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Cycles of Time and the History of Root Races
by Prof. Asiananda
Part II
H.P. Blavatsky
In my attempt to periodize Indian history in terms of its Pre-vedic,
Post-vedic, Trans-vedic Mega-Cycles, alone the ‘Indus Valley Civilization’
we know falls in to the first pre-vedic category, and we are then already in
the proto-historical times of the Bronze Age. Are the so called Dravidians
the originators of the Indus Valley Civilization? Are they autochthonous to
the subcontinent? Or should their origins be sought in the Proto-Elamite,
the Sumerian, the Proto-Saharan? All in haze and maze!! When we trace
it backwards in pre-history, then to the geological times, where can the
search of origins end? This endlessness forces me to penetrate into the
archetypal, quantum regions of the sub-atomic ergo the sub-psychic
timespace regions I have touched upon above and found it was helpful
to try the route of the ‘Seven Root Races’ via
Helena Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine;
thus one leaves behind the linear time and enters the
mythological the mystic and occult sense of timelessness one with the
endless cycles of human past and human future. Stretching across the
geological and cosmological times, Blavatsky gives us the story of five
root races, leaving open the scope of the sixth and seventh. Who know
if they will ever come, if there is future, Time or timelessness? And if
these root races are true only to her own private occult world?
The five of these root races, to be very brief, are: (1) Polarians (2)
Hyperboreans (3) Lemurians (4) Atlanteans (5) Aryans.
The 6th and the
7th Root Races are still in the womb of the future and evolution, on which
we can of course dare some speculations, as we do below which is the ad
vantage of taking this Blavatsky route.
The Polarians were primarily spiritual (Astral/Etheric), did not even
manifest except as vibrations at some chakra levels, and did not leave
any physical remains, may be the first involuted state of the Quantum
Brahman! Also the Hyperboreans were non-physical and etheric; in
the devas category or of the Superman who were Spirit, they were
sometimes identified with the Ultima Thule of the nineteenth century
Western occult teachings.
Map of Lemria
The Lemurians were the first species with partial physical bodies.
They were described as a race of three eyed giants and inhabited a
"lost continent" of Lemuria
which is believed to have been somewhere
the Indian and Pacific oceans now are located.
The Lemerians are generally identified as the root or the archetype of
the Dravidian race. Their origins and downfall are linked to destruction
when their continent sank beneath the 'sea' due to natural cataclysm a
gigantic tsunami. The event holds such an unfading fascination for the
Dravidian collective memory, it reappears in the Sangam era literature
of the Tamil language, they speak of three or four Sangams, which are
royal assemblages of great poets and savants running up to thousands
of years! The venues had to be shifted as each previous ones were lost
to natural cataclysm, so the sangams may not have been individual
events but faded memories of ages. What should we make out of a
royal assemblage that lasts say for three thousand years! And there
is recurring mention in the Dravidian collective memory and subconscious
of the lost Kumari Kandam; this may have been south of Sri Lanka in the
Indian Ocean, and some read this ‘Kumari’ as south of ‘Kanya Kumari’
and others as far as ‘Sumer’ connecting Dravidians both with the
mid-eastern and Indus Valley civilizations.
Map of Atlantis
The fourth root race Atlanteans are generally considered to have had
great occult and/or technological powers, and inhabited the lost continent
of Atlantis, which was destroyed due to their abuse of psychic powers.
Atlantis also had a great civilization like the Lemuria, some scholars think
it sunk as late as at the end of last Ice Age which may be 12000 or 18000
years ago when the polar regions of the Arctic was warm and sea levels
were low when Asia remained connected to Americas and Africa to Asia,
the latter joining with Australia so the human migration from Africa and
the Asian migration to Americas could take the easy land route. Also
Plato's description of the Atlantis in his Critias might indicate its
existence at a later age, but others interpret Atlantis could have been a
long long time ago, still others think the sunken Atlantis could have
been the continent of Laurentio, an older avatar of American continent
eons away; Atlanteans and Lumerians may have existed in similar or
overlapping times, some of the esoteric writings even speak of the
nuclear war of the ancient times between a possible 'Empire of the
Rama' and the Atlanteans, which is what might brought about the
destruction of the latter.
Blavatsky teaches that these Atlanteans were the ancestors of the fifth
root race, the Aryans of her times, and these Aryans have existed here
on the earth for a hundred thousand years! Aryans are the Indo-European
speakers. Like today English has spread the world over, Indo-European
once spread much of Eurasia from the Saptha Sindhu to ‘Ireland’ which
is the Anglicization of ‘Arya-land’! Proof of the Indo-Aryan language
family is established in some sort of common parentage to all the
languages in this vast Eurasian space in the Indo-European speaking
peoples, to which belongs the Eastern group or the ‘Satam (100) branch’
of Sanskrit, Avestha, Uralics, Slav, Baltics, and the Western ‘Centum
(100) branch’ of Latin, Greek, Germanics, Celtic, etc. Could the cultural
interactions of the historical times have brought about this common
bond among so many languages? The existence of a Prot-Indo-European
(PIE) with an incredible common fund of lexical and grammatical bonding
during the millennia that had developed no writing and restricted human
movement is no commonsense. So could it have been because these
language groups lived together in some long historical past like the Arctic
Home as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the Airyanəm Vacjah
suggest? Or is it
because they shared some intimate common past in some root race like
that of the Atlantis which Blavatsky wants us to believe, with some sort of
collective subconscious or archetypal memory? Where in human body is
our memory located? Is memory like our soul non-local? Is it transmitted
through some non-local morphic or morphogenetic means as Rupert
Sheldrake seemed to have found out? Is trans-temporal non-local
communication possible as happens in subatomic cosmos?
This fifth root race of the ‘theosophical Aryans’ and those of the 'Aryan
invasion theory' should not be thrown into the same pot. While the third
and the fourth root races destroyed each other or got destroyed in nature's
cataclysms, the theosophical Aryans of the fifth root race are the carriers
of civilization completing its human and planetary girdle. While it must
again be underscored that the proto Indo-Aryans of the ancient world
and the twentieth century 'Aryan myth' of the Western group that flared
up in the Nazi holocaust are happenings millennia apart and were totally
different cups of tea, both the Eastern and the Western groups must be
seen as having completed their civilizational missions: with the
Indo-Aryans of South Asia it was called 'Sanskritization' which by and
large embraced the whole Indian subcontinent and then broadened in
the ‘civilizing and spiritualizing advances’ through Buddhism that brought
nearly the whole of Southeast Asia, Sino-Nipponic North Asian and the
Mongol-Tartaric central Asian within its civilizational perimeter which
then was crippled by the aggressive spread of Islam. Similarly, a tide of
what may be called rationalization and modernization, industrialization
and democratization, went off from the Western Aryan branch that has
by now engulfed the entire planet, so we can now see the phenomenon
of globalization as the harbinger of the coming unified world civilization.
This civilizational accomplishment of the fifth root race understandably is
also perceived as ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ and the ‘Western
domination’, climax of whose postcolonialist articulation is the Aryan
invasion theory and such other racialist theories. But let us be clear that
the term 'Aryan' is perceived and interpreted differently in the
theosophical and postcolonialist narratives. Theosophy is a wisdom
religion, insists on the scientific corroboration of its doctrines, it is yoking
of science and religion in the glory of human spirit, the European
expansion of the modern period has brought about the convergence of
humanity in the global village within a virtually common world language
and communication network – call it modernization, aryanization,
civilization, whatever! The theosophical Aryan fifth root race I for one
believe has done its job.
Sixth root race: NEO-LEMURIA? In theosophical writings this root
race remains vaguely identified with America, not in the restricted sense
of the United States but of the NEW WORLD of the Americas of the age
discovery whose symbol is the Statue of Liberty encompassing the coming
sixth root race of the Aquarian New Age. It is the unfolding racio-spiritual
expression of a ‘postmodern world order’ not on the animal instinct of
FORCE and nuclear weapons but the psychological unity of the totalized
human race; this sixth root race has the calling to bring about such a
nuclear weapon-free Global PEACE Order, since it like the Lemurians has
the opening of a third eye, indicating group consciousness and telepathic
rapport, high intelligence and intuitive skills, combined with numerous
other possibilities and potentialities of the Aquarian New Age and its
unfolding holistic planetary consciousness. In this context we have
mentioned above the names of the great evolutionary futurists like
Teilhard and Sri Aurobindo, and such notions as planetization, noosphere,
the Omega of the converging World Mind as well as the descent of the
Supramental. This formulation, very innovative and forward looking
then remains now challenged if not threatened as the future of nanotech,
cyborgs, genetic engineering, transhumanism and the Singularity seems
like drastically overtaking any theosophical version of a coming sixth root
race. What happened to Lemuria and Atlantis will be repeated is still an
open question.
Seventh root race: NEO-ATLANTIS? Should our civilization ever
be the
scene of the seventh root race, may be centuries or millennia hence,
or even after eons repeating the fate of Lemuria and Atlantis, the seventh
root race will be the return to the Polarians and the Hyperborians in the
same astral or ethereal vibrational forms. The great adepts and initiates
will once more produce mind-born sons immaculately, and there will be a
race of angels devas or buddhas, sons and daughters of god, the purity
of the krita-age being re-established (SD 2:274, 483). The characteristics
of sex will gradually disappear, and humanity will slowly once again be
becoming androgynous. Offspring will be born in a manner generally
similar to that which prevailed during the second and early third root-race
periods, the superman of the Spirit is the ‘becoming’ Sat-Chit-Ananda,
the eternal Truth-Bliss-Consciousness. Back to the quantum
Brahman?
Geological-Astronomical Span of Root-Race Evolution
We must only remember that these theosophical root races assume form
and come to pass in time-frames that are conceived in terms of the
theosophical yugas, kalpas adopted from the Hindu cosmology. Alan
Watt the author of Perennial Philosophy explains:
"To the philosophers
of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of
light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of
time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact
that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological
applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that
technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it."
Map of Pangaea to the Present
We know of our planet consisting of seven continents and five great
oceans – the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, Arctic and Antarctic. But
some 500 million years before the Cambrian time knew the earth
surface only as a single ‘super continent’, and before which, during the
previous billion years of so, more such super continents rose and vanished.
We know at least three of them, the Columbia, the
Rodenia, the
Pangaea. The last of this super continent, Pangaea,
began to break up in
the mid to late Jurassic (about 167 million years ago) into two giant half
super-continent, Laurasia in the North and Gondwanaland
south of the
Equator, the northern forming the axis of the Atlantis archetype and the
Southern of the Lemurian. Then the East Gondwana, comprising
Antarctica-Madagascar-India -Australia, began to separate from Africa
during the Middle Jurassic. South America began to drift slowly westward
from Africa as the South Atlantic Ocean opened, beginning about 130
million years ago, East Gondwana itself began to be dismembered with
the northward shift of the landmasses Madagascar-Seychelles-India,
which began its dislocation in the Early Cretaceous (about 120 million
years ago), Australia began to separate from Antarctica perhaps as long
ago as 80 million years. About 45 million years ago, the Northeastern
Gondwana consisting of the Madagascar-Seychelles-India complex broke
with its major chuck colliding with Asia, forcing the crust to buckle and
forming the Himalayas. Thus the subcontinent of ours was born, the most
protected and sacred of the region of the globe between the high
Himalayas and the seas, the melting pot of all that is converging in history
and civilization. Another significant world climatic event was the final
separation of South America from West Antarctica sometime during the
Oligocene, perhaps 30 million years ago.
Alfred Wegener
Since long it was believed,on the proof of the shore of one continent
matching with the other which is
most clearly visible in the separation of Africa and Latin America across
the South Atlantic,that our seven might once have been one single
super continent, still few were ready to believe when
Alfred Wegenerpostulated this theory in the 1930s, which after
his tragic death, was then
confirmed by the studies of continental shifts and plate tectonics.
It is this geological and cosmological span of time that went into the vedic
conception of yugas and kalpas and was adopted by Blavatsky in her
calculations of the root races. If the first root races took millions of years
for their rise and fall, the fifth rose and transformed in hundred thousand
years, and the sixth could follow the footprints much shorter time spans
because history we know is infinitely accelerating. The formation and
consummation of these sixth and seventh root races should then be the
story of the unfolding of what I envisage as the
TRANS-VEDIC MEGACYCLE, which is Indian history’s planetary cycle.
Homo sapiens at best has a history of fifty or two hundred years or let us
make it two million going down to our distantly related mammalian
primates, yet the root races go back to billions of years because the total
geological and astronomical span is holographically ingrained within each
of us which is both the root of our race and our humanity which is verily
one and indivisible like the truth of our quantum cosmos. Root race is
verily the unfolding of quantum Brahman that is verily the atman in each
of us. No Aryo-dravidian binary can ground the truth of our civilization,
it is human divine cosmic.
Back to Historical Times – Svastika, Cross, Ankh
In the quantum cosmos our inner Selfis the total non-locally
registered memory and inheritance of this cosmos the Self, which makes
this cosmos
a WHO not a What; because we know very long and
uncharted geological
spans eons are within us including all these root races that went and that
are yet to be; continents races civilizations planets stars and cosmoses
were formed and unformed many times before, our universe is so vast,
with billions of light years and trillions of galaxies and stars more in
numbers than all the sand grains of the shores of all our seven seas put
together! With all our science and our presently ten-dimensional
Superstring and M Theories we shall never know more about this Universe
than what the Neanderthal man knew about the planet he lived in; if we
at all knew it, it is not through our intellect but the intuition, the intuition
that is awaiting us of the 6th and the seventh root races, in which we the
individual and total human race could be participants and co-creators:
there is something eternal, Sanatan, that is the Order, RTA in Sanskrit,
that is underlying the endlessness the infinity of this chaos. Inasmuch
as we measure ourselves and grasp our human and historical reality in
terms of the Pre, Post and Trans-vedic Megacycles I have attempted to
evolve, we ensure to ourselves an open human past and future, at the
same time we are also Co-creators of the 6th and 7th root races
that is going to be the story of the aeons to come.
While this Universe for us remains utterly ungraspable and our transience
as individuals in this vast and infinitely immeasurable cosmos a grotesque
joke, the beauty of it all is that we could relate ourselves to the pre-vedic,
post-vedic, trans-vedic Megacycles in terms of the most familiar and
extremely manageable three archetypal symbols which is the very soul of
the 5th root race of the theosophical Aryans – the Svastika the
Cross the Ankh .
Svastika
The Svastika is an archetypal symbol, it stands for the Indo-Aryan or
Indo-European ancient world for its collective subconscious and common
memory, in its sacred and secular forms it is world wide, no other symbol
stands for the totality of human past and inheritance as the symbol of
Svastika, which paradoxically and tragically is also the symbol of history’s
worst holocaust. That evil association of it brought about by the
Asura Hitler and the Nazis is bound to be transient, Hitler is but a wave
in what this archetypal symbol represents in the history of the fifth root
race; so universal in India and so auspicious to the Hindus, Buddhists
and Jains, the symbol that stands for the whole Eurasia and the ancient
Indian (Maya, Inca, etc) civilizations of the Americas; why was it that
the ancient world so universally embraced this Svastika? It is because
it is the cosmic symbol, its leftward movement stands for the devolution
of the Brahman and the rightward movement of evolution, the godward
movement, back to the origins OM the ultimate symbol or the archetype
of the absolute and unconditioned Infinite. When this sacred archetypal
symbol was misused by the western Aryan branch, read the Nazi Germany,
and brought on to itself destruction and the rest of the humanity at
World War II, it was regression but hidden within was also the power of
renewal and re-creation: the Atlantic Charter giving birth to the United
Nations and the New Humanity was born of it, it was indeed the
resurrection of the Atlantis, the negated Atlanteans coming to fulfil the
fifth root race their successors the Aryans; what remains after the
theosophical aryanization of the planet and humanity is its further
movement towards divinity, which is the sixth root race, the Dravidian
Neo-Lemuria, in the broader sense of the Indic root race one with the race
of MAN, whose very symbol then becomes the new cycle of the
self-renewed Svastika, moving rightwards, to the Gods of the seventh
root race OM that is eternal Sat-Chit-Ananda the very Truth Consciousness
the Self that is Cosmos. This Om is the transcending QUARTERNITY which
is the core both of the Jungian Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics
which for thirty years was jointly explored by this great depth psychologist
Jung along with with the great quantum physicist and Nobel Laureate
(1933) Wolfgang Pauli enabling Jung to formulate his theory of
Synchronicity which Pauli wanted to complete with some vague vision
he apprehended between Eros and Unified Field. This ‘a-dimensional
Quarternity’ reconciles and integrates the ‘dimensional Trinity’
– Svastika, Cross, Ankh – Father Son the Holy Spirit.
Holy Cross
If Svastika is a cosmic archetype, Cross has become its historical
counterpart. The medium of the theosophical aryanization of the fifth
root race certainly was European expansionism, its archetypal symbol
was the cross, like the Svastika was the archetypal integrating symbol
of the ancient pre-historic world, the Christian Cross might be seen
archetypally symbolic of the theosophical Aryan unification of our planet
of the historical times; of course the Christian cross today is in the
defensive the world over, the Westerns have by and large disowned it in
their secularization drive as the collective repressive instinct of the sense
of guilt associated with the imperialistic world domination and in
suppressing the crime of their over-exploitation of this brittle planet of
ours; at another level the cross and the crescent which once fought the
crusades and today are fighting the doomsday global terrorism are at
discord; no such antagonism for the christian cross at an archetypal level
is apparent in the Indic Sino-Nipponic civilizational spaces especially now
that China is emerging on the globalization forefront, Neo-Hinduism of the
modern Indian renaissance has embraced the cross at various levels
though there is building up resistance in the reductionist and majoritarian
Hindutva segments who are also the proponents of the Aryan invasion
theories; if we argued above that the Indo-British period contrasted with
the Indo-Islamic one was a redeeming phase for Indian history, if the
karmically bound and fatally burdened Hindu society embraced a
Constitution in 1950 on the corner stone of the equality of individual and
universal franchise, if the deeply superstitious and fossilized Hind world
allowed itself to be overwhelmed by the universality of Neo-Hinduism,
I for one have no doubt that the present revisionist and revivalistic
trends of the Hindu psyche after a natural period of adolescent rebellion
will enter the balanced age of healthy manhood. The sixth root race that
will guide the present materialistic hedonistic human condition and its
force/deterrence based geopolitics towards its transcending higher Truth.
i.e. guiding Evolution from animality to humanity and divinity, the sixth
root race that is the NEO-LEMURIA can come alone from the Indic race
that is human race; its inevitability is what I call the Trans-vedic
Megacycle.
If the Svastika is the archetype of the cosmic level of evolution and
devolution, Cross stands for redeeming progression of our historical
process. Jesus the Messiah, before fulfilling this Cross with his own
crucifixion and resurrection, at the Table of his Last Supper, invited the
Jew and the Gentile, the slave and the Greek, the Pharisee and the
Sadducee, the fisher and the tax collector, as equals in washing their
feet, breaking the bread and partaking in the covenant to which his
Church was obligated until a world wide community on that principle
was covenanted at the Atlantic Charter and internationally legalized in
the birth of the United Nations to which every nation of the world,
the big US no less the little Honduras, belongs as an equal member,
thus every human being remains as much joined to every other human
being as equal as anyone else – at least in principle and before justifiable
law of our present national and international order. Thus the Christian
cross is the symbol of the archetypal redeeming salvific principle, it stands
for law and self-surrender, and above all for Christian charity and the
human nobility of showing the other cheek, it stands for humanism,
enlightenment, subsidiarity and participation. Much of humanity’s problem
is due to the virtual negation of this Cross, alone with its affirmation and
renewal the Neo-Lemuria the 6th root race will have any chance of
surviving the terminator and flourishing itself as planetary souls.
Ankh
Like the Svastika and the Cross represented the archetypal symbols
roughly of my Pre-vedic and Post-vedic Megacycles, the Ankh
perfectly fits in with my Transvedic Megacycle as its archetypal symbol.
Unlike the Svastika and the Cross, which are symbiotically fused with the
movements of the ancient and the modern worlds and have evolved with
their karmas or vice versa, the Ankh still remains more or less a free i.e.
unbound archetypal symbol, Ankh thus is the archetype of the future,
the coming, it is verily the symbol of LIFE, one with RESURRECTION and
IMMORTALITY, Ankh is the personification of the primal Gaia or rather
Isis in union with Osiris whom she brought back to life, from whom she
got impregnated and whom she immortalized as the God of resurrection
for the ancient Egyptians; Ankh is the symbol of cosmos, its loop above
is verily the cosmic Creatrix, the vacuum (sunya) or the zero womb, and
it's supporting base is the Cross; the order that holds this cosmos, the vedic
Skamba; it is Life that is creation, as such it is the union of heaven and
earth, man and woman in one; as the archetype of union and integration
Ankh is the sign of androgyny, it is the bisexual Isis Astarta Mohini Venus
the Aphrodite, same as the mind-born son the adept the yogi Siva of
eternal tapas; Ankh is the particle-wave complementarity of the
subatomic cosmos, as such it is the Quantum Brahman, Ankh is the Eros
which Wolfgang Pauli predicted was the ‘unifying field’ at the heart of the
quantum cosmos, Ankh is the DESIRE which the Vedas tell us was the
cause of creation; as the principle of life and zest to live, Ankh brings
together the cosmic rhythm of the Svastika and the historic
self-surrendering self-negation of the christian Cross to the fulfilment of
the Person that is she and he, Ankh is verily the symbol of the New Man,
symbol of the sixth root race the Neo-Lemuria, it is verily the manifestation
of the anti-patriarchal Aquarian New Age and its gaiaic planetary
New Consciousness; as the fusing principle of the Svastika and the Cross,
Ankh is the archetypal New Humanity of the sixth root race, it is the rising
cosmic Christ for all humanity and human unity, the Third Adam, the
Cosmic Sophia, the eschatological fulfilment of history, the
New Jerusalem, or may be it is the New Benares of the six root race
humanity of the Neo-Lemuria, and the seventh Neo-Atlantis both Indic
and the Cosmic.
Such is the curve of the Trans-vedic Megacycle, the planetary cycle of the
Indian Spirit the Higher Truth, we should be capable of envisaging; while
I have by now given a fairly good idea of my no-end Pre-Vedic and
Post-vedic Megacycles through the easy route of Blavatsky’s seven root
races. , I have hardly said anything about my Post-vedic Megacycle,
which could be touched upon in the following section with which we
come to historical times and situate the ‘Aryan/Non-Aryan Origins of
Indian Civilization on the Megacyclical View of Indian History’.
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