Dwapara Yuga: National Laser Reactor

This week saw the opening of the National Ignition Facility in California.

The goal of the work is to achieve nuclear fusion, the cleanest energy source yet from the atomic research work that lead to WWII's atom bombs.

The time-lines involved mean that we must still move forward with solar, wind, geothermal as well as conventional nuclear energy in the near future.

The promise of fusion is that of plentiful and clean energy, removing one of the pressures of land, water, food, energy etc. that drive wars and much of politics, with their small-minded, mean spirited models of limited resources and zero sum outcomes, the antithesis of the expansive spirit of creativity and abundance inherent in Dwapara Yuga.

Some critics have questioned why such projects should even be attempted, ignoring that while one in every two dollars in a socialist country are taxes, even in the United States, that figure is still one in three, and should provide for the common good as well as serving the special interests of lobbyists and large campaign contributors.

Such research is in-line with the spirit of Dwapara Yuga, much as the Apollo program in the 1960s, breaking down limitations of space and understanding the finer details of energy, much as barriers and limitations in wider society come crashing down.

Dwapara Yuga: Ancient Technologies

Since the Yugas are cyclical with ascending arcs following descending ones and we are only just at the second of four ascending ages (Dwapara Yuga), we should look forward to future ascent and also see evidence of superior capabilities in the past.

The forward progress has been well-documented in entries in this blog.

However, there are a number problems with the perspective into the past:

1) knowledge was lost as we descended in the previous arc, with deliberate obliteration of documents and artifacts in the lows of Kali Yuga

2) those spiritual documents and artifacts that do survive are open to many interpretations e.g. descriptions of flight might be metaphorical and an object that appears to be a model plane might be a stylized model bird, say

3) our perceptions should give us insight into Descending Dwapara and Kali Yugas but we might not be in a position to recognize or comprehend knowledge from Descending Satya and Treta Yugas, for example, in the correct interpretations of ancient scriptures

Ancient technology is fascinating but largely absent from this blog since it's so hard to separate verifiable facts from potential pseudo archeology and arguments of the type 'x could have been for y and therefore it was' such as the 'helicopter hyeroglyph' pictured isn't forcibly a helicopter just because it looks like one.

Over time, the proof should build up in the way that say analysis of the comparatively recent Antikythera Mechanism has and the author respects all such efforts and the fundamental creativity and insight that they represent.

Ancient stories and legends such as the Nine Unknown Men of Ashoka are, for the moment, best enjoyed in fiction from that of the Theosophists to today's Heroes TV show.

For the record, the author does not believe that the end of the world will be in 2012 (Mayan) or whenever, rather that ages are cyclical, with upheavals, plagues and war at periods and the Christian 'second coming' is rather a personal, spiritual event rather than some literalist armageddon.

I must admit that so-called fringe or radical books are often the most interesting in that they implicitly challenge the status quo. Where would the world be if Galileo, or Einstein, or Luther had been suppressed, or worse, available only in bowdlerized, emasculated 'authorized' editions representing not their views but rather those with vested interests in controlling information?

In science and religion, it is often the mavericks and critics that shed the most light not the tamest of the tame editors who hide away information that does not fit their small, bigoted world views. Reading experts in scientific methodology such as Paul Feyerabend is quite instructive for lay readers who might naively believe that religion, politics, psychology and sociology do not intrude in the pristine world of science where many areas of research lay dormant today for fear of ridicule.

Dwapara Yuga: "I canna change the laws of physics, Captain!"

The above quote is from Scotty, the engineer aboard 1966's Star Trek TV show.

After two generations of sequels and spin offs (of varying quality), the franchise was relaunched this month with the movie "Star Trek (2009)", with a young, up-and-coming cast.

This blog does not typically deal with the media. Star Trek is the exception in that it did not simply portray the future, it invented it. Its positive spirit of inclusiveness, expansivity and justice echo the themes of Dwapara Yuga. At the height of the cold war, its crew included men and women from around the world and even an alien, always looking for creative, often technological solutions rather than the Kali Yuga spirit which gave us McCarthyism, cynical political assassinations and the Vietnam War.

Even today, most Scifi writing is dark and pessimistic, with a beginning point of Nuclear War or Plague. In the Dwapara Timeline, Star Trek has its own entry:

1966 Star Trek (USA) - essentially a utopian, Dwapara vision, drawing audiences together around the world. It covered controversial themes such as war, peace, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, racism, human rights, sexism and feminism. Most famously, the role of technology was explored, inspiring cell phones, sliding doors and research into replicators (see CNC), matter transporters and faster than light warp drives.

In the world of hitech, researchers were inspired to build the devices they saw in the show, from computers, to cellphones, and even more prosaicly, sliding doors. Steve Wozniak , the co-founder of Apple, watched the show to inspire his work in the mid 70s, and physicist Stephen Hawking, went so far as to appear in one of the sequels, so great was his love of the show.

One of the ideas from the show, teleportation, "Beam me up, Scotty!", has long been shown in the lab and similarly exists in concept in Judaism, Kefitzat Haderech, and Islam, Tay al-Ard. A previous blog entry describes similar concepts in the Vedas..

The show's creator, Gene Rodenberry, brought his experience of flying bombers in WWII and later passenger jets at Pan-am to his screen writing. Flying is one of the first signs of Dwapara Yuga, followed by space exploration and the annihilation of space as a constraint in general. A constant theme of the show, time-travel, is itself characteristic of Treta Yuga, i.e. time annihilation, as detailed in the Vedas and brought to modern attention by Swami Sri Yukteswar of Serampore in 1894 and through his disciple Yogananda in the US from the 1920s.

It should be noted that from the 80s, the designer of the x86 chips found in today's PCs credits Yogananda as an inspiration, much as Steve Jobs, the other more mystical co-founder in 1976 of Apple, was inspired in his early travels in India. Bill Gates, perhaps the archetypal Trekkie, began his company in 1975 with an unusually international and open outlook for the time.

Interestingly, the director of Star Trek 2009 is also the force behind the Lost TV series, which wears Eastern influences overtly, centered around the mysterious "Dharma Initiative" and karma. Lost in 2005 was one of the first TV series to be made available online, without ads, breaking the hold of network TV for younger and more tech savvy viewers. It is widely acclaimed as one of the most well produced and intelligent dramas in the last decade. Anyone familiar with SRF and especially Hidden Valley will recognize the model for the Dharma Initiative of "Lost".

Little Inside Joke

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SRF must have known these subtle connections back in 2003 when ordaining Brother Kirk, or perhaps it was preordained given that Kirk means Church in Old English, Kirche in modern German and is the informal name of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian).

Dwapara Yuga : A second renaissance

An article in the WSJ this week (extract below) details how new technology is opening up the analysis of ancient books and scrolls. Together with wider digitization efforts, we are seeing the Dwapara themes of expanding access to present knowledge and better understanding of previous ages that our Kali Yuga consciousness obscured.

"A cascade of groundbreaking discoveries in the past decade, unleashed by new technology, has stoked the sense of urgency [in scanning degenerating texts]. Multispectral imaging -- originally developed by NASA to capture satellite images through clouds -- has proved remarkably effective on everything from ancient papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts that were scraped off and written over when scribes recycled parchment pages. Using the technique, which captures high-resolution images in different light wavelengths, scholars can see details invisible to the naked eye: For example, infrared light highlights ink containing carbon from crushed charcoal, while ultraviolet light picks up ink containing iron.

Researchers in Baltimore discovered a veritable library of ancient texts hidden in the pages of a single 13th-century Greek prayer book, including an unknown commentary on Aristotle and two missing treatises by the Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Recently, multispectral imaging has gotten much less expensive, allowing researchers to take their equipment into the field. The next frontier, researchers say, is using CAT scan and X-ray technology to read brittle scrolls without even unrolling them.

This summer, a new project to decode ancient manuscripts with multispectral imaging will begin at the University of Michigan, Berkeley, and Columbia. The project, led by scholars from Brigham Young, will scan 400 papyrus pieces. Among the specimens: papyrus fragments from rolls that were stuffed inside mummified Egyptian crocodiles in the 1st century B.C., which are thought to contain ancient legal documents, contracts and perhaps literary works. Their efforts could reveal text that scholars have been laboring to read for decades, including a partially obscured play by Euripides.

"It's being called a second Renaissance," says Todd Hickey, a curator of papyri at the University of California, Berkeley, which has some 26,000 pieces of papyrus, many still unread. "It's revealing things that we didn't have a hope of reading in the past."

Dwapara Note

This blog is small effort to draw together sources around Dwapara Yuga. As recently as ten years ago, the whole field was restricted to a handful of individuals who had been very close to Yogananda, most of whom overlooked the importance of Dwapara Yuga, with research limited by access to photocopies of original documents, decades-old, out-of-print books and second or third hand recollections.