Explaining the Yugas

One of the many keys of understanding the concept of "Yog", or Union with Oneness, in context is to understand where we are currently in terms of our consciousness in time and space.

In the 25 minute video embedded here, we go through the Yugas, explain the key characteristics of each before coming to the current age of KaliYuga. In most places, you will find KaliYuga characterized as an age of moral decay, spiritual decline and conflict, and this is also explored in the video.

One of the keys is understanding that in KaliYuga, we have direct access to that which is Endless, a Divine entity of the Infinite in some way shape or form. I have transcribed the video below the embed, though I think you can watch it with Youtube's own Closed Captioning which already does a great job.

The Yugas Explained

Transcript:

Namaste. Today's topic is something called Yugas which is um means the ages.

What makes yoga such a key practice in the age and day we live in today is the topic of today's class.

First let's look at the word Yuga. It just means the word ages like we have paleontholic age, prehistoric age. These ages means that it covers a really long span of time. Depending on who you ask, each of the yugas can last from hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years to 10 thousands of years. I am not going to try to assign a year value on any of the yugas. All I'm going to do is refer to the yuga coming back to the modern day and age which is Kali yuga and talk about how yoga is the key practice for kali yuga. Okay.

But to get the context we will first look at all the yuga coming there. Sat yuga is the age of truth. Yuga = age, sat = truth. Right? So very simply sat yuga we're just going to say that this is the age of truth. Age of truth. Okay maybe you can read this on the camera maybe not but this is not so important. What we want to say about sati yuga is that people here in this day and age live to their ultimate truth. Um you could say perhaps there was order in society. People were had a good relationship with themselves. They were true to themselves and as a result of that they were true to people around. So things like lying, cheating, stealing, jealousy etc did not exist in that age. The way the yugas is taught it says that of all the ages sat yuga is the longest. Okay.

Each of the consequent age is half the age that precedes it and after we complete a cycle we go back towards sat yuga. So there is a cyclical nature in this that the ages are moving in a cycle going back around and again and around and again right so in the time of the sat yuga people lived the longest some people would say that people in sat yuga lived for tens of thousands of years. Again, I don't know any of this but what I want to share is that in the time of sat yuga, the age of truth, if we were to look at say a vibrational resonance of the human being, I would say that here we are all vibrating towards the truth. The vibration of people is at 100% vibration. I don't know if that means we were all gods. That's a different topic.

The second age that follows saty yoga is called tetra yuga. Tetra yoga in the context of South Asian history. Tetra yoga is defined by Ram Avatar. Um Vishnu in his uh godly essence creates avatars that comes to earth to preserve uh you can say social order or saves humanity. There's uh one story of Vishnu taking the form of a fish. There's another story of Vishnu taking the form of a boar. In Tetra Yoga, however, um Vishnu takes the form of Ram or Rama. Okay, both are the correct pronunciation. Ram has two avatars. The very first Ram avatar that comes, he's a warrior and he fights and maybe he's a little too rough. Okay. So Ram comes and he tries to bring order but the first variation of Ram is that he's too rough. A second Ram then comes and this is the Ram that most people know. Ram of Ayodhya, uh son of Dushrat, also known as Ramchandr. The stories of both Rams tell us that we've moved out of Satyoga into Tetra Yoga.

Now in a very rough way I could say that maybe by tetra yoga the vibrational resonance of people has fallen by maybe 20 to 25%. Actually I will just go down by 25% because we have four yoga here. So again these are rough numbers. They're not exact numbers. They're never meant to be exact numbers.

Okay. So here we will say that the vibration of the people in tetra yoga has dropped to 75%. And as a result of that drop in vibration we start to see a little bit of jealousy. So let's start with the jealousy. At the start of the Ramayan when Ram is wed with Sita and he comes to Ayodhya and there's a big celebration of Ram's ascension perhaps to become the crown prince and King Dushrat, the king of Ayodhya, Ayodhya meaning land without war, he's super happy with Ram he wants Ram to be the king after him but he has a third wife by the name of Kaikeya, who feels jealous and Kaikeya is owed a favor by King Dushrat. So he she tells him that she would like her son Bharat to be the king of Ayodhya instead of Ram.

You would think that perhaps that Ram would feel um angry or jealous or maybe not so good about not being the crown prince or the future king of Ayodhya. But Ram takes it in stride. He has no conflict in him. Then when Kaikeya tells Ram to leave for 14 years again he has no conflict in him and he goes. I highly recommend reading the Ramayana for any student of yoga going forward or perhaps watching one of the many variations of Ramayana available on YouTube. My personal favorite is a Japanese anime version. It tells the story so succinctly the stories of Ram Hanuman etc. If I can find the link I'll place it below.

Well, there are two stories right? The first is Kaikeya's envy. There's a vibration drop that makes Ram and Sita. Sita also has no conflict in the state to leave with Ram showing how high their vibrations are. Right? They leave the palace they go live in the forest. Who joins Ram? his brother Laxman. Laxman also decides that hey Ram is going to the jungle with my sister-in-law. There's no way they can survive. I will help them. If I stay here in the palace, perhaps I will do things that are uh not to my nature because I'm unhappy with Kaikeya. I do love my brother Bharat, but this just feels wrong. Okay, the the to loop off that story, Bharat does not become king. He actually says that he will reign in Rama's name until Ram finishes his time out in exile that he had to take as a result of a promise with mother ka. Why I bring this up? Because Ram is like the ultimate yogi. If we are to look at our own nature, right? The relationship between Ram and Sita, this is the relationship of the pure yogi. What happens? We expect something in this life. We think oh things are supposed to go this way for us and the reality changes. But unlike Ram we become upset, confused, conflicted and through that confliction conflictedness we get afflicted and that afflictions then create the sufferings that we suffer in this life. Right? If we learn to be more like Ram, we can build the strength of the world without conflict. And so Ram's story is something that I highly recommend for any practitioner of yoga or anybody who wants to go into a journey of understanding the self and establishing a healthy relationship with the self. The tetra yoga signifies a 25% drop in vibration whose um you could say the w the victory is done later when sitha is taken away from Ram and Ram has to go fight what is called a Dharam yug or a fight for dharma. That is another story.

I will continue the story of the yugas over here. The next yuga I want to introduce is something called dwarparyuga. Okay. Perhaps some of you know this story. The story of the Mahabharata. The story of the Mahabharata is the type of conflict we would have in dwarpar yuga. Why? Because in dwarpar yuga the vibration of people has steadily dropped down to the number 50%. And the story of the Mahabharata depending again who you ask it's tens of thousands of years old it is 1600 years old it is 800 years old I don't know the story of Mahabharata if you read the um the descriptions by Vyas, the Acharya the teacher who wrote it he says that he had a meeting with the gods and he's writing an accurate account of history. I'm not getting into that. What I'm going to say is that when you read the Mahabharata, you come to a very complex web of stories where certain characters defined as very strong, noble, and good like Drona Acharya or Guru Drona. He does things that are maybe not so guru like of him. Whether he's take whether he's sending his students out for revenge, whether he's passing a curse to people, whether he even cuts off or makes his own student cut off a thumb because Dronacharya was looking at himself and his family first.

That is just one example of many figures. Yudishtra, the Dharam Raj, the the the the person who represents the Ramlike figure in the Mahabharat, he has a gambling problem. The Mahabharata presents us a web of intricacies that are very complex that actually mimic a lot of what we see in real life today. Right? So the vibration of people has dropped to 50%. In the Mahabharata, we have the form of Vishnu or the form of the divine in flesh and blood under the name of Krishna. And there's a reason why I brought him up because within the Mahabharata, there is a conversation that occurs between the quote unquote greatest warrior on earth. And it has to come under quote unquote because Arjuna never really gets tested with the other two characters who are hinted at being better than him, but we never actually get to see the battle actually come down. Okay. But at the beginning of the battle Arjun uh he goes through a a crisis not so much of of a dharma crisis which is what some people try to portray this crisis that that Arjun is going through a crisis of dharm actually arjun's crisis is less about dharam dharam is in in the battlefield Arjun will be in his swa dharam to fight with swords and shields bows and arrows because this is his his most natural state. This is not the problem that Arjuna really faces. Actually, the problem that Arjuna faces in the Mahabharat is that of an identity crisis. He's unable to embody who he is at that very moment that he's supposed to start a battle. And this identity crisis is what consumes him.

And in telling Arjun to let go to establish a part of himself and to go out into the battle of Dharma, this is what Krishna shares to Arjun and that writing is called the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita tells us all about yoga. They each chapter of the Bhagavad Gita is a chapter on yoga. I'm not going to go through them in detail here. Perhaps in a future video I will take a deeper look at the Bhagavad Gita. However, the Bhagavad Gita shares us some main themes on yoga through which we still see yoga in the modern lens through the Bhagavad Gita. I will be making a video on the four main themes of the Bhagavad Gita that I will put out perhaps in the future.

The point here is that we've reached a state where the vibration of people has dropped to 50%. In the story of the Mahabharata, we have good people doing bad things, bad people doing good things. And sometimes you get conflicted reading this story because somebody you want to boo you cheer some of their actions. Somebody you want to cheer, you boo some of their actions. It's it creates a web of intricacies that start to manifest in this life. The end of the dwarpar yuga comes when Krishna Bhagwan dies. So the avatar of Vishnu known as Krishna by the end of the Dwarpar Yuga his kingdom Dwarka drops from the earth into the oceans and Krishna himself residing in a forest slowly dies and then depending on which variation of history you want to take there was a monster named uh Kali who Kali who comes up and starts to bring darkness to the world or with the death of Krishna, the humanity must go through another layer of evolution. And here's where we I'm going to take a pause and take a little bit more about what is kali yuga.

Kaliyuga is directly translated as the age of darkness. Right? So it sounds really bad like now we're at the age of darkness. If if I'm going to follow through with this vibration thing, I've been writing 100% vibration at saty yoga, 75% vibration at tetra yoga, 50% vibration at uh dwarpar yoga. By the time we come to kali yuga, the vibration has dropped to 25%. And I would like to say a couple of things um about this age of darkness.

One when you look at satyuga, tetra yoga, dwarpar yoga in the context of South Asia, the caste system it may have existed but it did not exist in a strict structure. the way it does in kali yuga. One example I can give you in kali yoga when a brahmin is touched by an untouchable the brahmin feels oh I have to take the the poop of the cow to clean this. So we know that this is the age of darkness because how can one human being be valued so low that cow poop is viewed as clean compared to a human life. This is ignorance. This is darkness.

Another thing I want to state about kaliyuga. We know we are in kaliyuga when we have the human being held as slaves. That one human being can think they have the ability to own another. And this is not in our past. I'm talking about I'm talking about the world today. There are so many people that are still used in the slavery business today. We have slavery, sex slavery, many other things occurring in the world in Kaliyuga. We are living in Kaliyuga because we have while a lot of us are finding peace, prosperity and materialism, there are still bombs being dropped. There are still starvation. There are still things occurring in the world that is dark. That makes us actually, you could say, a part of us demonic. So there's a part of us that chooses to be willfully blind or willfully ignorant. And the fact that this exists means we are in kali yuga. And yoga is actually the time or the practice of kali yoga because on the positive note kali yoga uh says and I'm going to take the um a seek philosopher in the mid 1500s by the name of Bhai Gurdas. He says this about kali yoga that in the time of kali yoga we can listen to the words of the spiritual masters and through the words of the spiritual masters we can free or liberate our own being

Right, so we look at kali yuga we've had various spiritual masters at various parts of the world be it the Buddha go sri goautama who broke his cast did not accept the cast that he was born in and became a spiritual leader We have uh Hazrat Muhammad who presented a path of love and light for his Islamic followers. We have Jesus Christ who spoke who was a revolutionary who spoke against the money makers of the temple and against the Roman Empire who was tortured for doing so and gave the teachings to free the soul. We have Guru Nanak of the Sikhs who taught that no matter what occurs in this world we keep to our higher self and we remember the divine. And we have in yoga the words of Patanjali who brought and systemized the teachings of yoga as something that we can practice every day. The words of Bhai Gurdas the Sikh philosopher says this about the teachings of Patanjali. He says that in the yoga sutra of Patanjali, Patanjali has given the path through which we can polish the mirror and clean the windows. This is beautiful in Kaliyuga because of the age of darkness. What we need to do, what we try to do, we need to polish the mirror. What does polishing the mirror do? It makes us reflect on ourselves much better. This is what we are trying to do in the practice, right? And clean the windows. What do we do when we live in the house? If the window is clean, we can see outside. We clear our perceptions so that we can see the world more clearly.

And it is in the age of Kali yoga that Patanjali gives his eighth bodied path of yoga referred to as ashtanga yoga which is something that we can study much further when you join uh yoga teacher training and you learn the philosophy of yoga. In the other ages, we had to rely on a spiritual middleman between the self and the divine because structure was more orderly, things were uh more strict in its place. But in Kali Yuga, we have the direct access to the divine. We get the direct access to God.

And this is not just me saying it. All the spiritual masters of Kaliyuga has taught exactly the same. Whether it is the Buddha, whether it is uh Christ, whether it is Guru Nanak, they have taught the same. But what happens in Kali Yoga is we become dogmatic. Oh, I am a follower of this path. Now I will follow this path. So now that anybody that follows the path different from me, I am going to judge them and I am going to tell them you are no good. Like this this skeleton over here, he does not have his head covering or or a beard. Not very nice of him. Right?

We are judging people like I'm judging this skeleton here. Everybody is oh I prayed exactly like this and I had my finger moved like this. They did not have it. They must be bad. This is what happens in kali yuga. We start judging, judging, judging. But what we forget is that the self is the divine. And the teachings of all the spiritual masters of kaliyuga has said this. So in kaliyuga we get a direct access to the divine. This access is more difficult because the vibration and the noise of vibration is much much more difficult.

We create a web of reality called Maya and we live in this Maya much deeper. In my next video here I'm going to talk more about what is maya and how this get formed and how we can use the knowledge of the self to transcend the maya. For this kali yuga we have direct access to the divine.

For the yogi we get the teachings of Patanjali and the teachings of Patanjali tell us that we according to Bhai Gurdas Gurdas uh polish the mirror and clean the windows. When we polish the mirror, we can reflect and see ourselves more clearly. When we clean the windows, we can see the outside world better. And so the yoga or the practice of kali yuga is to have a good strong Sadhna a firm foundation of a daily practice of yoga the eight limbs of yoga and applying the teachings of the spiritual masters in this modern world in this modern context. So when we talk about yoga, what is yoga, how yoga works, we're talking about it in the context of yoga in yoga. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did like it, please like and subscribe to this video and the channel.

Thank you so much to Ananda Yoga and Detox for creating a space to film this video and taking the time to film the video with me. Thank you so much. I look forward to the next video in the series and hope that you will also come and watch it.