The above quote is from Scotty, the engineer aboard 1966's Star Trek TV show.After two generations of sequels and spin offs (of varying quality), the franchise was relaunched this month with the movie "Star Trek (2009)", with a young, up-and-coming cast.
This blog does not typically deal with the media. Star Trek is the exception in that it did not simply portray the future, it invented it. Its positive spirit of inclusiveness, expansivity and justice echo the themes of Dwapara Yuga. At the height of the cold war, its crew included men and women from around the world and even an alien, always looking for creative, often technological solutions rather than the Kali Yuga spirit which gave us McCarthyism, cynical political assassinations and the Vietnam War.
Even today, most Scifi writing is dark and pessimistic, with a beginning point of Nuclear War or Plague. In the Dwapara Timeline, Star Trek has its own entry:
1966 Star Trek (USA) - essentially a utopian, Dwapara vision, drawing audiences together around the world. It covered controversial themes such as war, peace, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, racism, human rights, sexism and feminism. Most famously, the role of technology was explored, inspiring cell phones, sliding doors and research into replicators (see CNC), matter transporters and faster than light warp drives.
In the world of hitech, researchers were inspired to build the devices they saw in the show, from computers, to cellphones, and even more prosaicly, sliding doors. Steve Wozniak , the co-founder of Apple, watched the show to inspire his work in the mid 70s, and physicist Stephen Hawking, went so far as to appear in one of the sequels, so great was his love of the show.
One of the ideas from the show, teleportation, "Beam me up, Scotty!", has long been shown in the lab and similarly exists in concept in Judaism, Kefitzat Haderech, and Islam, Tay al-Ard. A previous blog entry describes similar concepts in the Vedas..
The show's creator, Gene Rodenberry, brought his experience of flying bombers in WWII and later passenger jets at Pan-am to his screen writing. Flying is one of the first signs of Dwapara Yuga, followed by space exploration and the annihilation of space as a constraint in general. A constant theme of the show, time-travel, is itself characteristic of Treta Yuga, i.e. time annihilation, as detailed in the Vedas and brought to modern attention by Swami Sri Yukteswar of Serampore in 1894 and through his disciple Yogananda in the US from the 1920s.
It should be noted that from the 80s, the designer of the x86 chips found in today's PCs credits Yogananda as an inspiration, much as Steve Jobs, the other more mystical co-founder in 1976 of Apple, was inspired in his early travels in India. Bill Gates, perhaps the archetypal Trekkie, began his company in 1975 with an unusually international and open outlook for the time.
Interestingly, the director of Star Trek 2009 is also the force behind the Lost TV series, which wears Eastern influences overtly, centered around the mysterious "Dharma Initiative" and karma. Lost in 2005 was one of the first TV series to be made available online, without ads, breaking the hold of network TV for younger and more tech savvy viewers. It is widely acclaimed as one of the most well produced and intelligent dramas in the last decade. Anyone familiar with SRF and especially Hidden Valley will recognize the model for the Dharma Initiative of "Lost".
Little Inside Joke
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SRF must have known these subtle connections back in 2003 when ordaining Brother Kirk, or perhaps it was preordained given that Kirk means Church in Old English, Kirche in modern German and is the informal name of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian).
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