Can cataclysms get any bigger than they are now?
The year was 1989. I was standing in my agency’s wobbly second story loft, just a few blocks from Stanford, where I once worked. My mind was riveted on a deadline. Co-workers were finishing last-minute conversations, trying to get the most out of an 8-hour work day. It was a few minutes past 5:00 pm. Suddenly, I felt the loft toss and rumble, a large truck navigating the garage below. I stared out the east-facing window as a sea of mountains bobbed up and down. Oh no, this is the big one. Bookshelves were falling everywhere and people were rushing to get under a doorway, of which there were none in the open-air loft. We thought about how we might die. It lasted for 15 seconds.
Later, a colleague, a talented artist who lived in the Santa Cruz mountains not far from the epicenter, described to me her experience. She was returning from work and had just lifted her baby out of the car seat when she felt it. She grabbed her other toddler’s hand and they began to walk towards the front door of their house. Within seconds, the earth between her house and her car opened into a massive gulch. They quickly returned to her car. Lives were lost. Nakula, my soon-to-be fiancé, was working at the Palo Alto ashram where I lived. He said the swells in the swimming pool were 10 feet high, a tidal cocktail sloshing back and forth.
Being born and raised not far from the San Andreas fault in California, earthquakes were on the menu. Over time, I’d learned the difference between a moderate and a strong shake, and could even guess the approximate Richter scale. Once, sitting at a stop light in Palo Alto, I felt one and guessed it was a 5.4 to 5.6. As a young girl, I used to feel them in our home, as if some giant hand was moving the couch back and forth across the floor, with me in it.
I’d never felt one this violent before. Though it was only a 6.9, with earthquakes, each order of magnitude is 10 times more intensive than the last one.
My father used to proudly show us the small cracks they left in the plaster walls of our aging home. He once told us about his grandmother, who had relayed to him the story of experiencing the after effects of the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883. She was a young girl, and could recall the earth’s skies were altered and dark for years afterwards. Over 36,000 people lost their lives. Back then, the population was far less. A Krakatoa-sized cataclysm today in a densely populated area could easily wipe out millions of people.
As mini-cataclysms ebb and flow around us, many are beginning to migrate, a natural occurring event that even happened in the last Descending Dwapara Yuga before the collapse of the Bronze Age catapulted us into the dark ages. Now, people are leaving California for fear of wildfires, yet the Maui wildfire and those in Canada leave us perplexed. More hurricanes and warmer, rising seas are here. As Yogananda once predicted, “You don’t know what cataclysms are coming!” He also said that in the future, we wouldn’t be safe anywhere. Yogananda urged young people to band together and move from the cities to the country, buy land together, grow their own food and live simply. Small spiritual communities, he said, will eventually spread like wildfire and become the blueprint for the future. Simplicity of living and high thinking would lead to the greatest happiness.
As far as I can tell, this might be the nature of Satya Yuga.
We are now in the early phases of Dwapara Yuga, the age of energy. The Yugas are a 24,000-year period of alternating descending (12,000 years) and ascending (12,000 years) consciousness that’s been recognized for millions of years. We are currently in Ascending Dwapara Yuga, which should give us hope, yet we still have many thousands of years before we reach the high civilization of Satya Yuga.
In Treta Yuga, we can communicate telepathically and our mind power lends superhuman abilities.
In the golden age of Satya Yuga, people can live to be four hundred years old. Yogi saints, like Babaji and those mentioned in The Autobiography of a Yogi, can live for thousands of years, which seems unfathomable. Everyone lives in harmony with nature. Satya (which means truth) Yuga is said to be ruled by the Gods, where pure ideals and goodness reign. People have a higher awareness of who they really are, our oneness with spirit and all that is. Compared to now, think how nice this could be. You won’t have to struggle with the idiosyncratic likes and dislikes of which politician or dictator you feel is most evil because you finally realize that they are really just a part of your own consciousness.
In Satya Yuga, most old forms and institutions will no longer exist. Language as we know it will disappear and there will be new things we can’t imagine. However, even as now, there will still be desires. And it’s our desire for fame, riches, our favorite friend, the perfect vanilla ice cream atop that flaky wafer cone, sleeping in, or other elusive desires that keep us reincarnating time after time, until, until what?
Yogananda once described the search for happiness and Divine Bliss as the ultimate quest. He even described what this feeling is like. When Divine Bliss comes, immediately my breath is still and I am lifted into the Spirit. I feel the bliss of a thousand sleeps rolled into one, and yet I don’t lose my ordinary awareness. When this profound superconscious state comes to us, the breath ceases to flow, all is quiet and we receive the magic wand of intuition deep. Then, he said, you drink of God’s bliss and experience an intoxication of joy that not a thousand draughts of wine could give you.
So go ahead and fill your soul with as much light as you can possibly imagine. It’s all there inside you. The more we meditate and bring light into the world, the more we have a chance to bring positive change. And don’t forget to share your light with all. The world needs your breath.
Thank you, Nischala, for your rich and beautiful account of the nature of time and being.