Sri-Chakram - The Form of the Formless

The ancient enquirers of  India discovered that consciousness and energy are not two separate factors, but two aspects of the same reality. They are one in essence. The evolution and manifestation of the material universe takes place thruogh the polarisation of these two aspects of the one, symbolised by lord Shiva and Goddess Shakti, and the different stages of their combination. Sri-chakram symbolises the stages of this evolution, and the way of spiritual expansion of man and his liberation. The powers symbolised as Goddesses in various stages of  Sri-chakram are the higher aspects of consciousness. By expanding to those stages through intelligent spiritual practice man becomes divinised.

Sri-chakram worship has developed an elaborate ritualistic system. Ritualism, although sometimes tends to degenerate into an end in itself, forms one of the effective means in the stages of human striving to reach the superior planes of intuitive consciousness.

According to scholars, the Sri-chakram diagram dates before the first millennium B.C. The researchers of the Soviet scientist dealt only with its mathematical properties. How the profound mathematical knowledge of our Saints merges with their spiritual insight is a subject for further in-depth investigation.

The conclusions of researches on Sri-chakram by Alexei Kulaichev, Candidate of physics and mathematics, senior researcher at the biology faculty of  Moscow State University, using modern exact sciences and electronic computers have evoked the interest of historians, ethnographers and scientists all over the world. The scientist was inspired to study its structure in depth, struck by its austere geometric beauty and regular design. As he proceeded he found its mathematical properties deepening amazingly.

Highlighting the mathematical enigma of Sri-chakram another scientist Ivan Kovalchenko, Member of the then U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences and a prominent Soviet historian, gives the example of the cetral fragment of the figure a 14 gonal star formed by the intersection of nine large triangles. He says that the ingenuity of the image lies in the fact that most of the straight lines forming it pass thruogh three, four and even six points of interseption with other lines. To build such a figure and to analyse it for an algorithm is an extremely challenging task. It has been accomplished only on a computer which has had to perform more than a hundred million operations to do this. Besides, each step in image building and analysis involved the solution of a wide series of related problems. Both computational and programmatic.

He points out that only a deep knowledge of exact sciences as modern higher algebra, numerical analysis and geometry as well as contemporary mathematical methods can build such a diagram and says, that the present day level of scientific and technical knowledge is sometimes insufficient to analysis the structure of, for example, some star of  Sri-chakram and the number of its possible configurations. Their analysis involves a complex system of algebraic equations and complicated computations which are beyond the capability of the present generation of computers.