Dwapara Yuga: artificial life

This week the first manmade genome was announced.

Up until this time plants and animals have been genetically modified by recombining existing elements.

This new step was synthesis of completely new elements, a first step in the creation of artificial life.

Along with cloning, atomic power, radio and television still further proof points that we are mastering finer forces and moving farther from the dull Kali Yuga.

The purely technical is far out ahead of any moral compass and so opens the door to fantastic advances such as solving global warming and ending disease and similarly plague and environment disaster.

Dwapara Yuga: cloaking devices

Two decades ago, invisibility to radar (radio waves) for planes, missiles and surface ships was achieved with stealth technology.

It has just been announced that a similar breakthrough has been made for sonar (sound waves) for making submarines invisible.

Progress is being made to true invisibility (light waves), for the moment existing only in James Bond's "Die Another Day" car.

Once again, these breakthroughs underline that we are no longer in the age of Kali Yuga but advancing in Dwapara Yuga, the age of energy, mastering finer and finer forces.

Technology is typically driven first by the military, then by finance and communications industries, spinning off into health care and energy.

A recent paper strongly correlates the wealth of nations with uptake of technology, going back to 1000 BC. In the modern West, a huge percentage of people have the time to meditate and advance, whereas in the developing world (excepting elites) the day is spent merely surviving.

Dwapara Yuga and Writing - "For it is written"

The first writings that archeology has been able to find are from 3300-3400BC, Sumeria and Egypt, i.e. the end of falling Treta Yuga and beginning of falling Dwapara Yuga.

As has previously been mentioned, in the higher ages of Satya and Treta Yuga, there was no need of the written word given the mental capacities of the peoples of those times.

According to Jewish tradition, Abraham, the father of Judaism (important in Christianity and Islam also) was born under the name Abram in the city of Ur in Babylonia around 1800 BC about 1000 years after the beginning of falling Dwapara Yuga.

The Jewish people have been very closely associated with writing and culture, with the words "for it is written" almost a catch phrase. Their language, Hebrew, developed in the 3rd millenium BC .

[As an aside, in the show Seinfeld, one of the most amusing plots is the dentist who converts to judaism "just for the jokes".]

Sanskrit, developed in the 2nd millenium BC, is the lanugage of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism.

In the West, knowledge was captured in the much more recent Greek and Latin, the so called classical languages.

Sir William Jones, speaking to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on February 2, 1786, said:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

The greater sophistication of Sanskrit than Latin, Greek and by extension English is one of those points that attracts the curious -- why would language devolve over time, rather than simply continuously improving? Further, why would there be no written language at all before a certain point even though we find other objects of great beauty and sophistication.

The reader might like to check out a recently published book: 30,000 years of art, a span covering more than one Yuga.