Most of us have heard that we live in the
Kali Yuga – a dark age of materialism and spiritual forgetting. But in his 1894 classic
The Holy Science (
Kaivalya Darsanam), the great master
Swami Sri Yukteswar – guru of
Paramahansa Yogananda – offered a luminous re-reading of the ages that turns this gloom on its head.
A mistake in the calendars
Sri Yukteswar pointed out that the enormous yuga lengths found in many almanacs – hundreds of thousands or millions of years – had crept in through error. During the depths of the dark age, he explained, scholars lost the key to the true reckoning and mistook smaller numbers for vast ones. The real cycle, he taught, is to be counted in ordinary human years.
The 24,000-year cycle
In his account, the ages move in a great wheel of about
24,000 years – a descending arc of 12,000 years in which consciousness gradually dims, followed by an ascending arc of 12,000 years in which it rises again. He linked this rhythm to the slow movement of our sun around a companion centre, mirrored in the precession of the equinoxes – the gentle “wobble” of the Earth observed by astronomers.
The four ages
Within each arc unfold four ages of differing length and light:
Satya (4,800 years), the age of truth;
Treta (3,600);
Dvapara (2,400), the electric or energy age; and
Kali (1,200), the age of matter. As the cycle turns, humanity passes down through them and then back up again.
We are rising, not falling
Here is the hopeful heart of the teaching. By Sri Yukteswar’s calculation, the descending Kali Yuga reached its lowest point around 500 CE, and humanity has been
ascending ever since – entering the rising
Dwapara Yuga, the age of energy, around 1700 CE. It is no coincidence, he suggested, that the centuries since have seen an explosion of understanding about electricity, magnetism and the subtle forces of nature.
Why it matters
If Sri Yukteswar is right, we are not stranded at the bottom of a dark age but climbing into the light. Collective consciousness is rising – and the inner sciences that had been hidden for centuries are naturally re-emerging. It is striking that
Kriya Yoga itself was restored to the world in 1861, just as this ascending tide gathered strength. For the seeker, the message is one of encouragement: the current of the age is now flowing with you, towards greater awareness, not away from it.
