Dwapara Yuga - Fluidity in movement

The print to the right shows a London boxing match from approximately two hundred years ago.

Even those with a passing knowledge of boxing will remark that the styles of the 1930s and 40s are very stilted and lacking in fluidity compared to a good boxer today, constantly ducking, diving, bobbing and weaving rather than trading blows from cocked-arms and static positions.

Hatha Yoga, dancing, boxing and martial arts are all interrelated being exercises in meditation, breath and body control, with the links being especially clear in Chinese and Indian culture.

In boxing, as in athletics and team sports in general, from the turn of Dwapara Yuga we see ever increasing professionalism that make old national and international level sports B&W news reels seem hopelessly amateurish.

The movements from traditional Karate, once an Okinawan powerhouse, today seem almost a theatrical caricature of self-defense yet they were a pinnacle of publicly available knowledge in the 40s and 50s in the West.

The author remembers a Sensei ("master") with several grades beyond black belt explaining many years ago that traditional moves were for grading but not to use them in reality since they didn't actually work! The published system of Bruce Lee, two generations ago, suffers from the same phenomena of ever increasing speed, fluidity and increasing pool of knowledge by potential assailants world wide, making many of the illustrated movements antiquated, although the principles and ideas remain strong. Much the same can be said of any new tactics and training in professional sports, initial leads are lost as entire leagues quickly assimilate breakthroughs. The traditional Chinese objection to Bruce Lee was his divulging of at the time secret "closed door" techniques - ones not generally known. As they predicted, these techniques have become worthless, known equally to street thugs, MMA franchise holders and masters alike.

In the world of televised MMA combatants have teams of coaches analyzing hours of footage of their opponents and can clearly be heard shouting instructions to their charges as to what moves to make, when and how, an exciting version of Rock'em Sock'em robots pitting opposing camps of trainers against one another, a new facet of wrestling as commercial entertainment. Effective counters to wrestling moves associated with the sport's founders are forbidden by the rules.

In many ways, being one of the most visible forms of Dwapara Yuga, progress in sports, dance and hatha is easy to overlook against more intellectual changes like meditation, growth in interest in Eastern philosophy, the spread of democracy, or technology. The capabilities of modern athletes will likely one day reach those of mythic proportions that come down to us from long past higher ages.

Sri Yukteswar, Yogananda, Kebalanda and many others in the Kriya line were far from being couch potatoes but actively involved in horse riding, fencing and martial pursuits of all kinds as well as meditation. The Ranchi school had a particular emphasis on wrestling and stick fighting as part of a rounded education.

All martial arts are a great way to build confidence and the ability to defend oneself in an age characterized by the battle between constrictive Kali Yuga forces and expansive Dwapara Yuga ones. As Yogananda frequently pointed out it is not sufficient to meditate but also necessary to act in dharmic ways whether to build business, society or defend oneself, not presuming constantly to put God to the test for miracles on every business deal, relationship, or potential act of aggression.

A nice example of this is the story of the two ladies who always left a pile of cash in their unlocked car "trusting in God" that no one would take it, which despite Yogananda's warning them to be more practical, is exactly what happened, much like the amusing Cauliflower Robbery story from the autobiography. Self defense can be as simple as not being in a downtown area with a map in one hand, expensive cellphone in the other while admiring the skyline and foolishly standing with legs crossed - potentially a victim of even a child assailant sure with one push to obtain the phone from an obvious mark!

In a very practical way, many European synagogues offer not only the usual religious services but also self defense classes in the Israeli Martial art of Krav Maga, at the very least sensitizing students to potential threats. There are of course many others, from obscure Indonesian and Indian systems through to heavily promoted ones such as Book of Eli's Kali/JKD or Batman's Keysi.

Dwapara Yuga -- Early American Colonies

Tree-ring data from Virginia indicate that the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island disappeared during the most extreme drought in 800 years (1587-1589) and that the alarming mortality and the near abandonment of Jamestown Colony occurred during the driest 7-year episode in 770 years (1606-1612). These extraordinary droughts can now be implicated in the fate of the Lost Colony and in the appalling death rate during the early occupations at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America.

The timing of those expeditions could not have been more unlucky. At Jamestown, the Native Americans suggested that the English should pray for rain.

In coming through the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevadas into California two centuries later, the early pioneers would be similarly tested by inopportune snows.

It seems that efforts at exploration, scientific or social breakthrough require not only the right consciousness being developed but also that specific tests be passed, much as the generations of Israelites had forty years of purification in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land. By extension, each world war, famine, plague, natural disaster suggests an opportunity for reform.

2008 and beyond represent something of a testing time with American Freedom and Democracy looking tarnished with 1 in 6 unemployed, financial crisis and two unpopular foreign wars while one party China is going from strength to strength, gaining influence around the world and leading many third world countries to question the value of Freedom and Democracy, most especially in the digital domain.

It is one thing to have a long term view but another to ignore present day suffering -- please consider a donation to the Red Cross, or other relief agency helping the suffering people of Haiti. Words are cheap, consider how much more you have than someone with no water, food, or shelter.

Update

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It's interesting that Hilary Clinton has brought up this week the openness of the Internet as a foreign policy goal. 20 years ago, it was largely the same experience wherever one logged in. Today, filtering of content is commonplace in France, North Korea, Iran and China, with more and more limiting 'localization' taking place, not conforming to local norms, rather enforcing them in the manner of Big Brother.

Even for mundane cultural items, one cannot watch from the US the online version of the show "Doctor Who" from the BBC or hard hitting documentaries on France's M6 since international access is blocked. Both counter that the US acts similarly with shows such as "Lost". This is an extension of the divisions enforced by region encoding of DVDs or the format wars of NTSC/PAL, which simply apply to folks not willing to dig for an answer.

The author clearly remembers the democratizing influence of American Satellite TV and Internet access in South America over the past generation and it certainly feels like modern hard line regimes have learned their lesson, building up their own barriers to keep news and information truly local (at least outside of folks with basic technical savvy).

All of this smacks of heavy-handed Kali Yuga style control with lists of "authorized" books, news outlets, sites and people, a first step in the direction of "in" and "out" that gave us the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Vichy Regime and the ovens of National-Socialist Germany.

Dwapara Yuga - Freedom Book

This month saw the release of the book Freedom, the successor to Daemon by LA's Daniel Suarez.

The allure of Suarez's work is the combination of page-turning thriller and the potential pros and cons of 24x7x365 access to all personal, social, business and government data everywhere. The intertwining material themes of Freedom, Democracy and Technology are those of Dwapara Yuga, although there is no explicit spiritual message in the books. The discussions of holons and neufeudalism are particularly relevant to our times.

Fifty years ago, such data was accessible only to first world governments, militaries, intelligence services and giant corporations but as the ARPANET and MILNET gave way to the Internet and mainframes shrank from minicomputers to microcomputers to laptops and PDAs such as the iPhone or NexusOne, the data sunglasses of the book are just a short step away for ordinary citizens.

Other aspects of the book from robotized weapons to drones are no longer the realm of science fiction but very much part of the modern battlefield, as detailed in a recent WSJ article - Israeli Robots Remake Battlefield - and the limits of power between nation states, private armies and nationless corporations and groups are likely to define the twenty first century.

Dwapara Yuga : Next iteration of One Laptop Per Child

The OLPC team announced at the end of 2009 the next iteration of their laptop for education in the developing world.

The sheet of plastic is stunningly innovative, more like something from a science fiction movie such as Minority Report or Terminator Salvation than something for $100 in 2012.

Per the WSJ this week, Apple is planning on releasing a similar device but at a price point 5 to 10 times higher, at the top of the market per its customary practice.

Nayaswami Order

First post of Dwapara 310.

At the end of 2009 (Dwapara 309), Kriyananda announced the formation of a "Renunciate order for the new age - the Nayaswmi Order".

Adi Shankara organized the Swami order in its present form in falling Kali Yuga, the 8th century BC, based on renunciation of the world and isolated monasticism. This in turn became the form of monasticism carried through Christianity and in recent times by some of the SRF Brothers and Sisters, keeping up single sex monasteries in Southern California.

Strikingly, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sri Yukteswar, Bhagwati Ghosh, Dr Lewis, Saint Lynn, Tara Mata, Yogacharya Oliver, Kamala Silva, Norman Paulsen, Roy Davies, and many others were and are married.

Kriyananda's insight is that the old order focuses on the negative constrictive attitude of "Neti Neti", "not this, not that", rather than the positive, expansive one of knowing God.

The Nayaswami order is the refocusing of the search for God in a Dwapara Yuga context, open to any modern renunciant, married, single, of whatever group, searching for God, without the props of a monsastery, living from the work of others on donations and especially free of the trap of egotism and aloofness that can develop in monks and nuns.

1) Swamis can be single or married.
2) They can earn money.
3) They can be freely creative, if the purpose is to serve others.
4) They don't need to be mindlessly obedient to an unenlightened "superior."
5) Overcoming the ego is achieved not by rejecting the world, but rather by expanding towards God's joy and Infinity
6) Swamis wear not the traditional orange color, but a royal blue. A married aspirant to Swamihood is called "tyagi", wearing aqua color, and a monastic aspirant "brahmachari", wearing golden yellow.
7) A new Swami is named not by one Swami (which has been the tradition), but by three.
8) A Swami of this new order is called "Nayaswami", with "naya" meaning "new".

To the author, this is a logical, Dwapara Yuga move. In Kali Yuga, form was everything and content of secondary importance, leading to priestly classes with appropriate buildings, clothes and ceremonies pressing their flocks for support of all kinds but most essentially tithes and deathbed bequeaths to further and further build up their titles, wealth and power, perhaps best exemplified by the House of Borgia and their modern equivalents playing politics behind the disguises of Fundamentalist Islam, Christianity or Judaism.

Whether in Nayaswami Kriyananda's particular form, or essentially a similar one at a later time or in a different place, this kind of order focusing on the content and not the form of an interior search for God is sure to catch on, being in tune with the times.

The author cannot fail to note that no membership, or affiliation, or external vows are required to begin, or continue that search for God today, although the "Kriya Yoga" techniques brought to the West by Paramhansa Yogananda and the clear thoughts of his teachings are particularly recommended, being themselves so in tune with our present age.

Information on the tens of groups disseminating Kriya Yoga in India, America, Europe and around the world can be found here.