Indocentric Cosmology

Theme One introduces the concept of Indocentrism, a term which Thea uses to define India’s role as the ‘cosmological centre’ of the earth during this 9th Manifestation. In theme one, the following topics provide a platform to begin to understand this concept, so central to India’s destiny:

  1. The study of our times, the Ninth Manifestation
  2. The Supramental Manifestation and the third stage of the yoga
  3. India as Cosmological Centre of the Earth
  4. The India-America Axis.

Scientist Ervin Laszlo writes in his thoughtful book, The Creative Cosmos:

‘… The next great paradigm shift in science will be by nature transdisciplinary – it will be a cosmological revolution in the classical sense in which cosmology has always been the science of the whole of reality. Kosmos, after all, means ‘ordered whole’ in classical Greek.’

Yes, a new cosmology is the need of this Aquarian Age, but Thea argues, it must be ‘Indocentric’.

Part 1: The 9th Manifestation of our Earth

The Map of the 12 Manifestations (below) is one of the primary keys of Knowledge of Thea’s New Way – each section of 6480 years is called a ‘manifestation’. They are 12 in number, the same twelve signs of the zodiac.

The Map is based on the Precessional movement of the Earth, her slow westward motion along the path of the Earth’s ecliptic. It takes 25,920 years for the Precession of the Earth to make one complete round through the twelve signs of the zodiac. A ‘Great Circle’ comprises 77,760 years; each Great Circle (of 12 Manifestations) signifies the birth of one of the four parts of the Earth’s body – physical, vital, mental and spiritual). The Earth has moved through two births, the Physical and the Vital (emotional) and she is in the final stages of the evolution of the Earth’s mental body or sheath. Periodically the Supreme Intelligence sends beings to our Earth to help mankind decipher the ‘cosmic script’; not all are the same.

Thea uses the term ‘evolutionary avatar’ for those divine incarnations that come from the ‘realm of light as messengers’ with a specific task of helping the Earth in the evolution of consciousness (The Gnostic Circle, ch 5). The Map of the 12 Manifestation is a record of the appearances of these Avatars, particularly the 7th, 8th and 9th avatar. Our primary focus now is on the 9th Manifestation (see arrow), a period of transition and tremendous possibility as the Earth evolves from the realm of Mind and into Supermind.

Part 2: The Supramental Manifestation

Shortly before her passing, Thea wrote a ‘message’ to her students and friends; she reviewed the extraordinary event of the first two stages of the yoga – the descent of the Supramental consciousness – and then described her ‘task’, as the Third in the Solar Line (Thea, The Supramental Manifestation):

‘This is the third stage of the transformative process Sri Aurobindo set on its way in 1872, when he took birth on Earth as the 9th Avatar of Vishnu. Its first two stages were carried out as a joint mission by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, his co-worker in the Yoga. Ostensibly the focus during those early first two stages was to lay the foundations for what came to be known as the Integral Yoga…

‘…almost the entire focus was to reverse the direction the quest assumed by all the yogas approximately after the time of the Buddha. It was a joint mission to turn the tide – a tide virtually with the power of a tsunami – in that all the great realisers over the past 2000 years, barring very few, had opted for an escape out of the material dimension so as not to face the challenges posed by a creation in matter which appeared insurmountable given the totality of circumstances at the stage of evolution of the species…’

 ‘…Six years after his passing in 1950, the long awaited breakthrough occurred. It set the transformative process on to its third stage… It was on 29 February, 1956, that the yogic breakthrough took place releasing the descent of a power that would ultimately bring about an entirely new principle operating within the evolutionary process. After it occurred the Mother made this statement:

‘This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine. As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that “the time has come”, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces. Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.’ (ibid)

The Mother

In this ‘new dispensation’, as Thea calls it, with the descent of the Supramental we need more than the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother of Pondicherry; humanity  must  ‘move ahead and integrate the entire universe by means of a consciousness-being so poised to become the sun’. And this is possible; birth on this third planet of our Solar System now comes with that potential imprinted within us.

Thea goes back to one of her favorite symbols – Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man – to help students understand the difference between the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Supramental yoga unfolding now in this new Aquarian Age of the 9th Manifestation. The Man in the Square represents the collective consciousness that had imprinted itself during the past Age of Pisces, poised around the individual ego with all its limitations, atavistic tendencies and self-serving vested interests. Man in the circle is the ‘Divine man’, the person toward whom humanity aspires in this 9th Manifestation, the one who has extended his boundaries to take in the universe.

This ‘circular methodology’ introduces a new operation, unique to the descent of the Supramental consciousness. ‘The task of the Third in the Line is to facilitate a vision of the Divine in action on Earth. The result is ‘seeing in understanding, whereby all creation is her being’ (ibid). We perceive the unfolding circumstances of our daily lives and evolving events of our planet as ‘order, and no longer chaos’. The astrological symbol of the Sun is appropriate here, the circle with the dot in the centre. Just as the sun’s gravitational pull holds the nine planets in their orbits, we create within us a centre that HOLDS, that allows us to stand firm in this central ‘being’ and observe the relation between the parts of the periphery and make sense out of them, make order out of chaos.

This capacity to see the play of circumstances in our lives in a different way is the key to the unfolding of the Supramental in our lives. Thea’s ‘New Way’ gives a method to perceive the Divine in action, to see and appreciate how the ‘convergence’ of events, large and small, are meaningful, purposeful and provide opportunity to move out of the small ‘boxed in’ person in the square, and become ‘the man/woman in the circle’.

When Thea was asked to choose an appropriate text for her first flyer which would summarise ‘The New Way’, out of all her inspired words, she chose the following:

‘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 SEE IN UNDERSTANDING:
Let us be the ‘new seeing’.

Part 3: India as Cosmological Centre

During this 9th Manifestation of the Earth there is one place on the planet that holds as the ‘centre’ during the shift from Eurocentrism to Indocentrism. India is that ‘Centre’ for the Earth during the dismantling of the ‘old earth’ and its evolution from the mental to the supramental consciousness. India has always carried the tremendous ‘burden of her destiny’ as the planet’s soul-centre the link to the  ‘other side’ – that replenishing eternal fount of light and power and bliss, Sat – Chit – Ananda (Thea, Burden of a Destiny). The nation lives on while others, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, have faded and waned out of existence.

India’s ‘centreship’ is not an enviable position; it means that all the problems our civilization has inherited from the last Age of Pisces (234 BCE – 1926 CE) which have been drawn into this destined centre must now be dealt with. India found herself, at the start of the new Aquarian Age (1926), shackled with many unresolved problems, the same ones that are creating havoc across the globe today, arising, it can be noted, from the divisiveness caused by religions. And because she is the Earth’s true cosmological centre what is being worked out in her grand plan, what transpires and unfolds in her consciousness, can affect the whole planet (Thea, On the Nature of Centreship). India is rooted in the Sanatana Dharma and therefore ‘exclusivism’ of any sort cannot be permitted.

Her Dharma is not religious and it is not ‘spiritual’, rather it is a way of life – unknown in the world today. Present day Hinduism was wrongly ‘packaged’ while under British rule into a religion, which made it equal with other exclusivist religions which arose only in the last Age of Pisces. In no way does it fit into the category of religion.

Thea’s Indocentric cosmology shows how the Time-spirit is working to
bring to the fore the struggle of all the many forms of  ‘exclusivism’ of
the past 2000 years. The battle now being worked out for the earth can
be framed in this question: Will India’s eternal (sanatana) dharma
prevail?

. . .

Sri Aurobindo called for a ‘new spiritual awakening’ in India’ one that would not only attend to the soul and its destiny but also to the evolving ’great problems of earthly life’. At the time of his writing he viewed India as being caught between the extremes of ‘conservative immobility and incompetence imprisoned in the shell of past conventions’. He concluded that ‘a third and as yet unknown quantity is indeed the force needed throughout the East.’

The New Way (V0lumes 1, 2 and 3) presents that ‘third way’ beyond science and beyond religions, that addresses Sri Aurobindo’s call for a resolution to India’s great problems of matter and spirit (Thea, The Supramental Synthesis, a Third Poise, & Thea, The Third Way of Conscious Evolution). She presents a model inspired by the cosmic harmonies of the Earth, and by India’s myths and history which reveal unceasingly that she is Bharat Mata, or Mother Earth. ‘India, like no other nation, is not only conscious of the Divine Mother, but her very geography proves that she is the representative of the Mother’; and with this ‘key of knowledge’ there is a path, Thea tells us, a way to be released from the present morass of uncertainty and unknowing.

This key is the Capricorn Hieroglyph, superimposed on the map of her integral body; Capricorn, tenth sign of the Zodiac, has always been considered the ‘ruler of India’ (Puranic Cosmology Updated, no. 11 and Shapiro, J., Keys of Gnosis). The symbol-map incorporates and respects the triune play of energy: Creation, Preservation and Destruction’.

Each of these is related to a particular aspect of the essential Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; each is directly related to the Mother through the ‘gunas’ or the energy flows of Rajas, Sattwa and Tamas of Hindu philosophy and systems of yoga (Ibid, The Gnostic Circle, ch 6).

The Capricorn symbol map provides a complex and fascinating study of the Dharma of the nation. Each one of the three gunas is related and completes the other, without this trinity no integration can come about (Thea, Cosmic Harmonies in Hindu Civilisation and Society, 2.2). Geographically the southern/Sattwa portion of India is the ‘destined preserver of the Dharma’ while the north/Rajas portion is the ‘defender’ and the northeast/Tamas ‘stands as the ‘dissolver of old forms’. With this cosmic vision or foundation, Thea analyses the Partition of India in 1947 (Theme three) showing how the dismemberment of the Rajas and Tamas parts of the land left the Sattwa portion, the V in the centre, standing alone – allowing a caving in of energies, undermining the health and spirit of the subcontinent.

Vedic India expressed an integral realisation based on the harmony of the three gunas: its foundation was based on a vision of God, nature and man, or Transcendent, Cosmic and Individual Divine. Over the centuries, with continuous attacks on that vision (Theme 3 and 4) India finds itself with political systems that have no relationship to the original ‘soul’ of the nation. Imported models based on ‘secularism’, for example, which are necessary for nations based on binary systems, where matters of religion must be kept separate from the state, have no relevance for an emerging India.

The destiny of India is to once again experience the vision of ‘truth-seeing’ and to be the vision that illumines the world. ‘This is not to be under the label of ‘Hinduism’ Thea writes, it is a vision arising out of ‘cosmic truth’ that allows for an unending eternally renewing experience. The old order is crumbling fast; India has yet to see what the new channels of expression will be, once the world gets through this transition period, which was destined to happen now in our Age of Aquarius, the 9th Manifestation (Thea, Cosmic Harmonies in Hindu Civilisation and Society, 2.3).

This discussion leads also to a deeper understanding of Time and the Ages; the student undertaking a study of the cosmic harmonies is encouraged to review The Gnostic Circle for the correct understanding of the meaning of the Indian Yugas. A ‘kaliyuga’ is mistakenly thought of as a measurement of years, whereas it is a measurement of seconds of degrees of longitude. A Kaliyuga is 432,000 degrees of longitude, or 4 signs through the Tropical zodiac. Thea states it may be hard to believe, in this period of disintegration, that ‘we are in the Satyayuga, the Age of Truth, and have been for over 10,000 years… The plunge into darkness is only so that the depths may receive the light of Truth.’ (The Gnostic Circle, pp 75-76)

Part 4: Capricorn-Cancer Axis

The USA forms an ‘evolutionary axis’ with India): Capricorn/Makar is India’s ruling sign, and Cancer is the Sun sign of the United States (Thea, Change and Stabiliy, and Thea, The Change that Saves).

These two nations represent the future of humanity’s growth into a more divine species: India provides the central stable core of knowledge and wisdom; America contributes the element of change and force of renewal which is essential to establishing on Earth what Sri Aurobindo calls, ‘The Life Divine’. In her text The Gnostic Circle, first written in the early 70’s, Thea discusses East-West Rapprochment in a very positive way, believing there is a new spiritual truth consciousness trying to express itself in the way America is opening up toward teachers coming from India.

It was initiated by the great giant, Swami Vivekananda at the beginning of the 20th century and it is inevitable that the union will grow stronger between the two nations.

The two poles, Spirit and Matter, India-America, must unite in the deepest sense, Thea writes, to bring about the birth of our new world. She also notes that although India is the ‘upholding (spiritual) force’, the Nation had lost her arms, her power, through the Partition, in 1947. All the more reason for American to step in and become the axis of ‘matter’, assisting India until she can take up fully her destiny as cosmological centre of the Earth.

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References: Indocentric Cosmology