Dwapara Yuga - Creation and consumption of Knowledge

It has been several years now that the quality and depth of the free material at Wikipedia surpassed that of the paying Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Microsoft has just decided to drop the Encarta product as unprofitable.

Encarta was ground-breaking in that it summarized knowledge to CD-ROM for easy and affordable lookup in the early years of the PC. It was equally known for the commercial angle of it's content, for example, offering different views of the same events for different markets.

Britannica was ground-breaking in the sense of summarizing general knowledge into book form at the end of the 1700s.

Wikipedia is ground breaking in two aspects: 1) It allows anyone to edit or create articles (with certain limits) as opposed to drawing on 'experts' and 2) it is freely searchable via the Internet, not imposing a rigid set of dimensions to searches.

Wikipedia represents a democratization of access to the creation and consumption of knowledge in line with Dwapara Yuga's spirit.

A similar move is occurring in the world of higher education. From 1969, in Britain, university education was opened to everyone no matter their academic background or location with the Open University.

In that most commercial of American Educational Products, the MBA, the idea of being location independent is being taken up to compliment the on site programs with Internet Versions from major institutions such as the Cornell and Thunderbird Schools of Management.

Dwapara Yuga: Education and human potential

Modern systems of education came about to meet the needs of factories.  In prior ages, farmers learned enough just by watching, there were specialized programs for priests and clerks, with so-called nobility (gangsters like Napolean or Henry VIII) getting a liberal arts education based on personal tutors and travel.

Prof. Sir Ken Robinson presents an excellent perspective on how the overemphasis on technical subjects in modern universities and colleges is killing creativity.   Such a realization is itself symptomatic of Dwapara Yuga:   a realization that many professional roles from lawyer to accountant to engineer to doctor are simple extensions of the machinery of modern factories whether the end product be fridges, computers or derivatives.

Dwapara Yuga: Mind controlled toys

New toys due out this fall use the power of the mind -– reading EEG via a wireless headset.

With Mattel's "Mind Flex" and Uncle Milton's "The Force Trainer," the goal is to focus your thoughts to play the games.

The retail prices are expected to be around $100, much less than the high priced items in military and government research labs today.

In the Victorian era, exploration of the finer forces of electricity and magnetism began with primitive parlor games based on the crude understandings of the time.

Today we are at the same forefront with still finer levels of energy as we move into Dwapara Yuga.

Uncle Milton's game uses "the force" theme from the Star Wars toy and media franchise, itself drawn from Yogic practices little known to the masses.

Dwapara Yuga: Blamestorming

Blamestorming is what goes on when a group or society comes together around a particular problem not to find a creative solution but rather to name a convenient scapegoat.

The family of negative thought forms from character assassination to false flag operations to disinformation are the revised expressions of Kali Yuga's materialistic tendencies to murder and massacre.

Similarly, today's crimes are rarely straightforward robberies and murders rather 'the big con' exploiting greed and/or dishonesty in a 'mark' in real estate, stock or business frauds using variations of the following strategy from the 1940's book 'The Big Con', which was the basis for the classic movie 'The Sting':

1. Locating and investigating a well-to-do victim - 'putting the mark up'

2. Gaining the victim's confidence - 'playing the con for him'

3. Steering him to meet the insideman - 'roping the mark'

4. Permitting the insideman to show him how he can make a lot of money dishonestly - 'telling him the tale'

5. Allowing the victim to make a substantial profit - 'giving him the convincer'

6. Determining how much he will invest - 'giving him the breakdown'

7. Sending him home for this amount of money - 'putting him on the send'

8. Playing him against a big store and fleecing him - 'taking off the touch'

9.  Getting him out of the way as quietly as possible - 'blowing him off'

10. Forestalling action by the law - 'putting in the fix'

At the time, the big store was a fake wire room or brokerage, sadly today the business has evolved to such an extent that it is likely to be a legitimate government office, bank, stock or real estate brokerage, with 'the fix' coming from the highest government circles.

As always, if a deal appears too good to be true, it probably is, unfortunately the whole world is reeling from having been taken on a particularly long con, itself emphasizing the more mental and less physical nature of our current age.

Poster Children of Dwapara Yuga

What are the poster children of Dwapara Yuga  right at the turning point around 1900?

The most obvious one is the following quote attributed to Charles H. Duell of the US patent office in 1899:

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Unfortunately, it is an urban legend, Duell never said it and on the contrary had great faith in the well spring of inventiveness yet to come.

The author's top 5 in the timeline are:

1901 - Marconi radioing from England to Canada

1901 - Freud's first publication

1903 - First powered flight by Wright Brothers

1905 - Einstein's special theory of relativity

1905 - Amundsen opening up the northwest passage after 500 years of man's attempting it

Dwapara Yuga: Daemon

The first novel Daemon was reviewed by Billy O'Brien, Director of Cybersecurity and Communications Policy at the White House as the “Greatest. Techno-thriller. Period. Experts have long feared the Internet doomsday scenario. Daemon is arguably more terrifying.”

As we progress in Dwapara Yuga, two themes are emerging: human potential, as people become more spiritual, smarter, faster, stronger and that same potential expressed in ever more sophisticated technologies.   After all, even in Hindu mythology the Gods had all manners of planes and devices.

Unlike the majority of writers of tech novels and movies, the LA-based writer is himself a technologist reflecting facts rather than the usual journeymen writers dressing up plot lines from Shakespeare with a few product placements and gimmicky references.

More intriguingly, the author has used the meritocracy of publishing his own works rather than the narrow circuit of agent-connected political, journalistic, sport, media, organized religion and criminal talent.

Dwpara Yuga: The wave

We entered Dwapara Yuga in only 1900, a period that will last 2,400 years. following a 200 year Sandhi or interval.

The forces of Kali Yuga are not fully left, simply retreating but not without a fight!

They take the form of extreme black and white thinking and "them" v's "us" mentalities, characterized in the 1930s by Nationalist Socialism in Germany and Communist Socialism in Russia, both equally evil, essentially sacrificing individual progression to herd mentality (known as solidarite in French) and today still strongly present in unions of doctors and lawyers around the world, restricting healthcare and justice to the highest bidders while arguing the opposite.

In religion, this mindset lead to massed battles in the Middle Ages between Christians and Muslems over who should have the most members, with the lingering expressions being that of fundamentlist Christianity in the US and Fundamentalist Islam in Saudia Arabia, the latter funding terrorism (a fact the US state department would like to ignore).

In modern times, the successions of Prophets in the Mormon Church lead to bloodshed and murder among the different factions and in only the past ten years to lawsuits between SRF and Ananda.

The 1967 Palo Alto experiment in modern Fascism known as "the Wave" illustrates that there is still power left in these Kali states of consciousness. California is after all at the leading edge of world thought, being the most advanced state of the most advanced country in the world, holding both the craddle of technology in Silicon Valley and culture in Hollywood, much as Britain, France and Germany did in centuries past.  It was California that Yogananda chose as the launching pad for his mission after gaining little traction in Massachusetts.

Kali ideas are alive and well in military boot camps around the world (making good soldiers and later huge groups finding normal life hard to adjust to) as well as corporate sales training of ruthless true-believers of the latest advances whether stealth fighters, DNA manipulation or Windows 7.

In the wave, the ideas of discipline and community are turned on their heads to be short-hands for violence and exclusion. As ever, the individualism espoused by Sri Yukteswar and Vivekananda is a fine antidote to conformist, group think of whatever variety.

Dwapara Yuga: Solar power thru metallic balloons

Solar energy has been the next big thing for decades.

The current oil crisis and housing market crash has concentrated many investors and engineers in silicon valley to the problem (including Ananda India).

The challenge has been and continues to be the expense and complexity of many solar solutions -- they just cost too much for what energy they put out and are found only in areas with state and or utility subsidies.  Each solution seems to be ever more customized, technical and expensive than the last.

This situation suits the profits of Kali Yuga throwbacks big oil and big auto with their lobbies and manipulative marketing, making it hard for individuals to have self sufficient, non polluting homes and transport as current economics force McHomes and McCars on nearly everyone, keeping financial freedom always one step away in McJobs from VP to Professor.

One CA company, Cool Earth, looks like it may have found a simple and elegant Dwapara solution - metallized balloons, which have much better ratios of power to cost than do traditional solutions.  En masse, they rival the economies of fossil fuel generating plants and suggest a way forward.

Dwapara Yuga: Kepler Mission

Is Earth unique? If not, how many Earth-size planets might there be in our galaxy, orbiting their parent stars at just the right distances to have liquid water on their surfaces? What are the distributions in planet size, in planet orbits and the types of stars hosting planets?

These are the key questions that NASA’s recently launched Kepler Mission team seeks to answer. This has the makings of a great Dwapara Yuga experiment - expansively looking for truth rather than narrowly concentrating on dogmatic interpretations of ancient texts in the manner of the Taliban or Christian Fundamentalists, the kind of mindsets that build the Sabbath elevator.