Dwapara Yuga - Land and Cattle

Texas was founded by pioneers looking to rapidly exploit what once seemed limitless resources of land, cattle, horses, oil and gas.

Billionaires and their lawyers and politicians developed in the most expedient, Kali Yuga way possible. First fencing the state into smaller and then smaller parcels at ever increasing premiums, controlling the flow of cattle drives, then railways and roads, before studding the landscape with oil and gas wells. For example, Houston grew up with no zoning laws resulting in a permanent smog, with oil refineries and chemical plants next to schools and homes, the latter no longer self sufficient rural homesteads but near zero plot line tract homes dependent on bought food, high-priced city water, sewage, electricity and gas.

The Mustangs are a world famous bronze sculpture by Robert Glen, that decorates the Dallas suburb of Las Colinas. The Carpenter family that held the original ranch had a wider vision for the livability and attractiveness of the area beyond simply cashing in. They paid close attention to present and future urban planning and built up around the sculpture which was itself seven years in the making. Mustangs are the wild descendants of the horses brought over to New Spain by the Conquistadores and developed into a symbol of the early pioneering spirit of Texas.

The positive, expansive spirit of Dwapara Yugas embodied in the art and architecture has manifested in the area being one of the most attractive and livable in the state from the 1980s onwards, part of a growing awareness of the need for a greater quality of life beyond big truck, big house, big debts.

Dwapara Yuga: Third laptop donated for the developing world

Based on profits from book and iPhone app sales, Dwapara Yuga has been able to donate a third XO laptop for the benefit of children in the developing world, as part of the One Laptop per Child Foundation. The Foundation is independent of any one Kriya Yoga Organization.

There are XO's in over 30 countries from Peru to Rwanda, and everywhere it goes, the results are the same. The laptops help children build on their active interest in the world around them to engage with powerful ideas. When the laptops arrive school attendance goes up, and kids begin teaching each other how to use the machine.

With the XO laptop, kids actually learn how to learn. And one by one a new generation will emerge. With the power to change the world.

The author has directly witnessed the benefits of PCs for children in the developed world in the last 30 years and wishes to extend those benefits directly to children in the developing world.

Thank you for your support.

"Wish the best for everybody, and, in the very act of blessing them, you yourself will be blessed. A stained glass window, with the sun pouring through it, is even brighter and more beautiful than the light with which it graces the church."

Dwapara Yuga: In praise of amateurs

Armadillo Aerospace is a space technology company funded and driven by amateurs with great success. What makes it doubly interesting is that it is being done from near Dallas, Texas, which is the home to occasional flashes of brilliance like the integrated circuit in the late 1950s and later almost the home of America's Answer to CERN.

In a similar spirit Waterloo Labs in Texas has some inspiring videos for example controlling a real car from an iPhone app.

The pattern of creative peaks and troughs in Dallas is much the same as areas like Route 128 in Massachusetts (Wang, Digital, Apollo), or Route 101 (Silicon Valley) in California, or Seattle, Washington (Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon), alternately pulling in and then expelling thousands of engineers and dreamers with waves of military, research or commercial funds. Dallas is typically harder hit by the troughs, Texas having only three Tier 1 universities, none of which is in Dallas.

Armadillo is part of a movement of bright (and well funded) amateurs competing for prizes such as the Ansari X prize. The author recently heard Anousheh Ansari's inspirational presentation of her childhood interest in spaceflight in Iran (where women are suppressed to this day, supposedly in the name of Islam) and how she was able to become an astronaut many years later. Another company in a similar vein is Tesla Motors. Their impressive sports car destroys the carefully cultivated image of unappealing electric cars calculatedly built by the Detroit Automakers, with their vested interest in lack of progress.

It's an archetypal theme of Dwapara Yuga that individuals should be able to succeed where governments and huge corporations often cannot since both tend to have very narrow definitions of what constitute 'good elements' in employees, or worse, a vested interest in inventions not coming to the market and disrupting fat profits in monopolies and cartels.

Dwpara Yuga: Faith and business

Harvard's MBA, one of the top business programs in the world has a formal oath to behave ethically in business, which, as of 2009, less than half of the students were willing to sign. Harvard's acceptance criteria extend to the exceptionally academic, the exceptionally wealthy and the exceptionally well connected, meaning these students are likely to be the future leaders of economies and businesses around the world.

Many people's experience in dealing with banks, insurance companies, lawyers and realtors suggest that selling one's soul to the devil is a prerequisite for success in business. The plot has been a Western cultural staple from Marlowe's 'Dr. Faustus', to Braine's 'Room at the Top', to Michael Douglas in the movie 'Wall Street'. Popular urban legends routinely tie large US corporations and their logos to the supposed "Church of Satan", which although not literally true do reflect the "values" of corporate executives who made off (Madeoff!) with funds in recent years.

In the US, a number of companies have chosen to publicly declare their adherence to Christian Values such as Hobby Lobby, Interstate Batteries and Chickfila. A larger number have Company Chaplains, a distinct improvement over the typical Intranet HR service where all questions from bereavement to pension contributions are handled anonymously via web in only 24-48 hours! Other companies like Ford (Hari Krishna movement via the founding family), Marriott (LDS Church, BYU) and the Hard Rock Cafe (Sai Baba) are more quiet about their religious ties since they are less mainstream in the US. Some of the challenges of publicly linking religion to business are potential backlash in the marketplace, accusations of Machiavellianism (i.e. using religion to push products or pressure workers), or simply negative publicity from routine disputes, as happened with the well intentioned "Yogananda Foundation" in recent years.

An executive of Interstate Batteries, speaking with the author recently, credited the success of the firm and its exceptionally low turn over to their Christian values. When asked if it was not a problem for the many nationalities and religions outside of Christianity working at the company, the executive said they too benefitted from the ethical environment and company's success and that it had not been a problem. They are currently hiring ahead of actual needs to help people looking for work, part of their many outreaches to the community.

The author believes that transformation is at the individual level and that powerful, ethical leaders can be a great force for moving their organizations forward in line with Dwapara Yuga. Yogananda was very clear that the means used color the ends. Yoganandaji had many businessmen followers, most notably Dr. Lewis, Yogacharya Black and Saint Lynn, who were able to align their personal and business behaviors. In recent times, the Harmony at work organization in India looks to lead individuals and organizations toward greater creativity and success leveraging Yoganadaji's teachings.

Management gurus in recent times with titles such as the "Seven Habits" series and "The Innovator's Dilemma" (both associated with LDS) share values that go beyond the usual business school staples into the areas of self help and faith-based values. Interestingly the LDS Church is the wealthiest per capita in the world, having spread from nothing - passing up the opportunity to settle in San Diego, CA and instead forming Salt Lake City, UT from barren desert with a metaphor of the honey bee or "deseret" and the famous words - "This is the place!"

Dwapara Yuga - The Big Switch

The recent book The Big Switch compares the advent of electric utilities such as Edison's a hundred years ago to the advent of compute utilities like Google in today's computer market and holds many Dwapara Yuga overtones.

The electric utilities moved from a world where a local DC generator was needed for every factory and neighborhood, to centralized generation and transmission by AC over power grids.

The showcase for the utilities was the 1893 Chicago World Fair, it's brilliant lighting inspiring the idea of the "Emerald City" in the "Wizard of Oz", and introducing the world's first "Ferris Wheel". As previously mentioned in this blog and also in the "Big Switch", this dawning of Dwapara Yuga event was in many ways the union of two great American themes (can do, practical attitude) utilitarianism and (the truths behind our material world) transcendentalism. The event physically brought together two of the founding fathers of Dwapara Yuga: Tesla and Vivekananda. It was the year of Yoganadaji's birth.

The modern parallel is the move from a PC in every home, and servers in every business, to centralized compute grids and transmission via fibre optic cables/the Internet with compute power being piped into homes and businesses just like electricity.

Both are examples of industrialization, standardization and centralization that drive benefits for billions, yet the model isn't necessarily completely positive or universally applicable.

Electrification lead to the deskilling of millions of jobs, the rise of the production line and a move from an economy of largely self employment to one of a handful of billionaire owners and masses of undifferentiated employees at the whim of the next reorganization or boss' bad day.

Utility computing similarly threatens to outsource work to the cheapest bidder worldwide and still further concentrate the IT industry into just one or two monster companies whose economies of scale allow them to dominate the market, just as for the original power company monopolies, phone monopolies and current PC monopolies. Most everyday people's interaction with the web is one of unpaid workers, their free writings, pictures, videos, reviews, comments and even their web search choices being aggregated by the 'net companies into profits.

To the Yogi, living simply, growing their own food, generating their own power and leveraging work via the Internet rather than being leveraged, down, or right-sized by it, the advantages of the societal changes coming can be reaped, side-stepping any potential downsides.

The author was present at the launch of HP's utility computing in the early 2000s and Amazon's Cloud in the mid 2000s so writes not from the perspective of a passive reader but an active participant, bringing a wider perspective to the theme of 'in the world but not of it'.

The potential for utility computing has existed in the mainframe world from the Univac in the early 1950s but lacked the dot com era fiber optic networks of the late 1990s to reach out beyond the corporate data center (glasshouse), much as Edison's initial DC efforts lacked Tesla's A/C transmission lines to reach out beyond urban areas like Manhattan Island, Valparaiso, or Paris.

Dwapara Yuga - TED event

The author attended the first TED event hosted in Dallas - TEDxSMU.

TED's tag line is 'ideas worth spreading', a forum for speakers, originally around technology, entertainment and design and now much expanded. The theme of the conference was "What will change everything?" with views from technology, ecology and theology.

TED expresses many Dwapara themes as well as the more subtle truth that our lives serve no purpose unless we are in some way of service to others.

Two quotes used in the presentations give a feeling of the tone of proceedings -

“If you cannot feed 100, then feed 1” - Mother Theresa

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” - Marcel Proust.

The two event standouts were a 13 year old piano genius, a walking billboard for reincarnation, playing his own compositions since the age of 3, and a young African man who built a windmill from a picture in a book so that his farming family would not starve.

To make a positive difference in Dwapara, no billions, or armies are required. Everything begins with an individual positive idea and the effort to make it a reality.

Dwapara Yuga -Yogananda makes headlines on second day in the US

Yogananda made the headlines in the Boston Globe the day after his arrival in 1920 - a fitting start to his Dwapara Yuga World Mission!

The article was discovered by a member of the Waltham, MA SRF group, continuing a long tradition of research on Yogananda's early years in the state.

Massachusetts was the home of many early devotees and the first American ashram was established in Waltham on Indian Road at Hardy's Pond.

In the early years, Yogananda lived in a rented room at the YMCA and the Hardy's Pond Ashram was a very humble affair, sadly now demolished.

His legacy is not so much the later, palatial locations of Mount Washington, Encinitas, Lake Shrine and others, rather the explosion of study in meditation and Eastern thought he drove both inside and outside the Kriya Yoga tradition and a universal world wide following not limited to any one race, religion, or group. In his lifetime, his temples were deliberately named "temples of all religions" to signal openness rather than sectarianism.

When we consider the Hollywood stars and starlets of the time, despite having been seen by million around the world month in month out in an era before television, they have all faded yet interest in Yogananda and his Kriya Yoga goes from strength to strength with the myriad versions of the Autobiography of a Yogi still best-sellers, tens of books by direct disciples, CDs, DVDs, iTunes songs, podcasts, videos, apps, dedicated sites, forums and blogs.