Vishnu, Sri Aurobindo & the Force of a Secret Unity
Several articles in this blog have discussed the idea that when looking at events and circumstances as being related within the 360 degree cyclical structure of Time and Space, one begins to see geometries, synchronicities, harmonies, themes, relationships and ‘golden threads’ that are not visible when looking at circumstances as linear.* When such patterns are seen within and throughout the whole, one can better appreciate what Sri Aurobindo called the Supramental Consciousness – a vast multi-dimensional or all-dimensional truth-consciousness and all-pervading force which far surpasses the human mind’s current organizational and creative capacities. By understanding the field of its action the Supramental consciousness-force is better understood and seen as the ‘force of a secret Unity’ which compels the material universe towards full expression of its Divine Self.
In August a series of events or circumstances unfolded in my life in a way that seemed to be an excellent demonstration of the multi-dimensional and higher-than-mental organizational skills of the True Self (a unified being/becoming). On August 7th I published an article titled ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Kin Asked to Leave India’. The subject matter was the corrupt circumstances underlying the deportation order hand-delivered to Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea) on July 15th. I wrote:
The very next day, on August 8th, Tusar N. Mohapatra (editor of Savitri Era Open Forum) wrote an article titled ‘Sri Aurobindo and the Mother already accomplished the metaphysical victory’:
Late that afternoon I went for a walk. I had not left my house in a week due to health issues; and so instead of walking out my front door and up a hill as I usually do, I got into my car and drove to a beautiful flat-land neighborhood and community garden which would be an easy stroll. On one street I saw and perused a garage sale which the owners were in the process of closing down. The moment I began to conclude that not much of interest was left, I saw a large metallic sculpture of what seemed to be Vishnu seated on a huge multi-headed cobra with two goddesses. The owner confirmed that it was indeed Vishnu and I marveled at the coincidence of stumbling upon this representation of him after I had been writing about his Line of Avatars in conjunction with Sri Aurobindo, his yoga and Thea’s plight with the India government. I had been wondering all day (for weeks really) what the consequences would be for India if Sri Aurobindo’s yogic ‘kin’ – a fellow restorer of India’s dharma (a dharma which includes the true importance and true function of Vishnu’s evolutionary avatars) – was ousted from Indian soil. And so, without much ado or thought other than ‘Wow’, I paid a small price for the beautiful and seemingly miraculous Vishnu sculpture, had it loaded into my car and brought it home.
Later that evening, via the world-wide-web, I discovered that it was a bronze Sheshshayi Vishnu from Tamil Nadu (the seat of Sri Aurobindo’s, the Mother’s and Thea’s yoga), worth over $1000. I felt like I had won a cosmic door prize ... a boon of assurance ... assurance that Vishnu, or rather the all-pervading universal consciousness he represents, was no irrelevant myth. It felt like an assurance that I am tuned in to the right station, that everything is in order and that Sri Aurobindo’s position as the 9th Avatar of Vishnu, his rebirth as the 10th and the importance/necessity of Thea’s yoga and her presence in India will eventually be self-evident.
Finding Sheshshayi Vishnu, complete with the two goddesses Sridevi (the Divine Mother or Mistress of the Cosmos) and Bhudevi (Mother Earth, Daughter of the Cosmos), would have been assurance enough for me; but other details kept popping up, adding intrigue and perfection to the picture. First of all this Vishnu – the ‘Lord of the Cosmos’ and Lord of the 360 degree zodiac – found his way to a house whose street address is 360. At this 360 address live four people (including myself) as well as one cat and one dog. With the exception of the dog, the Sun Sign of every member of our household is a Preservation sign of the zodiac – i.e. one of the four signs of Vishnu the Preserver: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. The fact that our dog is not a fixed sign is no spoiler of the Vishnu pattern or ‘golden thread’ because her name is Zoe, which shares the root ‘zo’ (meaning ‘life’ or ‘to live’) with the word ‘zodiac’. Zoe means ‘life giver’ and ‘zodiac’ means ‘circle of life.’ It was truly amusing that this Vishnu would find his resting place at a ‘360’ address wherein each of the four preservation signs of the zodiac was thoroughly represented. It was especially amusing and intriguing considering my own profound interest in the real evolutionary consciousness-force that Vishnu represents.
Due to the very real impact of Sri Aurobindo’s incarnation and his Supramental Yoga, Vishnu's periodic manifestations in the astrological ages corresponding to ‘preservation’ (as in our current Age of Aquarius) do not occur to me as a useless and fanciful mythological story. It rather occurs to be a very real evolutionary occurrence that not many are in the position to appreciate. My appreciation of the reality of the evolutionary scheme of Vishnu's Dasavatars versus the myth has been cultivated via an ongoing and thoroughly compelling study of the Supramental Descent/Manifestation, the Supramental Cosmology and the Geometry of Time. Without that background, Vishnu and his iconography, his 10,000 names, his Dasavataras, his Eagle (Scorpio) and his three backwards ‘steps’ through the zodiac … to the Lion (Leo), the Bull (Taurus) and the Man (Aquarius) would make no real sense to me at all.
The next interesting detail of finding Vishnu at the garage sale was that the date, 8.8.2009, reduces to 9 (via Theosophical addition). Those who are familiar with the circular and cyclical essence of Vedic Mathematics, or with the Supramental Cosmology and the Geometry of Time as introduced and taught by Thea, understand that the circle of 9 and the number 9 represent the form and dynamics of the cosmos which moves/progresses in circle or cycles of 9. [See 'The Vedic Circle of and 0, and The Gnostic Circle]
Events falling on a 9 powered day or a 9 powered year are ‘special’ in the sense that the 9 represents the full expansion and expression of the original seed, essence or indwelling consciousness of the sol/soul. It represents fullness – the maturation of a full cycle, gestation or evolutionary process from which something new can be born. Hence in Sanskrit nav means both ‘new’ and ‘nine’, and is also the root of ‘navel’ (the center of a circle or of a body). Sri Aurobindo’s incarnation as the 9th Avatar of Vishnu reflects this fullness – a full manifestation of Truth-Consciousness – from which a truly new stage of human evolution/consciousness is born. Not by coincidence, Sri Aurobindo was born in 1872, which reduces to 9 (1 + 8 + 7 + 2 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9).
The Mother herself seemed quite aware that the number 9 was ‘special’ in terms of the new Supramental consciousness and creation that has been born in the midst of the old.
After I realized the 9 number power of the date, I wondered what the address of the garage sale was. Days later I drove back by and saw it was 135 Laurel Ave. 135 reduces to 9 (1 + 3 + 5 = 9).* The 9 number power of the address was impressive. Equally impressive was the name of the street – ‘Laurel’, due to the fact my birth name and middle initial are ‘Laura L.’. So these synchronicities were delightful. I felt supremely held by the universe … not just held, but interacted with in a profound way, and grateful to witness some of the True Self’s mind boggling organizational skills.
Then a week or so later, on Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, I created and published an image of how Vishnu can be ‘seen’ in the Mother’s Symbol. This image was considered to be blasphemous by Mr. Mohapatra. [See 'Lori Deplored ...']
Anyone familiar with the zodiac can see that the four inner spokes of the Mother’s Symbol point to the very heart of the four ‘preservation’ signs of the zodiac:
15 degrees Taurus, 15 degrees Leo, 15 degrees Scorpio and 15 degrees Aquarius. As I was creating that image, I remembered that, in terms of the zodiac, 135 degrees of the 360 degree circle is actually 15 degrees Leo. Considering that Sri Aurobindo himself was a Leo and that 2007 marked the 135th anniversary of his birth, I was impressed by the multiple dimensions of the coincidences. The number 135 had presented itself in the spokes of the Mother’s Symbol, it presented itself in time as 15 degrees Leo (the 7th/8th of August) and in space as 135 Laurel Avenue, it presented itself in Sri Aurobindo’s current ennead (i.e. 9 year cycle: 135-144) and it presented itself to me in the substantial form of a bronze sculpture of Vishnu accompanied by not only one but two goddesses.
For me the ‘writing’ was on the proverbial wall; but the wall was not so much a wall as it was a unified field of Time and Space. Vishnu and his two companions represent the Divine Trinity: the Transcendent Divine, the Cosmic Divine and the Individual Divine as written of by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine and elsewhere. The Earth Goddess represents the Individual Divine because She (the Earth) is a child of the Cosmos – an individual form and individual soul evolving towards self-realization and self-fulfillment.
Up until 8.8.2008 I had assumed the Hindu god Vishnu only had one companion, a singular Lakshmi. I never realized or thought to consider that He would naturally by accompanied by both the Cosmic Mother and the Earth Mother. This incorrect assumption reminded me that up until January of the year 2000 I had assumed that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were strictly a Duo. I never thought to inquire into whether or not there was a ‘Third’. As is usually the case, when we assume that something does not exist, we are not likely to find it in our experience. As soon as I was opened to the idea/possibility that an Individual component of the Supramental Descent was necessary, circumstances quickly organized themselves to show me that this ‘component’ already existed.
It seems clear to me that a certain amount of Grace is involved whenever we manage to overcome our previous limitations and acquire a wider vision and experience of Reality; but it is also true that we can be taught and prepared to encounter wider and wider ranges of truth that have not been previously accessible to the mind. Even if at first we did not expect ourselves, the World and the Cosmos to be holistically and harmoniously expressive of and organized by a Divine Consciousness, we certainly can be taught and prepared to overcome our previously low assumptions and low expectations of the Consciousness, Cosmos and World that brought us into existence.
If I had found Sheshshayi Vishnu at a garage sale without having been taught to understand and see circumstances in terms of the 360 degree field or ‘superstructure’ of Time and Space, and if I had not bothered try to understand the true significance of Vishnu, his companion goddesses, and his various symbols, then very little of the gift’s true value and significance would have dawned on me. A week ago I noticed that a spider had cast a small but full web on Sheshshayi Vishnu. My first thought was that the web was out of place, a nuisance, and needed to be taken down. But then I saw the web had been constructed directly over Vishnu’s disc, as if the spider, the lord of the web, had put his or her own cosmic design on top of Vishnu’s cosmic design on purpose. Even in this small detail, the ‘logic of the Infinite’ was present. Its beauty and precision could easily have had no witness.
The full value, significance, beauty and purpose of the present and the past that the Divine Cosmos and Divine Earth has laid at our doorstep is frequently missed for all sorts of reasons. From what I have learned, a limited understanding of how the Divine Being and the Individual Soul navigates and expresses/unfolds itself in the 360 degree field of Time and Space is a fundamental culprit. Spiders never seem to loose their natural ability to express and attune themselves and their developmental/creative process to the 360 degree field in which they exist, nor do trees or flowers, or shells or planets or multitudes of forms that exist in the Cosmos and on the Earth. Yet somehow the human mind is quite capable of operating without much attunement to or appreciation of the field in which and by which we exist. This limited attunement to and appreciation of the field of our existence is not meant to be a permanent affair.
In August a series of events or circumstances unfolded in my life in a way that seemed to be an excellent demonstration of the multi-dimensional and higher-than-mental organizational skills of the True Self (a unified being/becoming). On August 7th I published an article titled ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Kin Asked to Leave India’. The subject matter was the corrupt circumstances underlying the deportation order hand-delivered to Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea) on July 15th. I wrote:
‘Surely some find it interesting that in the same month the government announced their plans to celebrate Sri Aurobindo’s arrival in the safe haven of Pondicherry, they sent police to the door of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, telling her she had four and a half days (two business days) to leave the country or she would be arrested. Ms. Norelli-Bachelet, a resident of India since 1971, is recognized by many in India and throughout the world as an essential continuation of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, and especially as an extension of his will towards uplifting the Sanatana Dharma and the true Vedic idea that has been lost on Indians and the rest of the world alike for aeons.’I noted the intriguing coincidence that on the same day the exit order was given, a chapter of her latest book was published in an Indian magazine (Bhavan’s Journal) which discusses Sri Aurobindo as an avatar of Vishnu. The book’s title is Secrets of the Earth – Questions and Answers on the Line of Ten Avatars of Vedic Tradition.
The very next day, on August 8th, Tusar N. Mohapatra (editor of Savitri Era Open Forum) wrote an article titled ‘Sri Aurobindo and the Mother already accomplished the metaphysical victory’:
‘The divine manifestation of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo is an unprecedented phenomenon which can't be explained by past mythological instances or received metaphysical formulations. Parameters of perennial philosophy or speculative prophecies like eternal recurrence fall flat here. All talk of the Messiah, the Tirthankar or the Avatar is idle intellectual approximations.’Mr. Mohapatra is in agreement with others who feel that ‘Sri Aurobindo need not be in the series of Ten Avatars’ and that Thea’s yoga and yogic knowledge are not valid extensions of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s great yoga.
Late that afternoon I went for a walk. I had not left my house in a week due to health issues; and so instead of walking out my front door and up a hill as I usually do, I got into my car and drove to a beautiful flat-land neighborhood and community garden which would be an easy stroll. On one street I saw and perused a garage sale which the owners were in the process of closing down. The moment I began to conclude that not much of interest was left, I saw a large metallic sculpture of what seemed to be Vishnu seated on a huge multi-headed cobra with two goddesses. The owner confirmed that it was indeed Vishnu and I marveled at the coincidence of stumbling upon this representation of him after I had been writing about his Line of Avatars in conjunction with Sri Aurobindo, his yoga and Thea’s plight with the India government. I had been wondering all day (for weeks really) what the consequences would be for India if Sri Aurobindo’s yogic ‘kin’ – a fellow restorer of India’s dharma (a dharma which includes the true importance and true function of Vishnu’s evolutionary avatars) – was ousted from Indian soil. And so, without much ado or thought other than ‘Wow’, I paid a small price for the beautiful and seemingly miraculous Vishnu sculpture, had it loaded into my car and brought it home.
Later that evening, via the world-wide-web, I discovered that it was a bronze Sheshshayi Vishnu from Tamil Nadu (the seat of Sri Aurobindo’s, the Mother’s and Thea’s yoga), worth over $1000. I felt like I had won a cosmic door prize ... a boon of assurance ... assurance that Vishnu, or rather the all-pervading universal consciousness he represents, was no irrelevant myth. It felt like an assurance that I am tuned in to the right station, that everything is in order and that Sri Aurobindo’s position as the 9th Avatar of Vishnu, his rebirth as the 10th and the importance/necessity of Thea’s yoga and her presence in India will eventually be self-evident.
Finding Sheshshayi Vishnu, complete with the two goddesses Sridevi (the Divine Mother or Mistress of the Cosmos) and Bhudevi (Mother Earth, Daughter of the Cosmos), would have been assurance enough for me; but other details kept popping up, adding intrigue and perfection to the picture. First of all this Vishnu – the ‘Lord of the Cosmos’ and Lord of the 360 degree zodiac – found his way to a house whose street address is 360. At this 360 address live four people (including myself) as well as one cat and one dog. With the exception of the dog, the Sun Sign of every member of our household is a Preservation sign of the zodiac – i.e. one of the four signs of Vishnu the Preserver: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. The fact that our dog is not a fixed sign is no spoiler of the Vishnu pattern or ‘golden thread’ because her name is Zoe, which shares the root ‘zo’ (meaning ‘life’ or ‘to live’) with the word ‘zodiac’. Zoe means ‘life giver’ and ‘zodiac’ means ‘circle of life.’ It was truly amusing that this Vishnu would find his resting place at a ‘360’ address wherein each of the four preservation signs of the zodiac was thoroughly represented. It was especially amusing and intriguing considering my own profound interest in the real evolutionary consciousness-force that Vishnu represents.
Due to the very real impact of Sri Aurobindo’s incarnation and his Supramental Yoga, Vishnu's periodic manifestations in the astrological ages corresponding to ‘preservation’ (as in our current Age of Aquarius) do not occur to me as a useless and fanciful mythological story. It rather occurs to be a very real evolutionary occurrence that not many are in the position to appreciate. My appreciation of the reality of the evolutionary scheme of Vishnu's Dasavatars versus the myth has been cultivated via an ongoing and thoroughly compelling study of the Supramental Descent/Manifestation, the Supramental Cosmology and the Geometry of Time. Without that background, Vishnu and his iconography, his 10,000 names, his Dasavataras, his Eagle (Scorpio) and his three backwards ‘steps’ through the zodiac … to the Lion (Leo), the Bull (Taurus) and the Man (Aquarius) would make no real sense to me at all.
The next interesting detail of finding Vishnu at the garage sale was that the date, 8.8.2009, reduces to 9 (via Theosophical addition). Those who are familiar with the circular and cyclical essence of Vedic Mathematics, or with the Supramental Cosmology and the Geometry of Time as introduced and taught by Thea, understand that the circle of 9 and the number 9 represent the form and dynamics of the cosmos which moves/progresses in circle or cycles of 9. [See 'The Vedic Circle of and 0, and The Gnostic Circle]
The Mother herself seemed quite aware that the number 9 was ‘special’ in terms of the new Supramental consciousness and creation that has been born in the midst of the old.
‘The whole is brought with lightening speed towards
the consciousness that will be this Consciousness
of the point and the whole at the same time ….
... The figure 9 has something to do with all of this ….
There are so many things we don’t know!’
– The Mother’s Agenda, 19 November 1969
the consciousness that will be this Consciousness
of the point and the whole at the same time ….
... The figure 9 has something to do with all of this ….
There are so many things we don’t know!’
– The Mother’s Agenda, 19 November 1969
After I realized the 9 number power of the date, I wondered what the address of the garage sale was. Days later I drove back by and saw it was 135 Laurel Ave. 135 reduces to 9 (1 + 3 + 5 = 9).* The 9 number power of the address was impressive. Equally impressive was the name of the street – ‘Laurel’, due to the fact my birth name and middle initial are ‘Laura L.’. So these synchronicities were delightful. I felt supremely held by the universe … not just held, but interacted with in a profound way, and grateful to witness some of the True Self’s mind boggling organizational skills.
Then a week or so later, on Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, I created and published an image of how Vishnu can be ‘seen’ in the Mother’s Symbol. This image was considered to be blasphemous by Mr. Mohapatra. [See 'Lori Deplored ...']
Anyone familiar with the zodiac can see that the four inner spokes of the Mother’s Symbol point to the very heart of the four ‘preservation’ signs of the zodiac:
15 degrees Taurus, 15 degrees Leo, 15 degrees Scorpio and 15 degrees Aquarius. As I was creating that image, I remembered that, in terms of the zodiac, 135 degrees of the 360 degree circle is actually 15 degrees Leo. Considering that Sri Aurobindo himself was a Leo and that 2007 marked the 135th anniversary of his birth, I was impressed by the multiple dimensions of the coincidences. The number 135 had presented itself in the spokes of the Mother’s Symbol, it presented itself in time as 15 degrees Leo (the 7th/8th of August) and in space as 135 Laurel Avenue, it presented itself in Sri Aurobindo’s current ennead (i.e. 9 year cycle: 135-144) and it presented itself to me in the substantial form of a bronze sculpture of Vishnu accompanied by not only one but two goddesses.For me the ‘writing’ was on the proverbial wall; but the wall was not so much a wall as it was a unified field of Time and Space. Vishnu and his two companions represent the Divine Trinity: the Transcendent Divine, the Cosmic Divine and the Individual Divine as written of by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine and elsewhere. The Earth Goddess represents the Individual Divine because She (the Earth) is a child of the Cosmos – an individual form and individual soul evolving towards self-realization and self-fulfillment.
Up until 8.8.2008 I had assumed the Hindu god Vishnu only had one companion, a singular Lakshmi. I never realized or thought to consider that He would naturally by accompanied by both the Cosmic Mother and the Earth Mother. This incorrect assumption reminded me that up until January of the year 2000 I had assumed that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were strictly a Duo. I never thought to inquire into whether or not there was a ‘Third’. As is usually the case, when we assume that something does not exist, we are not likely to find it in our experience. As soon as I was opened to the idea/possibility that an Individual component of the Supramental Descent was necessary, circumstances quickly organized themselves to show me that this ‘component’ already existed.
It seems clear to me that a certain amount of Grace is involved whenever we manage to overcome our previous limitations and acquire a wider vision and experience of Reality; but it is also true that we can be taught and prepared to encounter wider and wider ranges of truth that have not been previously accessible to the mind. Even if at first we did not expect ourselves, the World and the Cosmos to be holistically and harmoniously expressive of and organized by a Divine Consciousness, we certainly can be taught and prepared to overcome our previously low assumptions and low expectations of the Consciousness, Cosmos and World that brought us into existence.
If I had found Sheshshayi Vishnu at a garage sale without having been taught to understand and see circumstances in terms of the 360 degree field or ‘superstructure’ of Time and Space, and if I had not bothered try to understand the true significance of Vishnu, his companion goddesses, and his various symbols, then very little of the gift’s true value and significance would have dawned on me. A week ago I noticed that a spider had cast a small but full web on Sheshshayi Vishnu. My first thought was that the web was out of place, a nuisance, and needed to be taken down. But then I saw the web had been constructed directly over Vishnu’s disc, as if the spider, the lord of the web, had put his or her own cosmic design on top of Vishnu’s cosmic design on purpose. Even in this small detail, the ‘logic of the Infinite’ was present. Its beauty and precision could easily have had no witness.
The full value, significance, beauty and purpose of the present and the past that the Divine Cosmos and Divine Earth has laid at our doorstep is frequently missed for all sorts of reasons. From what I have learned, a limited understanding of how the Divine Being and the Individual Soul navigates and expresses/unfolds itself in the 360 degree field of Time and Space is a fundamental culprit. Spiders never seem to loose their natural ability to express and attune themselves and their developmental/creative process to the 360 degree field in which they exist, nor do trees or flowers, or shells or planets or multitudes of forms that exist in the Cosmos and on the Earth. Yet somehow the human mind is quite capable of operating without much attunement to or appreciation of the field in which and by which we exist. This limited attunement to and appreciation of the field of our existence is not meant to be a permanent affair.
‘By the force of the secret Unity, the soul in becoming is urged by its own unseen reality and by the occult pressure of evolutionary Nature to come out of this state of Ignorance and recover eventually the knowledge of the one Divine Being and its oneness with it and at the same time to recover its spiritual unity with all individual beings and the whole universe. It has to become aware not only of itself in the universe but of the universe in itself and of the Being of cosmos as its greater self; the individual has to universalize himself and in the same movement to become aware of his supracosmic transcendence. This triple aspect of the reality must be included in the total truth of the soul and of the cosmic manifestation, and this necessity must determine the ultimate trend of the process of evolutionary Nature.’ – Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine
* When I shared this article with Thea she commented that it was really done but she said I was missing the connection between the number 135 and her life/work. I asked her what the connection was and she didn't respond. I am not aware (nor have any of her other students been able to shed light on the number 135 in her life/yoga). Perhaps she was simply to the number powers of her birth day (5), month (1) and year (1938 = 3), though her birth date is not arranged in the order 135.
Some Related Posts:
- Geometry and the Superstructure of Time
- The Vedic Circle of 9 and 0
- Coordination
- Connecting the Dots
T O S H O W E R T H I S B L O G / P O S T with W E B L O V E
S U B S C R I B E ( v i a R S S ) and / or
S H A R E IT using A N Y of the I C O N S below
Lori, this is wonderful.
ReplyDeleteNo need to tell me about coincidence. My coincidometer :) has been off the scale just lately. Unbelievable.
I 'found' this an hour ago:
"I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats COULD grin."
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
:)