The Yugas and Shiva
The Hindus, like the Mayans, did not see time as a linear arrow extending from past to future with random events each building off the last, they saw time as an oscillation or a cycle of ages.
The Mayan Calendar ended its long count of an age at the end of 2012; an age which had attributes very similar to the Kali Yuga that ends (approximately) in 2024. If you imagine an electromagnetic wave on an oscilloscope, this is how they viewed time and events that happened in time.
In Western Astrology, where we get all of our modern astrology signs (or common archetypes), there is a Great Year through which we pass, and each sub-age travels backwards through the signs, from Pisces to Ares. According to this cycle, we entered the Age of Aquarius sometime at the end of the last century, perhaps around 1970. Some accounts state that we will reach the Age of Aquarius in the next hundred years, however.
You can also visualize time as a weight at the end of a coil, and the coil moves up and down with the weight’s pull upon it. So, if we look at the metaphor of a wave or a bouncing coil, there’s a high point (golden age – Satya Yuga) and a low point (Kali Yuga – iron age).
The Satya Yuga or Golden Age is marked by peace and prosperity for all life on the planet; man living in harmony with Nature and in the understanding of “God and Godly things”. These terms “God” and “Godly Things” are simply metaphors to be contemplated as per one’s own knowledge and understanding.
The Kali Yuga or Iron Age is marked with obsession with power and all material things, division, war, confusion, loss of connection with God and Christ-Krishna consciousness. This does not mean that if you are in Kali Yuga that it is impossible for you to observe God and renounce the destructive mode of world as temporal yet remain in the world as Christ said.
Nor does it mean that you can’t be an individual who is lost and in darkness (unconsciousness) within the Satya Yuga.
A Yuga is simply a cycle and the majority-trend by which consciousness/experience is guided.
Also, they saw this cycle as a Universal Law, something that is built into the universe, almost like how gravity and/or electromagnetism causes the Earth to move around the Sun. Whatever the engine that causes it, the Earth certainly moves around the Sun, and even the Sun orbits the center of the galaxy. There is very little that will change this other than entities which are still governed by the same physical laws. Such as it is with the Universal Law of Cycles.
The Kali Yuga has been an age which has lasted the last two periods of both descending (2700 years) and ascending (2700 years).
On a side note, I believe that Noah and his arc was a story scribed at the end of the last Golden Age, approximately 9976 BC when it descended into the Treta Yuga – a silver age. New evidence suggests that this great age came to a stop due to a comet striking the earth around 12,600 years ago. According to Graham Handcock's life time work, an advanced human civilization was destroyed around that time. Plato's Atlantis, Lemuria, and many other tales of an enlightened, advanced global culture come from this Golden Age.
From the end of the last Golden Age, the Yuga cycle has been in a period of a descending wave, where consciousness slowed down from a higher resonance (meaning closer to “God and Godly Things” - again, this is a personal contemplation). Each age begins with a transition period of about 300 years, and we can consider this to be a birth period – which determines what ‘form’ the next Yuga takes.
The 300 years is marked by Chaos, which unlike the western mind, the old religions always had two forms that chaos takes – Creation and Destruction. This is where Shiva and his cohorts come in.
It is said that at the end of each Yuga, Shiva chooses another cohort to dance with. And through this dance, our temporal reality (our earthly life) is formed. Shiva represents our individual willpower and intention, and even Shiva has two forms: supine and standing. Or, awakened and dreaming. Shiva, in awakened or dreaming state always chooses a cohort, and whether this choice is conscious or not is up to how aware we are of the choices that lay before us.
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There are two choices he can make: Kali or Shakti. These are the female entities which represent chaos, but as I stated before, one is creative chaos and the other is destructive. It is important to understand that Chaos is a neutral force and is actually part of the universe. One look into the heavens reveals both order and chaos in all its beauty with stars being born and dying – both are very chaotic events. It is an allegory of Chaos itself. This is very important to understand.
So he chooses either Kali or Shakti – destroying or creating. The Chaos itself is unavoidable since the cohort is chosen as part of the beginning of a new cycle. So in a round about way, I just explained to you why this transitional period is just that – Chaos will always return to Order. But it is up to us to consciously choose which kind of order comes from the chaos – creative or destructive. It is a GOLDEN opportunity to choose.
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My own quest for truth through self education started about 5 years ago after reading the book "Holy Science". I had heard of Plato's Great Year before but I didn't really give it much thought until after reading this book. Accepting the possibility that human consciousness can rise and fall in 24,000 year cycles has opened up avenues for understanding that explains so much for me that I think the cycle must be true, but I've yet to see a truly convincing theory for the cause of it. The theories set forth in the book and expanded upon by Walter Cruttenden are interesting but I don't see how they can directly affect consciousness. I have my own theories as to the cause, but would be interested to hear your thoughts on what causes the rising and falling of human consciousness. On a related note, I've recently re-read the Christian bible with an eye towards Astrotheology. While this has given me new insight into much of the allegory, interestingly I've also come to believe in the truth of long lives and giant stature of men in past ages and believe that the physical mechanism for this must be related to level of consciousness. Do you feel this way also?
@gmcalfee
I thank you for your thoughtful reply.
The very structure of our universe is a sort of oscillation of energies. Take for example if you view a light bulb through a very slow motion camera of many frames per second, and you will see the light "flicker" as light itself is a wavelength and nothing that is on all the time. The same goes for the greater cycles and oscillations, including our own cycles of consciousness.
The ancients understood this innately.
As far as the long-lived lives in the bible, I think perhaps the "years" was mistranslated from "moon cycles" perhaps. I personally do not feel that a human's life can go very far beyond 120 years (but I'm always ok with being wrong about this).
I've found this simple demonstration to be a useful tool in understanding cyclical consciousness shifts. In it you can see aspects of changing unity, duality, trinity, and quadrality all bracketed by periods of chaos.
This is a beautiful representation. Thank you for sharing it!
Awesome Work!