For the first time in recorded history, during this Aquarian Age, our Earth’s unique and full contribution to the Solar System will be unveiled; she will be seen as a ‘conscious entity’  among the nine.  Earth has been treated as an ‘outcast’, Thea explains, because of ineffective and  partial spiritual visions over thousands of years; her destiny has been totally misunderstood (4).  In both East and West, seekers  were encouraged to deny life on their own home planet: Western spirituality encouraged believers to accept suffering as a way to attain a reward in a heaven beyond this life. Earth was considered a prison, a ‘fall from grace’.  Similarly, a variety of Eastern philosophical systems  also negated life on this planet, ‘in a quest for otherworldliness,…all creation in matter was an “illusion’ (ibid).

Most cosmologies, like the yogas and religions of old, are also incomplete, they too have taken the vision of Earth’s central purpose for being away from the planet and directed it toward that which is external. It is a ‘cosmic-evolutionary’ problem we face, Thea explains. For most people, the reality is that after millennia of evolution,  at the centre of our being there is a great void instead of the central Sun,  the result is chaos instead of a cosmos.

Thea assures that we have the aid of Vishnu’s intervention. The 9^th evolutionary Avatar, Sri Aurobindo,  reversed the misdirection to the beyond and the seeking of otherworldliness; he exposed ‘the cosmic lie’.  We are an evolving species in transition from the mental to Supramental stage of consciousness, we move toward a cosmic consciousness, a universalisation that is demanded of us if we wish to accomplish the Aquarian goal:   to make manifest on our Earth, the Divine, ‘to become the living expression of the Supreme Will.’ (5)

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother created the first laboratory, gathering energies together who represented the old consciousness, the ‘otherworldly’ direction of the old yogas that had permeated the entire world. But after the Supramental Manifestation of 1956, and as a result of their tremendous labour, a new field was needed to root the Truth Consciousness into the physical Earth. 

Thea wrote the three volumes of The New Way to make clear the Third and Fourth levels of the yoga. She describes  the process undertaken, likening it to constructing a bridge – a body of knowledge (gnosis) which ‘densifies’ the vision and connects the Supramental to our Earth plane (6).  The first half of the Bridge was constructed by Sri Aurobindo, (the Transcendent Divine) and The Mother (the Cosmic Divine). The yoga of the second half of the Bridge  was carried out by Thea, third member of his Solar Line, (the Individual Divine) and the Fourth.

Thea describes Sri Aurobindo’s return as the Fourth in this way: ‘…as he wrote in A God’s Labour to describe his return from the abyss, ‘He who I am was with me still’. He returned this time as part of the New Creation, as the Immanent One of his former Transcendence, the minute and precise details of which were recorded in the measurements of the Inner Chamber by the Mother.’ (ibid, p. 13)