Dwapara Yuga: Behind the many, one

As any student of traditional martial arts knows, behind the exotic Chinese, Thai, Brazilian vocabulary, one finds the same 'kick', 'punch', 'throw' and greater or lesser vocabularies of physically possible movements and counter movements.

Similarly, in any profession behind the technical jargon and obfuscation are hidden a small number of defining principles the knowledge of which drives fee rates. Senior corporate management are often drawn from consulting or accounting companies whose partners have seen enough variants in different companies to discern the patterns and apply them for themselves e.g. layoff employees, increase productivity short term, raise stock prices, cash out options and move on, or another such as price, quality, timeliness, pick any two!

In the book Civilization One: The World Is Not as You Thought It Was, the authors show that ancient units of length, weight and time (beginning with stone circles in Britain) were derived from astronomical data illustrating a level of knowledge only recently reached by ourselves. Further, they show that our modern Imperial and indeed metric systems have the same bases: new expressions of astronomical constants.

In Kriya Yoga, with Babaji and Lahiri Mahasaya, we have an ancient technique linking the breath to evolution in a spiritual sense, a constant of our bodies and this world, which recurs throughout history and geography, changing only its names and outer forms from Christianity to Buddhism to Islam and beyond. Seven lampstands or seven energy centers, spirit or breath, once the formula is known the names of the variables are of no consequence.

This esoteric constancy is the mirror of the exoteric constant of one God worshipped in many forms and ceremonies, often a reflection of the worshippers: an angry God for the angry, a compassionate one for the compassionate and a golden opportunity for the more Machiavelian of priestly classes to achieve dominance. As Osho once observed, where there are days of carnival and celebration, the background must be one of limitation and oppression. Priestly classes today have forms reflecting 'secular religions' of consumerism, communism, fascism, nationalism, the fading expressions of Kali Yuga thought forms, each exploiting the many for the benefit of a few mafia-family-like instigators.

As the wheel of Dwapara ascends such truths become more and more evident to greater and greater numbers of people transforming and simplifying our relations with one another.

For example, 20 years ago, corporate data centers outstripped anything in the consumer space. Today, the average consumer harnesses such powerful tools from Satellite TV, to an iPhone, to Google, to TurboTax that corporate IT appears archaic and unresponsive. This one generation move has caught many corporations and governments out as they scramble to appear relevant in a world that will no longer tolerate their layers of gatekeepers and self-serving secrecy.

Dwapara Yuga Video Acknowledgements (~3 mins)

Built using iSpeak IT software (apologies to Steven Hawking) and iMac platform from the "Acknowledgements" chapter of the Dwapara Yuga book mixing the author's color photos with historical B&W ones from the Kriya Yoga Lineage.

Also available here on youtube.com

If you like the voice, you might like to check out the history of vocoders and another modern instrument the theremin.

Dwapara Yuga: Birth dates and epochs

In Malcolm Gladwell's recent new book, Outliers, he argues "Superstar Lawyers, Math Whizzes and Software Entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside normal experience -- the outliers of the title. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky -- but all critical to making them who they are."

Incarnation occurs at the precise time and place astrologically compatible with the soul and into a family, group and culture resonating with it.

As the ages ascend and descend, key individuals and groups are tuned into the age, for example in reformers, technologists and meditators presently, following examples such as Yogananda born centuries ahead of his time.

Dwapara book now also available on Amazon Kindle

The Dwapara Book is now available on Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader, a device potentially as revolutionary in the book publishing world as the iPod/iTunes have been in the music publishing world.

Apple is now the #1 retailer of music in the US, passing Wal-Mart in April, 2008.

As the WSJ recently noted, the Kindle, no matter how ground-breaking, is currently out-of-stock following a plug on the powerful "Oprah" TV show.

All of these trends are themselves symptomatic of the space-defeating nature of Dwapara Yuga whereby people are no longer limited to the physical stocks of local stores, or waiting days for national or international shipments but can increasingly access copyrighted information instantly.

Any profits are donated to the One Laptop Per Child Charity (laptop.org) - two donated so far in 2008.

Note: January 28, looks like a new version of Kindle is likely to be announced in early February.

Note: March 3, the Kindle 2 is out and the new sync functionality is slated to allow reading on iPhones.

Dwapara Yuga: Of men and supermen

Today, there are really two kinds of superheroes in popular culture: the modern variety such as Spiderman or Batman whose powers have biotechnological origins and the older, more spiritual variety found in the Hindu and Judao-Christian traditions such as Hanuman and the Nephilim. There has been a virtual media explosion in the last decade of this meme.

At the beginning of the last century, Nietzche's astrologer-sorcerer Zarathustra had more philosophical ideas around the superman and military leaders turned to "battle" or "go pills" to render their troops more alert, a practice that continues to the present day.

Yogananda's Autobiography documented feats of real world superheroes back in 1946 and stories from extraordinary strength, to seeing and tasting music, to resistance to cold are a current media staple.

From a purely textual perspective, the origins of the New York comic book heroes could be looked upon as transforming Old Testament heroes into modern day equivalents by Jewish immigrants substituting the old spiritual origins of powers with a biotech spin.

Similarly, in general Science Fiction, the likes of L. Ron Hubbard (of Scientology fame) drew inspiration from Aleister Crowley (early proponent of Yoga in the West, known for his Abbey in Sicily and influence on rock music), leading to once obscure ideas such as teleportation becoming commonplace.

If we use the Egyptian naming convention for the Yugas as ages of men, heroes, demi-gods and gods we can have an inkling of what the future holds for us and what capabilities we should see evidence of in the past. We are at the crossroads from men to heroes of extraordinary powers becoming more and more prevalent.

If we look to Yogananda's related commentary on reincarnation, we have Atlanteans being reincarnated who tune into the advancing Yuga thru technical and biological innovation in gene manipulation and also Yogis incarnating, manifesting various forms of Siddhis or "powers".

In the Mahabarata there are eight siddhis, most of which will be instantly recognizable in today's pop culture:

• Aṇimā: reducing one's body even to the size of an atom

• Mahimā: expanding one's body to an infinitely large size

• Garima: becoming infinitely heavy

• Laghimā: becoming almost weightless

• Prāpti: having unrestricted access to all places

• Prākāmya: realizing whatever one desires

• Iṣṭva: possessing absolute lordship;

• Vaśtva: the power to subjugate all

Yogananda taught that these are by-products of increasing spiritual advancement - both a measure of progress and a potential pitfall for the advancing Yogi since to borrow the classic line from Spiderman "with great powers come great responsibilities". Traditionally those who have sought powers for power's sake have great falls since the real goal is God communion rather than greater control in a material domain, itself a meme of demonic or mayic forces to distract potentially saintly individuals.

It's a testament to God's great creativity that these same themes come together through spectacular individuals, subtle changes in larger populations, litterature, technology, ancient religious texts and even folk tales of giants, flying witches and magic carpets.

In the commercial world, the ideas sell everything from Blu-Ray Batman, to television's Heroes series to How-to books (of doubtful quality) to would be sorcerers across a spectrum of archetypes from Harry Potter to Gandalf to Charles Manson.

Dwapara Yuga: English and the tower of Babel

From the dawning of Dwapara Yuga, the English language spread with the rise of the British Empire and then after WWII, with the Cold War's American sphere of influence, to become a world lingua franca - a common language.

Even in the European Union, although theoretically many languages are spoken in Brussels, the reality is that English is here too the lingua franca.

It was unified language in a previous higher age (Proto Indo European) that gave us the tower of Babel, which certain kabbalists interpret not as a building but rather flight technology, much as the Vedas also describe.

Symbolically, the tower was destroyed along with unity of language as a punishment for lack of attunement with God. The unity of language and the tower can be interpreted as access to knowledge and the punishment as misuse of that knowledge.

Certainly, English is a language of adoption of knowledge, as it displaces other languages and cultures, it tends to absorb them. At the time of writing, the Global Language Monitor counts just shy of 1,000,000 words in English. For example, there's an enormous vocabulary of French in English and in more recent times, Yiddish and from the 60s Sanskrit terms are becoming part of the common vernacular e.g. guru, prana, karma and avatar.

Historically, subcultures had their own versions of English e.g. cockney for thieves and polari for theater workers. In the US, African American musicians with jazz, blues, rock and now rap tend to drive the vocabulary with recent words such as crib and grill. Chinese influence tends to come to us via Japan, whose culture is built upon Chinese martial arts, science and artist accomplishments, themselves built upon Indian predecessors.

English has the greatest storehouse of knowlede in terms of vocabulary and written information and the ability to discuss it in English having been standard in many professions for decades e.g. for pilots and ships captains. The Internet continues this trend.

Watching the nightly news, most intelligent spokesmen are careful to present their arguments in English lest artful interpreters color their translations. It is shocking to watch the news in France, as almost every Enlgish speaker is over-dubbed with some official translation that seems to pander to the Elysees' point of view, over-riding any nuance or subtlety in the speaker's own words.

English is helping to bring all peoples together around the world and facilitating the passage of a direct, personal relationship with God requiring no payments, weekly attendance or subservience to a priestly class whether Christian, Jewish, Muslem, Hindu or Buddhist.

As the Quebecois in Cananda have shown, an encroaching use of English can lead to a cultural renaissance. In the French language, it is they who drive popular and intellectual culture much more so than the larger but stagnant France.

Much as in music, it is amalgams of cultures and languages that have the most strength. How tedious would the Caribbean be without its mix of European, Hindu, native and African influences from Barbecue to Pieces of Eight to Hoodoo? Much is the same for world changing figures such as the mix of Indian-Irish in Chuck Noris, German-Chinese, Bruce Lee, African-American Bob Marley and Barack Obama.

Indian Footnote
Yogananda himself is a unique product of Indian and British cultures that came together in Colonial Calcutta. Most don't realize that until the late 1940's, although living in the US, he was a British subject and speaking difficult truths in the US was potentially subject to sanction and deportation, especially in the Miami riot his words aroused in the early 20s (and no wonder he chose not to address issues of sexuality, psychology, sociology or politics, the themes that lead to Osho's deportation a half century later).

His associate Sri Nerode was followed for years by British Intelligence, hoping to hear notes of insurrection in his Yoga discourses. Ironically, it is the little known help of the Indian Army in WWII that allowed Britain not to be crushed by Germany prior to the entry of the United States.