Looking farther than your immediate circumstances, there are many positive and negative happenings in the wider world. And most are negative. They may seem very distant, but all scenes and events touch us in some way or another. They challenge our state of being, disturb our meditation and give us reason to regurgitate old feelings of anger and frustration. So we need to find an overview of the larger picture both historically and geographically. To do that we need to revise our perspective of the story of our journey as one human family up to this point in time.
Time has been a subject of fascination for many seekers of truth, through the ages. It has been stretched into millions of years by scientists seeking the origin of the universe. It has been squashed into one life by those who think we only have one chance to take what we can get – regardless of the effect on others.
To the eternal soul, time is a paradox. It is, and yet it is not. We are “in time” and yet we are immortal, beyond time. To the soul that has come to think of itself as a body, time means the pain of being trapped, imprisoned by limitations and the desires and perspectives which stem from identifying with the body.
In the physical world there is another law that is inescapable. It is so obvious, with evidence all around, but we don’t recognise its significance. It is the law that “Everything new becomes old”. Nothing ever goes the other way. Everything, from cars to carpets, philosophy to religion, moves from a state of newness to oldness. Translate this process onto the world physical plane and we now see an old world, over-used, mis-used, tired and worn out. And then translate this into your attitude which has become so physical and you will see why you also feel worn out, tired, old… even while you still may be relatively young.
Golden Age
Accepting this movement from new to old evokes a very different picture of time. In almost every scripture, mythology or legend, from the ancient Greeks to the Aborigines, from the Incas to the Hindus, there are extensive references to a time, some three or four thousands years ago, when the earth was paradise. The Garden of Eden, Atlantis, Dreamtime, are references to the time when the world was beautiful and new, perfect and paradisiacal. There was heaven, on earth, not up in the clouds, when matter was brand new, rich in colour and sound, beyond our imagination. And there we were, walking the earth, as divine beings who had come to play, to sing and dance like children, in the garden.
At that time, we souls were also fresh and new, so our consciousness was pure and totally positive. Joy, happiness and harmony were our natural experience and expression. There was a small population of less than a million, an abundance of natural resources and the complete absence of division, fear and conflict. This was the Golden Age of mankind. One land, one people, one way of life.
Silver Age
As time moved on, the population grew, and gradually each soul lost a little of its pure, conscious energy. After just over a thousand years of this “heavenly” existence, the degrees of newness and spiritual purity were slightly reduced and the world moved into what could be called a Silver Age. Still a time of harmony and oneness, still an age of no conflict or division, still a time when we expressed our highest and purest personality through a culture of natural love and truth, but the purity of this second season of humanity was slightly less than of the Golden Age.
More and more, as time passed, the power of the soul and the purity of consciousness reduced while the population increased. And then there came a critical moment when the first soul lost its spiritual awareness, and identified itself with the human form. This was the first moment of body consciousness which quickly spread, like a virus, to other souls whose spiritual power and identity had also weakened. The result was a pervasive attraction to others’ bodies, reliance on the physical senses for happiness and the wish for separation and division. This in turn led to the first experiences of conflict, of fear, of greed and of the first wave of sorrow within human consciousness.
Copper Age
Then began the third period “the fall”, or Copper Age. Spiritual power was quickly shed as body-consciousness became widespread. The sense of separateness resulted in the traveling and establishment of different communities, cultures and beliefs. Eventually nation states were formed, which then came into conflict over land and resources. The proliferation of conflict and sorrow, unnatural to human consciousness, sparked the search for meaning and purpose. Philosophy and science become the agents of that search. As different parts of the world were occupied by wandering and conquering humans, special souls incarnated with a message of truth and incited people to return to a spiritual way of life. Abraham, Buddha, Christ and Mohammed each brought spiritual guidance and lived by the principles they preached. But only a few had the power to follow, the rest merely listened and admired
Iron Age
The atmosphere and conditions throughout the world darkened as the earth moved into its fourth season, the Iron Age.
Our libraries are stocked with accounts of the past thousand years. From cover to cover books record the explosion of division and conflict, plundering and pillaging in all four corners of the world. But it is especially in the past one hundred years that the greatest darkness has swept across human affairs. Never before have there been so many wars, so many divisions (there are now 183 nation states), so much greed, so much anger (across borders and the breakfast table), so much racial tension so much exploitation of resources. While we appear to be progressing technologically, human behaviour, human relations and human consciousness appear to be regressing. These are signs of souls losing their power and thus the ability to live in harmony.
The prospect of what must happen next is alarming. Unless we revise our concept of time. A consequence of physical identification has been the assumption of time-linear thinking, implying that the death of the body is the final moment. “Take what you can now” is a philosophy which stems from this. People speculate on when time began and there is great uncertainty about when it might finish. Yet there is evidence all around us that suggests time does not move in this way.
Time is our measure of change. One year is measured by the cyclical movement of the planet around its own axis while orbiting the sun. And here lies the key to understanding the movement of time. The cycle of the day from dawn to daylight to dusk to night is a movement from new to old which repeats with absolute constancy. The larger cycle of the seasons from spring (dawn) to summer (day) to autumn (dusk) to winter (night) revolves in the same way. It is also a cyclical movement that repeats.
Stand back from the enormous picture of history and you will see yet a larger cycle: Golden Age (dawn/spring) to Silver Age (day/ summer) to Copper Age (dusk/ autumn) to Iron Age (night/winter).
And here we are now, at the dark zenith of human affairs. We have lost our spiritual power. We search for some truth or else squabble over resources which have been fragmented by our ideologies. All this, however, is just part of the larger movement in time: a few scenes from the complete story. It is also of our own creation, because we have forgotten who we are and why we are here. Like children playing all day in the woods and as night descends they realise they don’t know where they are or how to get home, we feel an overwhelming sense of being lost. Our cries for help take many forms of expression – from drugs to crime, from outright violence to the inner breakdown of mind and body.
It is at this point that the spiritual parent, God, hears that cry and responds. He intervenes, at the only time during our entire journey to tell us the whole story. He tells us who we are, what has happened to us and how to find our way home. His love is unconditional. He reveals the absolute truth of our history, our present stage and offers a vision of the future. He restores our sense of context of where we are and what we have to do in the context of time and space.
The cyclic movement of time means the past is also the future, and future is the past. From such a perspective we can joyfully expect the dawn. Yet for this to happen, great changes must take place in the context of human affairs to invoke the new dawn and the beginning of a new Golden Age. The old must give way to the new. It is a change process however, which must begin from within the individual. It cannot be focused from or on the outside.
Understanding the cyclical nature of time and change, and the principle that everything new becomes old, helps us to interpret and understand the obvious breakdown of society today. Our systems, boundaries, structures, institutions are all in a state of phenomenal flux and disintegration. Nations are destroying each other, either by outright warfare or by creeping exploitation. And nature itself is reacting to decades of human violence and abuse.
This period of transition is called the Diamond Age, signifying an age that is small, like a diamond, but very precious, like a diamond. It is also called the Confluence Age, signifying the coming together of souls with God, the children with their Father. It is the time where the “night” of human affairs meets the new “day”. A meeting of two ages, or the transition from one cycle into the next, provokes extreme and sudden change. If you are unaware of the significance of this time in relation to the larger picture, these changes and upheavals will disturb you, and meditation will have little effect on maintaining your inner peace. But realising the uniqueness of this time, seeing that night must transform into day, you can be free of the tension and fear caused by the unknown. Only then will you be able to see clearly your own role and know what you have to do.
Stand back and observe the picture of life on earth. Meditate on it. See it through your third eye, the eye of spiritual awareness. Do you apprehend the real journey of time and your own journey through it as an eternal soul or spark of conscious energy? You are in the cycle and the cycle is in you. Do you remember?
Births in Each Age
The cosmic cycle indicates how matter and consciousness (Souls) come into play during a course of 5000 years. Relationship of Consciousness to Matter is that Nature i.e. matter, reflects human consciousness. Consciousness is primary. If human consciousness get corrupted, nature too declines in its state of purity.
Souls, Supreme Soul, and Matter exist eternally. How these three come into interaction defines the cosmic cycle.
The cycle is five thousand years in duration and the number of total births a soul can take reaches a maximum of 84, as follows:
Golden Age: 8 physical births
Silver Age : 12 physical births
Copper Age: 21 physical births
Iron Age: 42 physical births
Diamond Age: 1 spiritual birth
In this we can calculate that there are 21 births in joy and 63 births in the period of mixed happiness and sorrow. You can also see that, as each of the four main ages are equal in duration, the life span in the golden age is much longer than the average life span in the iron age.
Meditation is seldom associated with history and concepts such as time and space. More it is seen as a method to escape or be free of the concepts and details of such things. Raja Yoga meditation however recognizes that the natural thirst of the soul for truth and understanding, for meaning and significance, for purpose and identity must be satisfied before the “peace that surpasses all pleasure” can be achieved through the technique of meditation itself.
The purpose of this meditation is to deepen our realization of who we are, acknowledging that we were one of those pure beings in the heavenly paradise. We call this spinning the cycle of self-realization. It’s a powerful way of destroying my weaknesses. Let’s meditate now…
I, the peaceful soul, see my life in this birth, the last birth of the iron age. In a detached way, I observe the difficulties, the obstacles, the sorrows. I look back before this birth and vaguely see a previous birth, a previous bodily identity, perhaps male, perhaps female. I go back 43 births and see, with the eye of understanding, a life of peace, a smile on the face, happiness that remains from the moment I arrive in that body until the moment I depart from it, ignorant of even the words sorrow, difficulty or obstacle. I am in the silver age, an age without vice, without sin, without negativity – only purity, peace and happiness. As I go further back in time, 50 births, 60 births, 70, 84 births, as the cycle of time begins, with the resplendent golden age…I see a joy in abundance, from childhood to seniority, nothing but the extreme of inner joy that expresses itself outwardly in the most abundant liveliness, creativity, innocence and pure love. This is the Liberation in Life spoken of by ascetics later in the cycle, the time wherein no-one and nothing can snatch away our kingdom of happiness. Then I go back a little further, before I arrived in the drama… I am in my Home, the Soul World, the Supreme, Holy dwelling of my perfect Father, God…There is stillness… Sweet Silence… Ultimate purity and total peace…Suspended in golden-red light, I the soul, together with the Father…And together with thousands of millions of my brother souls…All in perfect purity… And stillness. This is the “Liberation Beyond Life” that millions of yogis have aspired to throughout the ages, a Liberation that is the right of each and every soul…For this is our Home. Now I realize who I am… I am that holy being of light, a child of God, who emerged from that pure Land of Peace, where I was by my Father’s side. And I now realize further who I am…I am that divine human being, known as a deity, that expressed its joy and being through a pure body at the beginning of time. And today, as I turn my thoughts around the cycle, I find myself returning to my origin. I find myself becoming my Truth… A peaceful, pure soul.