The Seeds of Undermining - Inadequacies of the Indian System, Part II

An essay on Essence and Form Part II

Reproduced from The Vishaal Newsletter
Volume 4, Number 5, December 1989
© Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet 1989

[Link to Introduction]
[Link to Part I]

When we say that the nation has lost its ‘dharma’, and that it must re-establish this ‘dharma’, we mean something quite different than the spiritual leaders who, by the dozens, repeat ad nauseam this call. The point is precisely this: these fervent and well-meaning pleas receive no response, particularly from those quarters which appear to bear the greater responsibility for the decay, for the decline of the Dharma. Indeed, they are ‘crusted over’, so to speak. They are impenetrable. Thus, no amount of preaching will render them pliable, plastic and open to the light of the true Dharma.
The problem is, once again, mathematical. There is a cleavage, a chasm between the psychic essence of the nation – or the seat of its inherent Dharma – and the external dimensions where the FORMS to express that Dharma in a material universe must evolve. The origin of the seeds for this cleavage date back hundreds of years, millennia in fact. To be precise, they initially surfaced about the time of Gautam the Buddha, over 2000 years ago. It was approximately then that the seeds were planted in the spiritual consciousness of the nation to UNDERMINE that Dharma. Over the ages those ‘seeds’, similar to the parasite in our analogy, have born their entirely predictable fruit.²
But who in the nation can see the connection? Who can travel back through the corridors of Time and ferret out those turning points when the environment and the terrain were fertile for the insemination of those nefarious seeds of undermining which were destined to foist upon the nation, two thousand years into the far future, the contaminated ‘forms’ of a political system which is clearly and unmistakably the result of those ancient ‘seeds’?
Sri Aurobindo has equally clearly stated that ‘Kalki must come to correct the error of the Buddha’. Yet none, even his closest disciples, know with the exactitude demanded of the Supramental Manifestation which he heralded, just what his words mean. They too are the victims of the great Undermining, similar to the consciousness of the entire nation with its manifold avenues of expression – political, cultural, social, economic, and, above all, spiritual.
But the undermining was clear. It was unmistakable and the results were predictable. The seeds of ‘otherworldliness’ were sown over 2000 years ago. This simple fact, a ‘truth’ totally alien to the Indian Vedic spirit and soul, produced a schism in the energy field of the nation. The energies within that field then gradually became ranged on either side of the ever-widening chasm: spirit and matter. Simultaneously, an indelible line was drawn between Essence and Form. The two went off on tangents and apparently, at this stage of the development, they shall never again be able to meet.
Once more I must ask, Who in the nation can perceive this development with courage and boldness of spirit and can trace its origin back through the thick folds of Time? For even those who might perceive have not the impulse and intrepidity to formulate their perceptions boldly and to help the nation heal the chasm once and for all.
We witness the result of the incapacity: the spiritual leader’s voice becomes weaker and weaker and evermore distanced from the field in which this play of energies evolves. While that field becomes evermore choked by the rapidly increasing encumbrances of the parasites which this abandonment has produced: the most vigorous and creative energies of the nation have been posited ‘elsewhere’, in a beyond which now, on an increasing scale, has become defined as some far away paradise, a heaven or a plane of consciousness entirely apart and separate from this ailing planet Earth. Yet who, then, or which energies are to renew the national environment and restore its health if not those which are more finely tuned?
This is what is meant by ‘re-establishing the Dharma’. It has little or nothing to do with our moralistic notions, all of which are leaves and branches on the parasitic appendage and have no essential relation to the Tree. The Dharma responds to mathematics not sentiments.

*

The cleavage between essence and form plagues the entire world. A simple and rather obvious example is the campaign the Prince of Wales has felt himself obliged to carry on in the field of architecture, where his complaints tally with ours regarding essence and form, albeit his being concerned more with function and aesthetics. The questions are nonetheless related as he seeks to impress upon the community of architects that a form must not only be functional but it must also be in harmony with the total environment and aesthetically proper.

The human being sees only the dense physical. One’s vision is closed to the deeper strata and the more subtle play of energies in dimensions hidden from the physical eye. This is precisely the result of the cleavage, the predictable effects of those Seeds of Undermining sown 2000 years ago. Consequently, I can state that there is no one in the nation who can perceive with mathematical precision the connection between the present inadequate political system in India and the ‘error of the Buddha’ which Sri Aurobindo stated must be ‘corrected by Kalki’.
To make confusion worse confounded, those very seeds of undermining have made it impossible to know who or what this ‘Kalki’ really is, and, by consequence, what that ‘dharma’ is which this Kalki is supposed to re-establish. For even the line of Ten Avatars, of which Kalki is said to be the 10th and last, has become contaminated. The Buddha himself has been lodged therein…and thus those ‘seeds’ found a secure niche in the psycho-spiritual evolving consciousness of the Indian nation.
The confusion and unknowing are great indeed. The ‘crusts’ provided by the folds of Time make the truth almost impossible to expose. Especially when the parasitic appendage has grown hardy and agile in its ability to survive the attempts by the host subject to cast off its draining serpentine form.
The only way to illumine this condition thoroughly is to make the connections I have outlined here, from the distant past to this chaotic present; and thereby to see clearly the root of the problem, a fearless penetration which alone can UPROOT the parasite. And to perceive how all structures (forms) which we rely upon to express essence – any essence – are distortions or products of those original undermining seeds which have the power to thwart the expression of the pure and full Dharma.
This is the situation prevailing in the political structure (form) of the nation. But the hidden pattern of India’s destiny has survived via the factual and undeniable existence of the Solar and Lunar Lines, the helical arrangement by which the nation is held together in spite of any attempts to undermine its essential unity.
However, and this is the most important point to highlight, the consequences of that undermining and the ‘form’ it has foisted upon the nation are apparent to all and daily the corrosive power extracts its pound of flesh. The obvious effects are a prevailing, increasing chaos and the insatiable voracity of a corrupted ‘system’ which is the most visible and effective tool of those original seeds of undermining. At this point the separation between Essence (dharma) and Form (the ‘system’) is complete. The latter IS India now – or at least this is the appearance; and indeed, it is the tactic or finality of the agents of the Falsehood: to strengthen and foster the growth of the parasite to such a degree that its ‘form’ (the system) appears to be the tree itself. That is, the one has so completely overtaken the other (while draining it of its sap of life and revitalising power) that none can see the original form which still hosts the parasite, or supports and fosters its growth.
This is the graphic image of the destruction of the Dharma, and how, at the very same time, it is the Dharma itself that SUPPORTS the degenerative form. The latter feeds off the Dharma, making the distortion and the disfiguration all the more difficult to detect. For indeed, who knows where to look for the origin of the decay? The Tree is covered entirely and stands totally occulted. At the same time, when the critical threshold is reached this intertwined existence serves to render correction of the problem impossible – for to attack the parasite which has so completely overtaken the host body would mean to destroy the Tree itself. This is the compulsion behind drastic revolution – especially those which turn violent, ruthless and bloody. The Chinese revolution, for example, brought a thorough and drastic cut with the past: China of ancient times is gone; the present China is something of a soulless structure wherein ‘form’ has become top-heavy as it were, and has smothered the soul of the nation to a large degree.
India has not yet reached that point. Indeed, the cosmological model arranged for the nation is the only thing that has prevented such a drastic occurrence. But again I must repeat, a crossroads has now been reached. Clear seeing based on real knowledge, the knowledge of these eternal truths, must be allowed to evolve new forms to express the soul of the nation without permitting that parasite to stamp out the country’s psychic imprints which have survived in its cultural body through unimaginably powerful onslaughts which would surely have destroyed the psychic fibre of a nation with a less potent force of destiny.
It is naïve to believe that having survived this long the nation is out of danger. The truth is another: the time has come for bold measures to be taken in order to remake those inherited structures, the result of those ancient seeds of undermining, and to thus re-establish the Dharma on the basis of outer forms which are in harmony with the inner essence.

Today there is no such harmony. Hence the ‘system’ is thoroughly corrupted, contaminated, corroded – the ‘system’ which is supposed to be the very tool for implementation of essence, of policy and programmes and so forth; as well as the corrective mechanism to lop off any growth on the tree of essence which might threaten its healthy and uncontaminated survival. When such a point arrives it is the signal that a major crossroads stands before us. The time for change – deep and thorough – has come.

____________________

² In the Puranas this situation has been described when, in its inimitable style, Vishnu sends Gautam the Buddha to ‘mislead’ the Asuras who were so proficient in Vedic practices that the Gods could not conquer them. The Buddha’s task was to wean them away from the Veda so that the Gods could conquer. Hence he is often referred to as ‘the ruse of the Supreme’.

[Link to Part III]