Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri
(1855 - 1936)
WHY I AM ENCOURAGED
© Edward R. Close, March 9, 2019
I
am encouraged. I see a bright future
for the human race, despite the bitter political conflicts raging around the
world today. Why am I so optimistic? For reasons that I will attempt to explain
here. First, we are beginning a 12,000-year phase of gradual advancement in a 24,000-year
cycle. The current advancement of mental virtue began about 500 AD, and will
eventually lead to a much more enlightened average state of consciousness than
we are experiencing at present; and second, I know that the vicious political
conflicts we see today are typical of the lingering negative consciousness of
the descending side of the cycle resisting the increasingly positive rationality
of the beginning of a new ascent in the cycles of time.
Both
radical socialism, with its atheistic suppression of the human spirit, and
radical egoism, and its cruel social inequalities, lead to domination of the
many by a few, followed by the complete destruction of civilization. But the destructive
ideas of both radical left and radical right ideologies eventually cancel each other out, and when this
happens, depending upon whether we are in the ascending or descending side of
the time cycle, the world is propelled neither right or left, but straight
ahead in either a positive direction toward an increasingly bright future, or
in a negative direction, toward chaos and destruction. Fortunately, we are now in
the beginning stages of a 12,000-year ascending cycle.
In the Holy Science, by Sri Yukteswar Giri,
written in 1894, the astronomical and cosmological nature of these 24,000-year cycles
are explained, including how this knowledge was saved in ancient writings from
the previous periods of high development. Application of this knowledge of the 12,000-year
ascending and 12,000-year descending time cycles to the hard facts of the
history of our planet explains when and how scientific and spiritual understanding
has waxed and waned. It also explains the existence around the world of ancient
artifacts like pyramids and stone structures that are inexplicable in the linear
interpretation of time assumed by mainstream science. Such artifacts that
simply do not fit into the linear interpretation of time, fit perfectly into
the ascending and descending cycles of mental virtue, as explained by Sri
Yukteswar!
In
our new book, Secrets of the Sacred Cube,
a Cosmic Love Story, which should be available soon, Jacqui and I explain
how, thanks to the loving benevolence of God, the primary form of consciousness,
we came to know about the cycles of time and our place in them. Our physical
journey together in this life ended at 4:44 PM on December 15, 2018, with
Jacqui’s ascension into the subtler dimensional domains of spirit. but her
loving spirit is most definitely still with me, projecting support and encouragement,
and acting as a go-between, relaying the guidance of our spiritual mentors to
me. While I am sometimes aware of their presence, I am not yet spiritually
advanced enough to perceive them clearly and hear their voices directly, except
on rare occasions; but Jacqui, who is still as real as ever to me, is with them
now, and I believe she will be able to maintain our contact until our mission
in this life is completed.
I
have been blessed to live long enough to observe events of more than eighty
years that confirm the cyclic structure of time described above, and Jacqui and
I also shared more distant memories of events in a number of lives before this,
that suggest that the mental virtue, i.e., consciousness, is also cyclic. We
talk about this in our new book. Whether you choose to believe in actual reincarnation,
or that we have somatic memories of distant ancestors in our DNA that we
accessed somehow, it makes no difference; those memories deepen our experience and
understanding of reality, and provide a clearer picture of the nature of
consciousness and the logical structure of reality.
I
am encouraged by such memories, and by the fact that more and more serious
scientists are becoming interested in investigating the connections between the
physical, consciousness and spirit. The Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist
Sciences is currently leading the way, with credentialed scientists looking beyond the rank materialism
of the past. This trend agrees with the progress predicted for the ascent of the
mental virtue at this point, about 2,518 years into the ascending 12,000-year
cycle.
Looking
back into the historical events of our previous lives together, and conscious
memories of events from the early years of this life, evidence of the
over-arching purpose and mission (assigned by our spiritual guides) is apparent:
At some point in the distant past, we both committed to helping in the task of preserving
truths from the previous period of high development through the lowest point of
consciousness and comprehension in the previous 12,000 years of descent of mental
virtue. More details are included in our new book.
Embedded
in a section on Philosophy and Religion in the
Book of Atma, published in 1977, reproduced from essays and notes I wrote
in 1958 and 1959, you’ll find the following relevant statements:
The history of man’s progress
is written around the struggle to learn “what it is all about”… The essence of existence is differentiation
… The instant differentiation occurred, objective reality came into being, but
not before. Thus enters the concepts of before and after, or time. … having
interrupted the void … you have admitted or established consciousness … in order to perceive an object, the
consciousness, or differentiator must be [conceived of as] existing apart from the
differentiated object. Thus enters the concept of space.
These
notes, connecting space, time and consciousness, written sixty years ago,
foreshadowed the development of transcendental physics, the discovery of gimmel, the non-physical factor
conveying consciousness into physical forms, and the expansion of G. Spencer Brown’s
Laws of Form to include consciousness,
leading to the development of TDVP with Dr. Vernon Neppe.
Brown’s
mathematically elegant development of the calculus of indications, published in
1969, begins with the statement: “The theme of this book is that a universe
comes into existence when a space is severed or taken apart”. The differentiation
of an object from the rest of the world is a real distinction in the finite world
if and only if, it exists in three or more dimensions, because with less than
three dimensions, it cannot contain any substance measurable as mass, energy or
gimmel, the variable that conveys the logical structure of consciousness into
physical form.
Once
consciousness is recognized as fundamental, and is included in the equations describing
the forms of reality, - and the calculus of indications is refined to become
the calculus of dimensional distinctions, so it can be used to describe the
interface of mind and matter – then the mathematical
necessity of the continuation of consciousness, with or without a physical
vehicle, is indisputable, and the mechanisms for the recall of events prior to
one’s birth are open to actual investigation, understanding and explanation.
Edward R. Close
(1936 - )
Cover Photo for the Book of Atma, 1977
