Joseph Selbie on the Yugas interview.
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done well over 600 of them now. If this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com b-a-t-g-a-p and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll find them all organized in various ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on the website and a page about alternatives to PayPal. We did something a little unusual this time, both last week and this week, I’m speaking with the same guest. And that came up both because he has written two books on entirely different topics. And they both interested me, and I wanted to talk about them. And also because we had a scheduling mix up last week. So he was originally scheduled for this week. But at the last minute, we did an additional one last week. So anyway, the guest I’m alluding to is Joseph Selbie. And last week, we talked about his book, The Physics of God. We’ll have a few questions about that today and then move on to the topic we’re gonna talk about mainly today, which is the yugas, and in a minute Joseph will explain what the yugas are. Joseph has been a member of the Ananda community in Northern California for over 50 years that was centered is centered around the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda. And I’ll let him say a little bit more about himself. But he has had a keen interest in science all of his life, which is why he wrote the book about the physics of God, a the keen interest in spirituality. All right, Joseph, you want to just, we don’t have to go through, well, yeah, go ahead. Whatever you’d like to add about yourself here without necessarily telling the whole story of the LSD trip and all that stuff that you talked about last week, because people can go back and watch the previous one as well.
Joseph: Yeah, well, I think that kind of the core of that story that I told to begin last discussion was really that there’s kind of two sides to me, if you will. I have a strong scientific bent, and I have a strong meditation practice. And I’m deep into the spiritual teachings in general, and in specific, those of Paramahansa Yogananda. And something I didn’t mention last week, which also fits in with, you know, who I am, and how I got here is that Yogananda in particular was instrumental in bringing Western science, Western vernacular into describing Eastern spiritual teachings. So it was a excellent fit for me that those are the teachings I was drawn to. And so a lot of what I bring into my book on The Physics of God, and for that matter into The Yugas, as we’ll get to, has kind of some of its foundation in the way that Yogananda brought scientific principles into Eastern teachings. So that’s kind of it in a nutshell, there’s two sides to me. And I like to think of them as being, you know, blended together in The Physics of God, and classes and articles and so forth. Because I feel that particularly in America, but really throughout the West, science is kind of a foundation for people’s way of understanding reality. So if you don’t give credence to it, or if you don’t contrast it, even with Eastern spiritual teachings, a lot of people don’t feel comfortable with those teachings. They don’t feel like they can possibly make any sense. So by bringing the two together, I hope to make Eastern spiritual teachings and in general, I would call it universal spiritual teachings more accessible to Westerners.
Rick: Good. Yeah, my former teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi also was really big on science and spirituality. And he did a lot to promote research on meditation. But he also formulated something he called the science of creative intelligence, which was an attempt to really, I mean, using somewhat scientific language, an attempt to scientifically investigate God or, you know, make the study of deeper reality of life which mystics and yogi’s have explored, accessible to scientific or empirical study and investigation. I actually got a master’s degree in that back in the day. But that’s why the topic fascinates me too. It’s kind of in my blood. Yeah. Okay, good. So, um, a few wrap up points from last week. One point you made, when we were talking about The Physics of God was that, although there was math to, there is mathematics to somehow explain many worlds theory that some physicists or astronomers come up with, there is no math to support theories of consciousness that you’re aware of. And I was wondering whether that is because perhaps, consciousness is so fundamental, that it transcends all realms to which math might apply?
Joseph: Well, I think that’s a good assumption. I think it’s an assumption that has been made, you know, for many, many years, that I’ve been aware of, you know, sort of the scientific discoveries within consciousness, such as Dean Radin’s work and others. But I sort of wonder if, given the incredible creativity of scientists in general, that they won’t find a way to apply some kind of math to it. You forwarded me an article, or an email from a person who sent you the article for me to look at. And it was an exploration of how mathematics could be applied to consciousness. Now, there was one key thing there, though, was that the, the study that he was sharing with me, was trying to explore how to apply mathematics to the notion that the brain creates consciousness. And so it was looking a lot at how brain circuits work and whether brain circuits could be, you know, their function could be expressed through mathematical principles. So it wasn’t really about consciousness separate from the brain. But it was interesting to see that had already been attempted.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, even if consciousness is fundamental, and the brain is a transmitter receiver, rather than a generator of consciousness, perhaps the types of things that study discussed, that article discussed, would still be relevant. But, you know, just as they say, how, you know, the eyeball can’t see itself, because it’s that by which everything is seen, consciousness can’t be observed as an object apart from consciousness can because it is the observer. And, you know, it’s the ultimate sort of vantage point. And so, you know, maybe that ultimatness of it is, you know, means that it’s so transcendental that, well, I just repeated my earlier question that it’s not amenable to mathematical analysis of formulas, it’s just, because it’s not a thing. It’s not manifest in any sense.
Joseph: Right. There was one interesting thought I’d had after we talked last week. I don’t know if you’ve run into this yourself, but many near-death experiencers have mentioned that there are sort of schools in the astral regions. And one of them that has been referred to by many near-death experiencers is mathematics. So maybe perhaps what they’re working on in astral school bridges that. I don’t know. I’d love to know. And when I pass on, I’m going to be eager to go check that school out. Maybe I can enroll.
Rick: Yeah. I think Michael Newton talked about that in his books, too. You probably read his books.
Joseph: Some of them. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, good. So here’s a few questions. Christina Hutchins from Portland, Oregon was wondering, you know, regarding the observer effect and the moon, which we talked about a lot, you know whether the moon exists. “Another analogy if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Both scenarios completely discount the consciousness of any other being. Your thoughts and ideas on the consciousness of plants, trees, insects, animals, who might be in the forest when the tree falls, and the hubris of human-centric consciousness among scientists?”
Joseph: Well, mea culpa for hubris. I agree with you 100%. The reason it hasn’t been really addressed in, you know, by other physicists conducting these kind of experiments is simply because no one has figured out any way to prove it. You know, if a beetle is there in the forest, I would guess that that beetle would make perceptible that which is within range of that beetle’s senses. But how can it be proven one way or the other? So I agree with you in spirit, I agree with the person who asked the question in spirit. But I don’t know of any way that we can say one way or the other, whether it’s true. Okay. Another question, Meg Bain from New York: “What is the mind? Do our brains take electrical impulses from the quantum field through our senses, and then convert them to what we see, feel, taste, hear and smell, and then project these impulses onto the ‘mind,’ like a TV screen does, thus creating the reality we experience? If matter is mostly space and electrons pop in and out, the mind as a TV screen seems to be one way to explain reality.” I think it’s a good question and a good analogy. This gives me a chance to engage in some shameless commerce. I have a book coming out in the fall that focuses on the mind and how I believe there is a local / non-local continuous interaction from the local brain to the non-local mind and back again. So I think it’s I think it’s a good analogy. I use one similar to it in the upcoming book. It doesn’t come out until September if you’re interested. And it’s called “Breakthrough the Limits of the Brain.” But I think that thoughts, memories, emotion, the mind’s eye view are all non local; that the physical brain is not capable of generating those, but that there is an immediate no time delay kind of connection between the circuitry of the brain and those non-nocal phenomenon and vice versa the other way.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, good. All right. One final question on this stuff. This is from a fella named Withold Winnick in the U.S. “Does human consciousness collapse a wave into an observable particle in the double slit experiments? Or is it a less esoteric result of an interaction of a quantum wave function like a quantum wave function like particle with a lab instrument needed to register or observe the particle? Has it been proven one way or the other?”
Joseph: It’s a great question. And it was one that the earlier physicists who first encountered this paradox of the observer effect really wrestled with a lot. And finally, at least to most physicists satisfaction, a paper was written by von Neumann, who is responsible for all we call the von Neumann chain. And basically he posited that no matter how many instruments there are between the experiment and the observer, it is still the observer that makes matter perceptible. And I can’t tell you quickly how he arrived at that because it’s paradoxically, I think, paradoxically, he proved it with mathematics. But it was looked at. It was wrestled with a lot and the ultimate conclusion was that the instruments themselves were part of what becomes, you know, perceptible by the senses itself. And so you finally have to get back to the perceiver no matter how many instruments there might be in that chain.
Rick: Okay, good. All right, so we asked those questions. So now we’re going to switch and become a little bit less geeky, and talk about the yugas. So why don’t you just start by defining what the yugas are. Some people may not have heard the term.
Joseph: The yugas refers to a concept that’s been around in India, in particular, since as far back as anything we can know. So maybe 6000 BC, 7000 BC. It’s first referred to in the Laws of Manu. It’s referred to in parts of the Vedas. And it basically states that there is a 24,000 year cycle of human development that rises over a period of 12,000 years, peaks and then descends for 12,000 years. Rather like the waxing and waning of the moon; you go from full moon to new moon and new moon to full moon. And then during this waxing and waning, it goes through various ages, which, that’s all yugas means really, is ages or eons. And each one of those ages that it goes through, and there are four on the upward swing, and there are the same four, but in the opposite order on the downward swing, have distinctive qualities as to how mankind perceives the world, what they’re able to perceive, how deeply they’re able to perceive what reality is really like. And as a result of that, it affects just about everything about mankind. It affects their ability to create things, it affects their ability to understand matter at deeper and deeper levels. It therefore affects how civilization rises and falls, how politics forms, how we like each other, or don’t like each other, all the way to the highest expression of that. So it has a profound effect. And that’s why it appears in these spiritual traditions, like the yugas, but it also appears in Western traditions, which the ones that most people would be familiar with is the notion of the Greek ages of man that go from the the Iron Age to the Age of Heroes, to the Silver Age into the Golden Age. And it’s ascending, and of course, reverses that in the descending and the Golden Age is the highest. And it’s described as an age in which there’s great peace and comedy among man. And then gradually, things get more difficult for mankind until we get finally to the Iron Age where there is war and differences among people, profound differences among people that we, you know, have experienced ourselves most recently, in what are often called the Dark Ages. So the Norse have a model of this, the Mayans have a model of this, and you’ll find it all over this world that in every ancient traditional culture, there is a version of the yugas. The the yugas as I present them have some unique quality to it, which is that they give a specific timeframe to the length of those yugas, and I’ll show you a graphic here in a moment that will help you follow this more easily. But most of the other traditions, if they had the length of the ages at any time in their past, they’ve since lost them. The Mayan Calendar gives us a glimpse of that, but the Mayan calendar is somewhat incomplete from this point of view. So I am using the the dating and the fundamental notions of the yugas as it was presented by Sri Yukteswar. Sri Yukteswar wrote a very small book, very short book, I guess you could say, it’s usually physically small. But it’s short book called, “The Holy Science.” And most of “The Holy Science” is about extremely high spiritual thoughts about the nature of our own being, and how we can rise into greater and greater levels of awareness. But at the very beginning of that book, he talks about the yugas, and the reason he does so is that he was writing it just at the turn of a very important time, where we were moving from relatively less awareness into a period of higher awareness. And that it’s in this period of higher awareness that we can now appreciate the teachings that are, you know, he was giving and other spiritual teachers are giving at this time, because mankind as a whole is now more ready for them. And I’ll talk about that also, to some degree. So that’s the basic picture. Did you have any thing more, Rick, that you thought I should say?
Rick: Yeah, I have several questions here. One is, what would your opinion be as to why people who are interested in spirituality, who are interested in enlightenment, things like that, Should be interested in the yugas? How does it help them to know about them?
Joseph: Well, as we’ll see, when I get into them a little, in more detail, they’re really reflective of our own spiritual awakening. So you could argue that, when we’re born, we’re kind of in our lowest state of awareness, that we would, in terms of the theory of the yugas, we would be in Kali yuga. And then as we reach our teen age, we begin to develop more willpower and energy, we would be coming into Dwapara yuga. And as we become more intellectually awakened, and more able to use the mind as a tool and understand more subtle concepts, we would be entering to some degree, our own personal Treta yuga. And if we enter into a spiritual path, embrace that, and dive into meditation and trying to have higher spiritual experience, then we would be entering into our own Satya yuga. So it’s a mirror in a way; our process of growth mirrors the process that the mankind as a whole goes through in 12,000 years, also mirrors what we go through as individuals. So it can be helpful to understand why the stages, why the ages happen, why one is higher than another and what it means for those different ages to be deserving of the name higher.
Rick: When I first heard about the yugas, over 50 years ago, they were much longer the way it was described in what I read, like Kali Yuga, was supposedly 432,000 years long, and we were only 5000 years into it, which was kind of discouraging. But then I read Sri Yukteswar’s book around that time, also, and, you know, he presented a much shorter time span for the cycles of the yugas. And, I’d like you to comment on that, but also, I mean, could it be that both are true, and that there are huge cycles of yugas and then smaller cycles within the big cycles, so that both perspectives are right?
Joseph: I think the latter is true that there are cycles within cycles. I have a friend who is a very accomplished Vedic Astrologer. And he uses the notion of the Vedas to actually predict a person’s life which is a very short timeframe in relationship to the 24,000 years. So it can be broken down further and further and further. That’s one of the, I don’t know, kind of interesting strengths of Indian teachings is that there are layers and layers and layers of just about everything that is taught in Eastern teachings. Why there is such a disconnect be between the really vast realm of time that you mentioned where Kali Yuga is 432,000 years long, the entire cycle is measured in millions of years. As a matter of debate, I can just tell you what Sri Yukteswar said very simply, I can’t support it, because he speaks from intuition as to why he believes that the 24,000 year cycle is more accurate. He said, towards the end of the downward cycle, where mankind was losing knowledge and losing innate perception, that a decision was made that the 24,000 years that were referred to by Manu weren’t normal years, they were years of the gods. And each year of the god was 1000 years. And so this immediately exploded, the size, the length of the yugas, into a much longer cycle. But I don’t want to, I don’t know, put anybody off who was raised in an Indian context where that longer cycle is believed to be true. When Sri Yukteswar was alive, and he was, you know, the primary exponent of this 24,000 year cycle, when he would be out walking with his disciples, people would throw stones at them, because he dared to disagree with this much longer cycle that, you know, is very much held to be true in India. So I basically just ignore it, to be honest with you. What I did in the book was, I wasn’t trying to simply explain how the theory can be understood. I looked for the footprint. So my thesis was that Sri Yukteswar’s approach was true. And then I set out to do a lot of research, some of which I already done long before I wrote the book, as to whether the footprint of history, the footprint of prehistory, the footprint of paleontology matches what he says happens in that shorter span. And I found that it did. I found that the footprint was very clear of this shorter cycle. So take that as you may, that was my thesis, and I felt like it was proven to be true. And that’s as far as I could take it.
Rick: Good. At one point in your book, you said that Yogananda said that human beings have been on the earth for 50 million years, which I think is pretty cool. And by the way, I find it very, very convincing, actually, I mean, I had no, I have no particular axe to grind about this whole subject. But you presented the evidence very thoroughly, the book takes like 14 or 15 hours to listen to, and I listened to it all this week. And I just, you made a good case, you should have been a lawyer. But in any case, you’ll we’ll get into a little bit later how it could be that mankind in, you know, highly advanced forms has been around for millions and millions, 10s of millions of years. And yet the evidence of that would be skimpy. We’ll get into that. You have a whole chapter in your book that explains it. A couple more questions before we proceed. Well, there’s a rather technical explanation of why the yugas rotate around as they do having to do with the procession of the equinoxes. And we don’t want to get too into the weeds of what that means. It was a little hard for me to follow, actually, when I was listening to the book. By the way, just parenthetically, have you ever heard of a book called “The Pillar of Celestial Fire: And the Lost Science of the Ancient Seers” by Robert Cox?
Joseph: Robert Schoch?
Rick: Cox c-o-x.
Joseph: Ah, no. I don’t think I have.
Rick: Okay. Just curious cause he covered some of the same material you do. He’s an old friend of mine. He died a couple years ago, but I helped him edit that book, and you’d like it. That’s a good book recommendation for people. All right. So procession of the equinoxes. Now one, that has to do as you explain its mechanics, with some fairly local phenomenon in terms of our star and I suppose a dual star that it rotates with, and so on, which is neither here nor there. But that would lead me to believe that the yugas are, as we experienced them, are a relatively local phenomenon in our galaxy, in our little corner of the galaxy. And that elsewhere in the galaxy, there could be other yuga cycles going on not synchronizing with ours for other planets. And maybe the whole thing about the four hundred, the big long, multimillion year yuga cycle has to do with the entire galaxy or something instead of just our star and its twin star or its partner star. Any thoughts on any of that?
Joseph: I spent a lot of time and my my co author, David Steinmetz has spent far more time than I have on, again, trying to find a footprint, trying to find a factual measurable effect that would explain a 24,000 year cycle. And he basically explored the, what I call the gravitational justification to great length, and at the end of his exploration felt that there wasn’t adequate, you know, substantive reason for the gravitational. So let me explain what I mean by gravitational, briefly. So Sri Yukteswar’s description, or explanation for the outside influence coming from the stars that causes this waxing and waning in this 24,000 year period was that the, our star takes another star for its dual. And they revolve around each other in a period of 24,000 years. And that this revolving around each other brings our solar system closer to and then farther away from the grand central sun. And as we get closer to the grand central sun, the consciousness of mankind steadily increases. And then when we pass that peak, and we once again begin moving away from it, the consciousness of mankind decreases.
Rick: So the grand central sun would be something at the center of our galaxy, supposedly?
Joseph: Well, every one of those terms that I just used is debatable.
Rick: I mean, supposedly there is big, black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Joseph: And has been debated. So he doesn’t, in his time, when he was writing this – 1894 – the notion of a galaxy didn’t exist.
Rick: Right.
Joseph: There was just the universe. So in addition, he didn’t give any direction for where we would look to find that grand central sun. So since that time, many people who are, you know, keen on this theory including Walter Cruttenden, who wrote the Lost Star of Myth and Time, have looked for where that Grand Central Sun would be and how it could possibly be emitting something or that we get closer to and, you know, further into what it’s emitting and then back out of what it’s emitting. And, again, nothing has been really nailed down that indicates what that could be. And in fact, David Steinmetz found one thing that was intriguing, which he found completely by accident. He was reading about a series of experiments that were done in the Stargate Program, which I won’t try to go into, but I imagine many of your audience knows what the Stargate Program is. But it found that there was a correlation among remote viewers of when they’re remote viewing abilities were at their highest. And it was when the galaxy, not the constellation, but the galaxy of Venus, not Venus. What do I mean, I’m losing it.
Rick: Well, the galaxy is the whole enchilada, the whole great big thing.
Joseph: Yes, but there’s a galaxy beyond ours. No, it’s even further out there. It’s it’s like a cluster of galaxies. It’s like the most densely packed group of galaxies near us.
Rick: Andromeda?
Joseph: Andromeda is relatively close. But at any rate, when that cluster was directly overhead, was when the remote viewers had their greatest accuracy in what they were saying they were seeing. So this was the only sort of bit of science that he found that made a connection between our consciousness and some point out further in the galaxy around us or out into the stars around us. But even with that, he did not necessarily find, particularly the 24,000 year period, with another celestial body. The most logical thing would be a brown dwarf. So a brown dwarf is a star that never quite ignited, but it has the mass necessary to ignite. It’s just right on the edge. So it would have the gravitational force of a star almost the same size as ours. And so you can imagine the do-si-do happening with such an object, but it hasn’t been found. And if it didn’t exist, there should be perturbations in other objects within range of our solar system, like the Oort cloud that would also be affected by it, right? And he didn’t find them. So he finally pretty much gave up. He said this was kind of a dead end. It could still be true, but until there’s more evidence, I’m going to go look elsewhere. So he went, but so the elsewhere is what I think of as the astrological explanation. And so, as noted, as you as you alluded to, Sri Yukteswar mentions the procession of the equinoxes. And the procession of the equinoxes, as measured by scientists today is about 26,000.2 years. And Sri Yukteswar used the term 24,000 years, but they’re intriguingly close. And it may be that either Sri Yukteswar was rounding it off for the purposes of making it simpler to understand, or it has also been surmised the procession speeds up for unknown reasons as we get closer to that peak. But at any rate, he started to say okay, well, what if the whole explanation comes from the procession? So how could we talk about the procession in terms of there being a revolution about a dual? So he said, well, what if there is an astrological dual to our sun? And what if it’s ??? to our solar system basically, denoted by the axial tilt of the earth? So the axial tilt, I often show it this way. So hopefully, I can, you’re seeing my hand here. So if the thumb is the access to the earth, you can imagine a line going out from my thumb, and it actually creates a circle, right? It creates a circle way out there in space somewhere, the axial tilt of the earth.
Rick: Ok, so super far away though.
Joseph: It could be Virgo.
Rick: Because Andromeda is like, what is it, 20 million light years or something, or two million. As it goes around the sun.
Joseph: Well, yes, as it goes around the sun. And what David suggests is that is the revolution around the dual. That it’s an astrological phenomenon rather than a, it is astronomical, but where it becomes astrological is that the tilt of that circle puts us vibrationally more in touch with the Grand Central Sun, and then out of touch with the Grand Central Sun, so that it’s about a force that is constantly coming to us whether you think that Grand Central Sun is Sirius, or the center of our galaxy, or the Virgo galaxy, it is a continuous effect. And yet we pick up on it, because we get vibrationally more in tune with it. Kind of like tuning a radio, and then we get out of it. So those are the two basic, there’s the gravitational, there’s the astrological. I tend to like the astrological, because it answers more questions. But the jury’s out on either one.
Rick: Yeah. I think that was Rob Cox’s theory. And in his book, The Pillar of Celestial Fire that there’s a continual stream of subtle energy coming from the center of the galaxy. And that as the procession of the equinoxes happens, it blasts us more directly and then less directly, and that accounts for the cycle. But who knows, I mean, all of this is a little technical and a little hard for us to verify. But we just wanted to sketch out an explanation of why there might be these cycles. And obviously, nature is really big on cycles. We have day and night, and we have the seasons, and we have all kinds of, everything is works in cycles. I mean, the the galaxy rotates, that’s a cycle and all kinds, and probably the whole universe, you know, kind of emerges and then collapses again into what the Hindus call pralaya. And that’s a cycle. So everything works in cycles. So it’s kind of natural to suspect that there might be these ages. One thing I wondered about, as I listened to your book, and you know, feel free not to just be guided by my questions, if you want to go off in a particular direction. But one thing I wondered about is that is whether in the big picture, there might be continued evolution through the cycle of yugas such that, you know, the next Satya Yuga will be a little bit more profound than the previous one, and so on. It certainly happens that way through many of the cycles of our lives, we have the cycle of waking, sleeping, and dreaming that we repeat every day. And we grow over the years as that cycle repeats itself. So it almost seems like that’s the way God rolls, because the whole universe has this evolutionary trajectory, you know, and it would seem kind of monotonous to just have the thing not progress as it cycled.
Joseph: Well, the answer I have for you is from a grand perspective of what you just said. Good news and bad news. If indeed, there are cycles within cycles, we could be on the upswing of a bigger cycle, in which case, every time we went through that 24,000 year cycle, we progressed a little bit. But it’s equally possible that we are on the downswing of that larger cycle and each of those 24,000 years, we regress a little bit. So I think it’s possible. I also think there are very likely to be differing conditions every 24,000 years. And the way in which, the specific ways not the general ways, but the specific ways in which each age develops could vary significantly.
Rick: Yeah.
Joseph: I make the argument in the book that technology in many ways is a response to necessity, and that necessity is often, in our current civilization, born of how many people we have. That, you know, the example I used in the book, which was kind of fascinating to me, so I just threw it in there. In California, because they need to get vast amounts of water from Northern California to Los Angeles, they developed the canals that went down. And then they started to use up all the sources of water in those canals. And so then they thought of a way to get water coming in from even further north that comes into one side of the Sacramento River and just pours water into the Sacramento River. And then an equal amount of water is sucked out of the other side of the Sacramento River, pumped up over a mountain with the most monstrous pumps ever devised by man, emptied into a reservoir that has no other natural input, only so that that water can gradually go into the canal and go down to L.A. So if you didn’t have a population of our size, would a civilization ever develop the kind of technology it took to do that? I don’t know.
Rick: Yeah, you wouldn’t need all that stuff.
Joseph: You wouldn’t need all that. So I think it’s quite possible that
Rick: Or people might think, why would I wanna live in Los Angeles where there isn’t any water? I gotta go somewhere else.
Joseph: Right. Right. So it might be driven by population, it might be driven by climate, you know. If we had really adverse climate for nearly all of the last 5000 years, there could in fact be a lot fewer people, but the solutions we would have tried to come up with may have been entirely different. So I don’t think every yuga is the same.
Rick: Yeah.
Joseph: That’s the short, short answer to that. And so some yugas may, from a technological point of view, appear to be progressive, and yet a succeeding yuga even if we were developing a little bit positively with each yuga cycle, the very next yuga cycle may not look all that much better to us from the standards of today.
Rick: Aha. In other words, because the next yuga would really operate by different standards, and they might not be so technical or, you know, material as ours is. So people might appear to be living much more simply, which we might interpret as more primitively. But in fact, be far more advanced. I mean, you could picture, you know, rishis in their little forest hermitages with grass hut roofs and, you know, students sitting around in dhotis, which seems very primitive, but very highly evolved souls.
Joseph: Right. Right. Yeah. And, of course, the inverse of that, or the opposite of that is the rishis probably look at our technological civilization and think what a horrible primitive way to live – out of contact with nature, you’re out of contact with God, you’re out of contact with real food, why are you doing this to yourself?
Rick: Yeah. Actually, another thought that occurred to me as I was reading your book is, you know, with all these cycles of the yugas and, let’s say that the universe itself is a big huge cycle, where the whole thing booms out and develops and then eventually collapses down and into the pralaya state, and there are no beings alive anymore, and then it eventually bursts forth again. I mean, regardless of what sort of stage of progress our world or our galaxy or the universe is at, we as individuals souls progress. And so, you know, even if the whole society crumbles down into another Dark Ages in 24,000 years, we won’t necessarily be living in those Dark Ages, because we will have moved on by virtue of our own spiritual evolution.
Joseph: Now, I agree completely. Yogananda said something intriguing, however, he said that somebody asked him, you know, will I incarnate in a higher age? You know, in other words, do I just kind of progress right along with the yugas now that they’re on the upswing? And he said, while there are many, many places in this universe to incarnate, and you’re only going to go where it matches your vibration.
Rick: Right.
Joseph: So the outer aspects of the yugas won’t automatically evolve you.
Rick: Yeah. And he was probably not only referring to different planets one could theoretically incarnate on, but also different lokas or, you know, different higher realms, which aren’t even physical in our sense of the world. Okay. All right. So you might as well, I mean, feel free to guide this however you think best, but we want to kind of cover the cycle of yugas, and perhaps some historical evidence for the cycle with regard to the rise and fall of civilizations and technologies. And there are some amazing things in your book about, you know, the pyramids and other ancient structures, which archaeologists and paleontologists just have to sort of ignore, because they’re so anomalous, and they just don’t fit our understanding of how people could have done such things. So there’s that. And what else, there’s something else. I don’t know, that’s good enough to start.
Joseph: Right. Why don’t I walk people through the basics a little more, and use a graphic that I have that will help them follow along so they won’t get lost in the numbers and the ages. So I’m going to pop it up here. So this is a very basic diagram of the cycle that I’ve been describing to you and to your audience. And I will just sort of show you with my cursor here what corresponds to what. So the last Satya Yuga peaked at 11,500 BC. And then the yuga that came after that, the Treta Yuga, began at 6700 BC, went for 3600 years. In 6700 BC, went for 3600 years. Then 3100 BC, Dwapara Yuga takes over, and it goes for 2400 years. And then Kali Yuga begins at 700 BC and goes for 1200 years. And then we go up again, Kali Yuga ascending is 1200 years. Which brings us to 1700 AD. And then present day here we’re into Dwapara Yuga, not very far up into Dwapara Yuga, but in and we are approximately 300 years into it. And then we have the same thing going into our future. So Dwapara is altogether 2400 years, Treta is 3600 years, Satya is 4800 years, and then peaks at 12,500 AD. And then that begins the cycle going down.
Rick: There is an ancient saying, which is that which is closest to truth lasts longest. And that’s evident in this is diagram.
Joseph: Yes. I always loved the fact that the two highest ages, Treta and Satya, takes up the lion’s share of the 24,000 years. But I also like to point out that, not that it does us any good at the moment, but it’s nice to know that the whole is that way. So let me give some idea of the qualities of each age. So going up from Kali through Dwapara to Treta to Satya, Kali Yuga is the lowest age and according to Sri Yukteswar, this is when mankind as a whole can only comprehend the material world around them, that they comprehend everything through the senses. And they’re really not able to sort of innately understand that there is anything more than just what their senses tell them. And so we see that the means by which people survived and grew food and eventually had wind power and water power, and animal power, all had the same basic limit that they were all material sources of power or material, just the material world. And it also made for a consciousness that was very concrete. This was the time in religions that were commandment driven. You know, you just, this is the way it is. You don’t need to think about it. In fact, you shouldn’t think about it. This is just the way things are
Rick: In fact we’ll kill you if you think about it.
Joseph: What’s that?
Rick: We’ll kill you if you think about it. Like Giordano Bruno, or whatever his name was.
Joseph: It gets you in a lot of trouble for questioning it. Yeah. So Kali Yuga, right where my cursor is right now, 500 AD, that was when Rome was sacked. And most of the libraries in the world like the Library of Alexandria, libraries in Persia and India and China, were all destroyed. It was as if there was a mass determination to create worldwide amnesia. And they were really dark times. Not long after the 500 AD, we had the Black Plague spreading through the world. We had what was known as the the Grandeur of Rome, that began about midway down through the descending Kali. So about, say 100 AD or 100 BC, excuse me, the Grandeur That Was Rome was anything but grand. Rome was an extremely dark civilization. They had the lovely technique when the soldiers were balking at marching another 1000 miles away from all those they knew and loved, and were refusing to be put into battles where they were basically half of them were going to die, the generals got them in line by having the the ranks decimated. We know that something being decimated today. Well, it comes from a horrific actual reality that they killed every 10th soldier with the obvious intention of making them fall in line and the obvious threat that if they didn’t fall in line, every 10th man would be again killed. These days were the absolute pits. So they don’t deserve to be grand in any way shape or form. As Kali develops into Dwapara Yuga, mankind as a whole becomes aware of subtle energy or becomes aware of the fact that energy underlies all matter. So in a sort of transition period from 1700 AD to 1900 AD, and this is a period called a sandhya, sort of like a, it’s a Sanskrit for essentially a sunrise or a sunset. So this would be the sunrise as we’re going into Dwapara. During that 1700 to 1900 AD period, forms of energy that were more than just manpower, animal power, water power, wind power, were developed. The first of which was steam power. So from 60, or excuse me, 1700 AD, to about 1800 AD, that was the age of steam, and actually well into the 1800s was the, well the age of steam, which corresponded with the industrial revolution is that man found a way to multiply himself in terms of the energy that could be developed for things because steam power was so much stronger than man or animal power. And then, early 1800s on to the 1900s, early 1900s, mankind discovered electricity and magnetism and the laws of electromagnetism. And electricity began to be used towards the late 1800s. And this was even more of a multiplier from steam, that it enabled a technological revolution, because it enabled man to have so much more energy at his disposal. And then in early 1900s, 1905 is a good date to pick because that was the date when Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was published, in which he said, proved with his famous equation E=mc2, that not only is there energy more subtle than matter, matter itself is energy. So really, in 1905 the world, while most of the world didn’t know it, the world moved from a matter-centered age of Kali Yuga, to an energy centered age of Dwapara Yuga, and now the world is mostly caught up with that reality. And we’ve seen the advent of nuclear energy for better or for worse. We’ve seen the advent of solar energy and many more things are being developed that are being exploited for sort of outer purposes. Simultaneously, in Dwapara Yuga, we have a more subtle energy that has become available to us, our awareness. It’s always been there, but our awareness has allowed us to be aware of it. And this is lifeforce. So while most of the world is exploiting the outer expression of energy, there’s a small and growing number of people who are exploiting lifeforce or inner energy awareness. And so we’ve seen the rise in things like yoga, and meditation, which, and I’ll get into this more. But if you look back in time, to the waning era of Dwapara, you’ll see that meditation and yoga postures were commonplace. But then they died out in Kali Yuga, because nobody really understood what you were supposed to experience, or even could experience the more subtle things that meditation allows you to experience. But they experienced it, I mean, it originated in a higher age, and were freely available towards the end of Dwapara. So now, we’re rediscovering them. And I think that in the future of Dwapara, we’re going to see that the mastery of inner energy, lifeforce in particular, is going to become more pronounced and more important than our mastery of outer energy. And that more and more people will realize their happiness, their health, all the things that they think technology promises them today, but doesn’t so much, will be found within themselves where it’s always been. But they’ll discover it through these tools of meditation, yoga posture, there’s a lot more healing techniques now such as acupuncture, chiropractic, that work with those inner forces that all of us have. So we can get into this more, if you like, once I kind of get through this. Treta Yuga further in our future, almost 2000 years from now, is the age of the mind, the age of thought. And according to Sri Yukteswar, the primary way of communicating will be mental telepathy in Treta Yuga. And it will be an age in which mankind as a whole is trying to master the mind, master their lifeforce, master their body, to be of service to mankind, rather than to try to get what is, you know, whatever they can for themselves, which is kind of the keynote of Dwapara, particularly right now. And then Satya Yuga will be the age in which mankind as a whole understands that God is even more subtle and even more powerful and even more important than mind. So for our own inner understanding, you have matter, then you have energy underlying matter. And then in Treta Yuga, we realize that you have mind underlines energy, which underlines matter until finally you have spiritual awareness or God consciousness or the absolute, whatever you want to call it, that underlines mind which underlines energy which underlines matter. And this is, we’ll sort of be peeling back the layers that separate us from that awareness as we go through. Now, at any age, Sri Yukteswar was very specific to note that it’s just the majority of mankind, the bulk of mankind that follow these levels of awareness in particular, but even in Kali Yuga, there would have been and as we know historically, there were great saints and saviors. And it also is true in Dwapara; we have people whose awareness is much greater than just the main bulk of people in Dwapara and so forth. All the way up to Satya there. You could kind of think about it in reverse Even in Satya Yuga, there will be people who have less awareness. But the the core of mankind in each case will really be motivated by what they can perceive in those ages. And then we get to that peak, and we begin to go down. And this kind of gives me a way to talk about some of the things you mentioned. And so rather than leaving the, the diagram up, I think I’ll just kind of walk everybody backwards through this, to talk about some of the historical and prehistory footprint that is left to us that that shows us why people had that kind of consciousness in the higher ages. So any questions before I dive into that?
Rick: Just one quick thing, which is that I printed out a chart from your PDF, in which you discuss motivation, perception and comprehension in each of the four ages, and how they differ from age to age, so you might want to throw those in as you’re discussing what you’re about to discuss.
Joseph: Yeah, no, that’s good. And so, let me just let me just go up through them again, because I think it helps me tell the story of the last descending cycle. So, perception is sort of similar to comprehension. So, people’s perception in Kali Yuga was limited to the senses, people’s perception in Dwapara Yuga is while while comprehension may include the notion that energy underlies all matter, not not many people at this point perceive it, but you can perceive it. If you go within and you and you perceive subtle energy like lifeforce and you mentioned the the intellect awakening, whereas in Kali, it was more double mindedness predominated? Yes, yes, exactly. So we have intellect, and then motivation, unfortunately, in Dwapara, Yuga, is pretty nakedly of, to get what you can for yourself. The vast bulk of people who live into a part of today are self interested, that will start to change. As more and more inner awakening takes place, more and more subtle awareness takes place, people will begin to appreciate enlightened self interest that you get more of what you want, by giving away what you have. This time for it would be interesting to correlate this with political systems and things like that, you know, yeah. Well, I think in the higher ages have tried to yoga, you would definitely see governments that are very much there to support and help people. And people who are militant or selfish would be the pariahs of society rather than now the dominant people in society. So in 20, yoga, your perception would also increase, that you would directly be able to perceive thought, it’s difficult to even envision that from our point of view today, while I can met, a person may easily be able to appreciate that they could feel sad or subtle energy today. Many people have who I’m sure are your listeners, where you feel the lifeforce moving in your body and in your spine. And that is a very real perceptible thing to you. In 20 Yoga, being able to directly perceive thought is harder, I think, to come to grips with. But what do you mean by that? I mean, right now, you and I are having thoughts and I can perceive them. And would you describe what you actually mean by that? Well, I think you can perceive them in a way that allows you to use them. So you could actually in try to yoga, use a thought to manifest something.
Rick: I see. So I want an apple, you could manifest an apple.
Joseph: Yes,
Rick: I see.
Joseph: Or you could ask a tree to manifest an apple or you could deliberately transfer thoughts on a particular subject to another mind. And that other mind could To the extent that that mind is part of a person who is able to take in the meaning of all those thoughts, they could do so. So you could, you know, if we’re in Treta, Yuga, and we had a similar forum to this, this conversation would be much shorter. I could just broadcast the thoughts that are in this, and everybody who’s there to take them in could take them in, and we could discuss it mind mind, and be done in a few minutes rather than two hours. It’s interesting, sometimes people who have near death experiences and also sometimes spiritual, big spiritual breakthroughs or even psychedelic experiences sometimes speak of a huge information dump or download that takes place in it could happen in a few seconds. But it seems like they’ve gained years worth of knowledge or experience in just a flash. Yeah, one of the more amusing stories to me about that happening. Woman was having her near death experience, and I think it was her aunt, but I’m not sure somebody should knew, was giving her the tour. And while the tour was taking place, she was having this experience that you say that she even described it as I was, I was filling and filling and filling and filling. And then she said, and the reason I find this amusing is because it’s so human, it makes it sort of real, more real. She said, Stop. Stop. And her her aunt, or whoever it was turned around, startled, and said, well, well, why did I just can’t handle it all? And she said, Oh, well, you’re, you’re sort of trying to comprehend it in the way you do. In your earthly body, just relax and let it in. And so she was able to, but actually say, you know, people, you know, in the language of today, they, they get it on a massive scale. I mean, they get why they should live their life, on the earth in a certain way they get why the heavens are put together the way they are, they get they understand why there are higher heavens and lower heavens and it all happens. In instance, really,
Rick: earthly body, yeah, people often come out of those experiences with a completely different orientation, you know, they, they might go from being an atheist to, you know, spiritual person and, you know, totally change their occupation, all kinds of things just because they’ve had such a transformation. And there are of course stories, great stories in various spiritual literature about these things like Valmiki you know, who was a highway robber undergoing this metamorphosis and ended up writing the Ramayana, or Saul on the road to Damascus, or, I don’t know, so many different things where people just have this, they get zapped, you know, athlete fills them with knowledge that they hadn’t even thought existed.
Joseph: Yeah, and I think there’s also this is this is leaning over into the book that I already shamelessly plugged is that, I think it changes their brains when they come back into their body. But their their circuitry is different. They’re no longer dominated by habits that they had developed through their life, which had become, you know, hard circuits in their brain. And they really were able to live differently than they were before their before their experience. I think that’s why, you know, some of the psilocybin programs at Johns Hopkins and places like that, people just quit cigarettes or, you know, alcohol, alcohol or some other addiction and just lose the desire for it. After one experience.
Rick: There, I’m sure they’re working to measure what’s happening with the brain and such people.
Joseph: I think as long as we’re on the on this subject, I always want to say this to people. In any talk, I get that one of the things that most nd experience are saying, not all, but love most said
Rick: near death experiencers NDE
Joseph: near death. What did I say?
Rick: You said nd but I just want to make sure people got
Joseph: near death experiences. say is that that was immediately clear that there was there were only two things they really needed to know. And one of those is that you can never die. And the other was that the only important thing to do do while you’re on Earth is to learn to love other people. And this is said over and over and over by the people returning to their physical bodies. And it’s a great message. It’s the message of all the all the great saints. But it’s, there’s some powerful immediacy to it from these people. So anyway, here’s your example was good, but let me just finish with Sahaja Yoga suns, Hatha Yoga, you have the the same thing where your perception is really that you can perceive God underlying all thought, which underlies all energy, which underlies all matter. And you perceive it with your whole, with your whole being, it’s not a intellectual concept, or even a thought you you feel at your core. And that, as you can imagine these perceptions, which shape each one of those societies.
Rick: Yeah. And as you said earlier, there are there are always people like this at any time there there are people live now there are people live in Kali Yuga. But we’re talking about the predominance of such people. And obviously, if such people are predominant, if they form the majority, then that’s going to result in a completely different quality of society than if they are just an isolated individual here and there. Yeah, yeah, I agree.
Joseph: So I spend a fair amount of the book, trying to really share what I’m imagining, society might look like and try to yoga and in such a yoga, and I will freely admit that this is me just trying to imagine. And they’re just little bits and pieces of other things that I bring in might support it. And they’re they’re largely from spiritual teachings are from lore, ancient lore, ancient myths that might describe it. So I think what I’ll do that is just jump to the downward arc that just happened in the 14,000 years before us now. So it’s kind of interesting once you know, sort of the basis, it’s kind of interesting to start with Satya Yuga. And work down through the ages, because I think it makes more sense as to why you would find the artifacts that were found in those ages. So the descending tried to yoga, I mean, the two of them together, like 9600 years. So I’m just talking about from peak to the next trend to yoga, which is 4800 years. And that went from 11,500 BC to 6700 BC. So I looked for a footprint. That was always my first thing when I was researching for the book, is there any hard evidence that would support this? There are soft evidence as well. But I’ll get to that, though, is there any hard evidence, and it costs I know, when I was writing this, when I was working on the research coincided with the research coming out of a dig in Turkey, called Gobekli, Teppei. And Gobekli. Tepe Bay is fascinating, for more reasons. And one, one is that it is the oldest manmade structure of any sophistication that’s ever been found. And it’s somewhere around 10,000 to 9000 BC that it was built. And what was built, were these, and I believe they’re about 20 of them. Were these rings, ring like structures that more or less, went all the way around the top of a fairly big hill. And I think Ted Bay actually means hill. But that’s a modern Turkish word doesn’t have anything to do with what the circles were. And about four of them have been excavated, but they’re pretty, pretty clear that there are 16 More of them that they haven’t gotten to. And so they’re assuming that each one of these rings is going to be similar. So one ring is is a walled circle. And within that wall, there’s a bench that runs around the inside is pretty common to all four that they’ve dug up. And then there is a terrazzo floor, which is a stone floor that’s been pounded into hard condition. So, you know, a step or two beyond just an earthen floor. And then there are these statue like figures that are in slotted into the wall, around that circle. And these statue like figures have are carved, they have reliefs of animals on some of them, there was also a discovery that they, they appear to have hands clasp, sort of in their, what would be their belly. And that you can see arms coming from the back of the statue coming together to these hands. And then the top of them is another stone that almost looks like a head, these would be very stylized kind of things. They all seem to have astronomical orientation. And that it could be that there were 20 of them, because each one has a different astronomical orientation and therefore, astrological orientation. So here they are nine to 10,000 years ago, they have no roof. So they’re not lived in. There’s no evidence anywhere around this hill, of what would normally be assumed to be human habitation, such as fires, or middens, you know, just basically trash pits. They don’t exist. They don’t therefore seem to be fortified in any way. They’re not for defensive positions, they’re not lift in. And yet if these people are using basic tools to build them, like hand axes, etc, it would have been a major effort to create one of these, let alone 20. And if as is the common thought mankind was still in the hunter gatherer mode back then why would they expend so much of their energy to build 20 of these? And there’s some evidence to indicate there are more of these sites in other parts of Turkey. Why would they expend so much of their energy to do something that doesn’t feed them, doesn’t help them, to house them doesn’t protect them? I came to the conclusion based on putting it all together, that these were in some way sacred sites, you know, to have a bench on the inside of each one makes one assume that people use them. So maybe there were 20 3040 people who could come together in these. Maybe they meditated. Maybe in that Satya Yuga age, they were doing things that I can’t fathom, maybe they’re manifesting things. Maybe it was just a highly charged sacred spot, which would allow people to go deeper. I don’t know. But for sure. They weren’t built for any of the reasons that later structures were built. We also have some soft notion, soft evidence for what might have been happening in that age and why there would be very little footprint. There’s there’s almost no other footprint that would suggest high consciousness than that. But the soft footprint is that we have all the ancient lore gathered from various ancient civilizations around the world. There are two myths that predominate and the second most nodes and the second most prevalent myth, from all those things. Ancient cultures is the notion that there were varying ages in the past, which gives some confirmation for the yogi’s. But the first most prevalent myth was the idea that there was a parodies paradisaical paradoxical place on the earth, that paradise existed in some way on the earth. And the myth that we know the most from that is the Garden of Eden. And yet there are many, many similar ones. And one of the things they all have in common, and these myths easily go back as far as Satya Yuga. But one of the things these myths all have in common, the myth of paradise, is the idea that there is a tree or some sort of structure in the center of paradise. And so it’s the tree of life that gets Adam and Eve in trouble. It’s the Axis Mundi in the Near East, and similar concepts, which which translates to the axis of the world, and other cultures. What the various spiritual teachers say that this is referring to, is not a place, but a state of consciousness. And the state of consciousness that you have, when you’re in the tree of life, or when you’re in the access Mooney, ie your spine, is paradise. So these myths aren’t telling us a story. They’re telling us a teaching. They’re telling us the single most important teaching that could ever come down to us from the ancient past, which is that when you get in the spine, you find God, when you get into spine, you discover bliss, you’re in this paradise of experience. So I think I brought up some other cases in the book. But those are the two that that I found most compelling. Was there one that you like that I’m not mentioning?
Rick: Well, let me broaden that out a little bit. So a lot of people, most people, if you discuss this kind of thing, they and you discuss ancient history going back so many 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of years, they’ll think of caveman Neanderthals, you know, hairy, hairy people with sloped foreheads, and clubs and, you know, living very primitive, brutal lives. And so the idea that there could be highly evolved civilizations 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s, millions of years ago arouses a lot of skepticism. But you cover pretty well in the book, The Well, firstly, examples of things which have survived the ravages of time, the pyramids, for instance, which we still don’t understand how they could have been built. And also certain archeological finds, like some what was it, some kind of rock that had, obviously screw holes into it and, you know, polished surfaces that that had to be polished with some kind of machine tools, which equal the best things we have today. And there’s all these isolated little bits of evidence that are anomalous. And you have a whole chapter about how brutal time is in terms of erasing evidence, you know, how things disintegrate and are pulverized by ice ages and, or, you know, buried or, you know, covered with ash and all kinds of different destructive forces, that it would be hard to argue that, you know, higher civilizations didn’t exist, because it’s, it’s pretty clear that whatever they had going for them, could easily have been destroyed over the long lapse of time. So I just wanted to throw that out there in case people are skeptical about the whole notion of there being advanced civilizations, you know, 1000s of years ago, or 10s of 1000s of years ago, and I’m sure you can elaborate on what I just said.
Joseph: Well, you brought up a good argument for how that could play out in such a yoga or to comparing it to the the age of the rishis. There you know, in India, There’s long been the thought that There was a time period when the forestry she’s very advanced beings lived in the what is in India then, you know, miles and miles and miles and 1000s of miles of forest, that day lived and taught in solitude, they had small groups of disciples around them and they grew their own food, they probably needed less food, because they were in high states of consciousness. So if you have, you know, that kind of society, you don’t need to create any artifacts that would last very long, you know, a loom made out of wood, it’s not likely to last pottery. Even in India, today, they use pottery, almost like disposable paper, you know that, you know, jugs get served to you with Lassie in them, and then you just throw them away, because they’re just made of red clay. So you can have a very sophisticated society that isn’t technologically advanced, or even architecturally advanced, there’s really no need in with that kind of awareness to have those things.
Rick: And even if there were yugas, in which there were societies like ours, with skyscrapers, and, you know, flying machines and all kinds of other things, although there are actually records of flying machines in ancient India, but even if there were such societies, there’s a chapter in your book about how long it would take New York City to disintegrate if there were no humans around, and how long it would take to have it become unrecognizable pile of rubble. And it’s not that long,
Joseph: surprisingly, short, 100 years, 200 years, left completely to itself, New York City would disappear. And you would think I imagine most people do that, you know, the bidi, the mighty structures, that exists there that are mighty, because they’re made out of steel, or much of their structural strength that comes from steel. That’s actually their their weak point. Because if you don’t take care of such buildings, the steel will rust away rapidly. And then whatever structure they were holding up will just collapse bridges will fall down within, like 10 years. So our civilization is not building anything even remotely like the Great Pyramid, which has lasted for 1000s of years. Yeah.
Rick: Okay, well, you can keep sort of got any conversation, because I want to make sure you get in everything you feel is important. But um, since you brought up the Great Pyramid, I mean, that alone, it can remind us of when that was built. But there were these, you know, multi ton blocks and millions of them, which had to be put up, you say the whole thing at its height is half the height of the Empire State Building. And, and not only was it not sort of the stepping stone version that you see today, but there was all those gaps were filled in with polished limestone. So the whole thing was one big, beautiful, shiny edifice. And eventually, the limestone was pilfered for use in other types of construction. But no one knows. I mean, we couldn’t build that thing like that, even today with all the rd be very difficult to with with all the money in the national budget. And yeah, it was done in a fairly it’s what was supposedly a primitive society.
Joseph: Well, you can make arguments. And many have been made that with the right size workforce, and some basic engineering skills. You could figure out how to transport those huge blocks, you could figure out how to get them up and up and up and up. There’s a very convincing paper written by I’m not sure you actually was an archaeologist, but he obviously was very interested in the in the Great Pyramid. But he argued that as they build it, they essentially create a spiral pathway to the top so that the pyramid became its own ramp. There’s also an argument that as the pyramid raised in height, that they kept an earthen ramp that went out many miles by the time it was done. And they didn’t have to, like, you know, literally lift them by clever mechanical means or otherwise. So there’s a lot of arguments that you could get the, the stone there, and you could get the stone up, and you could put it together, what I think is the most difficult thing to explain is how what, according to archaeologists, was a society, just a few 100 years, out of being a stone tool on organized society with no cities, no agriculture. Now anything could in such a short time, and there were, you know, other pyramids built before the Great Pyramid, could even sell the time between them as a couple 100 years, how they could have figured out how to make the Great Pyramid, to the incredible precision that it was made. And to do it, you know, knowing what it was going to come out as, before they started. So one example of the precision, which I think still should and does blow most people’s minds, the base of the pyramid covers 13 and a half acres, that’s a lot of ground. So how many acres is a football field? I think a football field might be two thirds of an acre, half an acre somewhere in there. So you’re, you know, talking maybe 20 football fields base, maybe more, I may have my numbers wrong. But so over that 13 acre span, 13 acre footprint, you have each of the four sides, right? And none of those sides is out of level out of being perfectly level, more than five eighths of an inch
Rick: football field is 1.32 acres. So it’s about 12 football fields all put together.
Joseph: So you have so you have no you have no till you have no sag, it’s perfectly level you have the precision of some of the chambers inside that, you know, you can use a modern day laser, and you get almost no deviation for 10s, 20, 50 feet in these interior passages. How is this done with copper chisels is
Rick: is not chamber through which you can actually see Venus every eight years or something, it’s
Joseph: there are a lot of things like that, that they believe were in fact,
Rick: intentional,
Joseph: intentional. So there are air shafts that come in from two sides of the pyramid. One ends up in King’s Chamber, the other in the Queen’s Chamber, I believe. And now there’s yet another air shaft that comes in and goes nowhere, which sort of gives a bit of a mystery to maybe there’s another chamber. So there, I could go on and on. There are the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, when used in various ways will give you pie will give you both FFO or fi I forget which but it’s another like mathematical constant kind of number that nobody thought they should even remotely have. The Great Pyramid is aligned to the north with almost precision. But if you take it back to when it was built, it would actually be precise that there was some drift in the magnetic north since that time, magnetic or holiday graphical, probably my magnetic drifts all the time. Yeah. So how did they have that kind of precision back then? And the best that can be said is that they had, as I said, a copper tools, rope and logs, logs. How do they do it doesn’t seem comprehensible. So what I think it indicates since the Great Pyramid was built either right at the beginning of 12 power you got around 3100 BC maybe as late as 2800 BC. The current archaeological number for it is about I think either 26 or 2400 BC The reasons for the different estimates are the ways they are estimated. So the one that has the most way in mainstream archaeology is tying it to the Pharaoh Khufu, and it’s often called the Pyramid of Khufu. Because there is a stylized, stylized and never had anybody actually pronounced it to me, that sat between the paws of the the Sphinx. And on that stelae, it said, This pyramid is goofy was pyramid, more or less. And so because they have a dating for Khufu, the estimate is it was about 26 or 2400 BC. But other estimates that are much more scientific, dated later. In side the Great Pyramid, there are roughly dress stone that comprise the core. And they actually used mortar, unlike any of the stones that dressed at the limestone stones, that dressed it, or the stones that made the passages or the the chambers. Those are perfectly dressed and are not don’t use any mortar. But there are ones that do use mortar. And mortar is made of charcoal, and lime, and sand, I believe. So the charcoal is dateable. A charcoal can be dated just like anything else with organic matter in it. And the charcoal dating takes it back to at least 28 or 2900 BC. So somewhere in there, I think it’s probably right at the cusp of Dwapara Yuga. Because I believe what the Great Pyramid was, was a way of maintaining the higher knowledge and higher perception of Treta Yuga that came before it. And that it was a basically a consciousness raising machine. And meditating in the king’s chamber, was a way of maybe getting someone through a level of consciousness that they could not do on their own. And similarly the Queen’s Chamber, etc. And that it was it was a very sophisticated structure that only could have had that purpose, from the higher knowledge in tried to UGA. So try to hear that to me. I don’t know how much more time we have. But it’s funny minutes, I want to make sure we cover some letting us tell one learn tantalizing thing from tried to you guys, and we can move to your other questions. So again, looking for a footprint, the footprint that I found in Treta Yuga, in particular, was Sanskrit, the language. So the Vedas which according to Archeo astronomy, and I won’t try to explain the whole reason why the Trump has tried to the Vedas may go back as far as the very beginning of Satya Yuga. They may go to like 7600 BC, when they were first. You know, given I think is the best way to say it,
Rick: Or cognized
Joseph: By the rishis. they weren’t written down until much later. But when they were given they were given in Sanskrit and so Sanskrit has no proto language. Sanskrit has no prior language indicating some kind of development that took place before it came into being Sanskrit appeared at the same time the Vedas did. And to this day, it is the most sophisticated sophisticated language on Earth. It has a very high degree of lack of ambiguity so you can make a statement in Sanskrit that eliminates a lot of the ambiguities double meanings, you know, what did this person really mean to say kind of thing that happens later in time with what historian said or whatever you like choose with a very precise language and remain that very precise language. So how could that happened? How could it happen if you have no precursor? And how would the very first thing it’d be written in it be the most important step scripture on Earth, which is the Vedas. So that’s one additional tant footprint that can explain how traton might operate from a more level of mental awareness rather than the even the energy awareness that came after them with the Great Pyramid and so forth.
Rick: Also, Sanskrit has very sophisticated rules of grammar, you know, and you just wouldn’t imagine such a sophisticated language being developed by knuckle draggers.
Joseph: And why would they ever did it? Plus, even today, I believe most of the Sanskrit that most people learn today actually omits several other levels of grammar that nobody really appreciates how you could possibly use. Yeah, so I don’t even know what you would try to say in that tense, or that grammatical construction,
Rick: I want to bring up one other thing, which I found fascinating, about, you know, ancient records of highly advanced civilizations, which is the something called sounded like the Perry Reese map, which is this map, which actually showed the outline of Antarctica that currently is buried under miles of ice and, you know, is only now detectable through some kind of radar sonar or something like that. But actually, someone drew this map a long time ago.
Joseph: Yeah, the Piri piri rays map.
Rick: Yeah.
Joseph: Perry Ray’s was an admiral, he was a Portuguese Admiral. And that, therefore, the map was named after him, because that was given to him from by somebody else, I don’t know how his ownership sort of got tagged on to it necessarily. And interestingly enough, a professor whose name is eluding me took it on as a project for his college students to analyze the map, and to try to understand whether it was accurate or not, because it was famed for its accuracy. It was also famed for having knowledge of coastlines of various countries, that was way ahead of its time. So the first thing they did is they looked back through its provenance, and they found that prerace actually copied the map from a Greek map, and that the Greek map was actually copied from an Egyptian map, and then somewhere back in its provenance, they lose the ability to find out how much farther back in time it was. So the renderings got a little cruder over time, kind of like a, you know, when you make a copy, and a copier, and then a copy of that, and so forth. But even with that, this group of high school group of college students was able to understand the way in which multiple compass roses were used to. So we today are used to maps that have one compass rose so that everything is aligned north, south, east, west. And that anywhere you look on the map, it has the same orientation. But as we also know, if you do that it distorts the sizes of things.
Rick: So every time when Antarctica are huge, right, David
Joseph: gets spread all across the top of the map, right? You have certain projections. So these maps have multiple compass roses, which just look like nonsense. So it was it was not given much credibility at the time as being an accurate map. But this, again, this professor and his class, figured out that you just took each compass rose for a certain sector of the map. And then you found the accuracy that seemed to be missing from that map. And they would kind of corrected knowing what they didn’t know. And they would take some of the imperfections of that map and put them in an ordinary one compass projection, and they would find that they were more accurate than anything in the past, including, as you mentioned, pointing out the coastline of Antarctica. Now the coastline of Antarctica is is now covered with ice. And the only way that they could even compare what was on this map with Antarctica was by soundings so that they could identify where the coastline was underneath the ice. So then they looked back at when was the last time this part of Antarctica would have been ice free, and you had to go back 1000s of years. So it may be that this knowledge, this map, was passed down for a very, very long time, 1000s of years. And that’s where the knowledge of the coastline of Antarctica came from.
Rick: Yeah. So I started off this interview by asking, you know, why should spiritual aspirants find this stuff useful and relevant, and, you know, if we lie on the ground on a summer evening, looking at the stars, it expands our awareness spatially. And I found that this book kind of expanded my awareness temporarily in time, you know, I just kind of got a broader perspective of the vast span of time. And I think that has practical relevance, a question came in from Rita in the USA. She said, You know, when she first read the blurb about this interview, she interpreted us as being in a descending part of the current yoga, and that is being negative, but now listening, she just thinks it means we’re in the waning or second half, and there’s no reason to go to bed feeling hopeless. We’re not necessarily fighting against negative energies, but actually read up. Joseph has been saying that we’re now in an ascending phase. And he can comment on that. So. And the reason I find that interesting, and this whole discussion interesting is that, I mean, I have friends who, there are people, some well respected people who think we’re all gonna be dead in the next decade or something, because the tipping points of climate change are gonna get so accelerated that, you know, and then I have another friend Catherine Ingram, whom I interviewed on this program, and she moved to Australia in a sort of an on the beach move, if you remember that book by Neville suit, which there had been a nuclear war and everybody’s gonna die. So this couple, these people were just living on the beach in Australia, haven’t fun until they died. But anyway, some people think that, oh, well, we might as well just sort of make the best time of it, that we can, because we’re all doomed. And I just have this optimistic streak, which, which I’ve, even before I thought about this whole analysis of the universe, which I feel like there’s, there’s going to be some kind of like, heroic solution that’ll save the day, as often happens in adventure movies, even when all seems lost, like the Hobbit or something. And that, and that will primarily be due to an upwelling of spiritual energy, which is not necessarily evident, you don’t hear about it on the six o’clock news. And if all you get for your information, as the stuff that’s happening on the gross level of life, you could very easily become demoralized. But there’s this quieter thing and yet far more powerful, I believe, which is rising to counterbalance the, the destruction of Dharma that has prevailed in the world. And we might actually, not only not be on the verge of destruction, but on the verge of a much brighter, more enlightened age. So anyway, you know, your, your book provided a lot of evidence for me of why that could really be the case. And, and, you know, it gave a lot of good evidence of why Kali Yuga may be over, and we may now be in an ascending phase of an ascending series of yugas. And so things will just get better, although I’m sure there’s going to be ups and downs and localised catastrophes and everything else but big picture, it seems to me and inspires optimism that humanity will not only survive, but ultimately thrive.
Joseph: Yeah, I just I don’t think there’s any set way anyone yoga is going to unfold, that we’re not driven by a divine hand to have certain things happen. We definitely are, you know, co creating our future with the understanding the wisdom, the the energy that we have, and so I don’t think we’re just helpless victims of whatever may happen or or accidental beneficiaries of something, I think we have to still try to make it. And I think that it could be very bumpy, I don’t want it to be bumpy, I too am very happy to think that I’m in a ascending period of of time and that things are getting better, however slowly. But it’s not a great age. If you remember that diagram I showed everybody, we’re still pretty darn close to the bottom. You know, we’re not, we’re not far into the kind of enlightenment that eventually will come. So there are real possibilities that, you know, we could have wars here, we are talking about this while Russia has invaded Ukraine. Simultaneously, it’s odd to say this, but with that flood of news that we get with the, you know, constant drip of, of bad news. There actually are less people dying in wars now than ever. And part of that is that wars are fought more surgically. But I think the other part of it is that the tolerance people have for wars at all. And for wars that have high numbers of casualties are going down. It’s a no, no political entity can get away, even 5075 years after World War Two, just 5070 years after World War Two, when casualties, massive casualties were accepted as the price of war, so things are getting better. lifespan is increasing. Education is increasing certain basic human freedoms are increasing. We don’t get that reinforced for us a lot. But there are there are books you can find there are websites you can find if you want to go get a big dose of good news that that track these kind of things. So it can happen. It can happen that we get through this without you know, we get through. Well Are my life I feel like my life span I’m I’m an old guy now. I feel like my my visit here is almost over. I would I think even for people being born today, you’re gonna see potentially amazing changes ahead.
Rick: Yeah, I think so too. How old? Are you? By the way?
Joseph: I’m 68.
Rick: Or you’re just a kid? I’m 72.
Joseph: Brother.
Rick: Yeah, I think the Speaking of good news, I think Steven Pinker is a good one to read. from Harvard. He has a book about how things are actually a lot better in many ways than we might think. And there’s a guy interviewed a few months ago named Nipun Mehta, who is what very positive, upbeat guy. But anyway, if you look at that interview, and then follow the links, he has these things you can sign up for which I’ve signed up for which send you sort of really good news stories that you’re not going to hear elsewhere. But the thing about the bumpiness, I wanted to comment on is that, it seems to me that there are a lot of things that are quite solidly dominant and entrenched in our world, political systems, economic systems, various kinds of industries, structures, that really wouldn’t fit in a more enlightened age. And if that is true, and if we’re actually entering into a more enlightened age, then some of those things are going to be dismantled, whether intentionally or, you know, inevitably through some kind of economic shifts or environmental shifts or whatever, but, and that might seem like a really bad thing for the people who are invested in those things, financially and emotionally and in other ways. But in the big picture will actually be a good thing.
Joseph: Yeah, no, I agree. I think change happens, actually faster than people think. Sometimes, the structures like you pointed out, are the last thing to change. But we are seeing now maybe it’s just a blip, a little tiny trend that isn’t a trend. But it could also be significant. We’re seeing all these folks that went through the pandemic, who don’t want to go back to work. I know because they don’t want to go back to $8, in a cubicle, in the same building, seeing the same people day in and day out and driving an hour to get there and an hour to come home that what was required to, you know, make a living is not as attractive anymore. And I think there’s also a reassessment of well, what do I really need? You know, do I need to make 70,000 100,200 50,000 500,000? Do I really need that? Or, you know, here, I was just at home with my kids and my wife and or husband or partner. And I had a great time. You know, do they do I really need much more than that. So this may, as I say, just be a blip. And the workforce returns to the way it was five years from now, or it could be seen as a, a turning point that changes everything going forward? Yeah, I think it probably will be I mean, there have been other such turning points, if you think of, like, various labor laws that got introduced, so people didn’t have to work 12 hours a day, you know, six or seven days a week or the the end of slavery or child labor laws being instituted. First, a lot of these things when they happen, they’re irreversible, because people realize how much better it is. And yes, it’s just too difficult to go back. And in many ways that people were already in favor of all those changes before they happened. So I think that’s why when they happen, they seem to be sudden, is that really there was, you know, awareness, and not necessarily even a overt support for it, but there was just an awareness that meant these things no longer fit. Yeah, we talked about that last week about tipping points or phase transitions where, you know, something happened suddenly, but the conditions where it’s happening, have been building up imperceptibly. And then they finally get to a point where boom, the thing happens, and no one saw it coming. Yeah,
Rick: yeah. Well, anyway, I guess we’re talking about optimism here. And I just found your book to instill or inspire optimism in me. And also, just to, you know, I think it’s good to, I think we have a natural desire to want to understand the truth about things not only an ultimate sense, you know, which enlightenment might bring, but in a relative sense for anything that we might be interested in, I think it’s always useful, better than being misled or deluded. And, as we also talked about last week, there are many ways in which science or the prevailing paradigm resists or suppresses new information, that would actually be an improvement upon the, you know, the common understanding. Because people are invested in the existing paradigm, they don’t want to let it go, their, their, their livelihood, or their lives work, or whatever was invested in it. But um, when anomalies get overwhelming enough, then paradigm shift. And they’re, like you mentioned in your book, so many billions of dollars were spent on the Large Hadron Collider to see if the Higgs boson existed in yet, you know, funding for archeology, or paleontology, or the kinds of fields that would actually discover the sorts of things that you have been that we’ve been discussing today, is really meager. And yet this stuff is really important. I think it’s really important to understand our true history, and not consider ourselves the epitome of of, you know, human development and perhaps, have the humility to appreciate the wisdom and glories of more ancient civilizations that we could actually still learn from.
Joseph: Yeah, well, as you say, I think I think the truth will come out and it does come out. And the Dusseau in, you know, very, very fine layers, like the layers of the onion, but it does, it does come out. It is I was I was struck by the fact that you said most people really want to know the truth. And I was thinking, yeah, yeah. Well, I was thinking, yeah, that is that’s maybe a hallmark of people. They may not be able to understand truth as clearly and as well as another person, but I think they want to know They want to think they know, or they do think they know, I think that’s a strong human trait.
Rick: But I think a lot of people these days feel that they’re not being told the truth. And they, unfortunately are kind of grasping at various types of information that fly out them on the internet and accepting that as the truth because it’s not mainstream. And I think in many cases, they’re being misled. But ultimately, I think it’ll all be sorted out if you know, the scientific method and the spiritual pursuit, continue as they are. You know, I think we can get to a point where, well, Satya, Satya Yuga, right. Satya means truth, doesn’t it? So, ultimately,
Joseph: God is at his side.
Rick: Now there’s purity but we could be ultimately heading for an age in which we shall know the truth and the truth so shall set us free. Dogs are having a little wrestling match down here on the floor, you can probably hear
Joseph: have their own truth. Yeah.
Rick: Alrighty, Joseph. So thanks so much I’ve enjoyed. Can we just put them out for oh, no, nevermind. People enjoy hearing the dogs. Some people email and say, My favorite part is when I read interrupts you or I hear the dogs making a commotion in the background? Doing both right now. But anyway, thanks so much as I’ve really enjoyed reading both of your books in the past couple of weeks. And having these conversations with you, yeah, that dogs don’t care about you.
Joseph: Can I just put in a quick segue here?
Rick: Yeah,
Joseph: I forgot to mention last week when we were talking about the physics of God. For those of you who might be interested in obtaining a copy, I just want to make sure you realize there is a second edition. The first edition is no longer in print, although I’m sure you could still get used copies if that’s the way you want to go. But the second edition has more material. And it came out just this last year 2021. So if you’re, if you’re amenable, I recommend the second edition rather than the first.
Rick: Yeah. Also, both of your books exist as audio books on audible.com, which is how I listened to them. And if people you know, a lot of people like to do that. So anyway, I think if what we’ve talked about in these two interviews intrigues you, it will be well worth your time to read or listen to the books.
Joseph: Thank you very much. I love the love of conversation. I love having the long format, which really allows for much deeper exploration of things. So it was was a pleasure to do it.
Rick: I’m still laughing at these dogs. All right, well, we better wrap it up. The dogs are saying it’s time to quit. But thanks, Joseph, and thank you to those who have been listening or watching and we’ll see over the next one.
Joseph: All right, bye bye.
Rick: Bye.