Dwapara Yuga: Pace of Change

The two photographs are of the exact same section of the London Underground (King's Cross) 30 years apart.

The first has the colors and feeling of the early 70's and could almost be the 1870's, or even a painting by L.S. Lowry. The second, the clinical look of today, oddly similar to the 70's vision of a dystopic future in films such as Logan's Run or the original Planet of the Apes.

If a mere generation and a half can change a place so much, truly older civilizations are likely to be deep underground or deep underwater, or both.

Embracing the wide sky

The recent book by Britisher Daniel Tammet gives an interesting first person account of the life of an autistic savant with the bulk of material being a summary of current scientific thought regarding the mind.

Why should anyone be interested in autistic savants? Simply because figures from the recent Bill Gates to historical Newton, Tesla, Einstein and Mendel (of botany fame) are thought to have that particular mix of obsession, narrow concentration and high IQ leading to creative breakthroughs (and otherwise inexplicable, odd behavior e.g. Tesla living for years in a hotel room, Newton locking himself into his home for decades and Bill Gates rocking back and forth in his chair infront of Congress unable to answer a question).

Many themes in the book are analogous to those in this blog, for example, music and oral histories but especially the web of interconnectedness he describes in music, writing and mathematics, reminiscent of the masterpiece Godel, Escher, Bach of a generation ago, which inspired this blog's author to research much more widely than the world of science and technology.

Dwapara Yuga: Cults, Sects and New Religions

In James Lewis' excellent Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects and New Religions he characterizes the appeal of new religions (encompassing cults and sects) as
- Personal transformation, being born again into a new a way of living
- Social community

From the 1740's "Great Awakenining", Protestantism was the main motor for new religions in North America, yet from the 1900's the impetus has become much more Eastern-focused and New Age, with Yogananda opening the floodgates in the 1920's to the masses of gurus from the 1960's to the present day.

As older religions become mainstream, essentially social and business clubs, they tend to lose intensity, offer less transformative power and hence their appeal, with certain exceptions such as Mormonism which is both mainstream and internally retains intensity.

Interestingly in Evangelical Christianity, the idea of being born again (for example the transformation of George W. Bush from ne'er do well to President with a mission from God in the film "W") has much older roots in Hinduism with the idea of becoming twice-born/born again at the age of 12.

Organized religions, cult and sects moved from being simply technical terms to ones with negative media connotations in recent times where priestly figures abused their roles for money, sex and power whether in the Catholic Church, Televangelism or Manson Family style massacres.

Encompassingly, in Dwapara Yuga, religion is becoming much more personal and direct rather than formal and ceremonially driven, checking the power of priestly classes to abuse any but the most vulnerable. An attitude of questioning and research characterized the life stories of Vivekananda, Sri Yukteswar and Yogananda. A refusal by any organization to answer questions especially in the name of "loyalty" or "obedience" should be a red flag.

It's been a while since we had a joke. Here goes. Why should you always take two Baptists fishing? Because if you only take one he'll drink all the beer!

Dwapara: work to live or live to work?

In his Autobiography, Second Edition, The Path, Swami Kriyananda recounts the most powerful speech he had ever heard, given by Yogananda in Beverly Hills, CA on July 31, 1949:

"This day," he thundered, punctuating every word, "marks the birth of a new era. My spoken words are registered in the ether, in the Spirit of God, and they shall move the West. . . . Self-Realization has come to unite all religions. . . . We must go on-not only those who are here, but thousands of youths must go North, South, East and West to cover the earth with little colonies, demonstrating that simplicity of living plus high thinking lead to the greatest happiness!"(49) I was moved to my core. It would not have surprised me had the heavens opened up and a host of angels come streaming out, eyes ablaze, to do his bidding. Deeply I vowed that day to do my utmost to make his words a reality.

Often during the years I was with Master he exhorted his audiences on the subject of this cherished dream of his: "world brotherhood colonies," or spiritual cooperative communities-not monasteries, merely, but places where people in every stage of life could devote themselves to living the divine life.

"Environment is stronger than will power," he told us. He saw "world brotherhood colonies" as environments that would foster spiritual attitudes: humility, trust, devotion, respect for others, friendly cooperation. For worldly people, too, who dream of a better way of life, small cooperative communities offer the best hope of demonstrating to society at large that mankind is capable of achieving heights that are so scornfully repudiated in this age of spiritual underachievers. Such communities would be places where cooperative attitudes were emphasized, rather than social and political "rights" and the present social and business norms of cut-throat competition.

"Gather together, those of you who share high ideals," Yogananda told his audiences. "Pool your resources. Buy land out in the country. A simple life will bring you inner freedom. Harmony with nature will bring you a happiness known to few city dwellers. In the company of other truth seekers it will be easier for you to meditate and think of God.

"What is the need for all the luxuries people surround themselves with? Most of what they have they are paying for on the installment plan. Their debts are a source of unending worry to them. Even people whose luxuries have been paid for are not free; attachment makes them slaves. They consider themselves freer for their possessions, and don't see how their possessions in turn possess them!"

He added: "The day will come when this colony idea will spread through the world like wildfire."

SRF chose not to pursue the colonies idea beyond the short stay retreat center of Hidden Valley in CA. Ananda continues to have colonies as a central theme with major centers on the US West Coast, Italy and now India. To the author's knowledge, other Kriya organizations have run with the idea but on a smaller scale, for example, Sunburst, but with little media outreach.

As of 2008, in the US, the gap between the rich and the poor is at its widest since the last great depression. The buying power of middle class salaries has eroded to the point of working to simply exist - paying off taxes, mortgages, student loans, medical bills, auto loans and credit cards since high paying jobs are in high costs of living cities. These circumstances makes the concept of moving back to the land in a spiritual context all the more attractive for reconnecting with spiritual goals, living in communities of like minded individuals and working smarter rather than harder.

In the 1950's Erich Fromm had pointed out the alienation inherent in living only for career advancement (in between layoffs) and consumerism in his book the Sane Society but for many the good life was one of upscale homes, cars, schools and trips with no end to easy credit and endless stock market and stock options growth until recent times.

With advances in technology from solar panels to the internet, it is no longer an Amish-style, Hippy, travel back in time to live away from cities.

The challenge is one of finding a creative niche from which to make, save and donate money rather than treading water in some drone-like worker role no matter what past cache the role of lawyer, doctor, professor or scientist once held.

How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community?

Dwapara Yuga : Dome Homes

The domes for the world charity is leveraging a modern version of the bucky dome for housing in the third world.

Domes as well as having a certain aesthetic and futurist appeal have a number of key properties

• Maximize enclosed space for the amount of building material used
• Maximize strength and fire resistance, classed as FEMA shelters and have very low insurance premiums
• Maximize energy efficiency, requiring little energy to heat and cool
• Cost about the same as similar conventional structure of same floor space yet require much less maintenance and typically last longer

From history, the domed buildings that come down to us are typically churches - the Vatican in Rome, St Paul's Cathedral in London and the Haga Sophia in Turkey, which suggest that the curved spaces they enclose have a contemplative quality not found in linear buildings.

The domed Pantheon built in 126AD in Rome is the building with the longest history of continuous use in the world. Its very name means 'temple of the gods', although it later became a Catholic Church.

These properties make domes Dwapara Yuga structures and interestingly they were championed by the Dwapara Yuga figure of Bucky Fuller and were an original feature of Ananda Village back in the late 1960's although the technology of the time was not up to the task.

In comparison, most conventional structures are just concrete sheds, in their own way as dehumanizing and uncreative as the rows of cubes in modern offices. The negative effect of such office environments was well documented in the book Peopleware which umasked the productivity of open plan offices as a lie that became 'truth by repetition', a tactic most closely associated with Joe Goebbels.

Dwapara Yuga: Hidden in plain sight

Unfolding knowledge in Dwapara Yuga is not so much about discovering new things as reinterpreting the old for new insight, finding meaning and connectedness in apparently disparate fields and events from science to spirituality to sociology and history: finding truths hidden in plain sight.

Taken element by element, many know the history of Franklin, or the story of Lucky Lindberg, or Yogananda, the Agricultural or American Revolutions (see timeline) yet the age is a tapestry defined by the many threads of its warp and weft, kith and kin - certain leading the motif and others echoing it.

Even the last words used have a sense coming down through the Yugas. We find that our oldest books were written from oral histories and that there is a common musicality to ancient Indian, Greek, English or Slavic texts a pattern encoding knowledge from stories of Achilles to today's "Jack and Diane, two American kids growin' up in the heartland", from ancient India to "Punch and Judy" to Aesop's Fables.

Another feature of those texts which have survived for millenia is the archetypal hero who transcends the everyday thru much effort and returns with the message of the hero's journey for his countrymen, from Jason to Jesus to Yogananda - essentially spiritual texts with an arc of transcendance (the bible itself references many other books, almost none of which are now extant). Each hero's story is apt for his age and culture, yet our priestly and political classes are careful to ape only the fundamentalist surface sense of the words, outfits and ceremonies, leaving the path itself overgrown and neglected.

As we progress in Dwapara Yuga, towards the still higher Treta and Satya Yugas, the mud of Kali Yuga confusion and complexity fall away, at least for those for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, to reveal God, the truth behind all fields and events.