Dwapara & Corpus Clock

The Corpus Clock unveiled this month at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, England by Prof. Hawking is an art work celebrating the breakthrough in clock technology made by John Harrison in 1722: the grasshopper escapement.

At the dawn of Dwapara Yuga, the escapement allowed time to be accurately measured by a small clock that could be taken aboard a ship.

This solved the British Admiralty's problem of accurately measuring longitude (latitude is a simple astronomical measurement), enabling accurate navigation and forming a technology keystone for the rise of sea power, the British empire and the creation of Grenwich Mean Time. All of these dispersed new ideas, a common language and linked colonies from New England to British India.

The clock's opening by Prof. Hawking forms an interesting Dwapara sequence. Prof. Hawking is the current Lucasian professor at Cambridge, preceded 300 years previously by Sir Isaac Newton, who formulated the law of gravitation, and 150 years previously by Charles Babbage, the inventor of the programmable computer.

The author attended a conference on 300 Years of Newtonian Physics with Prof. Hawking in 1987 that lead to a deeper interest in Indian philosophy and an examination of the little explored 'why' questions of physics.

Sri Yukteswar sets modern scientists in a wider context in the Autobiography of a Yogi:

"All creation is governed by law. The ones which manifest in the outer universe, discoverable by scientists, are called natural laws. But there are subtler laws ruling the realms of consciousness which can be known only through the inner science of yoga. The hidden spiritual planes also have their natural and lawful principles of operation. It is not the physical scientist but the fully self-realized master who comprehends the true nature of matter. Thus Christ was able to restore the servant's ear after it had been severed by one of the disciples."

Dwapara & Financial Derivatives

Derivatives are financial instruments whose value changes in response to the changes in underlying variables. The main types of derivatives are futures, forwards, options, and swaps although there are many far more exotic ones.

Derivatives are a characteristic of Dwapara Yuga, being less directly tied into the material world, opening up the creativity of financial engineering and conversely huge risk of losses if not used responsibly.

Some texts find the existence of derivative contracts in incidents in the Mahabharata, a previous higher Yuga.

Their use (and abuse) in Dwapara Yuga has exploded from simpler forms a century and a half ago (CBOT farm commodity futures) to ones dependent on the massive compute power that became available to even small trading desks from the 1980s onwards (Mortgage Backed Securities being the most obvious example).

They fueled the growth of 100s of hedge funds wherein a few individuals and small staffs could outplay large banks and governments, a financial equivalent of the dot com boom. Financial and software engineering, entrepreneurship, media, politics (when did you last see a poor politican?) and sports are the handful of fields where upside is shared, most businesses limit upside and share downside.

A derivative based on aggreggation of loans, for example, is basically dependent on the assumptions in the valuation mathematical model and the conforming nature of the loans. If the assumptions are wrong or the characteristics of the loans are not as expected, the value of the derivative can plummet spectacularly, as we are seeing in the current wave of bank and insurance collapses.

LTCM was the poster child of such collapses a decade ago. Nassim Taleb compared LTCM's strategies to "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" balancing short term gains against potential catostrophic losses.

There is always a dynamic tension between heavily regulated and conservative regimes such as France where defaults are rarer yet for example, home ownership is out of reach for a huge percentage of the population and little regulated and liberal regimes in the US where defaults are currently commonplace yet home ownership is essentially open to all.

Underlaying these financial mechanisms are motives - greed breeds its own karma as does thoughtful service, determining long term results.

Jimmy Wales, speculating on the CBOT, was able to retire and fund Wikipedia a project characteristic of Dwapara Yuga since its content relies on the general public rather than a narrow elite of academics with their limited focus areas and peer pressures to conformity. In independent analysis, Wikipedia has proved not only to have wider, more recent coverage than Britannica and Encarta but also to be more accurate even in the most arcane academic areas. The book the wisdom of crowds expands on these ideas.

Dwapara Yuga & Technology Adoption

In 1855, Britain's Daily Telegraph Newspaper was founded. The telegraph in the title was the then height of technology providing for the first time news from around the world at the same time. Prior to that, dispatches from the Americas, Africa or Asia would be weeks or months old.

The chart above (from the NY times) shows the increasing rate of adoption of technologies (in the US) that annihilate space, connecting peoples around the world both physically (via planes, trains and automobiles) and via ideas (telegraph, telephone, television, internet, IM) - the most visible aspects of Dwapara Yuga (the more subtle ones being sociological and spiritual).

As we can see it took 100 years for the plane old telephone service (POTS) to reach 100% adoption yet the cellphone did it in 10. New technologies such as instant messaging (IM) have even steeper adoption curves, leading to a much more social, almost network youth culture.

The poster children of such a culture would be Tim Berners Lee in 1990 with the World Wide Web and Linus Torvalds in 1992 with Linux, sharing freely their work, a sharp contrast with the selfishness of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison a generation before, exploiting DOS and SQL respectively, both invented by other.

Dwapara Yuga & Dewey Decimal

In 1876 the Dewey Decimal system helped to systemise knowledge in schools and libraries around the world. The top 1000 numbers defined the most important topics according to its deeply Christian inventor Melvil Dewey. Islam just makes it and Buddhism not at all. However, what is interesting is the very high emphasis given to finer energies (see below), completely in line with the dawning spirit of Dwapara Yuga in 1900.

Dewey Number and Subject
130 Paranormal phenomena
131 Occult methods for achieving well-being
133 Parapsychology & occultism
135 Dreams & mysteries
137 Divinatory graphology
138 Physiognomy
139 Phrenology

It was not until 1905 that Einstein postulated the relationship between energy and matter (E=mc2), the finer and finer aspects of which are still being discovered by scientists today.

Today, with Google, arguably these rigid hierarchical classifications are obsolete in the virtual world but in a physical world, Dewey facilitated the access to knowledge that fueled research for the last 6 generations, especially in patent libraries such as the Library of Congress in the US or John Rylands Library in the UK.

Dwapara Yuga - Yogananda's affirmation of connectedness

Everyday strive to be healthy, wealthy, wise and happy, not by taking away the health, wealth and happiness of others, but by analyzing and planning everything that you do, in order to make others better and happier while you are trying to become better and happier yourself. Learn to include the happiness and welfare of others in your own happiness.

“Father, bless us, that we may remember Thee always and never forget that all things flow from Thee.”


From the 2008 Ananda book "How to be a success", which is a superset of the material that became SRF's classic "The law of success" in 1944.