Description
Description of The Four Themes
Volume 4 of The New Way offers a vision and a methodology to ensure that the seeker does not isolate him/herself and escape from the experience which is presently being offered to us by our planet – to see ourselves as parts of one luminous whole Earth. We are a race in transition, a higher Truth is evolving within us (TVN,Theme 4), and our Earth is the place where the process unfolds, where the Light of a Higher Being can increasingly manifest through us. Thea wrote these newsletters ‘from the Centre that is India’ because this nation is the ‘planetary soul’ of our Solar System; it is India that is to come forward to assist the Earth in the work to be done in this 9th Manifestation.
Thea wrote the newsletters in the 80’s and 90’, yet they remain even more relevant today – the Ayodhya issue continues to capture the nation’s imagination and conscience, for example. Written for students and friends throughout India and the world, Thea offers insights about historical and philosophical issues from a very unusual perspective. In each of the four major themes she makes a direct application of an Indocentric Cosmology, which she calls The New Way: (1) Music and the Harmony of the Spheres (2) the Evolutionary Avatar as the Backbone of the Hindu Civilisation, (3) The Meaning of a Dharmic Civilisation, and (4) Supermind and the Language of Gnostic Symbols.
Theme One: Music and the Harmony of the Spheres
Thea’s first article for the Culture and Cosmos series, written in October 1989, focused on Trends in Music and the Cosmic Harmony and the classical music of India rooted ‘everlastingly in the cosmic harmony’. She suggested the reader listen to the raga, keeping in mind its deeper meaning, as if listening to the moods expressed in our solar system which arise from the Earth’s axial rotation around her great luminary, the sun.
Theme Two: The Evolutionary Avatar – Backbone of the Hindu Civilsation
On the night of 22-23 December 1949 , Lord Ram, 7th Evolutionary Avatar, chose to appear in the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in the form of a divine child, or Ramlal. Thea’s ‘applied cosmology’ defines the Evolutionary Avatars as those emissaries of Vishnu who make appearance on Earth during a specific period of time: every 6480 years when according to the Precession of the Equinoxes, Earth moves through the ‘fixed’ signs of the zodiac – the signs of Preservation. They come to reveal a greater aspect of the Divine Truth, to show the next step in the divine unfolding on Earth: ‘they are the seed of the movement’.
The timing of his ‘miraculous appearance’ on the December Solstice, ‘that sacredmost moment when the Festival of Light begins as the Sun enters Capricorn and the light starts to increase’ is the focal point of this essay (TVN, December Solstice 1991). Most ancient cultures celebrated this period of fifteen days – 22/23 December through 5 January; as the Earth makes her annual revolution around the Sun, our planet comes closest to her luminary (perihelion) during this time. India has always considered these days most auspicious, celebrating Makar Sankranti, Gateway to Capricorn, as a national holiday. From antiquity India has been ‘ruled’ by Capricorn. The zodiacal glyph fits exactly within her physical landmass, as Thea demonstrates graphically. She IS Makar/Capricorn.
But in India today the Makar Sankranti is celebrated annually on 15 January rather than the true date: the solstice of 22-23 December. The Makar Sankranti celebrated by the nation today bears no relation to the true entry into Capricorn; Thea explains that the sacred measure has been lost. And so by appearing on the eve of the December Solstice Lord Ram verifies two important facts: not only is Ayodhya his traditional birthplace, but the December Solstice is the real Gateway into Capricorn, not 15 January (TVN, ibid).
Science has made a mess of things entering into matters beyond its legitimate domain, Thea claims; as a person with many years experience as an astrologer and cosmologist she sets out in Theme 2 to correct the basic premises. There are two zodiacal circles used for Earth measurements; both are important for different reasons. The Constellational (Sidereal) system is the correct circle to determine the Precession of the Earth as it moves through its long cycle of the ages. But the Sidereal/ Nirayana system of computation disconnects the Earth from her four-fold harmony of equinoxes and solstices, totally eliminating the seasonal structure inherent in her yearly revolution around the Sun. It is the Tropical Zodiac (the Sayana System) with its fourfold harmony of equinoxes and solstices that is the measure to be used for individual horoscopy and for annual temple timings.
The line of ten Evolutionary Avatars provides the mechanism for stability and change; it implies a march forward; Hinduism would not be the Sanatan Dharma without this inbuilt mechanism for renewal. The ‘divine epiphany’ of Lord Ram at Ayodhya in 1949 started a movement and some asked, ‘Are we a Hindu nation, or a nation of many equal religions?’(Wall Street Journal, ‘The Battle for India’s Soul’, Pokharel and Beckett, 3 December 2012). Thea’s response: Ram’s coming served to awaken energies dormant for the past 2000 years, ‘to revitalize the Hindu spirit and soul now weighed down by thick layers cast upon it by invading ideologies far removed from its own truth-core’. (TVN, 5/6, February 1991)
Theme Three: the Meaning of a Dharmic Civilisation
Thea reminds the reader that for ancient civilisations, particularly India, ‘the journey’ was central. Calendars were organized to bring society together around one common endeavor, to chart out a meaningful path to achieve one’s dharma. The Calendar became an instrument to allow a multitude of expressions for both the individual and the community, while, at the same time, to carry them into a greater Harmony with the Earth.
The Vedic civilization made the choice to live for the Divine principle known as the Cosmic Pillar or ‘axis mundi’ in all facets of its daily collective and individual existence. Thea turns to the Hymns to Skambha in the Atharvaveda and writes: “The Vedic civilization is the only one in the world, from ancient times into the present, which has been audacious enough to strive to establish an entire society on this profound basis, this ‘support, this Skambha’. (TVN, 7/1, April, 1992).
It was the mission of Sri Ram, 7th Evolutionary Avatar, (circa 12,000 BCE), and 8th Evolutionary Avatar, Sri Krishna (circa 6000 BCE), to imprint Skambha, this eternal truth, into the evolutionary matrix. During the dark age following Sri Krishna’s passing, a ‘great sleep’ swept across the earth hiding humanity’s purpose for taking birth on Earth and covering the third planet’s unique destiny in the Solar System. A separation between spirit and matter, unknown in ancient civilisations, undermined the foundation and purpose for the Earth journey and by around 500 BCE our planet became viewed, in both Eastern and Western philosophic systems, as merely a springboard to a ‘beyond’, which was conceived as a better place after death.
The long lost Vedic knowledge was destined to be discovered again with the appearance of Sri Aurobindo, the 9th Evolutionary Avatar. His coming was not only to reestablish the Vedic dharma and to imprint once again the eternal Skambha on the evolutionary matrix, but to erase the separation that had come to exist between matter and spirit by opening the pathway to the next spiral of evolution.
Theme Four: Supermind and the Language of Gnostic Symbols
Theme Four deals with the serious problem of the misarrangement of the Gunas. For true harmony and balance the three Gunas must be in their proper order, as in the ancient Vedic tradition: Rajas, Sattva and Tamas. This order was disturbed some 2000 years ago with Sattva being exalted over the other two energies, which were rejected by seekers. Sattva became equated with immobility, peace and inaction.
In this final series, written in April and August 1994, Thea demonstrates how this perversion in the spiritual realisation played itself out in the physical body of Mother India at the time of Partition when the two-nation formula dismembered her body. The true body of India consists of the complete Capricorn hieroglyph, which encapsulates all three Gunas.
In 1947 both the northeast (Tamas) and northwest (Rajas) portions of the country were cut off leaving only the central section of India (Sattva) standing alone as the sacred Pillar. ‘She (India) does not enjoy the balance of the triune energies in her physical base’ Thea writes; this has inflicted a terrible wound. But the knowledge has not been lost, she reminds the reader. With the appearance of the 9th Evolutionary Avatar, who is an embodiment of the Sattva/Preservation Guna, and his Solar Line, the new Supramental creation is upon us.
