I recently presented a version of this paper at the
Science, Wisdom and the Future Conference here in San Luis Obispo.
Ganesh Baba’s Cycle of Synthesis:
a blend of ancient wisdom and modern science
Abstract: Swami Ganeshananda was a 20th century Indian yogi and scientist whose life’s work is illustrated a “simple” diagram he calls the Cycle of Synthesis. Ganeshananda’s theory postulates four analogous fields in a unified field theory, combining Einstein’s idea of a four dimensional space-time continuum with C.G. Jung’s notions of the collective unconscious and archetypes in a framework based on Immanuel Kant’s premise that a set of categories can encompass all thought, and his own orally-transmitted, experience-based understanding of the ancient science of vibratory chemistry, Tantra, and its philosophic counterpart, Sankhya.
Indian wisdom says that when the student is ready, the teacher will come. The day Swami Ganeshananda, or Ganesh Baba, came into my life, I was not ready. It was Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1979, I had two small children and a ramshackle country house to look after, and I was not looking for a teacher. So, waiting in line, to meet the elderly gentleman my friends brought from India, I was completely unprepared for sense of recognition I felt when our eyes met. I never imagined that anyone’s hand could feel so familiar or a face could be as recognizable as my own in the mirror. But then, it was so.
His upcoming cataract surgery in California allowed us three days together. I was eager to spend as much time with him as possible and he tried to teach me as much as he could in the time we had. In the end, I spent three years rather than three days in close contact with Swami Ganeshananda, but the understandings I gained the first three days are the ones that still serve as the lens through which I see life.
Ganesh Baba, formally Shri Mahant Swami Ganeshananda Saraswati or Giri, (c.1885 – 1987) carried several lines of teaching. In fact, he called himself a follower of every religion and a student of every science. Prime among these is the Lahiri line of Kriya Yoga. Lahiri Mahasaya and his followers taught householders a streamlined version of yoga, which until then was only practiced by monks and renunciates. The Kriya yogis modernized yoga and emphasized its scientific nature. Like Theosophy, Kriya, or “central action” yoga, rose from the fertile soil of the Bengali Renaissance, a social reform movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries centered in Calcutta, characterized by the synthesis of Indian and British culture.
Ganesh Baba’s other primary lineage is the western tradition of empirical science, as revered in secular early 20th century Calcutta as anywhere in the Western world.
By the time I met him, Baba was well into the sanyasin, or renunciate, stage of his life. He was a wandering monk, a sadhu. He left behind his family and work, his name and his history decades before coming to America. The stories he told of his past were teaching stories, not meant to be taken literally. We never knew his real age or his background before his renunciation, but I saw for myself that he spoke the language of any scientist he met. The Indian sage says, “A guru is like a tree. A tree provides fruits and nourishment, shade and protection from inclement weather, dry branches for fuel and the leaves, thatching material for the hut, but if you dig the roots, the tree will die.”
Ganesh Baba told me he was the oldest son of a middle class Bengali family, born at the height of the British Raj. He attended English-speaking schools, where he acquired an impeccable Victorian Indian accent and perfect flowing handwriting, and then university in Calcutta where he studied physics and attended the lectures of many the great physicists of the time: Einstein, Bohr, and Planck. The psychologist C.G. Jung came to Calcutta, too. Many of the ideas that shape modern thought were born in those years: relativity, quantum mechanics, the unconscious mind. Ganesh Baba embraced the new views enthusiastically.
Then, in his mid-fifties, Baba had an awakening which led him to abandon his secular life. For the next thirty or forty years, he tried to synthesize his scientific viewpoint with his spiritual path.
The Cycle of Synthesis
Beyond the inordinate grace of showing up in my life at all, the greatest gift Ganesh Baba gave me is the Cycle of Synthesis (COS). A Sufi word, ta’wil, wherein a powerful archetypal image unfolds greater and greater truths over time, best describes my experience with this extraordinary drawing. In symbolism, the closest Western counterpart to ta’wil, meaning is assigned to an image by the mind; with ta’wil, the image reveals its own meaning.
Even the name of the diagram is a succinct version of its central thesis: the COS is a continuous cycle of opposites becoming one another. Two processes are synthesized: the reversal of polarities (pulsation), and continuity, or infinite wholeness. In India, such a diagram is called an akhanda mandala, a centered circle encompassing the entire universe.
It is in the nature of such a diagram to evolve, taking many forms, adapting to the understandings each new viewer brings to it. What remains stable is its numerological and conceptual basis.
This version of the Cycle of Synthesis from one of Ganesh Baba’s unpublished notebooks:
ENeuhaus figure 1
The following version of the diagram, which cites some of the its historical sources, was created specifically for this article:
ENeuhaus figure 2
The COS describes a cosmos in which matter is created out of consciousness and evolves through Darwinian and “conscious” evolution back into pure, formless consciousness. The Western scientific worldview is opposite; from the Western perspective, matter and sense perceptions are primary; only what can be proven is true or real. Creation begins when matter comes into existence at the bottom of the diagram. The generally accepted Western understanding of what is real encompasses a short arc of the great cycle illustrated by the COS.
In the Cycle of Synthesis, Cosmic Consciousness, pure, formless, and subtle beyond human understanding, has no existence except through contrast; yet through contrast, it iterates into the fractal world of rainbows and musical scales we perceive as reality. As the frequency of the vibrating colors and tones decreases and their density increases, the world we know condenses – through the continuum of Kantian categories – into forms recognizable to our senses.
This “upside-down” view of the universe was not only accepted by humanity through most of history and by most indigenous cultures, but also, from the Greeks to the Founding Fathers, even Western thinkers gave primacy to some form of the divine in the cycle of creation and evolution until very recently--general acceptance of a material-based view of creation and evolution came well after Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation of the death of God.
When Cosmic Consciousness becomes aware of itself, the first form, Cosmic Intelligence, emerges. Intelligence, the most abstract level of existence, is the realm of Plato and Jung’s Archetypes, of the most basic and primal of the patterns that inform existence.
Intelligence then reflects and refracts into aspects and Cosmic Mind, an infinite series of perspectives, is formed. Then Cosmic Life, the idea of change, emerges, as each of the perspectives takes on a life of its own. Once there is Life, there are beginnings and endings, so Time comes into existence. Time moves on, creating Space, which in turn condenses into Energy and finally to Matter, each a more dense, more fixed, yet more diversified form of its progenitor.
The visible palpable universe of matter and energy is only a topographical expression of the space-time continuum in which space is the weave and time is the weft. It is a 4-dimensional continuum in which matter/energy is playing its dance of evolution in the theatre of the Cosmic Space-Time Continuum.
But what of the biological, the psychological and the spiritual components of the Cosmos? As a matter of fact, what of man? What about life, mind, intelligence and consciousness, the second half of the primordial octave of creation of the Cosmos? (Ganeshananda, undated handwritten notes in possession of the author)
Time creates the midline in the diagram; Baba calls it the “mirror” in his version above. Above the midline is the timeless world, and below, the world governed by time. The physical world is a reflection of the timeless, eternal world. As Swami Amritananda of Devipuram once remarked, “One cannot deny that psyche controls the physical. Every time you stand up, you overcome gravity with the mind.”
But the COS is a cycle of synthesis: every part of it is in constant flux, constantly becoming its own opposite. So, once created, consciousness-in-the-form-of-matter (known by so many names: the spark of divinity, the inner light, the sacred in the commonplace, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Christ, the conscience; the penultimate quantum of the penultimate field) continues around the cycle, becoming subtler and subtler, developing subtler and subtler understandings, until it evolves back into undifferentiated Consciousness.
The role of the human
Along with the divine (and its ordinary correlate, magic), the Western perspective discards another understanding basic to most earlier world-views: correspondence, the idea expressed by the alchemical aphorism, “As above, so below.” A quotation from Plotinus, the 3rd century CE Greek Neo-Platonist philosopher, illustrates the perspective:
It is first of all necessary to make the organ of vision analogous and similar to the object to be contemplated. Never would the eye have perceived the sun if it had not first taken the form of the sun; likewise, the soul cannot see beauty unless it first becomes beautiful itself. And every man must make himself beautiful and divine in order to attain the sight of beauty and divinity. (Plotinus, An Essay on the Beautiful)
In a theurgistic cosmos, meaning is conserved when greater patterns are repeated in lesser forms. In the COS, the pattern set up by the creation of matter out of Consciousness and its evolution back to Consciousness is repeated throughout the cosmos, and therefore in the human being, whom the Upanishads say is the “mean between the macrocosm and the microcosm.”
The COS is divided into four increasingly subtle fields with the inertio-gravitational at the bottom, followed by the electro-magnetic, the bio-psychic and, at the top, the most subtle, the intello-conscious. The four fields are reflected in the human form as the physical, biological, psychological and spiritual phases of our existence. Evolution continues beyond the Darwinian physical and biological phases into the psychological, and ultimately the spiritual phase. When free will enters at the psychological level, evolution becomes a conscious choice. Ganesh Baba advocates Kriya yoga with its balanced approach to all four phases as the ideal path of conscious evolution.
A very brief exploration of the numeric basis of the Cycle of Synthesis
In ancient, indigenous and most non-Western thought systems, numbers are more important as qualities than they are in counting. Using the language of electronics, and the words Consciousness and Spirit, and Nature and Matter, interchangeably, Ganesh Baba explains how the quality of twoness, or polarity, informs the diagram and the cosmos:
Nature is negative [as in the negative pole on a battery]; power is based on the principle of potentiality and polarity. There must be a higher and lower potential, a source and a sink, to generate power, and Nature happens to be that sink. The Source is at the higher potential and the sink at the lower end of the creative inflow--Involution [or creation]. The higher potential, the Source, is positive and is termed Spirit; and the lower potential, the sink is logically the negative counterpart of the positive source at infinity, Cosmic Consciousness. Their play of power or energy is the pulsation, or alternating, interpenetrating, vibration of the positive and the negative in their innumerable proportions and modes, permutations and combinations. (Ganeshananda, handwritten notes)
The cosmo-numerological basis of the Cyce of Synthesis runs thus:
1 + 1 = 2 One becomes two when Consciousness becomes aware of itself.
1 + 1 + 1 = 3 Once two exist, there is a third: the first, the second, and both.
2 x 2 = 4 The two also squares itself, creating four,
2 x 2 x 2 = 8 and cubes itself, creating eight.
ad infinitum Once an octave exists, it iterates endlessly.
The COS is always true to its numerological base: it is a multi-dimensional whole divided in two, four, and eight. (The element three, the number of creation, is implied in the versions I chose to include here but explicate in others.)
Needless to say, a short paper like this can barely scratch the surface of the complex system the Cycle of Synthesis describes. In addition, the drawing itself reveals more and more information as one studies it. In thirty years since I first saw it, the COS has slowly opened doors to greater understandings of the processes of creation and evolution, to the functioning and structure of the world around and in me, than I ever could have imagined. Perhaps it will do the same for you.
Amritananda, Swami. Personal interview. February 16, 2008.
Ganeshananda, Swami. c. 1960 – 85. Unpublished notes and manuscripts in possession of the author.
Plotinus. An Essay on the Beautiful. Tr. Taylor, Thomas. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/29510
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November 2009 
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