Dwapara Yuga - I had gone a-begging from door to door

I had gone a-begging from door to door in the village path,
when thy golden chariot appeared in the distance
like a gorgeous dream and I wondered
who was this King of all kings!

My hopes rose high and methought
my evil days were at an end,
and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked
and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.

The chariot stopped where I stood.
Thy glance fell on me
and thou camest down with a smile.
I felt that the luck of my life had come at last.
Then of a sudden thou didst hold out thy right hand
and say `What hast thou to give to me?'

Ah, what a kingly jest was it
to open thy palm to a beggar to beg!
I was confused and stood undecided,
and then from my wallet I slowly took out
the least little grain of corn and gave it to thee.

But how great my surprise when at the day's end
I emptied my bag on the floor to find
a least little gram of gold among the poor heap.
I bitterly wept and wished
that I had had the heart to give thee my all.

Rabindranath Tagore

Dwapara Yuga - Ibookstore and "I'm a Mac"

In celebration of the LHC coming back online in Geneva, I will be making Tara's "Astrological World Cycles" book available on the new Apple iBookstore (accessible on the iPad).   It takes "4-6 weeks" for Apple to process a submission.

The "Dwapara Yuga and Yogananda" book has been available for some time in the Amazon Kindle format.

As someone having used computers to write books, make plans, write software, shoot videos, edit photos and make music I have to say that the Mac is a fabulously better environment (jet plane route - see picture) than the PC (bullock cart) in a home context (at least in a company one can just hand the machine to tech support since IT defines the environment it supports).

The PC is far cheaper at initial purchase but then that advantage is lost with man hours and weeks spent with updates, viruses, malware, failing drivers and general misconfigurations seemingly always requiring new payments and time to be spent on Windows 7 this, 64-bit that, compatibility mode the other as a kind of hitech torture to end up with a desktop looking surprisingly like Windows 3 from the early 90s!

When I have a creative work (or just paying bills) to do on the Mac, I just do it rather than instead spending time looking at forums or calling India or elsewhere for never ending tech support, completely losing inspiration or the momentum to accomplish a mundane task.

Dwapara Yuga - Trivedi Effect

Mahendra Trivedi (on right of picture) is able to affect the yield of crops with his mind. It is one thing to make such a claim, quite another for it to be backed by scientified research.

From the Trivedi Foundation website:

"For more than ten years Trivedi has worked with agricultural colleges in India to improve crop performance. He has modified the behavior and apparently even the genetics of dozens of agricultural species - because the changes he makes are passed on to later plant generations. These changes include making the plants more prolific and disease resistant. He did this not by working in the genetic engineering laboratory, but by sending an "energy transmission" called the Trivedi Effect™ to fields and seed samples.

The skeptical Westerner might scoff at these claims and others, which include transmuting matter on an atomic level, except for one thing: They are supported by extensive documentation.

At the present time, scientists from six different countries have conducted thousands of experiments on the Tivedi Effect™. The results are published in hundreds of reports available under the Scientific Research section of this website. His work with researchers is ongoing, and represents a tremendous opportunity for scientists to investigate the power of consciousness."

Such a power is typical of those demonstrated in the Autobiography of a Yogi and consistent with the widening horizons of Dwapara Yuga and the growing accent on energy ... and well worth investigating.

Dwapara Yuga - Satanic Software?

Certain saints refuse to touch money, perceiving it as completely contaminated by worldly vibrations. An interesting question is whether or not modern computing and communications devices and technology are similarly contaminated by the avaricious interests behind them, or a necessary evil, the avoidance of which is akin to riding around in horse and buggy.

Much as the Detroit Motor companies bought tram car systems to force car ownership and bought politicians to favor highways over alternatives, modern computing and telecommunications systems are swiftly pushing older alternatives like snail mail, branch offices and friendly local staff out of (business) existence.

New religious groups have often been known for their practicality, their inventions growing far beyond their original groups whether Mormons and their first department store in Salt Lake City, Seventh Day Adventists and their Corn Flakes, or the healthful foods and postures of Yoga finding their way into modern American life. Yogananda talked extensively of scientific discoveries and inventions in his autobiography and had many followers from the creative spectrum of business and the arts.

The photo is of Saltaire, a model English village built to help mill workers out of slums, alcohol and patent medicine abuse - a 19th century take on the juncture of industry and spiritual belief. Much of the urban housing for factory workers of the time and well into the 20th century was hovels.

Many workers got over their unhealthy lives in gin palaces, brothels or taking seemingly more innocent pick-me-ups containing (at the time) ingredients like Heroin (Cough Syrup), Cocaine (Coca Cola) and even Lithium (Seven up). During WWII, tens of millions of American, British, Japanese and German troops were issued Methamphetamines as 'battle pills' so that they wouldn't be overly concerned by fatigue or warfare. A similar quick fix approach was taken from the 1940s with mental illness, hammering an ice pick through the eye sockets and into the brain, scrambling the pre-frontal lobes in a Nobel prize winning procedure known as the lobotomy. Of course, medical, food, drug, business and social reform eased these problems as did new religious forms whether Methodists in the mines and valleys of Wales or Mormons in the factories of Northern England.

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

Gandhi thought of cities and technology as diseases - he placed a home spinning wheel in the center of the Indian flag. He argued that as centralized production draws more and more people to urban areas with the snares of good salaries and career advancement, overpopulation grows, the quality of life declines and vices of all kinds grow. In a talk this month in India, Swami Kriyananda reiterated Yogananda's view that cities are unsustainable and that Dwapara Yuga entails a correction to a more rural and village scale of life around the world.

Even modern France, presented by commentators such as Michael Moore as an idyllic place, is feeling the pressure.   France Telecom is is being sued by the government for so driving employees for production and efficiency that it pushed many to suicide.

Will the organic growth of telecommuting and home businesses leveraging the internet and global commerce in rural areas lead to the demise of cities over time? Or, is the demise of cities driven by financial crises happening much faster - rusting out Detroit while simultaneously unsustainably inflating Delhi? Is warfare the only cure for political and economic difficulty, labeling this group or faction to be the latest boogyman?

Dwapara Yuga - The Vedic Age

In the book the Vedic Aryans and the origins of civilization, the following interesting timeline is presented:

• 3800 BC (Descending Treta 2900) and before - High Vedic Age, the Rig Veda
• 3100 BC (Descending Dwapara 0) - Mahabharata War, Kurukshetra, Gita, Canonization of the Vedas by Vyasa
• 1900 BC (Descending Dwapara 1200) - Drying up of the Saraswati river and end of the Vedic Age

Thus from a Yuga perspective we can see that the High Vedic Age was part of Descending Treta Yuga. It fell, right at the beginning of Descending Dawpara Yuga and collapsed mid-way through.

The book's authors argue that earlier Sanskrit scholars were unduly influenced by a) Colonial interests, for example Max Muller being in the pay of the British, b) "Aryan" racial theories and c) Fundamentalist Christian time-lines with comparatively recent dates for the origins of the world. To this day in Glen Rose, TX there are parallel museums, one for dinosaur tracks set in stone and another for creationism.

The ruins of one of the last cities associated with the Vedic Age are at Mohenjo-daro in modern Pakistan.

Built in 2600 BC (Descending Dwapara 500) and abandoned in 1500 BC (Descending Dwapara 1600), it was not rediscovered until 1922 AD (Ascending Dwapara 222).

Much as for Ancient Egypt, earlier strata at the site show higher civilization, descending as we move forward in time. Extreme radioactivity suggests that nuclear attack may have marked the end of the city. Much as for all facts prior to Ascending Dwapara Yuga, competing theories and dates mar definitive conclusions and can lead to unflattering comparisons with literature of the style popularized by Dennis Wheatley -the devil rides out (a bit). Such comparisons are perhaps a constrictive reflex, an unwillingness to accept higher civilization in the past by peoples today in underdeveloped nations and dismissing their cultural heritage as just so much 'mumbo jumbo'.

Incantations and mantra, caught both in prayers and phrases such as Abracadabra (Abracadabra sounds as Abrahadabra, in Aramaic this word roughly translates into "I will create as I speak.") far from suggesting underdevelopment hark back to Treta Yuga when the appropriate thought forms could be made reality much as in the '60s cartoon the Arabian Nights a character could transform himself just by saying so - 'Size of an elephant!" In Kali Yuga and Ascending Dwapara, masters aside, anyone can make such a demand to call 'devils from the vasty deep' but the likelihood is that they will not come since the method requires appropriate mental rather than simply egoic development.

This week the Forbes list of most wealthy people was announced. Perhaps the most remarkable news was that it was headed by a Mexican national and filled with a host of Chinese billionaires suggesting that underdeveloped nations and unknown civilizations will not eternally be so. Modern America is swept since the dawn of Dwapara Yuga with ever growing interest in Yoga, Chi Kong and Shamanic cultures and a nagging disenchantment with Malls, suburban deserts, one ton SUVs, three hour commutes and industrialized education, family and work life.

When reading books of ancient history or archeology, it's helpful to have a quick Yuga calculator to situate the dates and provide new insight. It can hardly be a mere coincidence that the Mahabharata War falls right at the boundary of Treta and Dwapara, or that Einstein discovered matter and energy are interchangeable right at the boundary of Dwapara and Kali, just at the same time that Sri Yukteswar corrected the Kali era misinterpretation of the ancient Yuga calculations found in the Vedas.

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Dwapara Yuga - The long run

In 1054, a supernova was visible in the sky day and night for almost 2 years forming what is now known as the Crab Nebula. Its passing was noted by ancient Chinese astronomers and also by Native Americans in what is today New Mexico.

No recorded trace of the event remains in Europe, although that may be from a long tradition of ascribing (or suppressing) earthly significance to astronomical events, whether the Star of David signaling Christ's birth or Halley's comet appearing around the time of the Norman Conquest (as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry).

As we progress more and more into Dwapara Yuga, the evanescence of all earthly events becomes clearer to ever larger numbers of people beyond tiny monastic elites.

Beyond the founding and later dissolution of families, schools, religions, movements, companies, cities and countries, only the cycles of the moon around the earth, the earth around the sun and the sun around its twin star, have any relative permanence.

When we think of the Maya, the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Druids or others, the astronomical insight designed into their architecture underlines the relative immaturity of our knowledge, not least because we ourselves have only very recently become able to notice it.

Halley identified the nature of his eponymous comet in 1705, Dwapara 5 and the Crab Neblua, the remains of the event seen in 1054 were not observed in the West until 1731, Dwapara 31, with detailed explanations coming around the 1960s, Dwapara 260s. In the long run, meditation and its implicit acceleration of 'internal Yugas' would seem to be the best investment of time.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Note
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The founder of salesforce.com, a Silicon Valley darling, credits the foundation of the company and the philanthropic elements within it, in part, to the influence of the Dalai Lama, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Mata Amritanandamayi in his 2009 book underlining the possibility of business success without a completely egotistical outlook.