sign whose origin is so ancient that it is lost in the mists of time, can be accurately superimposed on the body of Akhand Bharat. This superimposed symbol is the seal of the Supreme.’ Thea, The Nine Nights of Durga – the destiny of India across the century in a new Cosmological Paradigm. November, 1999.

‘In other words, it is when the nine-months’ sacrifice is prolonged through the tenth, it is when the Navagwas become the ten Dashagwas by the seven-headed thought of Ayasya, the tenth Rishi, that the Sun is found… but what is meant by the figure of the months? For it now becomes clear that it is a figure, a parable; the year is symbolic, the months are symbolic. It is in the revolution of the year that the recovery of the lost Sun and the lost cows is effected, for we have the explicit statement in X.62-2… “by the truth, in the revolution of the year, they broke Vala”…’

‘The expression in the hymns, daso maso ataran, indicates that there was some difficulty in getting through the full period of ten months. It is during this period apparently that the sons of darkness had the power to assail the sacrifice; for it is indicated that it is only by the confirming of the thought which conquers Swar, the solar world, that the Rishis are able to get through the ten months…’

‘I hold for you in the waters the thought that wins possession of heaven by which the Navagwas [nine] passed through the ten months…’ (V.45-11)

‘This victory is won in twelve periods of the upward journey, represented by the revolution of the twelve months of the sacrificial year, the periods corresponding to the successive dawns of a wider and wider truth, until the tenth month secures the victory…What may be the precise significance of the nine rays and the ten is a more difficult question which we are not yet in a position to solve.’ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, 1915.

The Gunas

The three qualitative modes of Nature or ‘Gunas’ are inextricably intertwined in all cosmic existence. A clear understanding of these triadic energy flows – Rajas, Sattwa, and Tamas, is essential in knowing the truth of things, their essence, law, and operation. It is the very basis of the ‘Divine Maya’ or measure which Sri Aurobindo described as, ‘…a comprehending and containing consciousness capable of embracing, measuring and limiting and therefore formative; it is that which outlines, measures out, moulds forms in the formless, psychologises and seems to make knowable the Unknowable, geometrises and seems to make measurable the Limitless.’

‘Here we can see that India’s geographical mass is delineated by the Capricorn hieroglyph which contains the three “gunas” or qualities of energy flow. We can observe that Pakistan falls within the area covered by the Rajas guna, the Kshatriya or warrior element, consequently this energy flow will be its sole expression. It is therefore understandable that Pakistan has been almost exclusively under the rule of the military from the time of its inception.’ Thea, The Vishaal Newsletter, The New Dawn of 1989, December, 1989.

The Nine Nights of Durga
Thea, Æon Books
November 17, 1999, p. 30.

‘The geography of the nation is a visual expression of Bharat Mata. The Map of India with the Capricorn hieroglyph is the measure. Moreover the symbol is divided into three parts, each of which is an expression of one of the triadic modes of the Mother, the gunas: Rajas, Sattwa and Tamas; or else Creation, Preservation, and Destruction (dissolution).

‘In India’s present state, the gunas are not a threefold harmony. There are gaps, pieces cut away. Similarly, in the several independent nations that have been carved out of Indian soil in this century, we witness an imbalance wherein only one of the gunas exists. In the case of Pakistan, being comprised solely of Rajas can explain the nation’s compulsive reliance on the military solution. In its present incomplete form, Pakistan cannot be expected to house a true democracy. Forces will consistently conspire to break up any formula that demands a fullness the geo-cosmology of that area does not contain. Similarly with Bangladesh. There it is Tamas and not Rajas the predominant mode. The destructive power of nature is often experienced in this armpit of the nation in her full and unmitigated form. Tamas/Destruction rules this area, so accurately described by Sri Aurobindo in a letter to his brother in the early part of this century.

‘The time must inevitably come when the symbol is made complete, integrated, harmonised.’ Thea, The Nine Nights of Durga – the destiny of India across the century in a new Cosmological Paradigm. November, 1999.

‘You cannot separate what happens in any of the States covered by the Symbol–Map separate from one another. Particularly now when the showdown has come in what I have always predicted would happen, should what has been noted through the new cosmology be overlooked. Remember that I have always stated that the nuclear playout would be centred on India. Now more than ever this reveals itself to be true because Pakistan is a nuclear weapons state with more than 12 nuclear weapons [2] at its disposal, and with rockets ready to land them anywhere in India, north or south, at a moment’s notice. If Pakistan collapses or if militants take over (a real possibility with Al Qaeda headquarters lodged there), control of those deadly weapons falls into the hands of Islamic Militants.

‘The Rajas section of the Map-Symbol explains why Pakistan has taken the particular course that it has from the beginning of its coming to power. It is all RAJAS but seeking to act on its own, disconnected from the rest of its triune manifestation; which would be the rest of India. Similarly Bangladesh, but with the difference that it falls under the Tamas rule, hence it is less ‘intrusive’ we may say. Only when the three parts are rejoined can there be a resolution to the troubles the subcontinent faces.

‘The times are so significant …The Earth stands on the brink. The nuclear playout is upon us. Her most dire moment has begun.’ Thea, Subcontinental Issues, December, 2007.

‘K. S. Munshi, a Congress politician, was granted an audience with Sri Aurobindo, one of the few exceptions he made in the last years of his life.

‘…At the end of the interview, Munshi asked if there was anything Sri Aurobindo wanted to say. Immediately he asked, “When will India be reunited?” Taken aback, Munshi explained that he could not foresee it in his lifetime. Until 1947 he had worked for a united India. But he considered the partition to have been positive in so far as it allowed India and Pakistan to develop in their own separate ways. Sri Aurobindo insisted that Pakistan was “fraud, force and treachery”, and declared: “India will be reunited. I see it clearly.” After an exchange of views on local politics, Munshi asked, “When are you coming out of Pondicherry?” Sri Aurobindo replied: “I cannot say. I must first complete my work here.”

‘This was in July of 1950. Today we witness that same fraud and treachery. It is the history of Pakistan from the beginning of its existence. But now He has “come out” of retirement. 26/11 marked that point in the trajectory of his work which extends from 1872 to today.’ Thea, Sri Aurobindo on Pakistan, December, 2008.

‘India is free, but she has not achieved unity, only a fissured and broken freedom... The whole communal division into Hindu and Muslim seems to have hardened into the figure of a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that the Congress and the Nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled, or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled; civil strife may remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest. The partition of the country must go...For without it the destiny of India might be seriously impaired and frustrated. That must not be.’ Message of Sri Aurobindo on the occasion of India’s Independence, 15th of August, 1947.

‘The destiny of India is guided by a power that descends directly from the world of the Truth-Consciousness; but unless the nation recognises this, it can only respond to a leadership of a lesser force and suffer the ensuing consequences.’ Thea, The New Way, 1981.

Link to the next sections of this article OR
Download the entire book as PDF file

Part II
The ‘Eye of Shiva’
Auroville and the Mother’s Temple

Part III
The Mother’s Inner Chamber
Skambha & ÆON Centre of Cosmology
The Veda

Part IV
Calendar Reform
The Gathering Storm

Part V
India’s Irrepressible Renaissance

Part VI
Notes & References

[1] Cosmology in Rigveda — the Third Premise, Thea. This article was published in 'The Hindu', 9 July, 2002 in response to article by David Frawley & Michael Witzel. http://www.vediccosmology.com/Rigvedacos1.html

[2] The latest figure is 50 to 100. Pakistan is presently in the process of augmenting its nuclear arsenal. (Sept. 2009)

Thea, Vedic Mathematics & the Geometry of Time

2011-07-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

Recently a woman from Auroville made an inquiry to me about Vedic Mathematics (among other things). She wrote:

'I have done a Vedic math work shop recently and wondering you or may be Thea Has any knowledge about this subject and whether it was really used during vedic period. If so how?'

I will post below my own response, and then Thea's clarification on these matters.

Lori: As far as your Vedic math question. Thea recognizes that the 9/0 number system is thoroughly Vedic, and that this number system and hence Vedic math functions 'circularly' (within the structure, geometry and laws of the circle) not linearly. Other than that recognition, I do not think she has much to say about calculating mathematical sums based on Vedic mathematic formulas. Her focus is more on concept of the 360 degree Vedic Year (i.e. the Vedic sacrifice), which is an eternal measure, as is the Earth's day, as is the 25,920 year Precession of the Equinoxes. She is attempting to reacquaint Indians and the world with the knowledge that these eternal cyclical 'measures', are wombs of time, gestating/evolving our Self-Fulfillment, hour by hour, month by month, year by year, and age by age. With this knowledge the individual and collective can begin to properly orient within the various cycles, and to see that evolution unfolds with a certain geometric/harmonic precision. When the mind begins to witness this 'Geometry of Time', it begins to comprehend the FULLY integral and integrating power of the Supermind. Without such comprehension, all talk of Supermind, Integral Yoga, and Evolutionary Spirituality remains quite hollow.

How can deep can any study of the Evolution of consciousness or of the Supramental and Integral nature of reality go if the students are ignorant of, or not including the very real cycles of Time that birth us, sustain us, and orchestrate our evolution? When the Vedic seers divided the 360 degree circle of Time and Space into four quadrants and 12 months they knew well that they physical geometries of our journey in Time and Space were in no way separate from our Self-Knowledge and Self-Fulfillment. They knew that Time is the dynamic nature of the Self, and that true Self-Realisation must include realisation of how our evolution unfolds not randomly but consciously in geometrical patterns and symmetries that only reveal themselves in terms of the Year and other 360 degree cycles of time.

This is the Vedic knowledge that has been LONG forgotten, and is an epic blind spot in most people's Self-awareness/Self-Knowledge. The Zodiac is an ancient map of the evolution of our consciousness in Time and Space, yet few are prepared to recognize it as such.

The Secret of the Veda [PDF] by Sri Aurobindo helps to give readers an appreciation for the forgotten knowledge of the Vedic seers and a sense of how misunderstood the Veda is in our modern times. But I did not fully appreciate that book until I had read Thea's The Gnostic Circle and The New Way, Vol. 1 & 2 ... as well as The Magical Carousel.

Thea: Lori, I have been deeply involved in the Vedic Mathematics issue, before I came to the Mother and India. I got a copy of the original edition of the book (still with me), and I thought it was just extraordinary. Math is not my field so I cannot comment on that aspect. It was THE CONCEPT. Of course what moved me was the Vedic approach to Number, I suppose.

To be brief, when the Initiation took me to the Mother I brought that book with me. My son was enrolled in the Ashram School. I was convinced that math would be taught in this manner, on the basis of this book and method. NOT AT ALL. I realised no one in the Ashram School new of the book; what was taught was conventional all the way, on many fronts. So, I wrote to the Mother and sent her the book with my comments on how surprised I was to find that this was not taught or used in the Ashram School. On her part she passed on my letter and the book to the then School registrar. What followed was really interesting.

Kireet Joshi was the registrar. He was thrilled at receiving the book and told me the fascinating story that its acharya author had visited his village in Gujarat when he was 9 years old and spoke to the people about Vedic Math, etc. He never forgot it, but also he never came into contact with the author again. And here it was plopped into his lap - FROM THE WEST. I don't know how far the matter went then but I feel very, very certain that having brought the Mother the Book opened the channelled for Vedic Mathematics in India to come out from under thick covers. It was almost totally ignored.

I was passionate about the subject. The aphorisms in the book are not from the ancient Veda - for which the author is often criticised. But those who criticise are ignorant. It is the same system or concept that is used, revealing again the eternal nature of the Knowledge. It is like my work with the Veda today. You are grounded in that CONSCIOUSNESS, and then you can 'update', as I have done.

Please send this letter to X. I wish her well in her Vedic studies; it is still a subject dear to me. Thea

The 9, the 0, the Unified Multiplicity and the Divine Mother

Time as a Power (Not an Enemy) of the Self

A Response to Sameer Thakkar’s ‘Max-Muller Syndrome: Distorting Hinduism’

2011-07-02T21:00:00.000-07:00

by Robert E Wilkinson
2 July 2011

Debate and discussion of spiritual and esoteric philosophy is a time honored and established tradition in India and throughout the world. Its goal is to question, dispute, and continually challenge established dogma in order to arrive at a greater, more current, and integral truth. As someone who regularly participates in these debates and discussions I am used to the rough and tumble dialogue that arises from people with strongly held opinions and beliefs, but Sameer Thakkar's article goes beyond the bounds of intelligent discourse into fear mongering, misrepresentation, and lies. Instead of responding to issues of knowledge made in my original article, Sathya Sai Baba: the Counterfeit Avatar, Thakkar has introduced passages from my older articles, quoted completely out of context, in order to make Thea (Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet) and not me, the true focus of his attack. Why he would wish to do this becomes evident as we examine his claims.

Beginning with the title of his article, ‘The Max-Muller Syndrome: Distorting Hinduism’ Thakkar seeks to invoke the spectre of a colonial Christian missionary agent bent on the abuse and distortion of the Hindu religion. But curiously he makes no mention of Max Muller in his article. He immediately shifts his attention to a woman, Wendy Doniger, the controversial writer and Indologist who, according to Thakkar, is out to distort and demean the Hindu scriptures. He compares Ms. Doniger’s scholarly work to that of Christian missionaries and pseudo-mystics who wish to ‘exploit the tolerance of Hindus, deceive, manipulate, instill inferiority complexes, psychological slavery, hate, and the abuse of Hindu literature’. His attempts to cultivate an attitude of fear and distrust of foreigners was at first confusing but in the pages that followed It becomes clear that his intention is to associate in his reader’s mind Doniger’s unspeakable treason to Hinduism with another foreign woman, Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet who he also wishes to demonize. While this may serve to inflame his readers, it is a specious comparison made by someone with no appreciation of the profound differences in consciousness that distinguish a scholar from a sage, let alone the quality of their work. But in either case Thakker, is plainly threatened by ideas and interpretations that run counter to his own rigid dogma and has an abhorrent distrust of foreigners and women in particular especially those in positions of authority.

Contrary to Thakkar’s backward beliefs, Hinduism is not a rigid monolithic system. It is a multi-faceted, constantly evolving, many staged quest of the human spirit seeking new and more complete aspects of the Divine consciousness. ‘It rejects nothing’, said Sri Aurobindo, ‘but insists on testing and experiencing everything and when tested and experienced turning it to the soul’s uses.’ This process is the very heart of Yoga and an indispensable necessity of the evolution. Indeed the whole edifice of Hinduism was built on the sacrifice, testing, realization, and experience of impeccable souls like Shankara, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Paramahansa Yogananda, Ram Chandra and more recently Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Thea. Each of these great realizers have produced numerous volumes of written works describing their discoveries and new application of their knowledge. What, we might ask, has Sameer Thakkar produced?

It is clear however, especially with regard to Vedic knowledge, that there is more to be done. The evolution continues and there are many more discoveries to be made, as Sri Aurobindo explains:

‘…because we do not understand the Vedas three-fourths of the Upanishads are a sealed book to us. Even of the little we think we can understand, much has been insecurely grasped and superficially comprehended.... For want of this key profound scholars have fumbled and for want of this guidance great thinkers gone astray.’ Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth

For those of us who have bothered to study Thea’s works on the Veda and applied her incomparable knowledge to our own lived experience, it becomes self-evident that her cosmological discoveries will be the crown jewel of future spiritual realizations. She has unveiled that ‘Key’ to the mysteries of the Veda and opened the door to its greatest treasures. [Link to written works of Thea] Because of this she speaks with the same confident authority and power as Swami Vivekananda did when he was challenged by a Madras pundit objecting to something he said that went beyond the teachings of Shankara. Vivekananda shot back, saying to the pundit, ‘Shankara does not say so, but I, Vivekananda say so’. Sri Aurobindo later pointed out that, ‘…what to the ordinary eye may seem as the Himalaya of egotism is not what it seems. It is the truth of Vivekananda’s spiritual experience, and the attitude of the fighter who as the representative of something great cannot allow himself to be put down or belittled.’

Religious fundamentalists like Sameer Thakkar who live in fear and suspicion, nursing old hatreds and prejudice find this kind of authority both threatening and infuriating. They believe that by attacking a Sage with accusations and ridicule they can undermine their authority and somehow elevate themselves. Producing nothing of their own, they find a kind of perverse power in the suppression, distortion and destruction of the achievements of others. Over the years I have come to think of these kinds of people as living reflections of our own darkness and negativity to be given no quarter and no basis for existence. Like the legendary vampires they hide in the shadows where they can wreak their havoc unobserved, but drag them out into the light of day and they will sputter and spit and burst into flames.

Moving on to Thakkar’s charges that my articles constitute a battery of assault on Lord Buddha, Sathya Sai Baba, Ken Wilber, Deepak Chopra, and David Frawley, it is evident from his comments that he has not bothered to read any of them. What we see instead throughout Thakkar’s article are unfounded accusations and innuendos that seek to discredit anything I might write and excusing anyone from actually reading it. But for those who insist on facts and want to make up their own minds about Thakkar’s veracity, here are the links to the articles on Deepak Chopra, Sathya Sai Baba, and David Frawley. Read them and draw your own conclusions. I will be happy to respond to any serious questions about their knowledge content. Contrary to Thakkar’s accusation I have written nothing that can be construed as an attack on the Buddha and my conversations with Ken Wilber took place on the pages of his own magazine, ‘Quest’. It was hardly an assault but rather a discussion of Wilber’s misunderstanding of Sri Aurobindo and his epochal work.

[See: The Error of the Buddha
Sathya Sai Baba: the Counterfeit Avatar
Reply to David Frawley’s “Call for the Intellectual Kshatriya”]

Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of Thakkar’s limited knowledge is his treatment of a passage from one of my postings about the objective cosmic credentials of the Avatars. His complete lack of understanding of what was written about Time and Number is a perfect example of how certain higher truths can appear unintelligible to the uninitiated. Most scholars familiar with the writings of Plato and Pythagoras are aware of their profound discoveries in Number theory. ‘Numbers’, said Plato, ‘are the highest degree of knowledge’. Pythagoras went a step further saying that ‘Numbers constitute the true nature of things and set a limit to the limitless’. Thakkar, on the other hand, ridicules this knowledge as ‘exotic magic formulas of numbers, contrived theories and fancy terminologies ripped off from Sri Aurobindo’s work, designed to make his [rw’s] theories look intelligent’, and he makes this appalling statement with unabashed authority. He appears to have no understanding whatever of the deeper function of number and their relation to the very structure of creation. Like Pythagoras and Plato before them, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother both acknowledged the symbol powers of Number and their relation to Sacred Geometry and Vedic Architecture. The basis of their Supramental Formula; the numbers 3-6-9, were also discussed by the scientific genius Nicola Tesla who once wrote, ‘If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.’

When you weigh the wisdom of Plato, Pythagoras, Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Nicola Tesla against Thakkar’s statement that the numbers 9-6-3 are ‘nothing but an absurd formulae to predict the nature of the inconceivable Brahman’, you may begin to understand the depths of his ignorance. He has been through no initiation, engaged in no practice of yoga and yet he considers himself a credible authority equal to the greatest souls in human history.

Throughout the pages of his article Sameer Thakkar has viciously attacked and slandered Ms. Norelli-Bachelet and her work. I will not address his comments as she is quite capable of responding to this and has done so herself. Her reply may be found on: http://circumsolatious.blogspot.com.

Finally I would like to comment on Mr. Thakkar’s unsupported and erroneous claims about Sai Baba’s age and his reputed prediction of his own death. Any astrologer worthy of the name can look at Sai Baba’s true horoscope based on the date of birth in his original school records (October 4^th, 1929) and see the correspondences to his actual life. In astrology this process is known as ‘rectification’. In his true horoscope Baba had the planet Saturn at 24 degrees Sagittarius, a placement that indicates a problem with the bones of the hip and thigh, the part of the body ruled by Sagittarius. It is well known that Baba had a serious hip injury on August 9, 1988 when he slipped on the soap in his bathroom. On that day, the transiting planets Saturn and Uranus were both conjunct Baba’s natal Saturn, an event that only happens once every 28 and 84 years respectively. [Link to chart 1] On June 4th, 2003 Baba fell in his bathroom once again this time breaking his hip in three places and requiring a surgical hip replacement. Once again, transiting Saturn and the progressed position of Uranus were in a malefic aspect to his Natal Saturn indicating further problems with the bones and hip. [Link to chart 2] When you can see these kinds of events (not one but both) within the context of measurable astrological transits, there can be no question that October 4^th, 1929 was Baba’s actual birthday. You see none of these indications in a chart dated November 23, 1926. In addition you can also see the deaths of Baba’s siblings in the October chart as well as his own death in 2011 when Pluto, the planet of Death progressed into an exact conjunction with his natal Sun. [Link to chart 3] Thakkar will no doubt dismiss this as simply another contrived theory but it clearly and scientifically establishes Sai Baba’s age at 81 instead of 85 and refutes the mind-boggling claim in a Chakra News article that his 85 solar years map out at 96 lunar years fulfilling Baba’s prediction of his own death.

I could go on and on pointing out the errors and inconsistencies in Mr. Thakkar’s article but I believe that I have given his readers more than enough information to expose his hidden agenda and counter his lies and misrepresentations. His article does not rise to the level of even mediocre scholarship. It is rather a fundamentalist tantrum, a disrespectful rant, full of denial, ignorant opinions, faulty logic, and unexamined prejudices. He offers no knowledge, no facts, no clarity yet he expects his readers to accept him as a credible scholar. This evidently is what now passes for the new level of philosophical spiritual discourse. When opinion is taken for wisdom and sensationalism poses as scholarship, when religious pathology becomes the accepted norm, and psychological projection is welcomed as objectivity, when slander and ridicule become the new standard of journalistic integrity, you may know without the slightest doubt that a great reckoning is at hand.

Endnotes:

For those who may be unfamiliar with the controversy surrounding Sai Baba’s age I am including the relevant passages from my article, ‘Sathya Sai Baba: the Counterfeit Avatar’. A copy of his original school records may be found at: http://77.170.120.22/ex-baba/engels/articles/schoolrecord.html.

‘…After predicting that he would live for 96 years as his present avatar, Sai Baba died in April, 2011 at 81 years of age. This was the last of a mind boggling web of lies spun by Sai Baba to convince his followers that he was the living embodiment of Vishnu and the Avatar of the Age...'

'Sai Baba never missed an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. He took great delight at playing an Avatar, appropriating their sacred symbols such as Kalki’s White Horse and Shesha, the Aeonic serpent which he had made into a bed. But his most outrageous stunt by far was deceitfully insinuating himself into one of the most important events in Indian spiritual history. On 24 November, 1926, after a lifetime of yoga, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother sent word to their sadhaks asking them to assemble in the upper verandah of the Library House in their Ashram in Pondicherry to hear about something of supreme importance that had happened in the history of the Earth and Universe. On what was later to become known as ‘Victory Day’ or the day of Siddhi, Sri Aurobindo announced that Krishna, the Overmental Godhead had descended into the physical, meaning Sri Aurobindo himself. As the Mother explained, ‘…Krishna consented to descend into Sri Aurobindo’s body – to be FIXED there. Then I saw him – I saw him with my own eyes (inner eyes, of course), join himself to Sri Aurobindo’.

'With the integration of the Overmental consciousness begun by the 8th Avatar Krishna, Sri Aurobindo could now retire to his rooms and begin the establishment of the Supramental Consciousness-Force. This event marked the true beginning of his mission, the platform from where he could carry the evolution to greater heights. Sri Aurobindo’s Siddhi Day coincides with the close of the Age of Pisces and the beginning of the Aquarian Age that year. It was a victory for the whole world, because without it transpiring right on time, the Avatar could not have begun his transformative mission to bring down the Supermind. Upon learning of this momentous event many years later, Sai Baba changed the date of his birth from 4 October, 1929 to 23 November, 1926 and claimed that Sri Aurobindo was obviously referring to Baba who was supposedly born on the previous day (Nov. 23), and that he (Sri Aurobindo) had taken voluntary retirement after handing the reins over to the new God incarnate. While his followers continue to insist that November, 23, 1926 was Baba’s true birthday, a horoscope cast for 4 October, 1929, the birth date on Baba’s original school records, removes all doubt by indicating his passing in 2011 when Pluto, the planet of death, moved by progression into a conjunction with his natal Sun.’ [Link to chart]

An Interview with Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet regarding accusations that she is 'Distorting Hinduism'

2011-06-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

FROM AEON CENTRE OF COSMOLOGY
Tamil Nadu, South India
28 June 2011

At the beginning of June, IndiaCause and other blog sites, published Robert E. Wilkinson’s (RW) article Sathya Sai Baba – the Counterfeit Avatar. There was an enthusiastic response on all fronts – Sameer Thakkar’s article, The Max Muller Syndrome: Distorting Hinduism, among them. Mr. Thakkar (ST) has not restricted his critique to the article written by RW. Despite the fact that the yoga and work of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea) was not mentioned in RW’s article, ST has chosen to make her the central focus of his blog post.

In view of this development, we feel the person to address the issues he raises to be Thea herself. Certain aspects of the article were brought to her attention and we asked her to make a clarification point by point. We are happy to present excerpts of the interview to the general public.

***

ST writes that your student, Robert Wilkinson, has launched a bitter assault on all individuals and groups who have been well accepted as proponents of Hinduism. Obviously he is referring to RW’s recent posting ‘Sai Baba – the Counterfeit Avatar’. In India, ST writes, ‘mainstream Gurus support and respect one another – they promote Indian culture, Vedic wisdom and don’t hold personal grudges, whereas Robert has persistently over the years ‘attacked’ the Buddha, Sai Baba, Chopra, Frawley, Auroville people, etc. He asks his readers if this is how one would expect objective scholars to behave? What is your opinion on this?

The first response that comes to mind is that the author seems to start from the premise that one has no right to question attainments in the spiritual field. Though the philosophical/spiritual tradition of the subcontinent does not support this idea, the position is understandable since there has been no means to verify the attainments objectively. The layperson accepts them because one accepts the authority of the Godman in question. Realised souls recognise the attainments of others. It is not difficult to know what is genuine and what is not. For example, it is evident that the author of the article you mention is not writing from a position of knowledge in these matters – much less from the direct experience that can be attained through processes of Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo wrote that for some 2000 years no Indian has understood the Veda. But now we have Mr. Thakkar basically holding himself up as an authority on the Veda. Yet nothing of what he writes so authoritatively can stand up under the scrutiny of the direct experience and its resultant Knowledge. In fact, in what concerns my work, to which ST has made extensive references, he has not provided anything to contradict the new cosmology I have formulated other than to state time-worn clichés, none of which bear the stamp of that direct experience. And, I would add, when we are dealing with the ‘secret’ of the Veda, there is nothing in his long text that indicates he has touched that ‘secret’.

The next point to make is that from what I recall of Robert Wilkinson’s article, it was written on the basis of the accepted terms that can be applied in such situations. He raised the level of discourse to an analysis of the Baba in no way sensationalistic, if you will, but rather based on the teachings themselves and their relation to the next stage in the evolution of consciousness and its demands. This was a perfectly legitimate approach. It was called for because of the claims made by the Godman himself and those of his followers. However, ST’s criticisms of Wilkinson’s assessments seem to imply that to be ‘spiritual’ demands some sort of mental paralysis. Robert Wilkinson exercises his right to have opinions and share them with others, just as ST has the same right.

Having made my work the focus of his repost to Wilkinson’s article on Satya Sai Baba, it is clear that ST has a wider agenda. This complicates matters and makes it necessary to ‘clear the air’, so to speak, before any serious discussion on the issues raised can be held. I am pleased to deal with those criticisms point by point; but then we do have to ‘clear the air’. So let’s begin. I believe that in dealing with each point these ‘agendas’ will be exposed, and then a real and meaningful discussion can ensue.

According to ST, Robert distorts the meaning of Avatar to fit his own agenda, i.e., to advance the idea that you, Thea, have linked yourself with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and have descended to Earth with a special mission – to save the Sanatan Dharma.

There is hardly an individual in India who has understood the role the Vishnu Avatars play in the evolution of Vedic culture. I am probably the only one who has placed the appearances in the cosmological context – which is where they belong. In fact, the Line stands as the ‘axis’ of the new Indo-centric cosmology itself. That is perfectly as it should be: Reestablishment of the Dharma occurs as the Tradition has upheld for perhaps thousands of years – that is, centred on the Avatar’s coming which is precisely for that purpose. A scrutiny of my published works will prove the point amply.

If I have ‘linked’ myself to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother it is because that link is FACT and can hardly be ‘invented’. Nor has ST provided any proof to the contrary except denial; whereas, on page after page of my published works, in the course of formulating the new cosmology I have provided the factual proof of the linkage – not, as ST would have it, for some fanciful notion of self-glorification but because it forms a part of the indispensable cosmological formula. ST will have to do better than to rely simply on a strategy of denial without substantiation.

Destinies cannot be invented: they are fulfilled – or not. Yes, I have a specific destiny, like every other person. It is to resurrect, if you will, a long lost branch of higher knowledge within the context of our contemporary society – an updating, as I call it.

The understanding of the mechanism of the Appearances was lost many centuries ago. This too is understandable since thousands of years transpire between each descent. We have then only Myth to rely on to keep the Tradition alive. But as time moves on cobwebs accumulate which need to be cleared away. When we speak of a reestablishment of the Dharma, central to this activity is the correct understanding of the Vishnu Line since it is, as I hold, the backbone of Hinduism. Such being the case, it is to be expected that the target of distortion and obfuscation would be right there, at the heart of the culture. Therefore, anything that can shed light to dispel the darkness in so vital an area should be welcomed.

ST says you forget that when you add the numbers in the dates of birth of Sri Aurobindo (the 9), the Mother (the 6) and yourself (the 3), as found in The New Way, Volume 1, these dates in your formula are relative to the Christian calendar created in 4004 BC – this is not Vedic.

This is a most important point to discuss.

ST starts from a wrong premise and he builds his entire argument on this misunderstanding. But in bringing up this point with relation to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, he seems ignorant of the fact that they used ONLY the so-called Christian calendar in their Ashram. So, since he equates my work with some sort of anti-Hinduism – central to which is the calendar – he must also hold that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were anti-Hindu since they never used the Hindu Calendar for any purpose in their Ashram. The reason is simple enough to grasp. In no way could the Supramental Descent have been rendered factual, global and not speculative without the universal calendar in use today throughout the world. It is, after all, the official calendar of India.

But ST reveals another problem we face in dealing with criticisms such as his. He sees the operations of evolution as limited to a tiny framework, a very small slice of the process. He cannot perceive the CONTROL OF MAHAKAL over that evolutionary process, stretching across thousands of years. So, to those trapped in this limited box, the fact that the so-called Christian calendar is universally adopted stands somehow as a colonial imposition! And Hindus must resist the attempt to bring in Christianity through the back door by this means! But a consciousness of unity sees the Divine Hand throughout. After all, if the Dharma is sanatana, eternal, how can we fail to see that Consciousness behind everything that has transpired on Earth and will transpire, including the most important factor of time reckoning? This is at the root of a fundamentalism which seeks to freeze the flow of Time and Circumstance and then to reinstate a perceived ‘vedic’ calendar totally cut off from the world beyond.

A further point must be made: the calendar in question is not at all Christian. ST’s contention that I am somehow anti-Hindu because of the calendar I use in my cosmology needs to be exposed as untenable because it reveals his lack of knowledge in this area. The universal calendar in use today was originally the Julian calendar of the Roman Empire: PRE-CHRISTIAN. Christians adopted that calendar and inserted the birth of Jesus into it, as was the custom in those days, along with their other celebrations. That ancient calendar of the pagan world was then reformed in the 16^th century by Pope Gregory – but it was a reform only and not a new ‘Christian’ calendar. In effect, a Christian calendar, properly speaking, does not exist.

But to return to the heart of ST’s complaint, that all the dates given as per my cosmology are not Vedic because I use this ‘Christian’ calendar, then we have to assume that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother before me were ‘un-Vedic’. After all, I am only building on the edifice they provided. ST should check his facts: the Mother and Sri Aurobindo consistently celebrated ‘Christmas’ in their Ashram – though calling it by its ancient pre-Christian name: the Festival of Light. Further, the implication is that the new Indo-centric cosmology cannot have any relevance to Vishnu’s Line simply because it is inherently un-Vedic due to this Christian imposition! Here we have a myopic view of India’s destiny and the role she must play in this new Age of Vishnu.

Mr. Thakkar quotes extensively from one of your books regarding the third stage of the descent (‘the third integer’) – the part about how the third in line will be the most combated because without the third, there is no dynamism.

I have gone through the material but unfortunately ST seems to have strung portions together from my work without supplying the reader with the location of the original. Ignoring this fact, it is extremely interesting to note that his article proves my premise: The third integer in the Formula will indeed be the most combated: ST’s article itself proves the point. I will also ignore all the useless speculative assumptions he makes with regard to my motives and ambitions and deal entirely with Number-Power in the new cosmology because this is the core issue.

The births of the members of both Solar and Lunar Lines do not simply display a harmonic pattern – which in itself is remarkable considering that science has no answer as to how this miraculous display of the control of Mahakal covering a dozen births across more than a century could come about – but each birth number based on these calculations describes a power, a function. In the context of the Lines in question, the birth number (as part of the integral Formula) indicates the role of that individual within the process. The 9 embodies a power which is easily recognisable by his contribution to the process, his function; the 6 as well, and of course the 3. The Rig Vedic myth itself provides the key to the process. The dark force the Warrior must conquer is simply inertia. To conquer Death in the quest for Immortality means that this power of Inertia has to be overcome. The entire Rig Vedic ‘yoga’, if it may be so called, is centred on this attainment. This is part of the lost knowledge that is resuscitated in our Age of Vishnu.

Therefore, since the Third in the Formula provides the element of dynamism, and since that dynamism is essential for the success of the process (to overcome Inertia – as in the case of breaking the stronghold of the Panis where the ‘cows-rays' are trapped), the 3 must perforce be the target. This is a cosmological fact. And it has been proven to be the case in both Lines. We have the examples provided by the members of the Lunar Line to prove the point. History itself, the evolution of consciousness on the subcontinent itself, will prove the truth or otherwise of the new cosmology: non-speculative, unemotional, factual. Above all, the point needs to be stressed that the fulfilment of such destinies or processes the individual members embody by Number-Power does not depend on belief from any quarter. ST seems to suggest that the portions he has quoted from my books are my ‘defence’ of why I have not been accepted and have been ‘rejected’ (by whom?)! Since he knows nothing of the new cosmology we cannot expect him to understand the statement: Belief changes nothing of what IS. The only important thing is that the work gets done, that the process is completed. That having been the case, then where does the question rise of acceptance by anyone or any group? Since when was that ever an issue? I stress again, BELIEF CHANGES NOTHING OF WHAT IS.

Surely this deliberate attempt to mislead the public has to be dealt with. ST must be required to provide evidence supporting his statements.

ST writes that Robert does not understand ‘it is the Puranas which speak about the avatars, and not the Vedas’. Surely, you have something to say about this!

What ST states here is central to the entire reestablishment of the Dharma – not, as is suggested by him, a new moral ethos. And it is this lack of understanding of what the Veda really is and its direct connection to the Puranas that forms an intrinsic part of the process. This is precisely where things went off centuries ago. I will not go into details in this short space. Readers who are interested can find the answers throughout my published works. In fact the statement ST makes so authoritatively lies precisely at the heart of why the knowledge was lost. Suffice to say that the coming of the Vishnu Avatars, their functions, the exact times of their appearances find the most complete exposition in the Rig Veda verses precisely to Vishnu, RV, 1, 154, as we should expect. Only Sri Aurobindo’s translations of those special verses provide the key.

However, if we cling to the dogma that there is no mention of Vishnu’s Avataric descent in the Rig Veda, of course the hymns in question will be meaningless. And if we halt the process at the level of the 9, for instance, or even the 6, without the ingredient the 3 adds, then nothing of the Vishnu Line would have been known; more importantly, the evidence in the Rig Veda itself could never have been disclosed. Here are the verses from the Veda that provide the cosmic map or structure for the appearances. In conjunction with the Vishnu Hymns we have the complete key, pre-dating the Puranas by many centuries if not millennia.

Twelve spokes, one wheel, navels three.

Who can comprehend this?

On it are placed together

Three hundred and sixty like pegs.

They shake not in the least.

(Rig Veda 1, 164, 48)

One is the wheel; the bands are twelve;

three are the hubs – who can understand it?

Three hundred spokes and sixty in addition

Have been hammered therein and firmly riveted. (AV X, 8)

Readers who are familiar with the Mother’s work will recognise immediately that her own symbol is described in these verses in every detail. But added to this must be that factor of Dynamism. Enter the Third.

In my case I have provided the time factor – precisely what makes our universe ‘spin’. This is revealed in the name Thea with its number equivalents: 9-5-1. On that basis the above Vedic prescription discloses the exact cosmic formula for the appearance of Vishnu’s Avatars yuge-yuge.

So, ST’s contention that this ‘backbone of Hinduism’ was a latter-day formulation of the Puranic Age and that the connection RW made to the Veda was wrong, is completely off the mark. This is a case in point: a statement is bandied about denouncing ‘authoritatively’ an inaccuracy without any substantiation; whereas, we have volumes of published material at the Aeon Centre of Cosmology to substantiate the premises of my cosmology. Posterity will assess these issues objectively on the basis of those documented discoveries, shorn of ‘agendas’ and vested interests.

In this article, ST lumps you (and your students) with ‘Christian missionaries’ who read a few scriptures and distort them out of context. The goal of this ‘Christian Yoga’, he says, is to make monetary profit at the expense of Hinduism.

Well, first of all one has to ask, wouldn’t ST’s division between Vedas and Puranas and denial of a precise connection between the two, as disclosed above, serve a so-called ‘Christian agenda’ more effectively than anything found in my work?

Suffice to state that anyone who has studied my work can only laugh at this accusation. Since I have described in detail Christianity’s ‘cosmic error’ in my published works, I would hardly qualify for the undercover task ST attributes to me! And by the way, this ‘cosmic error’ is discovered purely on the basis of the sacred Formula and its application that ‘puts each thing in its place’. The Crucified Son is the issue because it would mean the un-Vedic victory of Inertia – i.e. an evolutionary dead end. And that is where the cosmic aberration lies. But we cannot deny that this legendary symbol accurately describes our world as it stands today.

The victory of the Warrior in the Rig Veda aims at correcting the aberration.

Related Links:
Sathya Sai Baba: the Counterfeit Avatar
'Sathya Sai Baba: the Counterfeit Avatar' - an Update
A Response to Sameer Thakkar by Robert E. Wilkinson (To Be Posted)

Sathya Sai Baba: the Counterfeit Avatar

2011-06-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

by Robert E. Wilkinson

With the recent death of India’s most controversial ‘godman’, Sathya Sai Baba, it was not at all surprising to see Tina Sadhwani’s articles on the Chakra News (http://www.chakranews.com), eulogizing her guru in the most superlative tones. [1] The passing of someone that one believes to be the physical incarnation of God is an understandable blow to an individual who has become identified with the worship of such a vital and charismatic being. Barely a week had passed before Ms. Sadhwani began to publish the lines of a complex mythology and dogma that would encourage the faithful to turn their unquestioned devotion to Sai Baba into a religion. This kind of embellishment often happens following the death or departure of one’s spiritual teacher, but Ms. Sadhwani’s excessive and idealized account of Sai Baba’s importance and her liberal use and distortion of Sri Aurobindo’s words to support her contention that her guru was one of Vishnu’s final Avatars demands to be answered in the most specific and unequivocal terms, for it is one thing to mythologize one’s guru out of all proportion from an abundance of devotion but quite another to deceive the public on matters of indisputable knowledge in the hope of converting them to a common belief.

Given the critical importance of Vishnu’s appearance in our present Aquarian age, there can be absolutely no mistakes about his identity, his position in the Line of Ten Avatars, and his evolutionary mission. Tina Sadhwani’s unsupported claims that Sai Baba is an Avatar simply do not rise to that level of knowledge and cheapen the meaning and purpose of the Dasavatars and their inextricable link with the Sanatana Dharma and its renewal. In order to fully understand who and what the Avatar is, we must return to the font of Indian myth and spirituality and, like scientists, explore the irreducible principles that give rise to such a preeminent legend.

Indian Myth and Legend of the Avatar:

India is the only nation in the world that can lay claim to a recurring history, eternally relevant and faithful to her ethos and cosmic culture, and the Vedic tradition of the Avatar is one of the most important symbols of her periodic renewal. Her Gods, Goddesses and creatures of the Vedic pantheon contain a profound knowledge of the dynamics of creation, beyond even the comprehension of modern science. Her principle deities, Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver and Shiva, the Destroyer, are the very embodiments of the cosmogonic forces behind the operations of the universe and their myths tell us how reality came to be. Vishnu is the preservation aspect of the trinity and represents that all-pervading power which maintains the universe and the cosmic order. He is the personification of goodness and mercy and periodically intervenes in terrestrial evolution by descending to earth in a human incarnation known as the Avatar.

When and Why Vishnu takes human birth is a matter of supreme cosmic importance involving vast cycles of time and profound archetypal influences. His periodic appearance not only punctuates the stages of our collective becoming, but radically alters the course of human events. In the 4^th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna explains to his student Arjuna some of the external circumstances surrounding his periodic appearance:

‘…Knoweth thou this, O Prince, that whenever the world declineth in virtue and righteousness; and vice and injustice mount the throne - then cometh I, the Lord, and revisit my world in visible form, and mingleth as a man with men, and by my influence and teachings do I destroy the evil and injustice, and re-establish virtue and righteousness. Many times have I thus appeared; many times hereafter shall I come again.’ Lord Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita, Part IV, Spiritual Knowledge

In her articles, Ms. Sadhwani has quoted this familiar passage to support her contention that Sai Baba was an Avatar but can she make that distinction simply on the basis of a predicted return during a time of social disequilibrium? If the term ‘Avatar’ is ever to become anything more than a meaningless honorific given indiscriminately to anyone’s guru, as Ms. Sadhwani has done with Sai Baba, it must be defined by an infallible and integral knowledge that allows us to identify Vishnu’s incarnations beyond any shadow of a doubt. In chapter 11 of the Gita, Lord Krishna reveals his ‘Supreme Countenance’ to the trembling Arjuna giving him a glimpse into the nature of that higher knowledge and the means by which it might be attained:

'The greater Form that thou hast seen is only for the rare highest souls. The gods themselves ever desire to look upon it. Nor can I be seen as thou hast seen Me by Veda, or austerities or gifts or sacrifices; it can be seen, known, entered into only by that bhakti which regards, adores and loves Me alone in all things.' Lord Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita , Part XI, 52-54, The Universal Manifestation

In this passage it is made abundantly clear that a vision of Krishna’s ‘greater form’ is only for the rare highest souls, Initiates who have entered into that most coveted knowledge through a process of identity or ‘Gnosis’. Only those with eyes to see, said Sri Aurobindo, ‘can bow down and confess the Avatar’. Initiatic knowledge cannot be attained through logic, reasoning, diligent study, or scriptural interpretation, it is based on Self knowledge gained through the revelation of a lived spiritual experience. Its most fundamental feature is a consciousness of Unity, forged in the fires of a life-long tapasya, that allows us to rise above the separative consciousness of our present mental species and see from a poise that casts no shadows. Part and parcel of this Self-knowledge is the nature of one’s relation to the Cosmic Harmonies and the innermost mysteries of Time. This is the highest truth, the truest perception, the Vision of visions reserved only for those rare highest souls, because it is Time itself which reveals the cosmic credentials and true identity of Vishnu’s Evolutionary Avatars.

The Scheme of Avatarhood:

In the Bhagavad Gita Lord Krishna says to Arjuna, ‘I appear millennium after millennium’, but exactly when in these millennial cycles does he take birth? The matter is made clear in the Rig Veda 1.154 with Vishnu Trivikrama’s three steps to measure the universe. According to the Veda, his first step is like a Lion (Leo); the second step is a Bull (Taurus); and his third and highest step is the Friend (Aquarius). For those with eyes to see, Vishnu’s strides take him through the Fixed signs of the Cosmological Ages. Being the Preservation ‘Guna’ of the Trimurty, these are Vishnu’s own zodiacal signs and represent the exact points/ages in the cosmic cycle when he descends to Earth as the Avatar. What is truly remarkable is that Vishnu’s steps are given in a backward moving order which parallels the Earth’s backward movement through the signs in a phenomenon known as the Precession of the Equinoxes. This is a clear indication that the Vedic Rishis had a far more advanced understanding of cosmology than was previously believed. By measuring the Earth’s movement through the 25,920 year Precessional cycle, we discover that Vishnu intervenes in terrestrial evolution every 6,480 years by descending to earth in the form of the Avatar. He incarnates on the earth in the signs of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and our current Age of Aquarius and comes at a time when the earth is under the influence of dark and evil forces.

When the scheme of Avatarhood is observed from these millennial heights it becomes apparent that Vishnu’s incarnations mark out meaningful points of progression in the Earth’s consciousness, a ‘parable of the evolution’, to quote Sri Aurobindo. But how does this evolutionary design correspond to the Line of Ten Avatars and what determines the order of their appearance? In order to fully appreciate this evolutionary parable, one must first understand the nature of the ‘INVOLUTION’ and, most importantly, exactly what is involved in the first place.

Involution, the Supreme Mystery:

We are told by a seer of impeccable credentials that the greatest mystery of creation, the means by which the Unmanifest enters into the Manifestation of itself is through a process of contraction and compression to a Seed, that precious bija, that miraculous Hiranyaretas known in the Veda as Agni. All of the attributes that we can conceive of in the Transcendent Divine are drawn, by its own power of manifestation, into the Seed of Itself. Because of this and from the beginning, writes Sri Aurobindo, ‘the whole development [of the universe] is predetermined in its self-knowledge and at every moment in its self-working - it is and moves to what it must be by its own original Truth, and will be at the end that which was contained and intended in its seed.’ This involutionary principle which all things must obey from literally the first instant of creation is none other than TIME as it evolves in our material universe from the seed of itself.

The process of human birth follows this very same principle with all life evolving from an original seed or embryo. The gestation of the human being occurs over a period of nine (9) months culminating with the birth of that which was originally involved. We find this same pattern of correspondences described in the Vishnu Purana in the form of the ‘Nine Creations’. And if we look at the Line of Ten Avatars within this context, we can easily see that the evolution of consciousness follows the same pattern. As Sri Aurobindo tells us, ‘Evolution is an inverse action of the involution…what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence’.

The Vedic Yoga:

The nature of Evolution in Time is an indispensable knowledge for those who would plumb the deepest mysteries of the Veda. Its secret wisdom, obtained through practice of an ancient yoga, reveals that the initiatic journey of the Rishis is not a journey through Space as many believe, but a journey in Time through the Year and its Twelve Months, the central figure of the Veda around which the Sacrifice is conducted, and it too follows the pattern of a nine month labor with a victorious birth in the tenth, as Sri Aurobindo explains:

‘...In other words, it is when the nine-months’ sacrifice is prolonged through the tenth, it is when the Navagwas become the ten Dashagwas by the seven-headed thought of Ayasya, the tenth Rishi, that the Sun is found… but what is meant by the figure of the months? For it now becomes clear that it is a figure, a parable; the year is symbolic, the months are symbolic. It is in the revolution of the year that the recovery of the lost Sun and the lost cows is effected, for we have the explicit statement in X.62-2… “by the truth, in the revolution of the year, they broke Vala”…’

‘The expression in the hymns, daso maso ataran, indicates that there was some difficulty in getting through the full period of ten months. It is during this period apparently that the sons of darkness had the power to assail the sacrifice; for it is indicated that it is only by the confirming of the thought which conquers Swar, the solar world, that the Rishis are able to get through the ten months…’

‘I hold for you in the waters the thought that wins possession of heaven by which the Navagwas [nine] passed through the ten months…’ (V.45-11)

‘This victory is won in twelve periods of the upward journey, represented by the revolution of the twelve months of the sacrificial year, the periods corresponding to the successive dawns of a wider and wider truth, until the tenth month secures the victory…’ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, 1915.

The Vedic sacrifice, as Sri Aurobindo reveals it, follows the same line as the Avataric parable because each of Vishnu’s incarnations represents an unveiling of a particular involutionary stage; ‘their periods corresponding to the successive dawns of a wider and wider truth’. Since the journey of the Individual and the appearance of the Line of Ten are both interrelated expressions of the same transcendent Being, it is through the lived yogic experience that one is initiated into the mysteries of the Avatars and by Usha, the Dawn Goddess.

Once possessed of this higher knowledge of Time and Divine Alchemy, the identity of the Avatars is no longer a matter of speculation and guesswork. Just as a competent scientist knows the position of each element in the Periodic Table based on its atomic properties, electrons and protons, and can even predict the discovery and proper position of new elements, the seer has realized a greater face of truth which of itself sets each piece in its rightful place. With this realization we are able to identify the time of the Avatars appearance, his position in the Line of Ten and the details of his evolutionary mission. Moreover, it becomes abundantly clear who is and who is not an Avatar.

The Cosmic Order of the Avatars:

If we apply this knowledge to the most renown of Vishnu’s emanations, Lord Rama and Lord Krishna, it is clear that they are the 7^th and 8^th Avatars of Vedic tradition. Lord Rama was born in the 7^th Manifestation some twelve thousand years ago in the Age of Leo. He was what is called a ‘Solar’ manifestation and details of his epic, the Ramayana, reveal him to be the IDEAL or Sattvic man. Lord Rama’s purpose was to fix for the future the possibility of an order proper to the sattvic civilized human being who governs his life by reason, the finer emotions, morality, and higher Mental ideas. The story of the Ramayana Epic revolves around Rama’s love and devotion to his wife Sita, an unmistakable theme of the 7^th zodiacal sign, Libra. The plot of the epic involves the abduction of Sita by the demon king Ravana. In his pursuit to rescue Sita, Rama assembles an army of allies who attack Ravana’s army, slay the demon king and reunite Sita with her loving husband, thus restoring balance and order to the world.

Lord Krishna, the 8^th Avatar was the Overmental Superman. He was born in the 8^th Manifestation around 3,100 BCE in the Age of Taurus. He was a ‘Lunar’ manifestation as the meaning of his name ‘the dark one’ implies. The most important document of Sri Krishna’s teaching is the Bhagavad Gita, revealed during the battle of Kurukshetra. The discourse between Krishna and his student Arjuna centers around War, Duty and Death, an essential knowledge for the ‘Kshatriya’ or Divine Warrior. As all initiates know, the subjects of War and Death are the preeminent themes of the 8^th zodiacal sign Scorpio, a sign ruled by Mars, the God of war.

Following this progression of Time and Archetype we would naturally expect the 9^th Avatar of Vedic tradition to appear in the 9^th Manifestation in the Age of Aquarius. He would be a Solar manifestation and the overarching theme of his life and mission would correspond to the 9^th sign Sagittarius, which represents a body of higher knowledge. Since we are told by a member of Sri Aurobindo’s own line that Vishnu’s 9^th Avatar would immediately return as the 10^th, in keeping with the Rig Veda injunction, we must view their appearance in the context of the culmination of the Vedic journey. What makes these final incarnations so absolutely unique is that they represent the last and supreme emergence of that original involutionary principle, Time. While Ram and Krishna prepared the soil for the conquest of Time, it is not until the concluding members of the Line that we see the complete apotheosis of Time as the ultimate feature of an integral Gnosis. We must expect therefore that their teachings would represent a radical reversal of an old transcendental spirituality whose strategy involved a complete denial of Time and Matter in order to reach the opposite pole, Spirit. Moreover we would expect Vishnu’s final Avatars to open an entirely new path for humanity, one that can at long last resolve the ancient paradoxes and unite the poles of Spirit and Matter through the instrumentality of Gnostic Time.

Our expectations of the 9^th Avatar are overwhelmingly realized in the person of Sri Aurobindo. He was born in the 9^th Manifestation and ushered in the Aquarian Age. He was the epitome of the Solar manifestation, born under the sign Leo which is ruled by the Sun. Considered to be one of India’s greatest sages, not simply of this age but of all ages, Sri Aurobindo fulfilled his Sagittarian mission by producing hundreds of volumes of an all-embracing and profound philosophy that has been described as a contribution to human thought the equivalent of which has not been attained by any other known thinker. Any serious student of Sri Aurobindo’s life and yoga will immediately recognize that his work represents a radical departure from all previous spiritual paths. It challenges thousands of years of traditional wisdom that believes a transcendence of the physical world to be the highest possible attainment. In an epochal reversal of direction, Sri Aurobindo and his line have presented humanity with a New Way, an entirely new direction that foresees the possibility of A MATERIAL UNION WITH THE DIVINE, one that takes us into the core of this world of matter and the innermost mysteries of time. The principal feature that unites these two realms within a single Integral Vision is a New System of Measure, a non-speculative formula that reveals the utter perfection of a Supramental Consciousness as it deploys itself on the Earth.

The coming of the Avatar, the sole purpose of his birth, is to renew the eternal truths and restore the Cosmic Order. That ‘Order’ is unmistakable in the lives and missions of the 7^th, 8^th and 9^th Avatars whose epic adventures reveal a seamless progression in consciousness from the Mental, to the Overmental, and finally to the Supramental Creation. With each of Vishnu’s ‘steps’ dawns a wider and wider truth revealing that the ‘spiritual evolution’ follows the same principles of the ‘biological evolution’, a progressive unfolding in time revealing new and more complete aspects of the Divine consciousness. Because of this orderly clockwork, each Avatar was bound by the constraints of the Time Spirit and could only complete his mission within the context of a stage in a larger evolutionary plan. As Sri Aurobindo explained, ‘…the whole development [of the universe] is predetermined in its self-knowledge and at every moment in its self-working’.

Rectification of the Ages:

Knowledge of this progressive unveiling of consciousness is invaluable when applied to the differentiation of historical spiritual teachings loosely defined as the ‘Perennial Philosophy’. It allows us to sort through what has been lumped together under the heading of ‘Enlightenment’ and put these disparate realizations in their proper category and order. This also permits us to follow the vector of the evolution and locate the dimensions of being under the greatest pressure for change. The great majority of Hindus, for example, believe that the Buddha was the 9^th Avatar. But we know that he was not and could not have been one of Vishnu’s sequential incarnations because he was born around 560 to 550 BCE near the beginning of the Age of Pisces. In the early centuries of that age the evolving consciousness of the race was founded on three rather than four pillars of being; the Physical and Emotional in the service of the Mental. The highest, (Spiritual) was completely lacking or dormant. At this ‘station’ of development, the great sages of the Piscean era including the Buddha were limited in their higher perceptions by the vibrational limitations inherent in the Mental consciousness. Despite their sincere aspirations, their discoveries could never admit of anything higher than a dissolution of the nexus of consciousness which held them in the world. Buddha called his experience of dissolution ‘Nirvana’ - a state of pure Being, equanimity and peace; an emptiness without form that grants liberation from this so-called ‘illusory world of becoming’. Lao Tze, the Chinese sage who lived around the same time, expressed his realization in much the same vein calling it, ‘The Nothing that is All’, and we find this same transcendental language later on in the teachings of Shankara, founder of the Advaita Vedanta school, who described ‘Moksha’ as a realization where one does not feel oneself any longer to be an individual with a name or form, but an infinite, eternal, space-less consciousness. From the limited evolutionary perspective of these renowned sages, life has no meaning or purpose. It is an illusion – ‘Maya’ that can only be remedied through a strategy of escapism based on a denial of oneself, the soul and the world. According to these teachers, Salvation, if it exists at all, may only be found in the transcendence of the world in some after-death ‘Heaven’, Advaitan ‘Moksha’ or ‘Nirvanic’ Void. When Sri Aurobindo was asked to comment on the efficacy of these paths of dissolution he replied, ‘…A great extinction is not God’s last word…[Nirvana] is not as many believe the ending of the path with nothing beyond to explore, it is the end of the lower path and the beginning of the higher evolution’. Kalki, said Sri Aurobindo, will come to correct the error of the Buddha.

As we move forward in time some 2,000 years we come to the Age of Aquarius, Vishnu’s ‘highest step’ and the appointed time for the appearance of the 9^th Avatar. With the continuing evolution of our species new and greater spiritual heights have opened to our view, The Mental has given way to what Sri Aurobindo and his line have called the ‘Supra-mental’. But our global society is still dominated by the nihilistic religions formulated in the Age of Pisces and because of the burdens of these past beliefs, our modern world teeters on a razor’s edge between madness and catastrophe. Each passing day bears witness to a world arrested by the atavistic beliefs of religions long past, with many still locked in some form of convert or kill mentality. It is clearly time for Vishnu to mount the throne and restore the eternal truths that will re-establish the dharmic path of virtue and righteousness. But, says Krishna, ‘…as the years have passed, the noble teachings have declined and their light has grown dim’. Who is it that can SEE the bringers of the light and how do we recognize them?

The Counterfeit Avatar:

As the Age of Pisces came to a close some of India’s most impeccable souls took birth to usher in the new age. Two of her brightest spiritual lights and forerunners of Sri Aurobindo’s own mission were Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and his student, Swami Vivekananda. Together with the likes of Sri Ramana Maharshi and Paramahamsa Yogananda they inspired a vibrant renewal of Indian spirituality that literally circled the globe. It was a period of palpable light and energy that renewed the Age and paved the way for Vishnu’s final Avatars. But where there is extraordinary Light, there are also extraordinary Shadows and those who would usurp these emerging energies for their own dark designs. The Veda calls them, ‘…sons of darkness who have the power to assail the sacrifice’. And for Victory to be assured, these pretenders must be brought out of the shadows and into the light where they may be exposed for who and what they really are. This brings us full circle and back to the matter of Sathya Sai Baba, the supreme poser and usurper of the light. After predicting that he would live for 96 years as his present avatar, Sai Baba died in April, 2011 at 81 years of age. This was the last of a mind boggling web of lies spun by Sai Baba to convince his followers that he was the living embodiment of Vishnu and the Avatar of the Age. In order to discover the truth or falsity of his unsupported claims, let us examine his life and teachings in the light of gnosis.

Unlike the iconic spiritual teachers listed above, Sai Baba presented himself as a gaudy caricature of an Indian godman. From the age of 13 he began to make the most outlandish claims about his incomparable divinity as well as his past and future lives. By his own account, he is the God Avatar of an entire Aeon, the embodiment of Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, and Shakti all in the same body, and there has never been another like him. Being a consummate showman, Sai Baba never missed an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. He took great delight at playing an Avatar, appropriating their sacred symbols such as Kalki’s White Horse and Shesha, the Aeonic serpent which he had made into a bed. But his most outrageous stunt by far was deceitfully insinuating himself into one of the most important events in Indian spiritual history. On 24 November, 1926, after a lifetime of yoga, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother sent word to their sadhaks asking them to assemble in the upper verandah of the Library House in their Ashram in Pondicherry to hear about something of supreme importance that had happened in the history of the Earth and Universe. On what was later to become known as ‘Victory Day’ or the day of Siddhi, Sri Aurobindo announced that Krishna, the Overmental Godhead had descended into the physical, meaning Sri Aurobindo himself. As the Mother explained, ‘…Krishna consented to descend into Sri Aurobindo’s body – to be FIXED there. Then I saw him – I saw him with my own eyes (inner eyes, of course), join himself to Sri Aurobindo’.

With the integration of the Overmental consciousness begun by the 8^th Avatar Krishna, Sri Aurobindo could now retire to his rooms and begin the establishment of the Supramental Consciousness-Force. This event marked the true beginning of his mission, the platform from where he could carry the evolution to greater heights. Sri Aurobindo’s Siddhi Day coincides with the close of the Age of Pisces and the beginning of the Aquarian Age that year. It was a victory for the whole world, because without it transpiring right on time, the Avatar could not have begun his transformative mission to bring down the Supermind. Upon learning of this momentous event many years later, Sai Baba changed the date of his birth from 4 October, 1929 to 23 November, 1926 and claimed that Sri Aurobindo was obviously referring to Baba who was supposedly born on the previous day (Nov. 23), and that he (Sri Aurobindo) had taken voluntary retirement after handing the reins over to the new God incarnate. [2] While his followers continue to insist that November, 23, 1926 was Baba’s true birthday, a horoscope cast for 4 October, 1929, the birth date on Baba’s original school records, removes all doubt by indicating his passing in 2011 when Pluto, the planet of death, moved by progression into a conjunction with his natal Sun.

The Danger of Miracles:

According to The Hindu, one of India’s leading newspapers, Baba’s early reputation was built on a series of miracles. He is reputed to have had the ability to produce vibhuthi (holy ash) or rings or miniature Shivalings out of thin air. An occasional wrist-watch was also ‘manifested’ for his more generous worshipers, each curiously bearing a factory-imprinted serial number. Baba never tired of telling his followers: ‘My power is immeasurable; my truth is inexplicable, unfathomable. All of the conceivable powers of the universe are resident in this palm’. But whether he had an actual siddhi or produced these so-called miracles through sleight of hand as the watches suggest is a moot question. Every genuine realized being since Patanjali, (c. 250 BCE - founder of the Yoga system of philosophy), has warned against the ostentatious demonstration of miracles as a dangerous distraction to both the performer and his followers. Sri Ramana Maharshi said that ‘powers’ such as these were ‘below the plane of Self-realisation’ and warned that they were more likely to inflate the ego than eliminate it. And Swami Vivekananda ruthlessly looked down upon so-called miracles as the greatest stumbling block in the way of truth. When the disciples of a genuine realized being told him of a man who had performed a so-called miracle and showed him the bowl he had produced, he took it, crushed it under his feet and told them never to build their faith on miracles again, but to look for truth in everlasting principles. From these examples, we can see that there is universal agreement among genuine enlightened beings that there is a plane of consciousness, a dangerous zone of transition between the ordinary consciousness and the realization of true yogic knowledge. Sri Aurobindo called this the ‘Intermediate Zone’ and describes in detail the pitfalls that can befall the unsuspecting traveler:

‘…Overwhelmed by the first rush and sense of power of a supernormal condition, they get dazzled with a little light which seems to them a tremendous illumination or a touch of force which they mistake for the full Divine Force…[one] feels himself freed from the normal limits…filled and enlarged and exalted; what comes associates itself with his aspirations, ambitions, notions of spiritual fulfilment and yogic siddhi; he is carried away by the splendour and the rush, and thinks that he has realised more than he has truly done, something final or at least something sovereignly true…one may take up one's abode in this intermediate zone, care to go no farther and build there some half-truth which one takes for the whole truth or become the instrument of the powers of these transitional planes’. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga

Anyone who has followed the career of Sai Baba cannot escape the conclusion that he is wholly a creature of the Intermediate Zone and has become an instrument of vital beings whose sole purpose is to usurp the higher truths of the Supramental age through a process of distortion, misrepresentation, and lies. It is additionally known by experienced occultists that one of the costs of maintaining one’s power on that vital plane is a huge increase in one’s sexual appetites. The heated controversy surrounding Sai Baba’s alleged pedophilia has been taken up elsewhere but it bears pointing out that when the United Nations, the British Parliament and the U.S. State Department all issue warnings of inappropriate sexual behavior involving youths and children by a prominent local religious leader at an ashram located in Andhra Pradesh, these charges are undoubtedly true. [3] But owing to a timid Indian media, cowed by Baba’s wealth, power and influence, the facts of these appalling events, including the 1993 murder of four young boys in his bedroom, were either suppressed or explained away as if they never happened. The children, who had come to confront Baba on the matter of their sexual abuse, were summarily executed by a hail of bullets from the Puttaparthi police. Immediately following this tragic event, the entire murder investigation was closed down by a confidential government order with no charges registered and no official report. One can only wonder how a man like this has managed to convince tens of millions of people that he was Vishnu’s highest manifestation, the God Avatar of an entire Age.

Gurus and Pretenders:

Spiritual personalities are complex and difficult to understand. Their claims of divinity, knowledge and power come from such a subjective level of experience that they confound all objective proofs. Only those at the same or a higher level of development can know the total pattern of their behavior. But according to Sai Baba, he is utterly unique and there has never been another like him, so how can we evaluate the validity of his claims? For most devotees this is an impossible dilemma and they are forced to fall back upon unquestioned belief which results in the loss of identity, personal power, and ultimately, responsible consciousness. Given the powers of conviction that arise from the unconscious projection of one’s own divinity onto an external god figure and the peer pressure of other members of the cult, the unwitting devotee finds himself overpowered by a commitment en masse that overrules all common sense. The result is blind obedience and a complete identification with the myth of the group. We can see an example of this devotional fervor in Ms. Sadhwani’s recent articles that glorifies Sai Baba out of all proportion without a shred of evidence to support her dogmatic claims.

For persons of vision however there is a tried and true method of evaluating the competence and spiritual bona fides of someone claiming to be God. The evidence lies in the quality of their teachings and the profundity of their knowledge. But to find the unvarnished truth, the architecture of their philosophy must be examined with the precision of an engineer, dismantling layer after layer until the core of their realization stands revealed. Only then can it be understood within the context of an integral spectrum of knowledge. When we apply this test to the written works of Sai Baba, we can see that his teachings are broken down into two subcategories; fully half of his message falls in the category of meaningless self promotion, with the balance being an eclectic mix of Advaita Philosophy and a patchwork metaphysic reminiscent of the age of Pisces. There is nothing new, nothing original and absolutely nothing that might justify the title of Vishnu’s Avatar.

Time and the Supermind:

In an earlier part of this article the Line of Ten Avatars was discussed in relation to the evolution of consciousness on earth. Sri Aurobindo had told us that the Evolution was simply an inverse action of the Involution. Since Time was the original element and factor in the involution, it would be, in the evolution, the last and supreme emergence. Indeed, the 10^th and last of Vishnu’s Avatars is known as Kalki, a name that derives from the Sanskrit root word ‘Kal’ which means Time. There can be absolutely no question that an identifying hallmark of the Supramental Avatars would be a new revelation of Time. We see nothing of this newness in the teachings of Sai Baba. His discussions of Time hearken back to the realizers of the Piscean era who saw it as an illusion and an impediment to spiritual liberation. But for Sri Aurobindo, Time was an obsession which he pursued until his passing in 1950. He was seeking the consolidation of a formula which might reconcile the Timeless Infinite and the Time Spirit deploying itself and organizing all things in time. He carried us to the portals of this discovery in his epic text, The Synthesis of Yoga and closed the book with a chapter entitled, ‘Toward the Supramental Time Vision’. What Sri Aurobindo ultimately revealed was that the last and supreme emergence of the Time spirit, its final unveiling, was the basis of a Supramental Gnosis.

‘The nature of Supermind is that all of its knowledge is a knowledge by identity and oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere and always. It knows all things as itself and in itself and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in their reality as well as their appearance. By concentrating on anything whatsoever, we are able to know that thing and make it deliver up its concealed secrets. This is the faculty of Essential Cognition, it always cognizes the essence, the truth. There is not even a trace of false knowledge.’ Sri Aurobindo

To the eye of Gnosis, the whole creation in its act of becoming reverberates with meaning and purpose and it is Time that makes this vision intelligible. Contrast this with the nihilistic teachings of Sai Baba:

‘…the world is maya (illusion), The cycles of birth and death are all fanciful weavings, illusory agitations and unreal appearances…. The ultimate refuge for man, the goal he ought to seek, the thing that I have come to give you is liberation itself…man will at last endeavor to know the secret of permanent joy and peace, that is to say, of moksha, liberation from the cycle of birth and death’. Teachings of Sathya Sai Baba

According to Sai Baba, there is no meaning and purpose in the world. The highest goal of human life is spiritual liberation, known by such names as moksha, nirvana, and mukti. These phrases which characterize Baba’s entire realization have been lifted word for word out of the age of Pisces some 2,000 years ago. And because of his ignorance of Time and the cosmic harmonies, his teachings on the Veda are irredeemably flawed. While he extols the Veda as the highest possible knowledge and a direct path to God, he cannot tell you the first thing about how to follow that path.

‘…Mother Veda has been kind to her children - the human race. To sanctify its cravings and to uplift the race, she has posited the concept of Time - and its components, the years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. Even gods were declared to be bound by Time. The individual or Jiva is caught in the wheel of Time and Space and rotates with it, unaware of any means of escape. But, really he is beyond the reach of Time and Space. The Veda is bent upon the task of making him know this Truth, and liberating him from this narrowness.’ Sathya Sai Baba, Eternal Truths

The Vedic Calendar:

Another indication of Baba’s immature realizations about time and the Veda may be seen in the ashrams and temples that bear his name and the errors in their ritual Calendar. According to the Rishis, the Vedic truth-consciousness is grounded in an experiential awareness of the sacrificial year and its twelve months:

‘Certain eternal worlds are these which have come into being, their doors are shut to you (or opened) by the months and the years. Without effort one world moves in the other, and it is these that Brihaspati has made manifest to knowledge’ Rig Veda (II.24.5)

The sages carefully prescribed ritual celebrations that were designed to bring about an experiential awareness of the cosmic truths through a process of repeating and reliving precise points in the sacrificial year. The most important of these points in the ritual calendar, the heart of the Vedic mysteries, is the ‘Makar Sankranti’, a time when the gods and goddesses can touch our world and revitalize our very souls. The true cosmological point of the Makar Sankranti begins with the change of the Sun’s direction from the Lower Hemisphere (Daksinayana) to the Upper Hemisphere (Uttarayana) and its movement into the 10^th sign Capricorn and house of the 10^th month victory. The Makar Sankranti is also the Winter Solstice, the perihelion of the Earth’s annual orbit of the Sun and the shortest day of the year. It is an astronomical fact, known by every school child, that the Winter Solstice falls on December 21, yet most celebrants, including Sai Baba and his followers, observe the Makar Sankranti on January 14^th some 23 days after the fact. If Sai Baba is the fullest manifestation of the Time-Spirit and has come to reset the cosmic clock, why did he adhere to a discredited Nirayana calendar system which has literally dissolved the sacred and eternal truths of the Veda into the mists of Sidereal time? He may boast that he is the very incarnation prophesied to restore the Sanatana Dharma, but he has, in fact, led his millions of followers on a path of Adharma.

Sai Baba’s complete lack of understanding of the Vedic yoga and its deepest cosmological mysteries bears testimony to one of Sri Aurobindo’s most revealing statements about the limitations of the Piscean realization : ‘...for some two thousand years at least no Indian has really understood the Veda.’ His statement confirms what has been written here about the unveiling of the Veda’s highest truths being an event that can only begin with Vishnu’s Aquarian Avatars and their Supramental realization.

In Conclusion:

From the preponderance of the evidence presented here, even the most skeptical reader must agree that there is simply no possibility of Sathya Sai Baba being one of Vishnu’s Evolutionary Avatars. Despite Ms. Sadhwani’s specious claims, he bears none of the identifying qualities unique to the Line of Ten. On the contrary, he bears all of the qualities of a poser, usurper, and denier of the light. Sai Baba lied about his birth, lied about his death and almost everything in between. While the real Avatar was in the thick of an evolutionary yoga designed to bring down the Supramental light, Baba was busy building a cult following of millions of people through which he amassed a fortune of billions of dollars. His extraordinary success was the result of decades of shameless self promotion to easily impressed, superstitious and disillusioned people desperate for an experience of cheap grace. Now that he is dead, his millions of followers have to come to terms with an uncomfortable truth: if Sai Baba was not who he said he was, or perhaps even worse, did not know who he truly was; who is this person that they have projected their hopes, dreams and indeed their own divinity upon? To their own terror many will soon discover that they have been led down a centerless Piscean path leaving them vulnerable to the play-out of an old and dying world. There will be no ‘Prema Sai’, or third incarnation of the ‘Sai avataric lineage’ prophesied to uplift mankind in the dawning of a new golden age. In the light of Gnosis this prediction is a complete and utter fantasy designed to distort and obscure the New Supramental Creation that has already descended. In his 824 page Epic poem, Savitri, which is to the Aquarian Avatars what the Ramayana and Mahabharata were to the 7^th and 8^th, Sri Aurobindo describes something of this extraordinary event.

‘In Matter shall be lit the spirit's glow,

In body and body kindled the sacred birth;

Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,

The days become a happy pilgrim march,

Our will a force of the Eternal's power,

And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.

A few shall see what none yet understands;

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;

For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done.’

Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol, Page: 55

Indeed God has grown up while ‘wise men’ like Sai Baba talked and slept. And those of us who SEE are bound by a sacred trust to maintain the purity of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s truth by exposing the forces of deception, distortion, and misdirection who would usurp the descending light and drag the world back into a medieval darkness.

It is doubtful that the true believers of Sai Baba will be open to any criticism of him no matter how well intentioned or carefully documented. Like the Indian newspapers who published glowing obituaries, they prefer instead to focus their attention on Sai Baba’s philanthropic works and his simple spiritual homilies. Indeed, how could a man like this be anything other than what he claims? It never occurs to them that behind the miracles and powers taken on their face as divinity, there is a dark vital force in revolt against the truth, although they have been given ample and frequent confirmation. But having chosen belief over real knowledge, like all cults, they have become enchanted by their own projection and can see only what will support and enhance the illusion. Baba’s well documented lies, perversions and distortions are brushed aside, dismissed as unacceptable distractions to the always just out of reach promise of Liberation. Had they chosen knowledge over mere belief, they would recognize the obvious contradictions in Baba’s teachings. For how can someone who claims time and again to have come to bring us the final goal of life, the ultimate refuge; liberation into a permanent joy and peace beyond the snares of time, space and form, also claim that he is here to restore the Sanatana Dharma. The two statements are mutually exclusive. Sanatana Dharma literally means ‘Eternal Law, Truth and Order which holds everything together’, a definition that begs the question; law, truth and order of What? It is obviously not a formless truth beyond the portals of time and space. Sanatana Dharma deals with the truths of this world and can only be restored as an expression of Time, Form and Measure. As Sri Aurobindo reminds us in his commentaries on the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, ‘…it is time alone that makes the ordering of the universe in space possible’. These eternal laws and principles are encoded in India’s ancient DNA and form the ‘Core’ or Soul of her being. Any talk of a glorious Indian Renaissance must begin with the recovery and renewal of her Dharma and Soul. But how is this ever to occur through Sai Baba’s nihilistic strategies of Liberation and ‘moksha’? This is the supreme lie, the greatest falsehood, and the root of all of India’s problems for the last 2,000 years of her history. A true renaissance cannot arise from a center-less Piscean void. To the eye of gnosis Sai Baba’s teachings are full of these half-truths and errors willfully designed to pervert and distort the very foundations of the Dharma. And yet we see Baba’s followers mindlessly parroting his baseless claims that he came to accelerate the long overdue restoration of the Sanatana Dharma. But if the world is Maya or illusion as Baba claims, what is the point?

Most of Baba’s devotees are likely to ignore the issues of knowledge made here, dismissing them as meaningless philosophical rhetoric overshadowed by personal feelings, visions and illuminations gained through their guru’s presence. But with Baba’s recent death the object of their worship and center of their spiritual universe is no more. What they will soon come to realize is that they have followed Baba’s path of Liberation at the forfeit of their own souls. Without the physical presence of the guru to sustain the projection of their own divinity, belief will give way to doubt and their faith and confidence will begin to crumble. In her articles Ms. Sadhwani tries to rally the faithful saying that, ‘…every Sai devotee bears a greater responsibility now in joining forces for upholding and carrying forward this majestic vision and world-transforming mission’. She attempts to focus their attention on the future, on the promise of Prema Sai and a new world order, but this too is a ruse, a diversion put forward to redirect their original projection toward a mental religious ideology without any real knowledge to sustain it. The predictable result is an existential crisis brought about by an untenable conflict between belief and reality. The millions of Sai devotees who formed the ranks of a global spiritual cult will gradually succumb to doubt and disillusionment and without the financial support of the faithful and their ability to proselytize new converts, the organization will collapse. Devotees need only watch what happens in the months and years ahead. Without its iconic leader, Sai Baba’s empire will slowly implode. This has already begun with a bitter battle for control of his money and his myth. And soon, Baba’s $5.5 billion dollar foundation will likely be confronted by the same tardy justice that rocked the Roman Catholic church costing them over $3 billion in sexual abuse claims. And in the end, all of those open to the light will learn who and what Sai Baba truly was; a cautionary tale proving to us that we should not seek miracles or visions or lights or etheric forms, we should instead pursue a solid path - the Vedic way of Knowledge and Realization. We must BECOME light and SEE IN UNDERSTANDING.

June 5th, 2011

EndNotes: [Additions of notes 1-3 were made on 16 June 2011]
[1] In the spirit of full disclosure it should be noted that Ms. Sadhwani has lodged a strong objection to the following statement:

‘…This kind of embellishment often happens following the death or departure of one’s spiritual teacher, but Ms. Sadhwani’s excessive and idealized account of Sai Baba’s importance and her liberal use and distortion of Sri Aurobindo’s words to support her contention that her guru was one of Vishnu’s final Avatars 1.’

Her objection is as follows:

‘…Now nowhere in my articles have I claimed that Sai Baba was the final avatar of Vishnu. Neither
have I mentioned the Vishnu Puran's dasavatars that Wilkinson keeps referring to. I have provided my own conceptualization of the Avatar that has nothing to do with the Purans and on the contrary I have even linked Sai Baba as the Shiva-Shakti avatar.’ Tina Sadhwani

Despite Ms. Sadhwani’s claims to the contrary, she uses the term ‘Avatar’ repeatedly in her articles, a concept which is unique to Hinduism and defined as ‘a manifestation of the deity Vishnu, in human, superhuman or animal form’. Vishnu is that All-Pervading essence that supports, sustains, and governs the Universe and originates and develops all elements within. He is also called 'Preserver of the universe' and is always discussed in conjunction with the Cosmic Order and ‘Line of Ten Avatars’ as I have done in my article. Since there is wide agreement that there have been Eight (8) Avatars, any reference to present incarnations of Vishnu involves the completion of the line through his final Avatars.

Ms. Sadhwani’s claims that she is using her ‘own conceptualization of the Avatar’ is simply not true. This is clearly evident in her citations of the Bhagavad Gita where she quotes the passage where Krishna gives a discourse to Arjuna describing his periodic return and purpose as being to rejuvenate the Dharma. As any good Hindu knows, this is a function exclusive to Vishnu as described above. She goes on in her article to present other attributes of the Avatar as contained in the language of Hinduism:

‘…It has been said that at every turning point and every great epoch of the earth’s existence there has often been one extraordinary being standing at the leading edge of light, unravelling the consciousness in which the transcendent descends into the physical, in which the cosmic pulse of the universe converges to a point, to a singularity that is at once human with its manifested boundaries, as well as suprahuman, displaying its infinite capabilities. Both heaven and earth have collaborated in the sacred alchemy of such a creation and in the divine birth of such an extraordinary being. In the language of the Hindus, such a sacred being is referred to as the Avatar. He is the direct, super-conscious descendent of the same force that shapes the universe and renders it its harmonies and balance. He symbolizes the unity of all existence and the pinnacle of the divine intelligence that is diffused in all things.

To many around the world who have experienced him, Sri Sathya Sai Baba, is the living embodiment of such a force and spiritual descent, that unifies all the planes of existence, from the cosmic to the planetary and finally to the individual, guiding humankind to the next stage of evolution, signifying the ultimate transformation and alchemy of Spirit and opening us to the possibilities of a higher dynamism, a higher principle by which we may actualize our own greatest potentials.’ Tina Sadhwani - Sathya Sai Baba, the Divine Alchemist, Chakra News April 19th, 2011

For Ms. Sadhwani to say that has been misinterpreted is pure nonsense. She defines ‘Avatar’ using the exact terms that describe the essence of the Godhead Vishnu. She then attributes these divine qualities to Sai Baba for the purpose of bearing up his own ridiculous claims that he is Vishnu’s avatar, that he was Rama and Krishna, and that he is Kalki. If she has mentioned 'avatar' it has nothing to do with Shiva or Shakti, it means the Vishnu Line of Ten. Sai Baba himself made this perfectly clear by having a photo shoot of himself as Kalki, white horse, sword and all. And then, if this wasn’t enough, he fashioned his bed as if he were Vishnu laying on Shesha. All this simply bears up the point made in the article that Ms. Sadhwani is misleading the public in important factual matters for the furtherance of her own personal agenda. For me to state that Ms. Sadhwani has ‘distorted Sri Aurobindo’s words to support her contention that her guru was one of Vishnu’s final Avatars’ is unequivocal and factually correct. RW

[2] A detailed account of how Sai Baba attempted to usurp the epochal events of Sri Aurobindo’s Siddhi Day on 24/11/1926 by changing the date of his birth from 4 October, 1929 to 23 November, 1926 and then claiming that Sri Aurobindo had taken voluntary retirement after handing over the reins to Baba. http://allchoice-barin.blogspot.com/2008/07/day-of-victory.html

[3] Documentation and relevant links concerning the Sex Abuse claims against Sai Baba as noted by UNESCO, the UK and the US State Department. http://www.saibaba-x.org.uk/14/

A number of important documents are listed (and/or scanned) here which bear relevance to the exposure of Sathya Sai Baba and the crimes of which he stands accused by alleging victims and others, including:

UNITED KINGDOM PARLIAMENT EARLY DAY MOTION on Sathya Sai Baba and the sexual abuse of children.

U.S. DEPUTY OF STATE WARNING TO TRAVELLERS In 2001 The US State Department issued a warning to travellers in Andhra Pradesh - which officials confirmed related primarily to Sathya Sai Baba. This warning has never been revoked, though since 2007 it ceased to figure in the official document. http://www.saibaba-x.org.uk/14/India%20-%20Consular%20Information%20Sheet.htm

UNESCO MEDIA ADVISORY WARNING AGAINST SATHYA SAI BABA This advisory was issued by UNESCO when it withdrew its intended participation in a Sathya Sai Education Conference due to serious allegations of sex abuse investigated thoroughly by UNESCO officials.

Misc.

In a passage from a manuscript of one of the Mother’s students, Satprem, we find a record of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram's ‘bright period’ in 1926, when the Mother had made an Overmental creation and the gods were beginning to manifest. Satprem quotes the Mother as saying: ‘In 1926, I had begun a sort of Overmental creation, that is, I had brought the Overmind down into matter, here on earth (miracles and all kinds of things were beginning to happen). In the end, Sri Aurobindo told me it was an Overmental creation, not the Truth. These were his very words: 'Yes, it's an Overmental creation, but that's not the truth we're seeking; it's not the truth, the highest truth,' (The Supramental). I made no reply, not a word: in half an hour I had undone everything—I undid it all, really everything, cut the connection between the gods and the people here, demolished absolutely everything. Because you see, I knew it was so attractive for people (they were constantly seeing the most astonishing things) that the obvious temptation was to hang on to it and say, 'We'll improve on it'—which was impossible. So I sat down quietly for half an hour, and I undid it all. We had to start over again with something else. But I said nothing, I told no one about it except Sri Aurobindo. At the time I let no one know, because they would have been completely discouraged.’

*****

‘Ignorance means Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth, -truth of being, truth of divine consciousness, truth of force and action, truth of Ananda. As a result, instead of a world of integral truth and divine harmony created in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a world founded on the part truths of an inferior cosmic Intelligence in which all is half-truth, half-error. It is this that some of the ancient thinkers like Shankara, not perceiving the greater Truth-Force behind, stigmatised as Maya and thought to be the highest creative power of the Divine. All in the consciousness of this creation is either limited or else perverted by separation from the integral Light; even the Truth it perceives in only a half-knowledge. Therefore it is called the Ignorance. Falsehood, on the other hand, is not this Avidya, but an extreme result of it. It is created by an Asuric power which intervenes in this creation and is not only separated from the Truth and therefore limited in knowledge and open to error, but in revolt against the Truth or in the habit of seizing the Truth only to pervert it. This Power, the dark Asuric Shakti or Rakshasic Maya, puts forward its own perverted consciousness as true knowledge and its willful distortions or reversals of the truth as the verity of things. It is the powers and personalities of this perverted and perverting consciousness that we call hostile beings, hostile forces. Whenever these perversions created by them out of the stuff of the ignorance are put forward as the truth of things, that is the Falsehood, in the yogic sense, mithyii, moha.’ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, Book I, Section Six: The Divine and the Hostile Powers, December 2, 1946, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, India, 1946.

Bibliography and Suggested Reading: [The addition of 'Articles by Tina Sadhwani' was made on 16 June 2011]

India’s Most Sacred Texts:
The Rig Veda: The Vedic Experience, by Raimundro Pannikar. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997.
The Vishnu Purana: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition (Translated from the Original Sanskrit) by H.H. Wilson, Dec 31, 2010.
Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God by Swami Prabhavananda, Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley Jul 2, 2002.
Ramayana Valmiki by Swami Venkatesananda and Valmiki, State University of New York Press; Concise edition, May 1988.
Mahabharata: The Greatest Spiritual Epic of All Time by Krishna Dharma, Torchlight Publishing, August 15, 1999.

Selected Works by Sri Aurobindo:
Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1940.
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 'Toward a Supramental Time Vision', Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1976.
Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads, 'The Great Aranyaka', Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1971.
Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, India, 1972.
Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, December 2, 1946, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, India, 1946.
Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: ‘The Process of Evolution’, Volume: 13, Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, September 1909.
Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, 1995.
Sri Aurobindo , Savitri: A Legend & A Symbol - Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, India, 1951.
Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: ‘The Yoga and Its Objects’, Volume: 13, Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, September 1972.
Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 2001.
Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo On Himself: The Present Darkness and the New World, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, India 1950.

Selected Works by Thea (Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet)
Thea (Norelli-Bachelet, Patrizia), The New Way – Volumes 1 & 2, Æon Books, New York, 1981.
Thea (Norelli-Bachelet, Patrizia), The New Way – Volume 3, Æon Books, 2005.
Thea (Norelli-Bachelet, Patrizia), The Gnostic Circle, Æon Books, 1975.
Thea (Norelli-Bachelet, Patrizia), The Hidden Manna: Being the Revelation called Apocalypse of John the Divine, Æon Books, New York, 1976.
Thea (Norelli-Bachelet, Patrizia), Time and Imperishability, Æon Books, April 1, 1997.
Thea, The Vishaal Newsletter, ‘The Capricorn Factor: India’s Lost Measure and its significance for the world’, October 1987, Volume. 2, Number 4.
Thea, ‘The Nine Nights of Durga: the Destiny of India across the century in a new Cosmological Paradigm’, 17 November, 1999.
Thea, ‘Secrets of the Earth: Questions and Answers on the Line of Ten Avatars of Vedic Tradition’, March 2009
Thea, ‘Cosmology in the Rigveda - The third premise’ published in 'The Hindu', 9 July, 2002.
Thea, ‘Sri Aurobindo and the Condition of Vedic Wisdom in India’ The Movement for the Restoration of Vedic Wisdom, 2 February, 2007.
Thea, ‘A Calendar that Unifies: Questions and answers on reforming the Hindu Calendar’ 6 March, 2009.
Thea, The Vishaal Newsletter, ‘Culture and Cosmos - 3: The Evolutionary Avatar in the Cosmic Harmony and in Contemporary Vedic Culture’, Volume 7, Number 6, February, 1993.
Thea, ‘An Interview with Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, India’s True History Is In Its Myths’, Published in Bhavan's Journal (English) Volume 54 Issue Number 1, 15 August, 2007.

Selected works of Sathya Sai Baba:
A Compendium of the Teachings of Sathya Sai, Charlene Leslie-Chaden, Sri Sathya Sai Towers Pvt Ltd, March 7, 1997.
Online Selections of Sai Baba’s Writings - Sri Sathya Sai Baba Divine Teachings, http://www.saibaba.ws/teachings.htm

Articles by Tina Sadhwani:
Sathya Sai Baba, the Divine Alchemist, Chakra News, April 19th, 2011
The Sai-Evolution, A Dharmic Odyssey, Chakra News, May 3rd, 2011

Indians Protest Against Government Corruption

2011-06-05T16:41:00.000-07:00

2011 Indian anti-corruption movement,
see Wikipedia article

'Baba Ramdev’s Bhrashtachar Mitao Satyagraha
brutally crushed by the government'
Bharat Swabhiman Andolan, 5 June 2011
'Government puts a black stain on the democracy of our nation. 5th June will be remembered as a black day when the Government ordered 5000 RAF officers to charge in a peaceful satyagraha, that too while they were sleeping. The government applied section 144(Emergency like situation) showcasing the peaceful satyagraha as a riot.' [Link to full story]

'Fast hasn't ended, they wanted to kill me: Ramdev'

Times of India, 5 June 2011

'HARIDWAR: Hours after being bundled out of Delhi, Baba Ramdev targeted Congress president Sonia Gandhi and government, alleging that his peaceful agitation was treated with unprecedented 'barbarism' and vowed to continue his 'satyagraha' against corruption.' [Link to full story]

'Baba Ramdev: India police break up yogi's Delhi protest'
BBC News, 4 June 2011

'Police in the Indian capital Delhi have broken up an anti-corruption protest led by controversial yoga guru Baba Ramdev. Around 30 people were injured as police fired tear gas to disperse thousands of his supporters, reports said.' [Link to full story]

'People join hands with Anna Hazare'

Times of India, 9 April 2011

'PURNIA/BHAGALPUR/GAYA: The ripple effect of the crusade against corruption launched by Gandhian Anna Hazare with his indefinite fast since Tuesday percolated down to the small towns across Purnia division as well.' [Link to full story]

A prayer for a New Way

2011-05-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

[The 'preamble' of The New Way - a study in the rise and establishment of a gnostic society, Volumes 1 & 2, Æon Books (1981). Picture added.]

I pray for a new way to come about, a way that will cause the barriers
between nations and between individuals to fall away, —that we may
come to the realisation of a new way.
        I pray for peace and harmony and good will—above all, good
will—among men. I pray for the emergence of a greater understanding
and a breakthrough in the attitude of division, be this either political,
social or religious. May all men be brought to the realisation that they
are members of the one planetary family, regardless of color or creed,
regardless of wealth or poverty.
       I pray for prosperity, that each man and woman and child may
have what is necessary to live in decency in this world, so that their
passage on this planet will be a joy and signify a progress, —a
spiritual and a material rise.
       May each man come to enjoy the possibility of moving about as he
wishes over the Earth, as his one home and the one home of all his
brethren; and to express himself as he may like; and to know freedom
in all things. But may this freedom be only for the expression of the
highest part of himself. May all the ugliness of the old man fall away.
       May the whole Earth come to realise the one goal, and to
understand that no matter how contradictory the appearances may be, each
of us is here for the realisation of the One Goal: to help the Earth to
realise herself, though her ways are many and appear each one to offer a
resistance to the other. Yet this resistance is merely to create the conditions
needed for the realisation, the all-embracing Realisation.
       Let each person see the cause within himself for the suffering and
the agony of his Earth. Let him understand that the division in his
being is productive of a division within his society. Let him heal this
division, and then come to a new way in the collective body—that of
true collaboration in a life of harmony, of positive growth, and of all that
is true and good and real.
       May all the forms of religion fall away—anything that seeks to
pull this new light into the ways of the past: there is a way that is not
religious, —may this be revealed.
       May the new light shine forth with a brilliance such as has rarely
been seen in the history of the Earth, and may this be as a magnet which
draws people to it and fills them with the thirst for Truth; and grant
them the power to express this Truth in all the ways of life.
       May we not seek miracles—let us rather have realisation. This is
the solid way. Let us not see visions or lights or etheric forms . . . let us BE
light, let us SEE IN UNDERSTANDING, let us be the ‘new seeing’.
       Let the new way of Love manifest, the real way, that carries in it
a power of transformation. Though we may not recognise it as Love, let it
BE, in spite of us. Let Power indeed lend itself to Love, and these two
will carry us forward on the glorious new way. Let each man and
woman and child be touched by THE NEW WAY OF POWER AND LOVE.
       But let us truly move forward to the New: let us not call the Old
the New. Let the New come forth in spite of ourselves.
       May the Power of Harmony, the Power of Truth and the Power
of Love manifest, and may we become each day the purer instruments for
this integral realisation.

— Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea)

Better Judgment Day

2011-05-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

Link to Photo Source

A few months ago I saw a billboard announcing 21 May 2011 as Judgment Day. My immediate thought was that perhaps 22 May 2011 should be celebrated as Better Judgment Day. Not MORE judgment ... but simply better judgment, better discrimination, better vision, etc. By better, I suppose I mean wider and more all-encompassing ... more accurate and integrous in terms of the Whole dynamic being that we are. I am sure most of us on planet Earth would benefit from the grace of having better judgment or better capacities of discernment. Because as is, we have a have a difficult time discriminating between what is TRUE and what is just the limited and distorted imaginings of an individual ego/mind or the collective imaginings, distortions or agreements of a mass of people. Most of us are caught up in one way or another in individual or collective stories that do not necessarily reflect the truth of our existence, nor the truth of our potential.

Humans need better judgment in most all actions and endeavors, but perhaps the biggest and most immediate area that calls for better judgment, is in the area of religion.

People have many names for the Divine and many ideas about what constitutes a 'right' relationship and communion with the Divine. People celebrate many different prophets, divine personas and teachers who have historically inspired or who presently inspire a powerful feeling and vision of Divinity. Most of the time people are born into their religion, and would likely have been successfully indoctrinated into another religion and world-view, had they been born elsewhere.

So, knowing this to be true, how is it that those celebrating the Divine by one name and by one strain of inherited customs, do not recognize that even though others are celebrating the Divine by other names and by other strains of inherited customs, the underlying impulse towards witnessing or experiencing Divinity is the same? Different languages, different cultures, different prophets, and different sacred texts are naturally going to produce different interpretations and different expressions of the impulse to observe the Divine hand supporting our material evolution or material experience. The pressing question now is: When will all of us participating in this natural process of varying interpretation, expression and splintered interests become aware of the process, and become blissfully aware of our common heart, our common origin, our common divinity, despite all apparent differences.

Each religion has some idea, vision or HOPE of a divinely-inspired destruction of our corrupted civilization and the birth of a new civilization and age based on the true force, true vision or manifestation of the Divine. I am curious to see in my life time, what religions and what portion of the religious masses will take a step back and consider that a substantial element of what is to be destroyed in any true apocalypse ('apocalypse' meaning: uncovering of light) is not only the unconsciousness that has allowed Divinity to be fragmented into so many bickering and warring sects, but also all the structures and institutions built up upon such unconsciousness.

Humanity should learn to celebrate the dismissal, destruction and dissolution of all inherited (and newly-learned) misconceptions and false separative barriers that block our realization and manifestation of a universal harmony and shared journey. We should honestly face the many generations, the many centuries of 'bad' judgment that has led us to our current world crisies (a world in dis-integration) and learn to support each other in our ability to experience and manifest higher Truth, higher consciousness and essential Bliss.

Links to Online PDF's of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's works

2011-05-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

'Our greater self of knowledge waits for us ...

Our larger being sits behind cryptic walls:
There are greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts
That wait their hour to step into life's front ...'

- Savitri, Book VII, The Book of Yoga,
Canto II: The Parable of the Search for the Soul

I have found the following links to many of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's works in online (in pdf format). I have most of these substantial books sitting in a bookshelf beside my desk, and am amazed and grateful to find them all available for easy reference and for the benefit of those who don't have access to hard copies.

Sri Aurobindo

Karmayogin - Political Writtings and Speeches 1909- 1910
Essays Divine and Human (1910-1950)
The Secret of the Veda
Hymns to the Mystic Fire
The Upanishads
Essays on the Gita
The Human Cycle, the Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination
Essays of Philosophy and Yoga
The Life Divine, Book I
The Life Divine, Book II
The Synthesis of Yoga
Letters on Yoga - I, II, III
Savitri - a legend and a symbol

The Mother

THE MOTHER'S AGENDA - 13 VOLUMES

COLLECTED WORKS OF THE MOTHER. - IN 17 VOLUMES

1 Prayers and Meditations
2     Words of Long Ago (- 1920)
3     Question and Answers (1929-1931)
4     Question and Answers (1950-1951)
5     Questions and Answers (1953)
6     Questions and Answers (1954)
7     Questions and Answers (1955)
8     Questions and Answers (1956)
9     Questions and Answers (1957-1958)
10   On Thoughts and Aphorisms (1958-1970)
11   Notes Along the Way (1961-1973)
12 On Education
13   Words of the Mother - I
14   Words of the Mother - II
15   Words of the Mother - III
16   Some Answers of the Mother
17   More Answers of the Mother

Evolutionary Transformation via 'enlarging self-knowledge'

2011-05-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

The following excerpt from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine is continuation of my May 1, 2 & 3 posts: 'On Matter and Evolutionary Transformation', 'More on Matter and Evolutionary Transformation' and 'Evolution Is a Process of Transmutation and Re-allocation of Energies'. These posts concern the Supramental and Integral transformation of matter, life and mind envisioned by Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet.

'To get beyond the ego is imperative, but one cannot get beyond the self, – except by finding it supremely, universally. For the self is not the ego; it is one with the All and the One and in finding it it is the All and the One that we discover in our self: the contradiction, the separation disappears, but the self, the spiritual reality remains, united with the One and the All by that delivering disappearance.

'The higher self-knowledge begins therefore as soon as man has got beyond his preoccupation with the relation of Nature and God to his superficial being, his most apparent self. One Step is to know that this life is not all, to get at the conception of his own temporal eternity, to realise, to become concretely aware of that subjective persistence which is called the immortality of the soul. When he knows that there are states beyond the material and lives behind and before him, at any rate a pre-existence and a subsequent existence, he is on his way to get rid of his temporal ignorance by enlarging himself beyond the immediate movements of Time into the possession of his own eternity. Another Step forward is to learn that his surface waking state is only a small part of his being, to begin to fathom the abyss of the Inconscient and depths of the subconscient and subliminal and scale the heights of the superconscient; so he commences the removal of his psychological self-ignorance. A third step is to find out that there is something in him other than his instrumental mind, life and body, not only an immortal ever-developing individual soul that supports his nature but an eternal immutable self and spirit, and to learn what are the categories of his spiritual being, until he discovers that all in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes the link between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to remove his constitutional self-ignorance. Discovering self and spirit he discovers God; he finds out that there is a Self beyond the temporal: he comes to the vision of the Self in the cosmic consciousness as the divine Reality behind Nature and this world of beings; his mind opens to the thought of the sense of the Absolute of whom self and the individual and the cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the original ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him. In his attempt to cast his existence into the mould of this enlarging self-knowledge his whole view and motive of life, thought and action are progressively modified and transformed; his practical ignorance of himself, his nature and his object of existence diminishes: he has set his step on the path which leads out of falsehood and suffering of a limited and partial into the perfect possession and enjoyment of a true and complete existence.

'In the course of this progress he discovers step by step the unity of the three categories with which he started. For, first, he finds that in his manifest being he is one with cosmos and Nature; mind, life and body, the soul in the succession of Time, the conscient, subconscient and superconscient, – these in there various relations and the result of their relations are cosmos and are Nature. But he finds too that in all which stands behind them or on which they are based, he is one with God; for the Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the Self manifests in the cosmos and Lord of Nature, – all this is what we mean by God, and in all this his own being goes back to God and derives from it; he is the Absolute, the Self, the Spirit self-projected in a multiplicity of itself into cosmos and veiled in Nature. In both of these realizations he finds his unity with all other souls and beings, – relatively in Nature, since he is one with them in mind, vitality, matter, soul, every cosmic principle and result, however various in energy and act of energy, disposition of principle and disposition of result, but absolutely in God, because the one Absolute, the one Self, the one Spirit is ever the Self of all and the origin, possessor and enjoyer of their multitudinous diversities. The unity of God and Nature cannot fail to manifest itself to him for he finds in the end that it is the Absolute who is all these relativities; he sees that it is the Spirit of whom every other principle is a manifestation; he discovers that it is the Self who has become all these becomings; he feels that it is the Shakti or Power if being and consciousness of the Lord of all beings which is Nature and is acting in the cosmos. Thus in the progress of our self-knowledge we arrive at that by the discovery of which all is known as one with our self and by the possession of which all is possessed and enjoyed in our own self-existence.

'Equally, by virtue of this unity, the knowledge of the universe must lead the mind of man to the same large revelation. For he cannot know Nature as Matter and Force and Life without being driven to scrutinize the relation of mental consciousness with these principles, and once he knows the real nature of mind, he must go inevitably beyond every surface appearance. He must discover the will and intelligence secret in the works of Force, operative in material and vital phenomena; he must perceive it as one in the waking consciousness, the subconscient and the superconscient: he must find the soul in the body of the material universe. Pursuing Nature through these categories in which he recognizes his unity with the rest of the cosmos, he finds a Supernature behind all that is apparent, a supreme power of the Spirit in Time and beyond Time, in Space and beyond Space, a conscious Power of the Self who by her becomes all becomings, of the Absolute who by her manifests all relativities. He knows her, in other words, not only as material Energy, Life-Force, Mind-Energy, the many faces of Nature, but as the power of Knowledge-Will of the Divine Lord of being, the Consciousness-Force of the self-existent Eternal and Infinite.' [bold emphasis added]

– Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter XVII
‘The Progress to Knowledge – God, Man and Nature’,
pp 726-728 of PDF version

Evolution Is a Process of Transmutation and Re-allocation of Energies

2011-05-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

'Everything has one and the same constituent element, you see;
and everything lies IN the interrelations.
Well, it's exactly the same for the transformation. …'

– The Mother, 9 June 1962

The following excerpts are continuation of my May 1 & 2 posts: 'On Matter and Evolutionary Transformation' and 'More on Matter and Evolutionary Transformation' – a discussion concerning the Supramental and Integral transformation of matter, life and mind envisioned by Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet. I selected these excerpts because they demonstrate the similarities between the Mother's 9 June 1962 Agenda entry, wherein she speaks of transformation as a change of relationships or inter-relations within the whole, and Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet's understanding and teachings regarding the nature of our evolutionary journey.

Excerpts from The New Way – a study in the rise and establishment of a gnostic society, Chapter 3, ‘The Way of Non-Violence’ by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet:

‘The new world is to found itself on the principle or the seed, let us call it, of Truth. Therefore in all things and in all the movements of the individual and group expression this light must be the guide along the way of unfoldment, this must be the secret formula that opens the doors of the descending new world. Such a Seed of Truth as the beacon-light must be evident even in the new society’s handling of the old one – and it must be the core and key of the process of working-out. The seed of truth is inherent in all things; the stuff of truth-consciousness is the inner-substance of all manifestation, and our evolution is simply for the purpose of peeling off more and more layers that clothe the inner light of Truth.’ (p. 34)

***

‘… The newness of today is precisely to be seen more easily in this need to integrate all the opposites, to see the place and purpose of all the myriad manifestations of the cosmic existence. Today’s world must as well embrace the very Earth that is crumbling. While not building on its foundations it must nonetheless utilize the energies that are being withdrawn from the decaying sheath in an accurately controlled manner. Otherwise these energies will remain ever free to continue in the service of the Ignorance. Cosmic evolution is always a process of transmutation or re-allocation of energies and nothing more, a re-ordering of the One Divine Energy and its progressive self-revelation and manifestation.

‘A fine and precise control is the secret key. Yet it is a control that must in some way arise of itself as it were, from the depths of itself. That is, it must not be imposed by an outside force, however enlightened, however divine or well-intentioned this may appear to be. The new creation, by a miracle of the re-allocation of energies under a divine ægis, will embrace, absorb and integrate the energies that are cast off by the process of disintegration. It will make use of these; indeed, it will find that these energies are the powers that will carry it forward more speedily on the path toward the completion of the Divine Will. The period of transition, as our times may rightly be called, is like unto a mighty brewing process, whereby the most diverse elements are cast into the cauldron to form a new and transmuted blend. (p. 35) [bold emphasis added]

***

… ‘The time has come’, were the words the Mother heard pronounced on the day of the Supramental Manifestation in 1956. And truly as of that time, Time has come, as an ally now.

‘It is by the all-pervading energy of Time—the New Time, as it were—and the perfect control it exerts over all manifested things from within the core of matter itself, of which it is the binding energy, that the invincible power for a total and secure protection has been born. All forms, all manifestations bear in their essence this secret energy; thus through and by it the new way will reveal the truth in the doctrine of non-violence. A control must be perfected from within the centre of things, from the heart itself of every minute particle. And in this sense we may being to speak of a transformation of Matter. At the same time—nothing must be wasted in the creation—hence even the Ignorance must find its place and its purpose, and reveal the greater truths of itself. Likewise all relations take on another meaning in this new way of Time; the most negative actions may well be the very method of Time’s harmony, unknown to us yet allied with us. Even we must state that there can be no misuse or evil manipulation of this energy, for its essence is harmony and whosoever passes these portals walks into a consciousness of the harmonious flow of things and only assists in the more perfect unfoldment of Time irrespective of the original motivation. Everything becomes Time’s field and tool, everything is Time’s form—thus to be conscious of Time is to better do the work of the Time-Spirit upon Earth. The powers of the Ignorance are transformed because the Ignorance itself is now compelled to act according to the inner control of the new time, the Supramental Harmony of Time. (p. 39) [bold emphasis added]

***

Upcoming: Excerpts from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine on this same theme.