Dwapara Yuga: Anger and Pie!

‘Sir?’ said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch him like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I’ve got a cousin who’s what they call a Theosophist, and he says he’s often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn’t quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.'

Dwapara Yuga - Words and beauty

In his book, God's secretaries - the making of the 1611 King James Bible (KJV), Adam Nicholson sets a wonderful historical and political context, bringing to life the characters who not only translated the ancient texts but redefined the English language.

The blog author's comments below are really just a 'highlight reel' for themes which in all their subtleties demand hundreds of pages of thoughtful examination.

Amusingly, Adam Nicholson's book describes the 'hidden' agenda of the earlier Geneva Bible where the word King was unfailingly translated as Tyrant, an apt illustration of just how much changing just one word from a work can change its whole meaning, let alone its subtle vibration.

The KJV represented the 'authorized version', tempering Dwapara Yuga reformism of the kind found in the Geneva Bible with a conservative Anglicanism characteristic of the waning years of Kali Yuga, as encompassing of divergent opinions as possible while still respectful of the power and wealth in established hierarchies.

This was the English response to the wider battle between the collectivistic, hierarchically oriented Catholicism and more privately and individually oriented Protestantism of the time.

As any reader will know, 1600 was the last 100 year sandhi of rising Kali Yuga.

William Tyndale died a half century before. His wish was that a plough boy reading from an English version of the Bible might know more of scripture than even the Pope. Such a democratizing access to scripture threatened to undermine both priestly and kingly authority and he was sentenced, strangled and burned at the stake for heresy. His last words were prophetic -"Lord! Open the King of England's eyes!" since three quarters of his translation made it into the Bible authorized by King James.

The striking passage below comes from the original preface to the KJV:

"It is not an herb, but a tree, or rather a whole paradise of trees of life, which bring forth fruit every month, and the fruit thereof is for meat, and the leaves for medicine. It is not a pot of Manna, or a cruse of oil, which were for memory only, or for a meal's meat or two, but as it were a shower of heavenly bread sufficient for a whole host, be it never so great; and as it were a whole cellar full of oil vessels; whereby all our necessities may be provided for, and our debts discharged. "

The author could not help but think of the Autobiography from 1946 and Yogananda's Gita commentaries - from Kriyananda's the New Path:

“A new scripture has been born!” Master spoke ecstatically. His commentary on the Bhagavad Gita had been finished. In three months of unbroken dictation he had completed 1,500 pages. “I told Miss Taylor the pages numbered that many, but she carefully counted them to make sure I was right!”

Master and I were walking around the compound of his retreat. Having finished his manuscript, he had summoned me at last to help him with the preliminary editing.

“A new scripture has been born!” he repeated. “Millions will find God through this book. Not just thousands. Millions! I have seen it. I know.”

The KJV, the Autobiography and the Gita commentaries are works both of incredible depth and beauty, the words of this blog are no more than mere doodles in the margin.

For the author, like many Church educated Westerners, having closely examined scripture, the key to the inner meaning of the Bible was found through Yogananda's presentation of the Gita, building upon a foundation of comparisons of many different Bible Editions in English and other languages.

Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose - the more things change, the more they stay the same as prophets return time after time to refresh the same eternal truths in manners befitting the times, from simple agricultural parables with Jesus in Kali Yuga to the sophisticated Yogic interpretations of Yogananda in Dwapara Yuga, implicitly reiterating the same messages from previous higher ages.

American Footnote

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The Geneva was the Bible the Puritans took to New England, away from the control of the Bishops and the King. Ironically, as the Puritans themselves gained in wealth and power, the KJV better fitted their needs, linking loyalty to God with loyalty to wealth and power in the established earthly authorities.

Today, in the author's opinion, the best Bible Translation is the 1978 New International Version, based on much stronger scholarship.

Part of the Kali Yuga influence in the KJV can be seen in the translation of the Greek word for congregation as church, emphasizing the role of hierarchies and the money needed for the upkeep of cathedrals, hermitages and priests rather than something that could be accomplished in private or informal gatherings in peoples' own homes.

Dwapara Yuga: Ioncraft

The ioncraft, popularly know as a lifter, is able to lift itself in the air with no moving parts, exploiting an obscure electrical phenomenon for propulsion.

This is just the kind of innovation we would expect to see in Dwapara Yuga, beyond primitive jet and prop engines that have been known for decades.

The lifter is an Internet staple, typically explained as 'anti gravity' and proposed by some as the mechanism of UFOs.

The popular American TV show Mythbusters debunked the anti gravity claim but did verify the lift phenomenon.

To the author, the most interesting aspect of lifters is that home experimenters such as Tim Ventura so raised the profile of this kind of propulsion that is was taken up by NASA! Just such garage entrepreneurs gave us GE, Ford, HP and Apple in the past.

Just as for Philo Farnsworth, the inventory of the television, it continues to be the case that armies of financiers and full-time engineers are not necessarily in the best position to make discoveries, or even to realize what discoveries are already out there that have been neglected.

Rather than mocking unexplained phenomena of all kinds, it would actually be smarter to investigate them rather than doing what most companies and research institutes do, which is bringing out slightly better versions of what is already known and neglecting areas of potential breakthrough. Such an attitude is not simply a lack of imagination but a lack of knowledge of the history of innovation.

In the high stakes of wartime, there is not the luxury of endless refinements, rather breakthroughs are the difference between life and death. Nuclear power, computing, spaceflight, stealth technology and the like are not modern rather themselves refinements of breakthroughs by key individuals in WWII, most prominently in Britain as the last bastion of free Europe at the beginning of the war and in the tail end, as the Germans looked for 'wonder weapons' as they were about to be overrun by the Russians.

In ascending dwapara yuga, the very age demands finer and finer knowledge of energy and the conquest of space in the physical sense and also more subtly in the breakdown of barriers of ignorant hierarchies based on wealth, politics, place of origin, ethnicity or lack thereof, nationality, race, religion, sex and so on. As always, those reactionaries most benefitting from such structures work to prevent change of any kind.

The Internet, more so than the invention of the printing press, makes knowledge and communication available to even the humblest of individuals, leveling the playing field whether with oppressive clerics, politicians or simply the inertia of academics and big business, cashing in year after year on old models sold as new with new names, logos and colors, rather like Hollywood remakes for each new generation.

Dwapara Yuga: 1 Trillion Pages in 1 Generation

The title refers to the world wide web designed by Tim Berners-Lee way back in 1989, beginning with 1 page. According to Google, today there are over 1 Trillion such pages.

Interestingly the original goal was to help physicists answer questions about the universe and today the web allows pretty much anyone to answer questions about pretty much anything, even such arcana as Yugas. The web was created on a NeXT computer upon which the present Apple Mac is modeled.

The Greek prefix tele named the early space-defeating nature of the first Dwapara devices. Today, it is networks of networks linking people to other people via sight, sound and to a much lesser extent touch (transmitting CNC blueprints say that are built on arrival), with taste and smell for the moment in the laboratory that characterize early Dwapara. The military research on such networks predates the world wide web by 20 years and the first computer virus by 8 years.

It was analyzing real world social networks that lead to the capture of Saddam Hussain and the communications implicit in modern networks are transforming media in the developed world and especially politics elsewhere. For example, in North Korea, anyone can play 'spot the secret base or gulag on Google Earth'. In Iran, the regime cannot suppress news reports. In Georgia , cyber warfare was applied to silence a critic of Russia, unintentionally magnifying the impact of his opinions.

As a youngling, the author would regularly compare news stories in Liberation, El Pais and The Independent, revealing differences both small and large in facts depending on the degree to which the particular country felt concerned with the matter. Such an exercise is vastly simpler, faster and less expensive today, and possible world-wide.

Such early comparisons suggested a blog looking more widely than any one particular group but inevitably that universalist, truth-oriented point of view attracts a tiny coterie of zealous defenders of their particular orthodoxy, their self righteous anger (itself suggesting deep-seated doubts and insecurity in their beliefs) summed up in the French word chauvinism, unreasoning and misplaced partisanship, unsupported by objective facts.

It is amazing that folks get themselves worked up over such dry stuff as three recent comments on themes as offensive as:

1) the desire by the author to see more books and works on Yogananda from SRF archives,

2) that in many churches more people are social networking than looking for God (Krihsna gives the statistics as one in one thousand in the Gita, no less) and

3) that France is not quite the free and liberal place that it appears to idealists (perhaps a quick review of Amnesty International's official reports might provide some perspective).

Dwapara Yuga - Animal Rights

In the depths of Kali Yuga, animals were to be worked and/or eaten. The concept of pets was relatively alien in the works of the Greek Philosophers.

As we ascend in Dwapara Yuga, less and less animals are being used for transportation, with only a few horses as rich men's playthings, or for use in official parades.

An enlightened few eat no, or very little, meat but in early Dwapara Yuga the advent of factory farming has moved meat from being a relatively rare dish due to its once high cost to being an everyday, low-priced offering, marketed by generations of politicians with slogans like a 'car in every garage and a chicken in every pot' (Hoover, 1928).

Dwapara Yuga has seen a growing awareness of the value of animals and plants beyond just being something to be ruthlessly and thoughtlessly exploited on a mass scale e.g. Silent Spring in 1962.

Swami Kriyananda provides the following insight in his recent book "The New Path": "The evolution of awareness begins at the lowest levels of conscious identity. It moves upwards automatically at first, through mineral, plant, insect and lower animal forms until at last it attains the human level (from 5 to 8 million incarnations). From this point on, evolution ceases to be automatic. Man's brain and nervous system, being more highly developed, grant him that specificity of awareness which is called the ego. Man has the ability to exercise intelligent discrimination, and also has a certain amount of free will. From this point on, he can either speed up his spiritual evolution, delay it, or temporarily reverse it, by his own use or misuse of freedom".

Sri Yukteswar was a vegetarian but prior to monkhood had eaten eggs and fish. His advice to students was to follow any simple diet that proves suited to one's constitution. Yogananda often had to discourage monks and nuns from crazy diet-related excesses as nutritional fads then as now swept California and the world.

The suffering from too much consumption of meat is not just that of the short lives of animals in factory farms but the effects of those death-vibrations. In countries like Argentina, with the highest beef consumption in the world, many lives are cut short by health complications due to over-indulgence.

In countries like the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, the ravages of poor diet are apparent to anyone stepping off an airplane, with masses of people so large that they have trouble walking. Part of the explanation is basic schooling in dietary information being suppressed in order to assist lobby groups such as dairy, beef, sugar and cereal farmers in moving their products, no matter in what proportions (and no doubt the added business for doctors and dentists). In France, the government works to ensure that alcohol consumption is perceived as beneficial, again fueled by a powerful agricultural lobby.

A recent phenomenon seen in the West is the rise of pets, not just as household guards and rat catchers but in some extreme cases almost substitute children for singles, childless couples, or empty nesters. In the wealthy United States, some doting owners think nothing of spending several thousands on veterinary care for an ailing cat but simultaneously perceive impoverished or under-educated inner city children as worthless, undeserving 'bums', especially when they are from different race or religious backgrounds.

Sadly, certain people living in tightly packed, polluted and indifferent cities have such an aura of hostility and negativity, for example in certain Paris or London neighborhoods literally built upon mounds of the dead in catacombs, that other humans flee them and they exult in the so-called love of dogs and cats, who by nature 'love' anyone who feeds and pays attention to them.

Of course not all pets fall into these extremes. Yogananda's boyhood home in Calcutta was filled with a number of cats and dogs last time this author visited.

As always, the accent should be on harmony and the consciousness with which we interact with animals, not the exaggeration of slaughter nor the misunderstanding of treating them as humans. A cat filled with chocolate and never exercised will, like us, soon have difficulty walking and end with diabetes and/or a heart attack! Yogananda describes just such a case with the fawn at his Ranchi school.

Dwapara Yuga and 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope

This month exactly 400 years ago in 1609 Galileo first used a telescope for astronomical observations.

Similarly, 400 years ago Kepler published "Astronomia Nova" an account of how the planets move around the Sun in ellipses rather than the simpler, earlier model of Copernicus.

Both of these advances represent increasing mastery of space/distance, one of the principle characteristics of Dwapara Yuga.

1600 AD was just entering the last 100 year Sandhi of Ascending Kali Yuga, with 1700 AD the beginning of the 200 year Sandhi of Ascending Dwapara Yuga, reaching it's full expression in 1900.

In a simplistic sense we can see the influence of Dwapara in the number of devices named for the Greek word for distance -- telescope, telegraph, telephone and television -- continually diminishing the effect of distance on humanity.

Treta, the next age, after 2400 years of Dwapara will be characterized by mastery of time and telepathy. The vaguest signs of the latter are even now beginning to be brought out where the latest generation of childrens' games for Christmas are incorporating brain wave controls.

At the time of Galileo's observations, there were far fewer formal distinctions between Astrology, Astronomy, Mathematics, Philosophy and Religion in the way in which we see compartmentalized knowledge today.

Despite the many successes of science, 'why' questions are typically not addressed and even for such everyday phenomena as gravity, the 'how' is still not well understood in a fundamental sense. Many physicists, especially those looking at Grand Unified Theories, tend to agree with the ancient Rishis that the essence of reality is consciousness and not ever finer building blocks of so-called fundamental particles. It was these same Rishis that knew thousands of years ago of the existence of our Sun's twin and the 24,000-year cycle of the Yugas around the Galactic Center Vishnunabhi, as detailed in modern times by Yogananda's guru, Sri Yukteswar, in 1894.

For the author, it was Steven Hawking's 1987 Tercentenary of Newton Conference in Cambridge that marked a move from looking at the 'beauty' of mathematical models to considering the insights to be found in the Vedas, written in previous higher ages and a deeper consideration of the more sociological and psychological rather than objective nature of much scientific consensus.

Many physicists, so called quants, were employed in Wall Street to do financial modeling and financial engineering during the booms of the last two decades. The discrepancy between reality and those models has been evident to all in the most recent housing market crash and worldwide recession -- one commentator compared the nature of those models to attempting to pick up pennies over and over before an advancing steamroller, great while it lasts but inevitably leading to a crushing!

Yuga Calendar Calculator for Apple iPhone & iPad

This app is available freely worldwide on Apple's iTunes Store.

Description

This fast, easy to use Yuga Calendar Calculator takes everyday (Gregorian) dates in a wide range from BC to AD (BCE to CE) and converts them to their equivalents on the ancient Hindu cycle of ages known as Yugas, with both a text and graphical output.

The calculation used is that of Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri of Serampore, West Bengal, India.

Students of the Yugas will find it simple to correlate the dates of past events, archeological finds, the lifetimes of religious figures, features in the night sky, predictions of future events and more with their place in the Yuga Ages.

For example:

2525 AD will be Ascending Dwapara 825

2012 AD will be Ascending Dwapara 312

500BC was Descending Kali 200

55000BC was Descending Dwapara 1100

It should be noted that this is not the traditional Hindu calculation, under which we are under Kali Yuga today and will continue to be for thousands of years despite the energy and space conquering nature of the world from 1700.

FAQ for free app

- AD dates are positive and BC dates are entered as a negative with a '-'

- Error checking is simplistic - valid numbers are accepted, invalid ones are treated as 0

- The date range is from -2^31 to 2^31 - 1 and rounds up or down for very, very large years

- Compatible up to iOS 5

Back story

When I first began researching Yugas two decades ago, it was a question of sky-high-priced international phone calls, internationally ordering books by mail and traveling to specific ashrams and centers to slowly piece together a wider picture. The bibliography of this blog is a tiny subset of the actual sources used. I found at the time that no one Kriya Yoga Group publicly presented the complete picture (although out-of-print and photocopied sources from the 20s and 30s did exist but only for those closely connected with older organizational insiders and their circle of acquaintances) and understandably their main focus was and is Kriya Yoga meditation over any particular one aspect of the teachings.

Today, Yuga research is vastly easier and open to everyone with the Internet and global bookstores, such as Amazon.com, with every year more people building on the legacy of Sri Yukteswar's 1894 The Holy Science, Sister Tara Mata's 1933 Astrological World Cycles and Paramhansa Yogananda's 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi.

This blog, 2007 companion book Dwapara Yuga and Yogananda and now calculator do not claim to contain all Yuga knowledge, focusing instead specifically on provable facts in Dwapara Yuga and allowing students to rapidly cover the main, original sources and to arrive at their own conclusions with many pointers to areas and groups to further explore.

I originally thought it was enough to publish the algorithm for developing a Yuga calculator but realized quite quickly that the majority of students do not have the time, inclination or technical expertise to do so and instead chose to present a ready to use product on the most ubiquitous smart phone platform. Such phones, like the 'net itself are part of the march of access to all information, everywhere, all the time which is characteristic of Dwapara Yuga and part of the mission statement of successful companies like Google (although it too is struggling between profits and ethics in ways reminiscent of defacto monopolies from ATT, to IBM and Microsoft and Facecrook).

The blog is not itself a religion, political movement, path, center or any such thing and any profits are donated for the benefit of children in the developing world in the One Laptop Per Child program (third donated in October 2009), which is independent of any Kriya Organization. A debt of gratitude is owed to the entire Kriya Yoga line of gurus and especially to Swami Kriyananda for the clarity of his writings in recent times, inspired by Yoganada's teaching's in the United States from 1920 to 1952.

The knowledge of the Yugas and Yoga today, here in the West, are the fruits of millennia of selfless service to all mankind by Swamis in India, culminating a hundred or so years ago with the missions of Swami Vivekananda and then Paramhansa Yogananda to America and Europe. They came from Bengal, the melting pot of cultures of East and West, once home to the capital of British India. Their legacy opened the door for many later gurus, especially from the 1960s, for example Swami Prabhupada, founding the Hari Krishna's in New York City.

"When every soul will rise above petty divisions in true spiritual understanding world misery will be consumed by the fire of realization of the universality of God and the brotherhood of man."

Groups

Information on the tens of groups disseminating Kriya Yoga in India, America, Europe and around the world can be found here. Positive, constructive news items around Dwapara Yuga and Kriya Yoga are welcome from whatever source on this blog. This site is not a booster of any particular group, or a hate-site against any particular group.

Related iPhone Apps

Ananda has a number of more sophisticated, free iPhone apps available for download here.   As yet, SRF and other Kriya Yoga groups have web presences but no mobile apps.   Please let us know when and if they become available so that they can be listed and publicized.