Dwapara Yuga: English and the tower of Babel

From the dawning of Dwapara Yuga, the English language spread with the rise of the British Empire and then after WWII, with the Cold War's American sphere of influence, to become a world lingua franca - a common language.

Even in the European Union, although theoretically many languages are spoken in Brussels, the reality is that English is here too the lingua franca.

It was unified language in a previous higher age (Proto Indo European) that gave us the tower of Babel, which certain kabbalists interpret not as a building but rather flight technology, much as the Vedas also describe.

Symbolically, the tower was destroyed along with unity of language as a punishment for lack of attunement with God. The unity of language and the tower can be interpreted as access to knowledge and the punishment as misuse of that knowledge.

Certainly, English is a language of adoption of knowledge, as it displaces other languages and cultures, it tends to absorb them. At the time of writing, the Global Language Monitor counts just shy of 1,000,000 words in English. For example, there's an enormous vocabulary of French in English and in more recent times, Yiddish and from the 60s Sanskrit terms are becoming part of the common vernacular e.g. guru, prana, karma and avatar.

Historically, subcultures had their own versions of English e.g. cockney for thieves and polari for theater workers. In the US, African American musicians with jazz, blues, rock and now rap tend to drive the vocabulary with recent words such as crib and grill. Chinese influence tends to come to us via Japan, whose culture is built upon Chinese martial arts, science and artist accomplishments, themselves built upon Indian predecessors.

English has the greatest storehouse of knowlede in terms of vocabulary and written information and the ability to discuss it in English having been standard in many professions for decades e.g. for pilots and ships captains. The Internet continues this trend.

Watching the nightly news, most intelligent spokesmen are careful to present their arguments in English lest artful interpreters color their translations. It is shocking to watch the news in France, as almost every Enlgish speaker is over-dubbed with some official translation that seems to pander to the Elysees' point of view, over-riding any nuance or subtlety in the speaker's own words.

English is helping to bring all peoples together around the world and facilitating the passage of a direct, personal relationship with God requiring no payments, weekly attendance or subservience to a priestly class whether Christian, Jewish, Muslem, Hindu or Buddhist.

As the Quebecois in Cananda have shown, an encroaching use of English can lead to a cultural renaissance. In the French language, it is they who drive popular and intellectual culture much more so than the larger but stagnant France.

Much as in music, it is amalgams of cultures and languages that have the most strength. How tedious would the Caribbean be without its mix of European, Hindu, native and African influences from Barbecue to Pieces of Eight to Hoodoo? Much is the same for world changing figures such as the mix of Indian-Irish in Chuck Noris, German-Chinese, Bruce Lee, African-American Bob Marley and Barack Obama.

Indian Footnote
Yogananda himself is a unique product of Indian and British cultures that came together in Colonial Calcutta. Most don't realize that until the late 1940's, although living in the US, he was a British subject and speaking difficult truths in the US was potentially subject to sanction and deportation, especially in the Miami riot his words aroused in the early 20s (and no wonder he chose not to address issues of sexuality, psychology, sociology or politics, the themes that lead to Osho's deportation a half century later).

His associate Sri Nerode was followed for years by British Intelligence, hoping to hear notes of insurrection in his Yoga discourses. Ironically, it is the little known help of the Indian Army in WWII that allowed Britain not to be crushed by Germany prior to the entry of the United States.