Dwapara Yuga: E pur si muove!

Legend has it that the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei muttered this phrase - and yet it moves! - after being forced to recant in 1633, before the Inquisition, his belief that the Earth moves around the Sun

As recently as 2000, access to Yogananda's 32 years of US writing and speaking was filtered through a handful of lessons, books and CDs, unless one had access to original materials via monastics, ex monastics, grandparents, or groups willing to share freely.

One of the extraordinary things about Yogananda is that we have transcripts and writings in English and not simply accounts from disciples decades after the fact, which is our lot with many prophets, a circumstance leading to centuries of debate as to what was or was not included and/or edited, most famously with the Bible - a collection of only certain works in specific, edited forms and with questionable translations, despite the assertion to the contrary in Revelations.

The works of disciples are, of course, themselves valuable since they provide specific lines of interpretation, much as Paul's views on Christ, that constitute much of the New Testament - some Theologians go so far as to call modern Christianity Paulinism. This site has long called for SRF's archives to be opened to the public much as Presidential Libraries fully illuminate our Presidents, as big business, the Vatican and LDS Church have already done, to quiet debate over disputed texts and complete histories (warts and all).

With the Internet, online archives and Amazon publications, any motivated person can rapidly access a great deal of material, lawsuits, charity status and compare current and original versions to make their own determinations of what is true and false.

From it's inception, this site has endeavored to provide links to many groups and sources of information, especially the search features on the left hand side.

Apple's iPhone is one of the most successful computer launches in the last 20 years, with over one billion applications downloaded to-date (the author is unaffiliated with Apple). Some of these, such as Olive Tree's Bible software, are just straight copies of what has been available on the PC for decades -- the ability to keywords search and analyze many different versions of the Bible - a very Dwapara idea.

A new, free one is the text of the Autobiography of a Yogi, to peruse from the phone.

Sri Yukteswar and Yogananda were great advocates of scientific thinking and testing the proof of any conjecture, simplicity itself where the item in question is a text!

Dwapara Yuga: Michael Jackson dies

Although we're usually on the hard news side of the news-sport-celebrity spectrum of media coverage, we could hardly mention Elvis and not comment on the passing of Michael Jackson.

Much as Elvis was a bridging figure in the 50s, Jackson bridged barriers of age, gender, race and geography, with musical and dance talent in the era not of radio and movies but 80s music-television (MTV), the ghetto blaster and walkmen. In the present era, no one figure has emerged leveraging the capabilities of iTunes, Youtube, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook to similar world-wide effect.

Perhaps becoming such a figure is harder with fragmented, interactive media which lack the one-way concentration of old-style radio, network television, movies, records, DVDs and relics like record and Blockbuster stores in an age of wifi downloads and 24x7x365 communication.

Much as every great strength is its own flaw, Jackson's asexual, a-racial persona seemed to have moved from universal to some odd pariah status after many surgeries, surrogate parenthood and lawsuits, mirroring Elvis' personal struggles behind public success.

With great success, to paraphrase spiderman, comes great responsibility to remain consistent privately with a public image. As any analysis of sports-politician-religious celebrity figures attests, their downfall is often that aspect that they must publicly protest their distance from.

It is interesting that Jackson died in LA, a town known for the ease with which worldwide fame can be built and then hidden in a high security mansion or modern day castle, emerging only occasionally to receive the acclaim of paying crowds or collaborating with flattering film crews.

Unity behind apparent diversity, a literal world brotherhood, is such a Dwapara theme that Kali Yuga forces, Satan or Maya if you will, inevitably attempt to tear it down thru public character assassination (false), or temptation to private failing (true).

Dwapara Yuga: Cooking and Yoga

Two centuries ago, apart from bread basket areas around the Mediterranean, the selection of foods and recipes was severely limited, for example, the monotony of pork, potatoes and cabbage in areas of Gemany and Poland with associated ill health and shortened lives.

Pork products have long been avoided by Hindus, Muslims and Jews for these very reasons. Yogananda described the sweetness of pork as being due to its 'puss-filled' nature. Gandhi recounts at length his early detours in diet in his autobiography.

With the French Revolution, the cooks left the chateaux and set up in town, part of a process of sensitizing the general populace to quality ingredients and preparations, in line with the breaking down of barriers in Dwapara Yuga.

To the French, psychological development has always been associated with cooking knowledge, much as in India and China. Sri Yukteswar placed special emphasis on cooking in his Ashrams as did Yogananda during his lifetime, with recipes figuring prominently in his teachings, along with martial arts and athletics as well as the importance of taking the sun - part of a rounded lifestyle.

The recent EAT study on children's diet in the US indicates that families eating together improves children's diets, another facet of 'breaking bread' which is well known in the world of business and sales but ignored by many overly busy families and friends.

In the US, much as Britain, the variety and quality of ingredients available and types of restaurants has growth exponentially from the burger and fries of the 1970s, driven by a number of leading cooks, to today where even small town America have Indian, Thai and Japanese foods as well as fast foods. Ironically, the most successful restaurant chain in France is McDonalds but this is more of a reflection on the lazy, unclean, indulgent nature of many of the chefs in so-called fine dining establishments there who have lost the plot of catering to people rather than some image of themselves inflated after the collaboration and destruction of WWII.

Gordon Ramsay, the Michelin Three Star British chef, regularly gives lessons to troubled restaurants (often with French chefs) that apply not just to the restaurant business but (in spirit) to business in general, and even basic human relations in being focused to the individual customer:

- Simple menu of understandable, well-done, fresh dishes

- Be known for a particular dish

- Place an emphasis on cleanliness, quality, service and value (actually the motto of McDonalds but often ignored in the restaurant trade in general)

- Have a welcoming ambiance

- Be consistent

SRF initially served the community with a restaurant in Hollywood, a great inspiration of Yogananda. The project was later dropped (for reasons unknown, perhaps the increasing focus on monasticism, even though many monasteries were and are known for their culinary skills in Europe) but taken up by many other groups such as the Hare Krishnas where it is an important outreach to non members.

SRF recipes have been made available in the last few years by a third party and Ananda has its own cookbook also.

In the 1920s, Yogananda was a regular contributor to health magazines, espousing themes which have only really taken hold from the 1960s and even then only in college graduates. In the 1920s regimes of diet and exercise were regarded as eccentric and faddish, as can be seen in movies like Chariots of Fire, where even having a trainer was regarded as unsporting during the 1924 Olympics.

Today the question is not 'what is yoga' but rather 'which yoga', as large numbers of especially educated, urban women tune into the benefits of Hatha Yoga. In his early years, Yogananda often had demonstrations of Hatha Yoga for all men and women (not simply the Yogoda exercises now known as Energization Exercises). One of his recorded speeches of the time includes a long explanation of the dangers of smoking, practiced even by some of the monastics. As Dwapara advances, more and more people will look into the remaining steps outlined by Patanjali, specifically meditation, not simply doing postures in a normal or heated room and calling that Yoga, a somewhat distant union with God.

Dwapara Yuga: People are not computers

In the 1930's, Hitler kept a life-size photograph of Henry Ford in his Munich office. So deep was his admiration for the American industrialist that he wanted to model his entire nation on Ford's work practices. Such modeling was not new, decades before, the Kaisers' officers had observed Ringling Brothers' build-up and breakdown-crews in order to better train their soldiers.

The 1930s production line and trophy engineering projects held a peculiar fascination for the Kali Yuga regimes of national and communist socialism, who liked to reduce humans to machine-like roles, always obeying, never questioning, or tiring. Stakanov was the model Russian worker who always (publicly) exceeded his quotas.

Ford himself was a social pioneer (also later disavowing his anti semitism and links to Hitler), allowing his American workers shorter hours and the possibility of buying the cars for themselves, coming into line with Dwapara Yuga. However, the production lines meant a move from craftsmanship and creativity towards deskilled, repetitive tasks along the new lines of Taylor's 'scientific management' and studies like the 'Hawthorne effect'. In Russia and Germany, slave laborers filled the factories. Much of Japan's industrial revitalization after the war was associated with empowering individual workers around quality and ownership (reversing the dehumanizing trend ).

Through the 1950s with the growth of so-called professional management, greater and greater emphasis was given to bureaucracies and accounting, reducing individuals to mere cogs in great machines. The symbol of the era was the IBM salesman and his funereal dark suit, keeping clients locked-in and ' true-blue' with mainframe temples (glasshouses, amusingly British Army Slang for Prison) dictating behavior from insurance companies to the jungles of Vietnam.

With wider computerization in the late 1980s, computing power escaped the glasshouses doing away with many low-end production line roles and clerical tasks such as typing and records keeping. As the power and communications abilities of computers increased in the late 1990s, the white collar world was affected as journalists, researchers and consultants, for example, found themselves being replaced by cheaper alternatives in developing nations.

In our era, the model for the company worker is no longer the dumb machine of the 1930s but the supposedly infallible, always on-computer, as employees are deluged with ever more requests for work performed to exacting standards, and connected to their places of employment in the evenings, weekends and over vacations, with replacements ready in the wings in case they 'wear or breakdown'.

However, with so many skills and capabilities now pure commodities (with an implicit race for the bottom in pricing, occasionally even at good quality) it is human ingenuity and creativity that are at a premium as never before. Microsoft who defined the early PC era are increasingly seen as dinosaurs with their only two successfull products ever, Windows and Office, near unchanged after 20 years (beyond logos, packaging and behind the scenes intimidation and Nokia's operating system is actually the most common in the world) and companies like Google, although current stock market darlings, were recently forced to try to capture the ideas of even the most junior employees lest they go to build their nemeses, who may be just 'one click away', like Wolfram Alpha, say.

In parallel, with ever more emphasis on testing in US schools, leading to SATs, GMATs, GREs and the like, derivatives of the IQ tests once used to decide who would be sterilized or not in the US and Nazi Germany of the early 20th century, a workforce is being prepared for yesterday's roles, when today's are much more in line with languages, music and arts with the technical aspects easily handled by computerization. The lunatic who attacked the Holocaust museum in the US recently was very proud of his Mensa credentials yet it was symbolic of his unbalanced nature.

We are not computers, or machines like Vaucanson's automatons. In Dwapara Yuga, as Yogananda's teachings (although not his organization, sadly modeled after his death on big business 'efficiency' with standardized lectures and the like) emphasize, it is creativity and individualism, sparks of the divine that need to be cultivated and not stamped out in the name of collectivism, which serves only its leaders.

Workers of the world, meditate, compose, paint ... and blog! You have nothing to lose but the chains of Kali Yuga thought forms :)

Dwapara Yuga: Yogananda's views on sectarianism

Below are Yogananda's words on sectarianism in 1927.

As a period example, the famous photo on the right shows Lenin in Red Square in 1920. Trotsky (one of big three of Communism along with Lenin and Stalin) was in the original. By 1930 he was edited out of the picture, and by 1940 edited out of life altogether following the path of bitter rivalries between once close colleagues as Stalin consolidated monies and power around himself.

THE RAMAKRISHNA SWAMIS—By Swami Yogananda, East-West Magazine, Sep-Oct 1927

Sometimes there is a kind of professional jealousy even in spiritual work and religious organizations of all types. Certain ministers and priests, as well as amateur "Swamis" and "Yogis", betray narrow-mindedness in this respect. Even an average good man belonging to one sect often will not speak well of another good religious man like himself, because the latter happens to belong to another sect. "O, well, find out for yourself how he is," says this kind of religious man, even though he knows in his heart that his brother of another sect is really good.

Such intolerance and jealousy is nowhere out of place so much as in spiritual work. In this country, where true religious teachers often have to undergo various forms of soul-crucifixion and trials of all kinds, it is with sympathy and understanding that I view the efforts of other teachers to bring the message of spiritual knowledge and freedom to America.

So I take pleasure in announcing to East-West readers and Americans in general, that the Ramakrishna Centers in America are bringing a beautiful spiritual message to this country.

One very fine Ramakrishna Swami, Paramananda of California I have known since 1920 in Boston. He invited me to his Asrama (hermitage) in Massachusetts and California several times. He is doing much good in America thru his devotional teachings.

Dwapara Yuga: Elvis and bridging cultures

Everyone knows the caricature Elvis, the overblown symbol of Vegas meaninglessness and kitsch, the Velvet Elvis Altar or Velvis.

As the Czech writer Milan Kundera observed, kitsch functions as a kind of totalitarian worldview in which all difficulties are hidden and all answers are given in advance, to preclude all questions.

Elvis as a cultural bridge in Dwapara Yuga goes much deeper than his Gracelands image suggests.

As a young man, auditioning in Sun Studios in Memphis in the early 50s, he was on the point of being turned away for traditionally singing blues staples, when, while 'acting the fool', he dared to provide his own interpretation, finding his own voice. It was this moment of stepping away from the crowd that launched his career - the point that generations of young people shy away from as they step back into the comfort of the herd.

Elvis was a white man who dared to bring a range of feeling to music that had previously been limited to African Americans, bridging a cultural divide that later the Beatles, the Stones and Zeppelin would cross, from the comfortable integration of England, ultimately bringing the original African American musicians like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley to wider attention.

At the time, Elvis became a sensation and later 'the King of Rock and Roll'. In his private life, the hidden depth of his culture was manifested in his Kriya Yoga, following Paramhansa Yogananda's teachings and also in his Kempo Karate under Master Ed Parker (the man who discovered Bruce Lee), twin currents subtly intertwining the strengths of East and West that had also previously been kept well apart in the spirit of division and racism of Kali Yuga.

Dwapara Yuga: Creativity and Multiple Culture

There is a tendency in any old civilization to turn in on itself, lack sparkle and creativity as it affirms and reaffirms its norms, turning out conformist, party-line-towers who are able to get by in steady times but fail when circumstances change, whether its leaders are politicians, CEOs, or generals. Such civilizations tend to spiral and decay where the offspring of the elite classes automatically move to positions of power and leadership whether they are capable of them, or not. Placing incompetent but so-called noble-born generals in command of the Roman Legions hastened the Empire's Fall, much as the ossification of Manu's caste system in India stripped it of its independence, and Britain's blind trust in its upper classes caused it to lose not just Empire but most of its influence in the world in the last century. It is a peculiarly Kali Yuga idea to look up to those who inherit titles and wealth from ancestors, particularly where the ancestors were 'robber barrons' profiting from sharp monopolistic practices legal in their times or 'Archduke slept with the King, cut the King's hair, gambled with King' or other Middle Ages beribboned buffoonery.

Saints, sages and epoch changing leaders tend to stand outside of all such considerations, being agents of change representing currents from Satya and the higher Yugas in whatever time periods they arise.

If we look at the particular time-line of England, a potted history goes something like this. The underachieving Anglo Saxon locals lost to the Normans (Vikings in Northern France) in 1066 and picked up both the Viking go-getting spirit and French culture, eventually limiting the power of the King and nobles, developing sea power and one of the world's most outward facing cultures, soaking up information from around the world, leading to a synergy with India and in Dwapara the creation of vibrant, independent new countries such as India, the US, Australia, Canada and so on (a stark contrast to ex French colonies like Haiti, Ivory Coast and Algeria mired in civil wars for decades). Interestingly, from the fall of Empire after WWII, signs of growth in England are tied into reverse immigration with some of the brightest and best of India coming to positions of power.

To the author, a key feature of Dwapara progress is the idea of double or multiple culture, rather than the often narrow, provincial culture of those who have only lived in one place, spoken one language and known one set of ideas, beliefs and traditions. A great many figures of change are themselves products of travel and exposure to multiple languages and cultures, for example Parsis in India, Jews in the US, or Muslims in France. Historically, it took the Italian Napoleon to revitalize the moribund Post-Revolutionary France and the Hungarian Sarkozy is revitalizing the modern Republic. A great many US leaders traveled to Britain as Rhodes scholars and many elite US colleges insist on travel programs to Italy and Europe as part of a broad liberal arts undergraduate education, and no modern Masters in Business Administration would be complete without a couple of world trips to spice up the often US centric materials.

In today's Silicon Valley and Wall Street, what is striking is the number of people with multiple cultures, much as the showcase nuclear and space programs in the 40s and 60s. George Soros attributed his rise on Wall Street to having detailed knowledge of both the US and Europe at a time when the 'blue bloods' knew only their privileged but still provincial New England academies, something similar is happening today with those with knowledge of Brazil, Russia, India and China rise.

Absent international exposure, an access to a second culture can be had from a deep attunement with religion and spirituality for example in the lives of Joseph Smith or John Wesley - Smith read the Bible over and over to tune into it, much as did Wesley. In more modern times we have Saint Lynn's Gita studies prior to meeting Yogananda, IT leaders such as Jobs, Gates and Ellison finding creativity in drugs, dropping out and founding their business empires, and bands such as Led Zeppelin (and others in the 60s and 70s), in attunement with the earth forces in charged, nay notorious locales such as Headley Grange or Boleskine House.

Ironically, in WWII, it was the Nazi insistence on 'purity' that caused their key scientists to flee to the US and build their war-winning devices there. After WWII, it was the balance of German scientists who built the US and Russian space and nuclear programs. Even the AK47 assault rifle, one of the few inventions of the Soviet Union and a terrorist staple, is nothing but a cheap copy of a German rifle. Diversity and difference are not weakness, on the contrary strength much like a field of diverse varieties of corn is much more resilient than a monoculture (especially genetically modified) variety that in perfect circumstances is more productive but is prone to be destroyed entirely by new pests or even slight ecological change. Ireland's potatoe famine was due to a monoculture with little resistance rather than a British genocide as the US sponsors of IRA terrorism claimed. Hitler, with his mixed Austrian-Slavic ancestry, WWI experiences as a trench runner in France, intense individualism and extensive esoteric reading, vegetarianism and yoga was far from a model of collectivist conformity in the Kaiser's Army let alone the later Nazi and Communist models. Much as today's CEOs, religious and political leaders, Hitler's mantra was do as I say, not as I do.

All collectivities have their comfort of being part of a group, not standing out, whether a model Nazi, Communist or just plain 'Joe six pack' with predictable (public) social and consumer behaviors - giant SUV, two kids, married-young-out-of-school, Sabbath Day Saint (other 6 days open-season), Baseball/Football, Prozac, Ritlin, Vallium, Viagra, Mary-Jane and beer which means herd-like success or failure (i.e. strong group karma - nation, race, religion etc.) but little opportunity for creative, financial let alone spiritual growth. Even in India, Yogananda's interest in meditation led him to be called the 'Mad Monk' with kudos coming only decades later. Had Steve Jobs (Apple/Pixar) or Jimmy Paige (Led Zeppelin) not had great fame and monetary success, they would be 'hippy bums'. Sri Yukteswar compared the lives of people fixed to mundane things to those of chickens in coups, simply existing from generation to generation with no purpose.

Dwapara Yuga: Sacred Sites

Martin Gray's wonderful book on his 20 years of pilgrimages to the world's sacred sites, Sacred Earth, underlines two great unifying truths revealed in Dwapara Yuga: the great astronomical knowledege built into the designs of the sites and their syncrenistic nature: each new wave of religion taking over the sites and holy dates of the previous one, literally building on the old foundations of pre-existing holy/high energy locations.

To the sensitive, the sites can be felt without the need to even see the various structures and relics amassed over millenia there, or note how they unfailingly relate to solstices, equinoxes, precession, the galactic center or other astronomical/holy fixtures, knowledge that mocks the theory of past primitive man but resonant with the truths that Sri Yukteswar brought forth in his works. Much as for the symbolism in the world's holy books, the sites often have myths associated with them of serpents and dragons, the energy in the spine and the defeat of mayic or satanic forces.

England's patron saint is Saint George, famed for slaying the dragon. In WWII, Churchill named his plane for Ascalon, Saint George's sword, another reminder of the esoteric undercurrents in WWII and the recurring battle of good and evil it represented.

Dwapara Yuga: Disposible Living

In the 18^th century, Capability Brown was the foremost landscape gardener in England, his huge lawns flaunting the wealth of his aristocratic patrons in the large numbers of servants and resources required to first build and then maintain them. Real castles and fortified houses associated with wars in the Middle Ages became increasingly opulent palaces.

The conspicuous consumption spread throughout Europe and even to the American Colonies, moving from the upper to the middle classes where today’s Home Owners Associations require a perfect lawn in cookie cutter subdivisions, ideally with an over sized and over pretentious McMansion, the less energy efficient and harder to maintain, the better.

Unfortunately, those same middle classes do not have interests in foreign colonies, mills or thousands of acres of farm lands and indentured servants as the British Nobles did (many of them ruined ironically by the upkeep of their own ancestral properties), so adding to one of the many monthly charges from lawn care, pool care, pest service, alarm service, maid service, maintenance, insurance, property taxes (3% per year in Dallas) and utilities that eat up income even on a fully paid off home. Today, just existing is an expensive proposition and policing, educational quality and business opportunities are closely tied to the neighborhood, city and state meaning that a cut in neighborhood might also be a cut in income and education.

Similarly, in the past loans were meant to be repaid with a definite principal and series of payments. Today, credit cards make their money not on being repaid but in the various fees associated with their use and especially over-use. Their ideal client never repays and repays the initial sum many times while always owing it. Cars magically fall apart after the warranty period adding still further to the pattern of paying to live with planned obsolescence in everything from media formats to televisions and computers.

In an economy where workers are simply used up and then layed off, it is simple to describe the rat race but harder to describe a solution. Re-examining the England of the 18th century, the same nobles had been quick to leverage their influence in Parliament and with the King to have common lands enclosed, forcing peasants from the fields where they had historically lived free to become landless workers in their mills or economically forced colonists, further supporting the nobles wealthy lifestyles, much as CEOs today who talk of valuing employees while doing no such thing.

New social theories, revolutions and wars did not change the relationship between the rich and the poor but in Dwapara Yuga Yogananda's ideals of simple living and high thinking suggest a solution in looking for housing such as Dome Homes and Earthships in ways to reduce monthly bills to a minimum and leveraging Internet options to be away from expensive areas and the need to use up vehicles on pointless commutes and especially to not "live up to the Jones", the pathetic exercise of defining one's life in terms of plastic surgery, cars, homes, casinos and vanity church building projects 'ours has the taller steeple and nicer gardens'. Before SRF's current great wealth from property investments and rents, Yogananda had the monastics growing their own foods and tending flocks!

Dwapara Yuga: Gender Gap

Prior to the 20th century, women were essentially subjugated to men, existing only in terms of their relationship to fathers, husbands and sons, with divorce, or out of wedlock child birth leading to scandal, the convent, or the workhouse. For many educated women, it was far better to become a nun than to be married off against their will.

Outside of isolated pockets of religious fundamentalists and poor, agrarian economies, the 20th century saw social advances for women in equal opportunities for voting, education and professional work, the no fault divorce and scientific advances like birth control, freeing women to be independent of men, in line with the breaking down of barriers in Dwapara Yuga.

At the beginning of the 21st century, women are, in the US, the majority of voters, 60% of college students and 50% of professional students in law and medicine, having not simply caught up but edging ahead in terms of being better educated than men, less prone to early death, imprisonment, drug addiction and obesity with skills much more suited to modern knowledge work than defunct skills of hunting or manual labor.

With the divorce rate in the US around 50% and the majority of families requiring two wage earners, many, especially professional women are re-assessing their views on marriage and the 'dream of finding the right man' in terms of the 'dream of motherhood', independently of any potentially impermanent relationships. As of 2006 in the US, married couples are actually the minority.

It seems to the author that in correcting past wrongs, we are passing a period of over correction that will itself calm over time with generations after the hedonistic 'sex and the city' one choosing not to simultaneously pursue motherhood, girl around town and master of the universe at work and a recognition that men are not better than women, or vice versa, rather that each are different, with their own complimentary strengths.

Dwapara Yuga: The panopticon and the surveillance society

The panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785 (Dwapara 85). The concept of the design is to allow a prison warden to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners (from the central tower with concealed windows) without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched (in their windowed cells), thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience."

An important consideration was that no special qualification was required for the warder, anyone could fulfill the function: it was the illusion of perpetual surveillance that counted most with the inmates policing their own behavior. The design facilitate inspection of the inspector also since any official could arrive at any time and take over the central surveillance tower and assess the functioning of the prison and its warder.

Although the actual prison was never built, the model of low cost, continual surveillance and ideal of self-policing of behavior has been hugely influential in schools, hospitals and the modern workplace, as argued by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 (Dwapara 275) book Discipline and Punish, also ostensibly regarding prisons but in actuality regarding wider mechanisms of social control.

In his book, Foucault contrasts the rapid changes that occurred in the space of time around Dwapara Yuga from the purely Kali Yuga mechanisms of public execution and torture to the more subtle expression of attempted control of behavior via hidden surveillance rather than police or church agents.

In our times, the warden's central tower has been replaced by elaborate systems of documentation from passports, to credit reports, to school and college reports, police reports and tracking from satellites, drones, cellphones right to every clickstream from myspace, to IM, to email, to amazon, cradle to grave for people in our current generation.

Sadly, despite oppressing the vast majority, all but the tiniest percentage of criminals and terrorists fall through this net since by definition they do not conform to the self-policing behavior of writing out their plans in emails, calling around to collaborators and booking flights in their own names etc (much to the chagrin of the various leaders of the so-called war on drugs, terror etc. who hope that the public will not surmise the enormous waste and invasion of privacy they perpetuate).

Ultimately, progress is personal and individual, one's own goals and objectives in a program of the kind advocated by Yogananda rather than some rigid behavior imposed not for personal progress, rather for the benefits of the haves behind the particular panopticon from Paranoid/corrupt CEO, Cult Leader, French technocrat, Saudi despot, or North Korean crackpot. Even in once backward China, where 20 years ago tanks rolled in Tainamen Square, today the role is filled by cyber surveillance and America's experiments with torture, have proved to aid their enemies in propaganda and recruiting more than themselves since they violate the very spirit on which America built its success.