Historians see the advance of civilization in terms of progressive sophistication from primitive "hunter gatherers" to farmers, to city dwellers, to our own age of unprecedented scientific achievement. Their teaching is that basic human nature has remained more or less the same throughout history. They quite naturally dismiss the possibility that man, though he lives in a cos mic environment, is affected by cosmic influences.
Paramhansa Yogananda's guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, gave us a very different view of history, based on the reality of those influences. He said the earth passes repeatedly through great cycles of increasing and diminishing awareness from deep ignorance to steadily greater enlightenment, then back again to its former depths. Relying on ancient tradition as well as on his own intuition, Sri Yukteswar attributed these cycles to the sun's movement around a dual, a revolution which brings our solar system alternately closer to and farther away from a cosmic center of highly conscious energy, or Vishnunabhi.
Interestingly, numerous ancient peoples throughout the world believed in these cycles of time. They even divided each of them into four ages, which Greek tradition symbolized with the words gold, silver, copper, and iron Orthodox historians today, of course, don't admit the possibility that such cycles exist. Yet it is from his tory itself that we get the first glimpses of those cycles' reality.
These great cycles of time, as Sri Yukteswar explained them, reached their nadir, or lowest point, in the year 500 AD. Indeed, one discerns in the centuries prior to that year a gradual decrease of knowledge, awareness, and sensitivity, amounting to a steady decline in human awareness. Since 500 AD, moreover, there has clearly been a steady increase in that awareness, resulting in ever-greater clarity.
The possibility of the earth's going through a cycle of ascending and descending ages gives credence to the evidence, rapidly accumulating in our own day, that high civilizations existed in the past. Many books today make a case for some of those civilizations, at least, having reached far higher heights than our own. As for there being cycles of time due to the movement within the galaxy of our sun, at least two books so far address this subject in depth: Lost Star of Myth and Timer, by Walter Cruttenden, and The Yugas, by Joseph Sellie and Byasa Steinmetz.
Consider one simple, known reality which points to the general debasement of consciousness approaching 500 AD: the Roman "games," in which gladiators ferociously slaughtered one another in the Colosseum, to the applause and delight of many thousands Today it seems hardly credible, but even Saint Augustine, in his youth, was addicted to those games.
Consider also the widespread poverty and squalor of those times; the general illiteracy, the violence and insensitivity, the brevity of life combined with the prevalence of disease. These and many other symptoms of emotional and intellectual darkness prevailed everywhere.
Since 500 AD, there has been a general rise in human conscious ness. Si Yukteswar corrected old Kali luga reckonings as to the correct length of each age, which assigned to Kali Yuga a duration of 432,000 years. Sri Yukteswar said that, in fact, a whole cycle lasts only 24,000 years, and the darkest age lasts only 1,200 descending, and 1,200 ascending years.
I would like to express my gratitude to the many conscientious scholars whose careful research made this work possible. Especially I would like to thank C. Warren Hollister and his student, Amanda Clark Frost, for their monumental work, Henry L. It was more than nine years ago that Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters), after reading their book, suggested that I consider under taking doing the research for, and writing, another book, based on theirs, but intended for a more general readership.
Their work was obviously intended especially for the benefit of fellow scholars. Its nearly five hundred pages contained some 2500 footnotes, some of which included untranslated passages in the original French, Latin, or Greek. Obviously their work, though ground-breaking, was intended for a restricted readership. Swami Kriyananda proposed that I research and write a work for a broad er audience.
I want also to thank the following individuals: Devi Novak and Asha Praver, for their insights into similarities between Henry and Kriyananda; Richard Salva, who brought his own scholarship and love for the subject to the job of indexing; and Anandi Cornell, for her editorial help.
Above all, I want to express my profound gratitude to Swami Kriyananda, my dear teacher and friend, who gave unstintingly of his time to help edit and shorten material that might otherwise, because of my enthusiasm for the subject, have overwhelmed the poor reader with too many facts! I want to thank him also for giving me the courage to produce what may be viewed in time as a new kind of history.
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