Dwapara Yuga - Football, Business and God realization

A recent USA today article describes a curious paradox in the world of American Pro Football.

Pro Football has long been one of the most socialistic enterprise in America because the worst teams each year always get the first pick of the best players for the next season.

The idea is to prevent the same teams (typically the ones with the most wealth in a major sports-entertainment market) winning year in and year out, causing fans to lose interest. Paradoxically, the same teams do win and the difference is one of overall approach, not simply access to Pro Bowl players.

The USA today article illustrates a Dwapara Yuga truth that good leadership and a considered process or system for winning matters more than any one individual or star, especially since a good system can develop such stars.

"Successful leaders, such as Colts President Bill Polian and Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, backed by patient owners, are just as important to teams as Pro Bowl players, if not more. They flood their organizations with talent – players, coaches and scouts – that collectively buys into a broad vision. Their frameworks cultivate winning, not merely talented players."

"I think one of the biggest reasons why [losing] teams aren't getting better is instability," says former Bills coach and general manager Marv Levy, who coached the team to four consecutive AFC titles from 1990 to 1993. "It's always, 'Let's change, let's change.'"

The football truth applies equally well in the business world. Strong leadership and a long-term, team-based approach for innovation characterize good companies like Apple with a pipeline of successful products masking occasional failures.

The weak, or Kali Yuga, approach is found in egotistical executives who optimize their own short term compensation with little regard to their companies, shareholders, customers or employees with wheezes such as "me too" poorly copied products, cutbacks of research and engineering and continual reorganizations, wasting time and energy dancing around real issues.

Politicians play a similar Kali Yuga game, inventing new laws with action-oriented names that do not address fundamentals and may never be implemented since they cover the same ground as existing laws but provide the illusion of action without the burden of thought or effort of execution - like tightening rules for legal immigration in the US when illegal immigration is ten times greater yet does not respond at all to adding more form filling or background checks so beloved of bureaucrats.

In spirituality, Kriya is a system for God contact with proven examples, itself rather different from large religious organizations that can point to occasional saints and prophets over the centuries against a backdrop of a distinct lack of realization. Most older religions (and surprisingly some new ones) have no lack of their own 'dancing around' of interminable ceremonies, special schools, gestures, clothes, even home appliances to distract from any real search for God. Such a search is characterized by intense personal effort and concentration that more than likely will not be visible to the casual observer.

Dwapara Yuga Homes of the future

A recent Boston Globe article sums up the state of play with modular homes like those from IKEA pictured to the right.

Traditional housing follows the formula of price, quality, time -- pick any two! In renewable/ecological terms, they tend to fail in every category, outside of showcase homes for governments, universities and the wealthy, where quality is achieved but at high prices.

Houses are traditionally built on site with little thought to the quality of materials, no thought for recycling/eco systems, and are done in 3 - 9 months (much more in Europe) with most of the effort going into having high margins and maximizing those features easily understood by buyers like eye catching staircases or light fixtures.

In principle, modular homes can be built in factories for much less, with higher quality materials, built-in ecological systems, in just a few weeks and then shipped inexpensively to site.

Historically this approach tended to be used only at the absolute bottom of the market with the idea of mobile homes or trailers associated with the problems of poverty in the US, much as say Council Housing in the UK or HLMs in France. The trailers used by FEMA after hurricane Katrina highlight the issues of toxic building materials wrongly used to keep prices low.

It is a very Dwapara idea to look to comfortably and healthily house people rapidly and inexpensively without making compromises that hurt the environment. Tradition and its built-in Kali mindset will take a while to embrace what is a logical progression.

Dwapara Yuga - Creativity

The Wall Street Journal ran an article today - Tinkering Makes Comeback Amid Crisis.

The article talks about the move away from theorizing in top engineering schools into creativity and actually building things, something not seen in years.

Previously the best talents went into "financial engineering" on Wall Street. When the wheels came off their theoretical models, the crash was felt around the world.

One student makes the recession era and critical Dwapara point - "If it doesn't have that creative aspect to it, it may not be worth doing, because your job can be outsourced,"

Where once tinkerers like the Wright Brothers could build a plane 100 years ago, we have lived through decades of only large companies having the resources to innovate. In the 90s, inexpensive computing power fueled the dot com and telco revolutions. Today falling prices are making high-end engineering tools like CNC machines inexpensive. CNC machines do not output 2-D pieces of paper but 3-D parts in metals, ceramics or wood that can be combined into planes, robots or just about anything. To the last point, researchers are looking at printing replacement organs.

Together these trends are democratizing the access to the tools for innovation so that inventors need not put forward just blueprints but complete working solutions. With such advances, small independent companies like Tesla and Armadillo Aerospace have been able to succeed where trillion dollar incumbents have failed.

Apple was an early pioneer in computing with the Apple ][ in the late 70s, launching the PC revolution. Its latest platform, the iPhone, has spawned another generation of people who do not settle for using pre-existing software but create their own and share it with others.

This week saw the launch of the first computer language in almost 10 years - Go. For the millions and millions of developers in IT, it's ironic that so much time should have passed since the last, and that the authors of the new language are not trendy teens from Russia or China but actually figures from the UNIX/C world of the 1960s and 70s, the same technology that sits behind the modern faces of iPhones, iMacs, DVRs, Google, Amazon, Pixar, Dreamworks, the FAA, NYSE and CME exchanges that so symbolize modernity.

In terms of art, it is today incredibly easy to go from a strong idea and some drawing skills to a hit animation with desktop sound and image software. In terms of television, the creators of animation have the greatest degree of artist control and simultaneously largest rewards, free from physical limitations of sets, actors and to an extent heavy censorship of themes and language.

Dwapara Yuga - Yogoda World-City Planned

Inner Culture, March, 1937

[Article by Richard Wright, Secretary of Yogananda, Brother of Daya Mata. Pictured is the Encinitas Hermitage of the time.]

Swami Yogananda, through the inspiration of God and the Masters, is planning to create a model Yogoda World-City in Bengal, India, where he wants to combine really necessary industries and scientific training of Yoga. Here people of all races schooled in Yoga will be admitted. This city will be guided by the highest spiritual principles and the laws of universal brotherhood.

In this World-City, dairies, fruit orchards and agricultural developments, along with carpentry and weaving, will be carried on. Both married and unmarried harmonious, intelligent, laborious, cooperating people will be received. Each citizen in this Yogoda World-City will be expected to live as a perfect citizen of the coming United States of the world, with God and Truth as the guiding President-King.

The cooperation of able-bodied young men and women, Rajahs and Maharajahs, and of unselfish, philanthropic people of the world is invited. They may give their suggestions or physical or financial or whatever kind of help they can offer, to make this Yogoda World-City a success.

The idea in creating the proposed Yogoda World-City is to offer to the war-torn, industrially-selfish, politically hide-bound nations of the earth a glimpse of a perfect divine city, which can be an inspiring model pattern after which all nations of the earth would like to build their cities.

Swami Yogananda, with the help of a few exalted souls, is going to make a supreme effort to do something practical in establishing such a city. It has hitherto remained only an imaginary idea with most people. He is not looking for absolute success or failure in the creation of a perfect World-City. He would be satisfied in making a supreme effort to create one such, as near-perfect as possible, avoiding the mistakes of all one-sided nations and taking in the best methods of all of them.

Swami Yogananda believes that the greatest enemy of man is ignorance and selfishness—not wars nor variety of religions nor customs nor races nor colors nor creeds. If ignorance and selfishness were driven from the hearts of men and they were taught to cooperate for mutual good, regarding themselves as brothers born of the one Father God, then that would pave the way for a World Nation.

The Yogoda World-City—its Aims

1. To follow the religion of actually knowing and therefore loving God.

2. To speak one universal language besides one's own native language.

3. To follow the best universal laws of hygiene and diet. Creation of health and meditation centers all over India and the world, to allay the physical and spiritual suffering accruing from wrong diet, wrong living through individual, social and political selfishness.

4. To use industry for mutual benefit and not selfish ends.

5. To consider God as the Ultimate Harmonizer of all our difficulties, paradoxes and unintelligible problems of life. To recognize those of all races and colors as children of the one God. To teach the good and evil of patriotism. To introduce the study of international brotherhood in the schools of the world to save children from world-hatred which leads to world-wars.

6. To give self-supporting, soul-uplifting, ever-new joy-producing education.

7. To make everybody an athlete—a Sandow in body, mind and soul.

8. To teach one religion of Self-Realization. Federation of all temples, churches and creeds of the world.

9. To advance moral consciousness and spiritual utilitarianism.

10. To establish a temple of all religions in the four quarters of the globe. Three already established in Los Angeles, and Encinitas in California, and at Ranchi in India.

11. To teach universal brotherhood—celebration of good-will congress for all nations—teaching to love all nations and to correct them by love and example and not by hatred or wars or evil politics.

12. To adopt universal standard customs governing body, mind and soul, taken from all nations, which would perfect body, mind and soul, and make each man an ideal world-citizen.

If this model City is fairly successful then similar ones can be established in the principal cities of the world.

Dwapara Yuga - Electric Meter Running Backwards

The most obvious symbol of being tied into a system of waste and poor architectural choices is the racing electric meter, especially in the newer parts of the US South, with homes with poor solar orientations, poor insulation, no shade trees and racing A/C units. Similarly good drinking water is just flushed away, or sprinkled on resource-guzzling lawns, gas and oil burned, to mention nothing of occupants polluted by outgassing VOCs from paints and glues thoughtlessly used in construction.

As Dwapara Yuga progresses, these issues come into clearer and clearer perspective. The first solar home, built in Colorado in 1943, was a long time in finding siblings, with the real stimulus coming in the oil crises of the 1970s and recent years.

It is standing joke in car dealerships that customers spend more time examining cup holders than looking at or understandings engines. Similarly and understandably, with the growing wealth of the United States from the 1950s onwards, homes are chosen beyond the usual formula of location, location, location by ever increasing size, numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms and large numbers of labor-saving amenities.

Just as the oil crises have brought modern diesel engines back into focus in Europe and hybrid electric-gas ones in America, more people are beginning to look at the systems behind homes and how they interact with the networks of expensive services from property taxes to electric, water, gas and oil, making home owners and renters poorer and a handful of energy network owners wealthy based on carefully cultivated mass ignorance.

The standing joke of politics is that everyone likes sausages but no one wants to see them being made. The author suggests that we may not all like sausages and should really care if unhealthy ingredients and processes are necessary in their production. As the sausage making system of waste and poor architecture becomes more and more visible, politicians are forced to act since their power lies in appearing to represent the public rather than their lobbyist and party sponsors (whose wealth comes from charges, fees and a vested interest in the status quo). The desire for power is true across the whole political spectrum, irrespective of the 'green' badge worn. Even in the 1970s and 80s, anti nuclear greens in Europe, for example, were simply sponsored by the KGB, cultivating a climate favorable to Russian gas pipelines that could be stopped at any moment, with no real concern for individuals, their real and financial health and even less the planet.

In homes, we need not all live in extreme earthships or domes reminiscent of science fiction movies but instead make better choices in combining simple systems, often just getting back to how pioneer homes were designed when choices were simpler:

• Size - is such a giant home with its burdens of maintenance, cleaning, heating, cooling and taxes really necessary? According to a recent WSJ article the size of luxury homes even is falling for the first time in decades.
• Lot - would more thoughtful orientation, shading, landscaping mean less watering and room for growing vegetables?
• Insulation - with a more thoughtful design and much higher degree of insulation in windows and frames, with windows arranged to meet local conditions, less electric, gas or oil is needed for heating and cooling
• Electricity - even a few solar panels can make a home net zero energy, without the hassles of batteries, benefitting from federal credits and charge backs to the utility and even the smallest rented apartment can cost less with CFC or Led bulbs and energy efficient appliances
• Water - for a few dollars, almost any WC can be made dual flush to save good drinking water. Simple collection of rainwater can go a long way, without going to the extremes of gray and black water recycling and wells that attract the interest of wary city engineers almost as much as solar generation!

The ultimate symbol of living more in tune with nature and reversing some of the malign network influences on individuals is the electric meter running backwards, as an individual home covers its own needs and gives back to the community, lessening the need for coal and nuclear plants and by extension wars around the world, grasping for ever remoter natural resources.

We need not concern ourselves with the fate of the Exxons and the Chevrons, with their armies of engineers, they will simply continue to move over from oil exploration to building better solar panels, cars and the like, in tune with Dwapara.

Yogananda believed that the greatest enemy of man is ignorance and selfishness—not wars nor variety of religions nor customs nor races nor colors nor creeds. If ignorance and selfishness were driven from the hearts of men and they were taught to cooperate for mutual good, regarding themselves as brothers born of the one Father God, then that would pave the way for a World Nation.