2.10.11

Updating the Vedic Altar – 5

Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet
Director, Aeon Centre of Cosmology
September 29, 2011



The Cow is the Ray is the Year – is an exercise in Equivalency, for which the Sanskrit language is admirably suited. One word may have several meanings. For instance, gau (cow in Sanskrit) means both the animal and a ray (of the Sun). Throughout the Rig Veda, for example, the word for Cow can be interchangeable, depending on the reader’s level of development. There are numerous references to the ‘herds of light’, for example – the Milky Way; though 19th and 20th Century Indologists, in seeking to establish the primitive, nature-worshipping level of the early residents of Bharat, preferred to consider these ‘herds’ as simply that: herds of cows.
Sanskrit supplies both Cow and Ray in one word, but the Mother has carried the exercise to another level by drawing the vedi down from an even higher plane than the Rishis had done – the supramental Truth-Consciousness, or Swar, the solar world. In that plane the Mother ‘saw’ the Ray in its entire glory. It was not merely a beam from the Sun. It was the Year. The equivalence between these elements, which should not be understood as a symbolic reference but as that very thing, comes to light with what I have called the Geometry of Time. Thus because the Mother was able to provide an exact measure for that Ray, the symbol exceeded itself to become the Year, via function.
The Mother left us a detailed plan of her accomplishment as her final legacy; in it we find the sum total of the Yoga she accomplished up to her passing, and especially in the measurements she provided for each item of the chamber. It is not sufficient to SEE the chamber in the subtle plane, however high; the real achievement lies in the act of measuring because that is when the symbol is brought into our Earth atmosphere and given a material body, as it were. Measure adds density, physicality – and this is what has been lacking until now.
It is further to be noted, and this carries us to a correspondence with the Vedic Altar, that the Mother did not want photographs of herself and Sri Aurobindo in the chamber. She stated that there should only be their symbols; that is, the geometric forms which could serve in the act of geometrising time. This was her unique achievement: giving Time a measurement over a particular area of space, thereby updating the ancient tradition to carry the vedi forward and into our Aquarian Age appropriately. The reader will be able to appreciate how unparalleled this achievement was as we penetrate deeper into her revelation.
It is worthy of mention at this point how disinterested the disciples she left behind have been in this, by far her most important and revolutionising legacy. I mentioned earlier that the only publication where her genial legacy was revealed was inquisitorially ‘burned at the stake’. As for Auroville, the township she founded in 1968, some of its residents do indeed take to burning books at the stake, by their own admission. Two years after its founding, when she handed over the plan she had drawn up of the chamber which was to be the centre of the city-project, those who received this unparalleled legacy drove it to the ground, dismantled the vision and finally built the chamber ‘in their own image’.
These facts are disagreeable and we would like to avoid mentioning them when undertaking an appraisal of the Mother’s legacy. However, they tell us much about the human condition as it realistically stands today, and the representative level of consciousness which those disciples brought to the laboratory she and Sri Aurobindo established for the transformation that required this reproduction – a microcosm of the macro beyond the boundaries of the laboratory. In noting their reaction we are also given a preview of just how hard the labour would be in adding the final ingredient to the Mother’s vision. Hers was the first step – another was to follow. As the incarnation of the 6 (the Cosmic Divine) in the scheme of 9/6/3, she was admirably suited to the task of creating a ‘new model of the universe’ – a new cosmic model that could serve as a womb of knowledge – all knowledge, similar to the youth’s story referred to in Part 4. Her vision (and its accompanying plan, for we cannot separate the two) is virtually a womb of knowledge, a source we can turn to that serves as an eternally-replenishing font, as well as a sort of Philosopher’s Stone whereby we can gauge the correctness of our own seeing.
This was the first part of the exercise; more was to follow when the Geometry of Time would add dynamism to the vision, thereby becoming a model of the applied Truth-Consciousness for this new Age. Every Hindu Temple is a book of knowledge. The Mother’s updated Vedi is no exception – rather, it is truly an unending source of inspiration for the seeker. But according to the record at our disposal of the manner in which it was received by her entourage, this ‘book of knowledge’ was denied its legitimate place at the heart of her city-project – not merely denied but actually destroyed. Further, in its place a shadow copy was built and falsely called ‘the Mother’s original’.
Fortunately the original plan survived, along with her recorded discussions explaining finer points of the plan, some of which had been erroneously transcribed by an engineer-disciple. In fact, what emerges from those taped conversations is that none in her entourage at the time expressed any interest at all in her vision. They were all simply intent – the recordings reveal – on being rid of hers and focussed on theirs to replace the Mother’s, which indeed did come to pass. To date there has not been any request for the extensive material I have published on her chamber from those quarters – official or otherwise – be this from Auroville or Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram. Had it not been for Divine Providence her miracle of Seeing and Measure would have been lost. But the volumes of material now available provide all the details of the supramental knowledge the Mother enshrined in her original plan. These publications stand as factual proof of her yogic legacy and the advancements made in rooting the supramental Truth-Consciousness in this material plane.
The 9th Avatar required two feminine powers to complete his mission. Number again comes to our aid and updates a revelation which in former times would have been expressed as ‘consorts’ or shaktis. This is the equation 3+6=9. In the eyes of some this 3+6=9 might justify the belief that two women (3 and 6) equal one man (9). It would seem to explain the supremacy of the Masculine. But this is not the correct perception because 3+6 as in our equation explains function within a process, rather than essential levels or degrees of power or capacity. The process is adequately described by the triangle where each angle is allocated a number; they are further designated as Transcendent (9), Cosmic (6), and Individual (3).


Returning to the Year/Ray the image reproduced here would be static if dynamism had been withheld from the exercise, the ingredient the 3 adds to the equation. Time would be unmoving and otherworldly pursuits would be justified in a static world, if this were at all possible. But in such a case the purpose of our very existence in this material creation, in this dynamic universe would be denied. Religions would be justified in advocating, each of them, salvation in a heaven beyond this evolving world. The descent of the 9th Avatar and his helpers has been expressly for the purpose of dismantling this erroneous concept of a heaven outside of the cosmic manifestation – which in effect is a denial of the Earth’s singular role in the System, supreme as she is among all the planets.
There are two scales that capture the function and essence of the two feminine powers. In the Mother’s case, as the 6 in the equation, her scale was based on the horizontal 12. The 3 of the Formula, on the other hand, adds the vertical 9. Further on I will describe how the two scales have been incorporated in the original plan of her chamber: the horizontal 12 in the chamber’s floor plan, the vertical 9 in the solar ray.
Sri Aurobindo announced that a divine life would be established on this planet. To render this factual, to bring this down from the level of philosophy or visionary idealism, the feminine powers of 6 and 3 were required. The task of the 6 was to gather the cosmic components into a ‘body’ as it were, a preliminary basic collection of a certain cross-dimensional quantum of energy that could serve in the transformation process required by the Time-Spirit. Once that had been accomplished, and the chamber’s plan stands as testimony to the fulfilment of her task as 6 in the Formula, the next step was to organise the elements and unveil the function of each element within a unified wholeness and set the movement on its way according to the applied formula 9/6/3. Dynamism was the call of the hour after the Mother had completed her task; it fell to the third in the Line to carry that work forward to completion. That third factor of the Formula is the Individual Divine – the soul in evolution, the eternal spark of the Divine we carry within. In the Veda it is Agni, the divine Will, the Immobile within the Mobile.
The soul is our special vahana or carrier in this material universe. It is our stable point as we journey through the evolution in a ceaseless experience of Becoming. It is the seat of Being – hence Being and Becoming find their perfect harmonisation in the individual soul. This is the grace we are given by birth in this universe and on this particular planet, the third in the system and therefore the position most suitable to its expression.
Referring to the updated Vedi, dynamism results in the Geometry of Time as the key to decipher the Mother’s plan. She established a measure for the Ray, a length of 15.20 meters. But the Mother was never given a chance to explain its meaning and to elaborate the significance of this unusual selection. Her vision did not survive intact beyond 18 days – that is, as the plan adopted for the actual construction. Several years would transpire before the meaning of 15.20 would be explained. Finally, in 1974-6 the full revelation came to light. 15.20 is the measure of our Earth year of 365 days; the 20cm over the even 15 are the 5 days in excess of the 360 degrees of the circle, or the 5 days out of the calendar as this period was known in certain ancient cultures and which I refer to as the period of ‘the seeding of Time’. In 1976 this measure of 5 would surface as a key feature of the chamber’s Ray, as I will describe further on, which in the Veda is referred to as the Residue.

For the present, let us concentrate on the dynamics added to the Ray whereby the measure of the Year is set in motion, and continues on and on into infinity. The important ingredient is, however, the individual soul, the ‘eye that sees’, without which that measure is not perceived in its periods and would remain static. The Cow enters our discussion at this point, when periodicity is the issue. For there are two pillars of the Vedic symbology: Cow and Horse. We have lost sight of the importance of the Horse to a large extent, but it needs to be emphasised that the one cannot exist without the other in this material universe if we are to be truthful to our position in the harmony of our System. Succinctly, the Cow is consciousness, the Horse is force: together they form the axis of creation: Consciousness-Force. The Cow would be undifferentiated consciousness; the Horse defines, differentiates, organises through dynamism the universal harmonies we, as humans with the Eye of Consciousness can perceive. This is expressed in the Vedic myth as Usha, the divine Dawn who rides the white stead, Agni.

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