Dwapara Yuga - Home Schooling

Earlier this month a German family was granted political asylum in the US.

They were being persecuted for trying to home school their children. The state in Germany like Ireland and other countries prides itself in raising children with its own values, outside the home, by force, if necessary.

Despite recent financial turmoil and political stalemate in the US, there are still some basic freedoms both available and commonly exercised here that are generally not available elsewhere.

Europe itself is hardly immune from charges of financial mismanagement, as it turns out Greece, Italy, Spain and perhaps others have been falsifying government accounts for years. The EU can rarely reach agreement in areas of foreign let alone domestic policies.

Grade and university studies are big business around the world and teaching unions are especially vigilant in case their markets are restricted. Historically, tutors, travel and religious instruction were a much larger part of education than the dry testing that is the focus of much industrialized education today. Sports, music and arts are cut to make way for ever more fact-based drills, ignoring how computers and globalization have commoditized away basic skills and the most successful citizens tend to excel in sports, music, arts and creativity in business and society!

The author is very much in favor of choice as part of the expansiveness of Dwapara Yuga -- the availability of both traditional and home models, whether professional educators, tutors, parents or via rich media based distance learning. The diverse ecosystem around home-schooling and home education in the US provides benefits for learners all around the world, whether in business, gemology, languages or learning about Kriya Yoga from SRF, Ananda, CSA, or others.

As a particular example, the Living Wisdom School in Northern California continues the work begun by Yogananda at the Dihika and Ranchi Schools in India and picks up from his early attempts in Encinitas, California which came too early in Dwapara Yuga, still in tune with the waning forces of Kali Yuga era monasticism rather than spiritualized families and householder saints living in the world but not of it. The author had the pleasure of meeting several students and their teachers in India where they were on a school trip to see the Dalai Lama!

Dwapara Yuga - Sculpting in plastic

For under $1,000, a personal 3-D printer is now available. It allows designs to be built on a computer and printed-out in three dimensions relatively inexpensively and by near beginners.

A set of chessmen of great inventors, a model infantry squad of blood thirsty politicians or line of guru altar pieces are just a few clicks away ;)

It's only been the last generation that had good personal 2-D laser printing, prior to that it was largely a world of clunky typewriters, nasty photocopies or printing shops rubbing their hands over the money they were about to make.

The 3-D printer is deeply symbolic, not only for the creativity that it unleashes -- freedom from decades of training in traditional sculpting/modeling and also for the open-source, collaborative nature of that modeling and the company itself.

Creation to realization in all fields is becoming much more of a short step, without the tedious years of apprenticeship, suggesting implicitly the spiritual nature of this world with God willing the various worlds into existence and the abilities of great masters, those who have cultivated Siddhis and an everyday possibility of Treta Yuga.

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

Dwapara Yuga - No birth, no death

In the original version of Cosmic Chants in 1938, Yogananda recommended the song "No Birth, No Death" for overcoming religious, racial or social prejudice, and for achieving non-attachment to all human ties. It was the song that he sang at the time of his entrance into the Swami Order in 1915.

His explanations are no longer offered in the current SRF version but the vibration remains in the song -

"No birth, no death, no caste have I. No I

Father, mother have I none.

I am He, I am He; blessed Spirit. I am He

Mind, nor intellect, nor ego Chitta (feeling or emotion).

Sky, nor earth, nor metals am I.

I am He, I am He; blessed Spirit. I am He."

The sentiment seems to aptly cover observing but not getting wrapped up in many of the themes in this Dwapara Yuga blog from

- Scientific and medical discoveries
- Expansion of travel and communication networks
- Political progress
- Social progress
- Economic progress
- Spiritual awakening
- Important books
- Ends of wars
- Pandemics, natural and man-made disasters
- Recent events echoing corresponding past events

Through Kriya Yoga, although the age itself is slowly advancing a student can move ahead of the curve depending on the depth of her practice. Buddha, Moses, Krishna, Christ, Mohammet, Nanak Dev and other sages/prophets/gurus (having Christic or Saintly consciousness) are always representatitve of the pinnacle of Treta Yuga no matter at what time in the Yuga Cycles they appear. The outer forms of religions change but the inner truths remain constant. True Masters are always in agreement no matter how much their spiritually ignorant and zealous follower fight one another.

Dwapara Yuga - Padre Pio

Swami Kriyananda observed that persecution is inevitable on the spiritual path and should be completely accepted as such.

His amusing words were - "sprinkle it on your cereal for breakfast". It seems that any good act generates a satanic backlash, often from those whose mission is supposedly to uphold the good. Who better to act demonically than a church executive, social worker, school principle, judge, petty government official, or military officer?

Padre Pio, the saintly Italian monk, well illustrates the principle. He was persecuted both by Satan directly and Satan via church administrators who did not want him disturbing the smooth running of "their" organization - the acquiring of new adepts, donations, buildings and power.

One particular passage has the Padre pointing out that Satan is not expelled using Satan's ways.

The Padre's miraculous life simply underlined how far those bureaucratically and administratively minded officials had strayed from following Christ rather than some book of rules and procedures, as illustrated in the recent DVD.

In the US, many Christian denominations seem to revel in harsh judgment and lack of mercy in their extreme focus on Old Testament passages, quite forgetting Christ and His new covenant of mercy, inclusion and love for one's neighbors. Their churches are seemingly always pristine, huge and wealthy no matter how poor the surroundings just as the whitewashed tombs Jesus referred to twenty centuries ago in Mathew 23.

Pastors like the progressive Joel Olsteen was hounded for his openness in failing to affirm that Jesus was the only way to God.

Dwapara Yuga - Falling barriers

It took the shortages of troops in the Korean War to force the US military to integrate blacks and whites in the 50s.

Today, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are forcing the US military to drop it's ban on gays and lesbians, again because of troop shortages, leaving behind the ambiguous "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in favor of good soldiers whatever their particular background. It is proposed to have mixed crews on submarines, once the favored example of the impossibility of integration.

The US is hardly alone in this, joining Israel and the United Kingdom who already allow men, women, blacks, whites, gays and lesbians to serve, from similar pressures and drawing from increasingly diverse societies wherein fundamentalist, nuclear families are increasingly minority groups.

Perhaps one of the greatest barriers still remaining in early Dwapara Yuga is that of age discrimination. Most companies are set up to hire young people from schools and colleges, train them briefly and then work them for twenty or thirty years before forcing them into retirement. With less and less baby boomers coming up, a more appropriate program would be more retraining during careers, with later, more carefully managed retirements that do not empty armies and companies of their knowledge in favor of young turks, either home grown or recent immigrants.

Older workers are particularly vulnerable to the French syndrome, mimicked by good 'ol boy networks in the US where a "have" class of professionals command permanent, powerful, well paid posts but at the expense of "have nots" who are either unemployed or underemployed in precarious interim roles no matter what their actual talents and qualifications.

In the recessionary period, much mid career retraining has become hopelessly expensive with the $100 to $160,000 of fees required for an MBA from a top tier US school being hard to justify when recent graduates are either unemployed, or forced to beg for their old positions at the same or lower salaries while carrying years of crushing debts.

In a wider sense, Yogananda suggested an answer in simple living and high thinking -- living inexpensively, close to the land, leveraging meditation, general culture and education to work remotely or at a small scale not subject to the huge swings and pressures of industrialized society with it's sudden need followed by lack of need for armies of programmers, engineers, architects etc.

Aside

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The recent book quants, about the mathematical trading strategies on Wall Street, describes one ultra rich young quant (mathematician or physicist employed at hedge funds/I banks for smarts rather than the more usual family, political or regulator connections) so unfulfilled by the great wealth nearly effortlessly realized that he took to playing a portable keyboard in the New York Metro.

One of the very few quant driven hedge funds to make money during the meltdowns of 2008-9 was Renaissance. The author feels that a large part of that was due to the concept of the "second forty hours". Employees were expected to accomplish all their regular activities in the first forty hours and were then free to be creative in any area of the firm in the time beyond that. Most other firms were based on a handful of senior people using strategies often decades old with others relegated to grunt work and the original founders living prima donna lives more focused on poker tournaments and showy purchases than their funds, the markets, or investors.

In a nutshell, the regimented approach, shared downside and limited upside along with non sharing of information characterize the majority of poor work environments and consequently poor performance. To the author's mind, wherever bright people's creative energy can be channeled harmoniously we see bursts of genius whether in finance, hitech, dance, military operations, music or teaching. It's a lofty goal, one requiring inspired rather than pedestrian leadership -- more the question of a Napoleon - "Are you lucky?" than the bureaucrat ticking off boxes and pulling in "yes" men like surface pond weeds, choking off all oxygen to the bright fish below.

Dwapara Yuga - Little Ice Age, Old and New Worlds

If it were not for the Columbian Exchange from 1492 to 1700, the beginning of Dwapara Yuga, it is doubtful that the social changes associated with the agricultural, industrial and democracy movements could have taken place.

Although hard to realize from our present time, modern staples such as corn, potatoes and even tomatoes, avocados and chocolate came from the New World of the Americas to the old World of Europe.

These new vegetable products provided basic foodstuffs for workers and livestock alike as well as spicing otherwise bland dishes with products like chili peppers.

The little ice age corresponded to the exact same period, seeing the move of most of Europe from wheat to potatoe-based diets. Potatoes could not only better survive the cold but were less vulnerable to the crop-destroying tactics of modern scorched-earth warfare.

The arrogant French refused potatoes as "dirty foods", with bread riots leading into the 1789 Revolution, spurred not by revolutionary ideology but starvation. The revolution lead not to liberty, brotherhood and equality but a reign of terror, settling petty scores in cities, towns and villages followed by years of dictatorship with Napoleon's killing half of the populace in wars.

Even in the past decade, when restaurants in Nice, France tried to charge for bread it was a huge social scandal, touching the idea of bread insecurity in the French collective karma.

Treasures Against Time Site No more

With the passing of Jeannette Saunders late last year, the Treasures against time Dr Lewis site is no more, although the excellent book of the same name remains in print.

A devotee has maintained an archive here.

The old East-West site similarly disappeared in 2009, with a partial archive available here.

Back in 2007, the author made the effort to re-publish Tara's work that had too fallen into obscurity and was no longer in print.

It's a shame that there is less and less access to original materials, only partial views to it via references in new books or in fragmented/scattered forms across many sites and forums, which are themselves evanescent (a fate from which this site is not immune).