Signs and Symbols of an Accident-Induced Sabbatical ~ Part 3 ~ "Heaven on Earth": The Highest Expression of Saturn-Neptune conjunct at 0° Aries
An illustration of St. John’s Revelation or Apocalypse, Chapter 21, depicting “New Jerusalem” and “A New Heaven and a New Earth”, from Royaumont Bible, New Testament (Unknown artist, 1811)
In Part One, in addition to writing about Saturn’s initial 2025 ingress or movement into 0° Aries—the beginning and end of the Zodiac—one day before I tripped and shattered my left wrist, marking the beginning of my second Saturn Return, I wrote about my family’s ADHD field and related challenges as being instrumental in launching me on my path of yoga.
In the hours after my father’s 1988 suicide, while flying back from a summer job in L.A. to my hometown in Virginia to be with my family and community, my normal consciousness was swept away for a bit and I directly experienced the ever-present field of Divine Love underlying and connecting ALL. From that point onwards, I craved direct experience of the Divine. The Neptunian enchantments of religious dogma, religious faith, and religious community persistently fell far short of the mark for me. At the age of 24 I found and deeply resonated with Sri Aurobindo’s yoga and teachings on the hidden yet immanent DIVINE nature, core, and reality of Matter and of our material manifestation or Matrix, which, once born out and REALIZED via the natural course of evolution, establishes the prophesied “Heaven on Earth,” by whatever name.
“[T]here has even been the dream or a psychic prevision of a fulfilment exceeding the individual transformation, a new earth and heaven, a city of God, a divine descent upon earth, a reign of the spiritually perfect, a kingdom of God not only within us but outside, in a collective human life. However obscure may have been some of the forms taken by this aspiration, the indication they contain of the urge of the occult spiritual being within to emergence in earth-nature is unmistakable.
“If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the spirit, mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, CWSA, Vols. 21-22, p.879)
In retrospect I now see and understand the goal and mission of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga—the realization of our Divine Matrix, Maya (measure) and the manifestation of the Divine (Self, Truth, Consciousness, Law, Order, etc,) seeding or birthing an entirely new Age and phase of evolution on Earth—can be rightfully characterized as the highest of high expressions of Saturnian-Neptunian at 0° Aries. Likewise, this birthing, revelation, or “apocalypse” of the Divine Consciousness, in humanity, on Earth, in our Age of Aquarius, is also a high expression of Aquarius—the sign of Man, the Water Bearer, and the Water Jar (Kumbha)—which is ruled by both Saturn and Uranus. In astrological tradition the 8th planet Neptune rules the sign of Pisces, but Neptune’s home in the Gnostic Circle, is 20° Aquarius, corresponding to the 8 Point of the circle of 9.
Sri Aurobindo made the case that the religions we have inherited from ages gone by missed the mark of the true goal of life and of Spiritual Realization, because they have long-assumed that God or Divinity, by whatever name or characterization, is a thing separate from ourselves, and that this Divine experience or presence is to be attained or met via essentially escaping the “illusion,” sin, or suffering of our of material and temporal existence, by whatever means—death, heaven, dissolution, meditative trance, moksha, etc. He wrote:
“I do not agree with the view that the world is an illusion, mithyā. The Brahman is here as well as in the supracosmic Absolute. The thing to be overcome is the Ignorance which makes us blind and prevents us from realising Brahman [=the Divine] in the world as well as beyond it and the true nature of existence.” (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga 1, CWSA, Vol. 29, p. 391) [Text in brackets added]
*
“Brahman…is the name given by Indian philosophy since the beginning of time to the one Reality eternal and infinite which is the Self, the Divine, the All, the more than All, which would remain even if you and everybody and everything else in existence or imagining itself to be in existence vanished into blazes—even if this whole universe disappeared, Brahman would be safely there and nothing whatever lost…. [A] realisation of the Self is the beginning of Brahman realisation;—the Brahman consciousness—the Self in all and all in the Self etc.” (Sri Aurobindo, “What the deuce is "Brahman consciousness?” Letters on Himself and the Ashram, CWSA, Vol. 35, p. 668)
*
“The divine Conscious-Force is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled, operative secretly behind the actual phenomenon of things, and it expresses itself there characteristically through its own subordinate term, Life. (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, CWSA, Vol. 21-22, pp. 232-33)
*
“For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga - I, CWSA, Vol. 23-23, p. 280) [All bold emphasis in this quote and in other quotes of this article is added.]
*
“There must be an emergent supramental Consciousness-Force liberated and active within the terrestrial whole and an organised supramental instrumentation of the Spirit in the life and the body,—for the body consciousness also must become sufficiently awake to be a fit instrument of the workings of the new supramental Force and its new order. Till then any intermediate change could be only partial or insecure; an overmind or intuitive instrumentation of Nature could be developed, but it would be a luminous formation imposed on a fundamental and environmental Inconscience. A supramental principle and its cosmic operation once established permanently on its own basis, the intervening powers of Overmind and spiritual Mind could found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection; they would become in the earth-existence a hierarchy of states of consciousness rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme spiritual level. Mind and mental humanity would remain as one step in the spiritual evolution; but other degrees above it would be there formed and accessible by which the embodied mental being, as it became ready, could climb into the gnosis and change into an embodied supramental and spiritual being. On this basis the principle of a divine life in terrestrial Nature would be manifested; even the world of ignorance and inconscience might discover its own submerged secret and begin to realise in each lower degree its divine significance.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, CWSA, Vols. 21-22, p. 998)
Throughout the first 6 years of studying Sri Aurobindo’s works (1993-1999), even while fully resonating with his teachings on the veiled divinity operating through and organizing ALL, I would always make the Saturnian demand: “PROVE IT.” In other words, I demanded of Sri Aurobindo—who was very much alive in my consciousness even though he died 19 years before my birth—the direct and lived experience of the Supramental Consciousness-Force of the hidden Divine Self of all selves by whatever name, at work in my life and in the world to help me know that I was on the right track. I was decidedly interested in what was actually TRUE, not in what I wanted to be true or wanted to believe.
Convincing and life altering proof did come via various means, including an initiatory chain of events that included Sri Aurobindo appearing to me in a vision, with a legion of dis-embodied souls behind him, telling me that I was going to India in 1999. Soon thereafter, once I got to Pondicherry, India, while gazing upon the last living pictures ever taken of he and the Mother, my consciousness was flooded with the knowledge that there was a third stage of the Supramental Yoga that would be essentially considered heretical by the crystalized consciousness of the Ashram and Auroville, with no indication of who or what that entailed. After my time in Pondicherry, via the suggestion of my travelling partner, I travelled to Kodaikanal where I felt an overwhelming sense of peace and an integral understanding of my life thus far. Subsequently, upon my return to the United States, via no effort or searching on my part, I came across The Gnostic Circle on my sister’s bookshelf, introducing me to the author and person—Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, aka Thea—who had been carrying out the third stage of the Supramental Yoga with little to no fanfare or recognition, since the decade of my birth. My sister had never read the book or talked to me about it, she just saw it on someone’s coffee table and resonated with its cover.
When I finished Thea’s revelatory book, I discovered that she lived precisely in Kodaikanal. At that point my mind was forever altered because I realized, via direct experience, that the Supramental Consciousness-Force, or some higher-than-mental force by whatever name, had not only organized ALL of the details and events of my first trip to India and my return to the United States, but had been organizing the details and events of my life all along. After that, I no longer wondered if I was on the right life path. The direction of my yogic life path was crystal CLEAR. It was the culmination of my first Saturn Return and true to Saturn’s promise, it dismantled my old structures and ways of thinking, and launched me into a new reality, BEYOND THE POINT OF NO RETURN. I simply could not un-experience what I had directly experienced, or ignore what had been revealed to me via my compelling inner relationship with Sri Aurobindo.
The Mother
Sri Aurobindo's spiritual partner, the Mother (Mirra Alfassa), was born in the Neptunian sign of Pisces. She was Neptunian in the highest sense. She was a psychically gifted artist, seer, and yogi who studied occultism, and experienced altered states and visions. She possessed a cosmic and non-local consciousness, and was, in this non-local way, connected with Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness long before they ever met and long after his passing. From what I have gathered from her talks and writings, her chief spiritual strategy was a Neptunian surrender to the Divine. In the Mother’s natal chart, both Saturn and Sun are in Pisces, in the Capricorn-ruled 10th house. Thus it is perfectly astrologically fitting that the Mother’s dharma was to participate alongside Sri Aurobindo in the avataric process of birthing and manifesting the reality of the descending supramental or divine truth-consciousness on Earth, which again I see as a high expression, synthesis, and harmony of both Saturnian and Neptunian energies.
The Mother performed her avataric mission or role in various ways, including her relationship and work with Sri Aurobindo, her yoga of bringing down the supramental consciousness into her body, her yoga of transforming the physical body, her incites and teachings regarding both the old world based on the dimly-lit mental consciousnessness and the new world based on the supramental consciousness, as well as her profound understanding and use of symbols and sacred geometry to communicate the Divine Presence in the forms and shapes of our world. She also established, organized, and ran the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Sri Aurobindo wrote the following about her avataric role and yoga. Note that the Sanskrit word avatara means “descent,” and denotes the descent or bringing down of the Divine from the transcendent heights or “heavens” into the material world.
"The Mother comes in order to bring down the Supramental and it is the descent which makes her full manifestation here possible.” (Sri Aurobindo, 23 September 1935, The Mother with Letters on the Mother, CWSA Volume 32, p. 34)
*
“[The Mother’s] is a chance for the earth-consciousness to receive the supramental into it and to undergo first the transformation necessary for that to be possible. Afterwards there will be a farther transformation by the supramental, but the whole earth-consciousness will not be supramentalised—there will be first a new race representing the supermind, as man represents the mind." (Sri Aurobindo, 13 August 1933, Ibid. p. 32)
*
“There is no difference between the Mother’s path and mine; we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same.” (Sri Aurobindo, 10 September 1931, Ibid, p. 81)
*
“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, but she is working here in the body to bring down something not yet expressed in this material world so as to transform life here ― it is so that you should regard her as the Divine Shakti working here for that purpose. She is that in the body, but in her whole consciousness she is also identified with all the other aspects of the Divine.” (Sri Aurobindo, 16 June 1933, Ibid. p. 32)
*
“[The] Mother has taken the body because a work of a physical nature (including a change in the physical world) had to be done.” (Sri Aurobindo, Ibid. p. 509)
From 31 December 1969 through 17 January 1970, the Mother’s role in helping to birth or manifest the seed of the divine supramental consciousness and its Divine Order (Ritam), Divine Measure (Maya), Divine Law (Dharma) on Earth took the form of a vision of a sacred temple, or divine structure, aka “the Mother’s Temple” or Matrimandir.
“The dharma of the Mother was to concretise the nourishing vessel of the new consciousness that originates from the seed of the Father. In practical terms what this means is that her tapasya was to generate conditions in the world which would bring about the desired Birth….” (Thea, “Saturn and the Mystery of the Mother's Yoga,” The New Way, Vols. 1 & 2, pp. 277-78)
*
“In the very beginning of 1970 the Mother 'saw' the chamber in the plane of Truth. She looked into the dimension of perfection and saw the soul of the new world, or rather, the seed from which it shall arise. (Ibid, p. 281)
*
“While Sri Aurobindo reached the source of the Sanatan Dharma, the Ancient Way, it was the Mother who actually did the yoga that finally permitted that ancient Way to be reinstated. The Divine Measure was her contribution, epitomised in her [Temple] Vision and Plan, her final legacy.” (Chronicles of the Inner Chamber, Part XII)
*
“Precision [in measure] was the Mother’s call…. [So] that the Divine Measure she brought to Earth in early January of 1970, in an extraordinary yogic feat, could be transposed into our world of time and space and measure. In this act her purpose for incarnating was encapsulated; in that plan we have the condensation of everything that the Mother was – what she came down with and what she grew into once she was born on Earth. The entire trajectory of her yoga is captured first in her own symbol, which forms the overall basis of the Chamber’s plan, and then all the other elements of the design as given by her. We will cover them all, one by one, in these Chronicles.” (Thea, Ibid., “Part II: The Disfigurement of the Mother's Temple Vision”)
*
“The Mother’s Vision and its accompanying geometric plan is her legacy to humanity in that it reveals exactly what she accomplished up to that point in time; and also the exact stage of the Supramental Manifestation in January 1970. Her final gift to us was given during those eighteen days when she explained and defended her Vision before the non-believers.” (Ibid.)
As discussed in the books quoted above, the prevailing dim consciousness in Pondicherry and Auroville, did not respect or adhere to the Divine Measure of the Mother’s temple vision and it was thus Thea referred to the Auroville temple that goes by the name of Matrimandir (literally meaning, “the Mother’s Temple”), as “the shadow-temple,” recognizing it as a distortion or shadow of the original vision, which is tragically celebrated and revered as the real deal.
Any temple, or structure, including the structure of religions, religious or mythological ideologies, dogma, rituals, organizations, scriptures, hymns, art, symbols, as well as any books or writings about divinity, spirituality, or higher consciousness can rightfully be characterized as a Saturnian crystallization of Neptunian conceptions of the Divine or Neptunian longings to connect with and experience the Divine. The problem arises when these structures and their adherents are manifestations of immature or low expression of these energies, further crystallizing humanity’s partial, immature, and incomplete understandings of the Divine, obstructing the direct experience, energy flow, and all-integrating force of the manifest Divine. Of course violence erupts when humanity’s fear, ignorance, and fragmented consciousness turn these misunderstandings into ideological hatred, which is amongst the lowest of low expressions of the intersection of Saturnian and Neptunian energies.
The Zodiac itself is a Saturnian embodiment and crystallized template of the Divine Law, Order, Measure, geometry, matrix, and harmony of the Earth’s Tropical or Solar Year divided into four quadrants and twelve months based on the four seasonal markers: the vernal equinox, summer solstice, autumnal equinox, and winter solstice, as well as the sacred geometry of the circle itself which I have illustrated at length in my writings.
Understood correctly, as illuminated by Thea, the Tropical Zodiac—which she equated with the Sanatana Dharma (Eternal Law) and recognized as the true form and measure of the Vedic Year or Sacrifice (Yajna)—is a real bridge between humanity and the Divine. Misunderstood, this sacred year or divine “sacrifice” becomes plagued by superstitions, fanciful imaginations, misuse, rigid interpretations, and mismeasure as well. In St. John’s much-misunderstood biblical “Revelation” or “Apocalypse,” the Zodiac was characterized as a temple and as a 12-gated city named the “new Jerusalem.”
“Him that overcometh [i.e. the Divine Son=Avatar=Conqueror] will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name. (Revelation 3:12, KJV21) [Text in brackets added, above and below]
*
“And there was given me a reed like unto a rod; and the angel stood, saying, “Rise, and measure the temple of God and the altar, and them that worship therein. (Revelation 11:1, KJV21)
*
“I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband…. And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the Holy Jerusalem, descending out of Heaven from God, having the glory of God. And her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. And had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel: On the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof.” (Revelation 21, excerpts, KJV21)
This golden reed, rod, and pillar—equivalent to the Vedic skambha—as I discussed in Geometric Keys of Vedic Wisdom (book and blog), is the radius of the circle which divides the circle into its twelve months. In The Hidden Manna (1976) Thea discussed St. John’s Revelation or Apocalypse, as a prophecy of the victory of the Aquarian Age avatar, whose descent as the “Divine Son” marks the birth, establishment, or seeding of the universalized Divine Mind by which the prophecy of “Heaven on Earth” is realized or made real. She wrote of the zodiacal sense of St. John’s vision of God’s temple and city, and of the Mother’s vision of her twelve-pillared temple. She saw both, and the Zodiac itself, as symbols of the victorious manifestation of the Divine on Earth.
“[T]he Revelation offers a very clear line to grasp hold of, which is the initial vision of the zodiac and then the subsequent descent of this in the form of a temple,—that is, a temple which incorporates all the details of that vision, that becomes, as it were, a structure in the most material creation identical to the vision of the zodiac in the subtle spheres. Hence as the zodiac in its subtle form is a body of knowledge, the temple, which is its material counterpart, would also be the physical record of the advent of the Evolutionary Avatar and the divinisation of the Earth, the knowledge of which is contained in the subtle zodiac and the harmonic structure of the solar system.” (Thea, The Hidden Manna, pp. 7-8)
*
“New Jerusalem is the city that represents the new consciousness.” (Ibid. p. 298)
*
“The New Jerusalem, that jewel [=that city] descended from heaven, is the message of the zodiac realised in Matter." (Ibid. p. 303, text in brackets and bold emphasis is added)
*
“In the prophet’s [St. John’s] vision he sees this truth as a most concrete reality. The subtle essence of truth-consciousness has taken possession of the forms of the most dense matter. It shows itself to his eye in the most rigid part of the material gradation: in the mineral and the stone. These are the jewels of the twelve-faceted crown, once the temple, now the City….” (Ibid. p. 313)
If we understand what Thea is saying here, then it follows that the prevailing rejection of the Zodiac by our world's present crystalized religious and scientific "old guard" represents a real obstruction to the REALIZATION of "Heaven on Earth," or "The Life Divine," as Sri Aurobindo called it, which is the full manifestation and lived experience of the Divine on Earth.
Whereas in Part Three of this series, I have been discussing the avatar’s or avataric mission of manifesting the Divine on Earth as the highest of high archetypal expressions of the energies of Saturn conjunct Neptune at 0° Aries, in Part Four I will discuss the significance of the actual 2025-2026 conjunction of Saturn and Neptune at 0° Aries falling 99/100 years into our Age of Aquarius, according to Thea’s measure of the astrological ages. I will also discuss some intriguing details about the timing of Saturn’s initial 24 May 2025 ingress into Aries and my subsequent 25 May 2025 accident, in relation to the 26 November birth of “the Fourth” or “Son” of Sri Aurobindo’s avataric or solar line.
available on this blog, please consider donating.
Comments
Post a Comment