Dwapara Yuga: Bread, circuses and earthships

The continuing economic depression prompted the reflection of how bread and circuses were used by the Roman elite to keep control over the mob (non elite) with inexpensive food and lots of popular diversions lest the many realize their sacrifices and oppression for the benefit of a few, whether the senators of 2000 years ago or of today, socialist leaders, fascist leaders, generals, captains of industry, or pick from our any brand of wealthy lawyer or industrialist willing to 'sacrifice to help us'.

Then as now, a rich elite (still above the law with near every matter from murder to fraud settled with a fine or community service unless a scapegoat is needed) and impoverished lower classes, many of whom do not even outright own their own homes (as their parents did, a mortgage is not ownership), let alone having money for education, retirement or healthcare (even in socialized Europe the gap is there) but food is cheap at 'everyday low prices' and entertainment is piped right into the home, with ads on near every channel and web page.

Interestingly, the US Department of Labor defines 45% of Americans as Working Class yet most consider themselves Middle Class and especially not "Workers", rather "Associates", or some other euphemism that hides their role of limited upside in good-times but maximum downside in any kind of downturn. FW Woolworth bluntly put it, there are no "cheap goods" without "cheap help".

Then as now, the poorest of the poor become foot soldiers for income, education and citizenship. Longshanks in Braveheart observes "Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing." and Cromwell in the eponymous movie observes "It's an odd thing, Every man who wages war believes God is on his side. I'll warrant God should often wonder who is on his." No unjust wars would be fought if Senators sons had to die in them.

The gap between rich and poor is today similar to what it was in the 1920s with jet-setting billionaires and their hobby sports franchises paid for by millions of poor working two or three jobs and/or many hours since real buying power has eroded from salaries that used to cover buying essentials outright to long-drawn out credit card and loan payments.

In the US South, a model for the Western World, people step from air conditioned McMansions into air conditioned, giant SUVs (Mobile McMansions, temples to egotism) to go to air conditioned, unhealthy glass skyscrapers and back choking 10 lane superhighways with pollution, eating fast food there and back driving factory farming, with children brought up by Internet, video games and TV, and all tempted by the easy gratification of alcohol, cigarettes, prescription/illegal drugs and a fling with the neighbors, as glorified on daytime television.

Wal-Mart offers discount prices on foods and all manner of consumerist non-essentials and there's always the latest political-religious-entertainment scandal, Cowboys or Manchester United game (and we still have chariot races, turning left into oblivion) to distract in the media while jonesing between ever-longer work sessions, now extending into evenings and weekends thanks to the 'benefits' of mobile technology.

Many bright, spiritual people write to inform me of the latest Ananda or SRF scandal (imagined or real) that's just come to their attention, caught up in mundane affairs, quite forgetting that the effort to meditate is personal and independent of any social-religious organization no matter how exalted or abased its administrator might be. Does raising up or tearing down administrators deepen your personal practice? Is God bigger or smaller for the success of a Billy Graham or scandal of a Televangelist? The Founding Fathers were hardly Saints, yet their good outweighed their bad, much as JFK is remembered for his good works and not his many mistresses, a trait he shared with George Washington. Why not have the long view today?

On a practical note, other than keeping perspective on media hype, how can we step further away from the rat race (without living tax free on donations in some 'do as I say, not as I do' church, or crony welfare from some political lobbying effort)? Tempted to violence and revolution? Just look back to the 30s where similar problems were 'solved' in these ways and learn that lesson. Just think how the 60s hippies got free everything back in the day and have become the exploitative establishment today. Reading the right books, following the 'right' worldy leaders and mouthing slogans or taking up arms is not enough. Why not look to improve and reform yourself?

The world's first barcode appeared on a pack of gum in 1974 and if you aren't careful, you too will have your price and sell-by date in today's society unless you make moves to improve today. In the giant shell game of modern society, if you don't know who the chump at the table is then it's you and the other players have armies of lawyers, accountants and marketeers to keep you in the dark.

Yogananda was very clear in the need to be thrifty and the inevitable correction that would come to America (and by extension the West) if selfish attitudes and wasteful practices continued (end of the world talk in 1940, actually about Dwapara Yuga and not a literal end of the world).

He and Sri Yukteswar were careful within their purses, a contrast to today where the author well remembers an ex SRF minister even a generation ago whose family ate from paper plates at every meal, throwing them away, just to avoid doing dishes!

To take the example of the home, the most extreme with zero utility bills is the Earthship incorporating systems for:

- Water capture

- Greywater recycling

- Blackwater recycling

- Solar water heating

- Solar heating / Thermal mass

- Solar and Wind energy

- Facilitation of growing food internally and externally

Many of the basic elements can be used in a standard home by reducing loads

- Efficient lightbulbs and cutting off unused loads at the powerstrip

- Low flow WCs

- Cutting back on sprinkling systems

- Lowering AC and Furnace settings

Today, Earthships are expensive for their sizes, from 2 to 400K for just a few 100 square feet, with costs coming not from the near free construction materials, or relatively modest systems package (filters, inverters, batteries etc.) but the large amounts of manual labor. Perhaps the example of Levittown could be applied to mass produce such homes, or their key systems alone. After all, the obnoxious malls that litter that landscape multiplied from zero in the 1950s to thousands today in answer to consumerisms.

Canals, railways, cars and now planes changed the places where people could live from simply being on the oceans, seas, lakes and rivers. Today that transformation is coming with the Internet. Older, uninformed employers have not yet recognized that there is little reason to ferry everyone in and out of the office and we are poised for a reversal of the transhumance from country to town, as more and more people recognize the huge cost and low quality of life tied to these absurd and wasteful practices.

In short, remember that Yogananda asked that we look for the good in everyone and everything and apply it personally, not just in political, social club and church (in so much as they differ) affiliation and try not to be caught in the Kali Yuga distractions of bread and circuses. A wish to live ever in the present and to know nothing of the past, including what Yogananda actually said is a peculiar narcissism, potentially a trap for many lifetimes.

"Worldly people do not like the candor which shatters their delusions. Saints are not only rare but disconcerting. Even in scripture, they are often found embarrassing!"

Dwapara Yuga: E pur si muove!

Legend has it that the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei muttered this phrase - and yet it moves! - after being forced to recant in 1633, before the Inquisition, his belief that the Earth moves around the Sun

As recently as 2000, access to Yogananda's 32 years of US writing and speaking was filtered through a handful of lessons, books and CDs, unless one had access to original materials via monastics, ex monastics, grandparents, or groups willing to share freely.

One of the extraordinary things about Yogananda is that we have transcripts and writings in English and not simply accounts from disciples decades after the fact, which is our lot with many prophets, a circumstance leading to centuries of debate as to what was or was not included and/or edited, most famously with the Bible - a collection of only certain works in specific, edited forms and with questionable translations, despite the assertion to the contrary in Revelations.

The works of disciples are, of course, themselves valuable since they provide specific lines of interpretation, much as Paul's views on Christ, that constitute much of the New Testament - some Theologians go so far as to call modern Christianity Paulinism. This site has long called for SRF's archives to be opened to the public much as Presidential Libraries fully illuminate our Presidents, as big business, the Vatican and LDS Church have already done, to quiet debate over disputed texts and complete histories (warts and all).

With the Internet, online archives and Amazon publications, any motivated person can rapidly access a great deal of material, lawsuits, charity status and compare current and original versions to make their own determinations of what is true and false.

From it's inception, this site has endeavored to provide links to many groups and sources of information, especially the search features on the left hand side.

Apple's iPhone is one of the most successful computer launches in the last 20 years, with over one billion applications downloaded to-date (the author is unaffiliated with Apple). Some of these, such as Olive Tree's Bible software, are just straight copies of what has been available on the PC for decades -- the ability to keywords search and analyze many different versions of the Bible - a very Dwapara idea.

A new, free one is the text of the Autobiography of a Yogi, to peruse from the phone.

Sri Yukteswar and Yogananda were great advocates of scientific thinking and testing the proof of any conjecture, simplicity itself where the item in question is a text!

Dwapara Yuga: Michael Jackson dies

Although we're usually on the hard news side of the news-sport-celebrity spectrum of media coverage, we could hardly mention Elvis and not comment on the passing of Michael Jackson.

Much as Elvis was a bridging figure in the 50s, Jackson bridged barriers of age, gender, race and geography, with musical and dance talent in the era not of radio and movies but 80s music-television (MTV), the ghetto blaster and walkmen. In the present era, no one figure has emerged leveraging the capabilities of iTunes, Youtube, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook to similar world-wide effect.

Perhaps becoming such a figure is harder with fragmented, interactive media which lack the one-way concentration of old-style radio, network television, movies, records, DVDs and relics like record and Blockbuster stores in an age of wifi downloads and 24x7x365 communication.

Much as every great strength is its own flaw, Jackson's asexual, a-racial persona seemed to have moved from universal to some odd pariah status after many surgeries, surrogate parenthood and lawsuits, mirroring Elvis' personal struggles behind public success.

With great success, to paraphrase spiderman, comes great responsibility to remain consistent privately with a public image. As any analysis of sports-politician-religious celebrity figures attests, their downfall is often that aspect that they must publicly protest their distance from.

It is interesting that Jackson died in LA, a town known for the ease with which worldwide fame can be built and then hidden in a high security mansion or modern day castle, emerging only occasionally to receive the acclaim of paying crowds or collaborating with flattering film crews.

Unity behind apparent diversity, a literal world brotherhood, is such a Dwapara theme that Kali Yuga forces, Satan or Maya if you will, inevitably attempt to tear it down thru public character assassination (false), or temptation to private failing (true).

Dwapara Yuga: Cooking and Yoga

Two centuries ago, apart from bread basket areas around the Mediterranean, the selection of foods and recipes was severely limited, for example, the monotony of pork, potatoes and cabbage in areas of Gemany and Poland with associated ill health and shortened lives.

Pork products have long been avoided by Hindus, Muslims and Jews for these very reasons. Yogananda described the sweetness of pork as being due to its 'puss-filled' nature. Gandhi recounts at length his early detours in diet in his autobiography.

With the French Revolution, the cooks left the chateaux and set up in town, part of a process of sensitizing the general populace to quality ingredients and preparations, in line with the breaking down of barriers in Dwapara Yuga.

To the French, psychological development has always been associated with cooking knowledge, much as in India and China. Sri Yukteswar placed special emphasis on cooking in his Ashrams as did Yogananda during his lifetime, with recipes figuring prominently in his teachings, along with martial arts and athletics as well as the importance of taking the sun - part of a rounded lifestyle.

The recent EAT study on children's diet in the US indicates that families eating together improves children's diets, another facet of 'breaking bread' which is well known in the world of business and sales but ignored by many overly busy families and friends.

In the US, much as Britain, the variety and quality of ingredients available and types of restaurants has growth exponentially from the burger and fries of the 1970s, driven by a number of leading cooks, to today where even small town America have Indian, Thai and Japanese foods as well as fast foods. Ironically, the most successful restaurant chain in France is McDonalds but this is more of a reflection on the lazy, unclean, indulgent nature of many of the chefs in so-called fine dining establishments there who have lost the plot of catering to people rather than some image of themselves inflated after the collaboration and destruction of WWII.

Gordon Ramsay, the Michelin Three Star British chef, regularly gives lessons to troubled restaurants (often with French chefs) that apply not just to the restaurant business but (in spirit) to business in general, and even basic human relations in being focused to the individual customer:

- Simple menu of understandable, well-done, fresh dishes

- Be known for a particular dish

- Place an emphasis on cleanliness, quality, service and value (actually the motto of McDonalds but often ignored in the restaurant trade in general)

- Have a welcoming ambiance

- Be consistent

SRF initially served the community with a restaurant in Hollywood, a great inspiration of Yogananda. The project was later dropped (for reasons unknown, perhaps the increasing focus on monasticism, even though many monasteries were and are known for their culinary skills in Europe) but taken up by many other groups such as the Hare Krishnas where it is an important outreach to non members.

SRF recipes have been made available in the last few years by a third party and Ananda has its own cookbook also.

In the 1920s, Yogananda was a regular contributor to health magazines, espousing themes which have only really taken hold from the 1960s and even then only in college graduates. In the 1920s regimes of diet and exercise were regarded as eccentric and faddish, as can be seen in movies like Chariots of Fire, where even having a trainer was regarded as unsporting during the 1924 Olympics.

Today the question is not 'what is yoga' but rather 'which yoga', as large numbers of especially educated, urban women tune into the benefits of Hatha Yoga. In his early years, Yogananda often had demonstrations of Hatha Yoga for all men and women (not simply the Yogoda exercises now known as Energization Exercises). One of his recorded speeches of the time includes a long explanation of the dangers of smoking, practiced even by some of the monastics. As Dwapara advances, more and more people will look into the remaining steps outlined by Patanjali, specifically meditation, not simply doing postures in a normal or heated room and calling that Yoga, a somewhat distant union with God.

Dwapara Yuga: People are not computers

In the 1930's, Hitler kept a life-size photograph of Henry Ford in his Munich office. So deep was his admiration for the American industrialist that he wanted to model his entire nation on Ford's work practices. Such modeling was not new, decades before, the Kaisers' officers had observed Ringling Brothers' build-up and breakdown-crews in order to better train their soldiers.

The 1930s production line and trophy engineering projects held a peculiar fascination for the Kali Yuga regimes of national and communist socialism, who liked to reduce humans to machine-like roles, always obeying, never questioning, or tiring. Stakanov was the model Russian worker who always (publicly) exceeded his quotas.

Ford himself was a social pioneer (also later disavowing his anti semitism and links to Hitler), allowing his American workers shorter hours and the possibility of buying the cars for themselves, coming into line with Dwapara Yuga. However, the production lines meant a move from craftsmanship and creativity towards deskilled, repetitive tasks along the new lines of Taylor's 'scientific management' and studies like the 'Hawthorne effect'. In Russia and Germany, slave laborers filled the factories. Much of Japan's industrial revitalization after the war was associated with empowering individual workers around quality and ownership (reversing the dehumanizing trend ).

Through the 1950s with the growth of so-called professional management, greater and greater emphasis was given to bureaucracies and accounting, reducing individuals to mere cogs in great machines. The symbol of the era was the IBM salesman and his funereal dark suit, keeping clients locked-in and ' true-blue' with mainframe temples (glasshouses, amusingly British Army Slang for Prison) dictating behavior from insurance companies to the jungles of Vietnam.

With wider computerization in the late 1980s, computing power escaped the glasshouses doing away with many low-end production line roles and clerical tasks such as typing and records keeping. As the power and communications abilities of computers increased in the late 1990s, the white collar world was affected as journalists, researchers and consultants, for example, found themselves being replaced by cheaper alternatives in developing nations.

In our era, the model for the company worker is no longer the dumb machine of the 1930s but the supposedly infallible, always on-computer, as employees are deluged with ever more requests for work performed to exacting standards, and connected to their places of employment in the evenings, weekends and over vacations, with replacements ready in the wings in case they 'wear or breakdown'.

However, with so many skills and capabilities now pure commodities (with an implicit race for the bottom in pricing, occasionally even at good quality) it is human ingenuity and creativity that are at a premium as never before. Microsoft who defined the early PC era are increasingly seen as dinosaurs with their only two successfull products ever, Windows and Office, near unchanged after 20 years (beyond logos, packaging and behind the scenes intimidation and Nokia's operating system is actually the most common in the world) and companies like Google, although current stock market darlings, were recently forced to try to capture the ideas of even the most junior employees lest they go to build their nemeses, who may be just 'one click away', like Wolfram Alpha, say.

In parallel, with ever more emphasis on testing in US schools, leading to SATs, GMATs, GREs and the like, derivatives of the IQ tests once used to decide who would be sterilized or not in the US and Nazi Germany of the early 20th century, a workforce is being prepared for yesterday's roles, when today's are much more in line with languages, music and arts with the technical aspects easily handled by computerization. The lunatic who attacked the Holocaust museum in the US recently was very proud of his Mensa credentials yet it was symbolic of his unbalanced nature.

We are not computers, or machines like Vaucanson's automatons. In Dwapara Yuga, as Yogananda's teachings (although not his organization, sadly modeled after his death on big business 'efficiency' with standardized lectures and the like) emphasize, it is creativity and individualism, sparks of the divine that need to be cultivated and not stamped out in the name of collectivism, which serves only its leaders.

Workers of the world, meditate, compose, paint ... and blog! You have nothing to lose but the chains of Kali Yuga thought forms :)

Dwapara Yuga: Yogananda's views on sectarianism

Below are Yogananda's words on sectarianism in 1927.

As a period example, the famous photo on the right shows Lenin in Red Square in 1920. Trotsky (one of big three of Communism along with Lenin and Stalin) was in the original. By 1930 he was edited out of the picture, and by 1940 edited out of life altogether following the path of bitter rivalries between once close colleagues as Stalin consolidated monies and power around himself.

THE RAMAKRISHNA SWAMIS—By Swami Yogananda, East-West Magazine, Sep-Oct 1927

Sometimes there is a kind of professional jealousy even in spiritual work and religious organizations of all types. Certain ministers and priests, as well as amateur "Swamis" and "Yogis", betray narrow-mindedness in this respect. Even an average good man belonging to one sect often will not speak well of another good religious man like himself, because the latter happens to belong to another sect. "O, well, find out for yourself how he is," says this kind of religious man, even though he knows in his heart that his brother of another sect is really good.

Such intolerance and jealousy is nowhere out of place so much as in spiritual work. In this country, where true religious teachers often have to undergo various forms of soul-crucifixion and trials of all kinds, it is with sympathy and understanding that I view the efforts of other teachers to bring the message of spiritual knowledge and freedom to America.

So I take pleasure in announcing to East-West readers and Americans in general, that the Ramakrishna Centers in America are bringing a beautiful spiritual message to this country.

One very fine Ramakrishna Swami, Paramananda of California I have known since 1920 in Boston. He invited me to his Asrama (hermitage) in Massachusetts and California several times. He is doing much good in America thru his devotional teachings.

Dwapara Yuga: Elvis and bridging cultures

Everyone knows the caricature Elvis, the overblown symbol of Vegas meaninglessness and kitsch, the Velvet Elvis Altar or Velvis.

As the Czech writer Milan Kundera observed, kitsch functions as a kind of totalitarian worldview in which all difficulties are hidden and all answers are given in advance, to preclude all questions.

Elvis as a cultural bridge in Dwapara Yuga goes much deeper than his Gracelands image suggests.

As a young man, auditioning in Sun Studios in Memphis in the early 50s, he was on the point of being turned away for traditionally singing blues staples, when, while 'acting the fool', he dared to provide his own interpretation, finding his own voice. It was this moment of stepping away from the crowd that launched his career - the point that generations of young people shy away from as they step back into the comfort of the herd.

Elvis was a white man who dared to bring a range of feeling to music that had previously been limited to African Americans, bridging a cultural divide that later the Beatles, the Stones and Zeppelin would cross, from the comfortable integration of England, ultimately bringing the original African American musicians like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley to wider attention.

At the time, Elvis became a sensation and later 'the King of Rock and Roll'. In his private life, the hidden depth of his culture was manifested in his Kriya Yoga, following Paramhansa Yogananda's teachings and also in his Kempo Karate under Master Ed Parker (the man who discovered Bruce Lee), twin currents subtly intertwining the strengths of East and West that had also previously been kept well apart in the spirit of division and racism of Kali Yuga.

The positive aspects of his life echoed Yogananda's poem to rugged individualism "The Noble New" - interpreted nicely here.