PURANIC COSMOLOGY UPDATED: The Great Divide

[Link to Part I or to Part II]

To safeguard our planetary home, new ways of grasping the interconnection between people in societies, between societies, and between humankind and nature, are being explored. As the Apollo pictures from space reveal, our planet is a world within a larger world – the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe as a whole. The renewed striving towards integral vision embraces these wider realities as well, seeking to grasp our origins, our place, and our role in nature as well as in the cosmos.

‒ Ervin Laszlo, The Creative Cosmos

The stabilising Axis of Being

Being and Becoming are offered to us eternally, for as long as the solar system exists. The quality of Being is cosmically conveyed by the Stable Constant. It is the ecliptic upon which, within which the entire Family travels; and through the respective tilts and rotations of axes, our System creates its very own music of the spheres.

In our solar system the ecliptic ‘densifies’ the cosmic directions of contraction and expansion via the Solstices and Equinoxes. Within the 365 days of the year, at four points in our annual circumambulation of the Sun, this same function is carried out to become ingrained in the constitution of all things born on planet Earth.

As creatures of planet Earth, it appears that we alone in the Family are provided with a special device whereby we can not only ‘hear’ that music but we can become conscious of our role and contribution to the Harmony. If we observe our solar system within the parameters laid out above, the Axis stands out among all other aspects of the System as a determining factor; yet so little is known of its own origin and the cause for its emergence at a given time and place. The purpose of this essay is not so much to uncover the origins of an axis but how a deeper understanding of the special assembly of axes in our solar system can help us fulfil the destiny of the Earth.

In the Vedic Age the axial function was understood in depth. The hymns of the Rig Veda are testimony to the fact that the solar system with its rhythms and harmonies was a living being and all its planets and living creatures were expressions of that particular ‘note’ the System contributes to the total Reality. While the ecliptic stable constant exists for the entire universe, it is the abiding truth of all its individual components. In our solar system the ecliptic stable constant is the eternal pathway of the planets around the solar Paterfamilias, whose own axis is truly the pole of our existence, the ultimate ‘centre that holds’ the Family together. For the ancient Rishis fulfilment was clearly connected to understanding the cosmic harmony and discovering a method whereby not only would that understanding come but the aspirant undertaking that special journey would discover the internal axis and thereby his or her place within the whole, commonly known as one’s inner truth (swadharma) and destiny. It was never a question of disengaging from the Harmony but rather to become evermore conscious of its ‘sounds’; and in the process the individual note each soul contributes to the symphony in praise of the Sun.

Regarding the Axis, macro- or micro-cosmic, we must take note of the fact that its origin is largely unknown because the axis is our link to the beyond – that is, beyond science’s singularity. When in the new cosmology we refer to compaction of the trinity in the Zero, expressed in Number as 9, 6, 3, and from that Zero the first point of space emerges, or in the number 1, we are actually describing the origin of the axis. It would be a further densification of OM. There are the three dimensions of Time whose fourth dimension is the first point of Space. It could also be said that Time’s fourth dimension is precisely the point of the origin of the Axis. These three dimensions of Time are properties of the side beyond the singularity of material science. Naturally they cannot be examined because, as we know, the laws of scientific cosmology break down at that threshold. The cosmologist stands before a closed door. Thus, however much he pushes his probing into the depths of the past, he will always crash up against this tightly-sealed door. Access is barred because his poise of consciousness is not a harmonious balance of time and space, or contraction and expansion. It is that balance produced by alignment born of centering which offers the possibility of access to that dimension on the other side of the Zero. Out of that Zero comes the Point; its pulsations (tapas) ultimately create an axis: Skambha of the Veda which in turn is personified as Agni, navel of the world, the Son of Force, and the primordial Fire.

The Contingency Plan

I have laid emphasis on the disease of Otherworldliness, which we have inherited from the Age of Pisces with its clear evidence of the Great Divide, because it demonstrates what the result must be when we reject our place in this material universe in favour of an unprovable Beyond disconnected from our solar system and its harmonies. The critical crossroad we have reached is only because we stand on the edge of the Divide and we must make a choice. That choice is not of one side or the other of the divide, i.e., spirit or matter. It is the greater harmony of Synthesis that must be the choice if we are to continue on this journey as a global society. To reach that synthesis we have to accept our destiny and place in the cosmic manifestation and cease fleeing from the ‘land of our birth’.

That land is our solar system. The ancients understood this by universalising their consciousness to the point where they experienced the whole world as their abode, kutumbhakam vasu…. Naturally today’s Indologists, historians and pundits cannot understand the records they have left of that vastness and wideness of consciousness because their approach is one of an a priori rejection, even in the best of cases. The key to unlock the door to the worldview they enjoyed is to retrace our steps and seek to recapture their acceptance of the cosmos as the only path to integral self-perfection, and thereby to the establishment of a society, now global, that can express the harmonies of the System and so to eliminate the cacophony we now know and attempt to prolong, though we all realise its death is near at hand.

Indeed, as I have written, evolution is not to be fooled. Therefore, the decline in consciousness and the poise of rejection had to have been a carefully crafted part of the universal Becoming of Being like everything else. The experience of Oneness makes this obvious. The Divide would necessarily bring quake-like disturbances: cacophony would be the result. But to help the evolving species survive the tumultuous breakdown, an escape route was devised. This was the focus of all religions and yogic systems of the Age of Pisces when the global disruption was destined to begin. It is often stated that religions are the major cause of discord in the world, incongruous as this would seem. But if we understand that they were part of a merciful ‘contingency plan’, we understand how this incongruence can be true. Buddhism is an example. It had to be a mahatma of the Buddha’s calibre, with his immeasurable depth of compassion, to introduce the reversed direction away from life and not flowing with it. Proponents of Buddhism may argue that it seeks to do just the contrary, to join the flow, as Zen Buddhism in particular encourages. The truth be told, there is only one vehicle available to the human being to ‘join the flow’. That vehicle is the Soul, and Buddhism disregards its place and purpose in the scheme of things.

This was a deliberate act because the Buddha’s only concern was to free human beings from suffering, from entrapment on the wheel of endlessly generated samskaras. Given the unavoidable breakdown after the Vedic Age, the method or contingency plan, which would carry evolution through the most dangerous period of its trajectory somewhat in tact until the arrival of better times, would be to preach the illusion of that suffering itself. It was unreal, or only as real as the subject’s poise of consciousness would allow. With the loss of the true and full Harmony and given the breakdown with its attending diminished awareness, those seeds of undermining were easily planted. They have been flourishing ever since.

The soul is precisely the element that can harmonise Being and Becoming in the individual. It is the compact essence of the Transcendent and Cosmic powers/principles as they become embedded in our universe and in particular in the consciousness of the highest species on planet Earth. The compacted Transcendent is born as the Immanent in each individual consciousness. But it stands that a world where Death is lord and master with the consequent suffering this lordship entails, the soul, the Earth’s very own contribution to the universal harmony of an integral truth, had to be rejected. This rejection continues into the present and can be identified as the root of the destruction of our habitat itself. Rather than free ourselves of suffering by this denial, we have become more solidly entrapped in this diminished state where Death is the sole master.

We must realise that the breakdown the Divide caused is not external to the whole; therefore, it too must ‘make sense’, as indeed it does. But the contingency plan is also part of the whole and its very existence points to the ultimate solution.

When the ecliptic is the foundation, the stable constant of our existence, the ups and downs of the evolution of consciousness can be understood as the increase and ebb tides of destiny. One follows the other, even as the Earth dips and rises below and above the plane of the ecliptic, similar to ocean tides. But plateaus are reached from time to time in the ascent of consciousness. The ‘downs’ are experienced from ever higher levels as we scale the evolutionary mountain. At this stage in our journey we are almost at the summit, the mountain’s apex from where a steady state can be attained: from truth to greater truth.