Searching for Dwapara Yuga

In music, from the 15th century we had the harpsicord and by the beginning of the 18th, the piano, following the arc of Dwapara Yuga.

From the 1980's music was always in-time with drum machines and click tracks and by the 90s in-tune with tools like autotune. From the 00's, it was in-the-box, completely digital from end-to-end, beginning with Ricky Martin's "La Vida Loca", allowing anything and everything to be corrected

Research and scholarship has followed a similar ascendant path, from the destruction of the great libraries in the depths of Kali Yuga, surviving in scriptoria in Dark Ages monasteries with hand copied books chained to desks, available to only tiny religious elites.

With the printing press in the 15th century to the first public libraries in the 19th, research and scholarship became available to the literate masses, driving great religious and social changes around the world.

As an undergrad in the late 80s and early 90s a course in library science was a prerequisite for hard sciences (often along with philosophy of science) and much manual "hyperlinking" of authors and references via physical books in a reference library took days and weeks. A hard science PHD was 50-100% based on acquiring the knowledge of the state of play in a field, with any actual discovery pushed to numerous Post-Docs. Researchers then as now benefited from tight, closely knit teams with shared experiences making up for less than perfect tools.

Much as for music, search became far simpler from the mid 90s, allowing anyone to make simple keyword searches on terms like "Dwapara" in Google or Amazon, far more easily than the great mental acumen, wide reading and spiritual insight required by Sri Yukteswar or Sister Tara Mata and others.

Early computers allowed word-based analyses of Shakespeare, the Bible, LDS and other writings, helping establish the authenticity of disputed plays and showing that three of four of the Gospels cribbed from one another. Analyses of the dead sea scrolls provide insight on the evolution of both Christian and Jewish religious writings.

Today, the next frontier is not the simplistic search of "Google" - top results are top because a) many web pages link to them and b) many people make the same search but rather meaning based computing.

Looked at coldly, Google returns thousands of irrelevant hits even with careful use of advanced features since it has no understanding of terms beyond simple strings of letters. Similar concepts in different wordings are missed completely - what of Greek or Roman writings, with the same ideas? The contents of audio and video files are missed completely, beyond looking at titles and potentially helpful tags/comments.

Today's modern search engines, coming from the worlds of cryptography, audio and visual analysis are capable of capturing and correlating patterns of meaning much more widely - potentially pulling in video and audio of Yogananda where Dwapara or related concepts are mentioned, not to mention the writings of Greek poets or Theosophists, or new parallels.

With tools such as these, a review of the subject will be child's play and deep insight available at the click of a mouse. There are two challenges in the short term a) such tools are typically deployed in intelligence services and inside companies with deep pockets since the general public is typically unaware of limitations in tools like "Google" and b) the tools would need access to archives from handwritten letters, recorded speeches, films, notes and original writings.

One of the key advantages of such tools is that they are automatic. They do not require the painstaking efforts of transcription and/or redaction by monastics, simply that a digital archive be available. A closed archive and redacted work is the modern equivalent of scriptoria, much knowledge for a tiny few and edited highlights for the many.

- Yogananda’s magazine articles and lessons published before 1943 are in the public domain
- All books by Yogananda published before his passing in 1952 are also public, including the Autobiography