Kali Yuga — Dark Times

We're living in dark times. Kali Yuga, the "age of destruction" is upon us, so named after the Indian goddess of death. World War III is in full swing. Displacement. Genocide. Death and moral decay.

Kali Yuga. An age of intersecting systemic crises: War, climate change, poverty, racism, mass extinction: the strange fruits of an extractive industrial economy based on the prinicple of infinite growth. The merger of state and corporate power: Third-wave fascism. The tragedy of the commons. COVID-19, opioid addiction, missing and murdered indigenous women, patriarchy. Poverty, income inequality, homelessness, resource wars. Colonialism, imperialism and religious extremism are thriving like a strange disease.

Palestine, Syria, Lybia, Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, Tibet, Kashmir. Jamal Khashoggi. Mahsa Amini. Hind Rajab. Humans. And who wins in wars? Weapons manufacturers. The Military Industrial Complex. The Prison Industrial Complex. Corporations and billionaires. They externalize costs and risks to the public and to the watershed, and privatize profits. They privatize tax dollars through tough-on-crime legislation, private prisons, bank bailouts, agricultural and pharmaceutical subsidies, military contracts, and endless wars. Ever goading us into scapegoating some "other" or another as if they are our enemies.

Kali Yuga. Everywhere xenophobia and fascism are on the rise. Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil is illegally kidnapped by ICE agents. US Citizens illegally detained by ICE. This is America's "greatness," returning with all of its dehumanization. It never left. America has always been "great". We've been great since before Operation Paperclip. We build walls against the "barbarians" and "savages" and then bomb hospitals and refugee camps full of civilians in the "War on Terror". We are the harbingers of catastrophe. We have officially entered the post-Orwellian panopticon.

Kali Yuga. Extractive capitalism. The industrial revolution creeping into every tiny detail of life. We commodify the world, seeing nouns instead of verbs. We look at nature and one other as "things", employing an obsolete materialist cartesian view of the world. Life becomes "stuff." People become "human resources" or "collateral damage". Indigenous lands become a dumping ground for toxic waste, our waterways a dumping ground for sewage. China builds colonial boarding schools for Tibetan Children, echoing US and Canadian boarding schools filled with kidnapped indigenous children, built to “to assimilate them and steal everything Indian out of them except their blood, make them despise who they are, their culture, and forget their language.” US imperialist interventions lead to genocides, war crimes, dictatorships and destabilization in Cambodia, Bosnia, Argentina, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza. In North America. All over the world there is war. Your tax dollars at work.

Kali Yuga. The acceleration and omniscience of destruction and chaos. The precarity and volatility. The information overwhelm and misinformation. The disorienting risk and vulnerability of the human condition. The pointless tragedy and stupidity of greed and power. If you look the tragedy of our world in the face and understand our interdependence, you won't sleep unless you act.

Look. Act. Get some sleep.

Kali Yuga. In a post-colonial world, everywhere you look you find a history of war and displacement. A history of CIA intervention and US imperialism. All of humanity can be traced back to indigenous roots. In a crowded world, all are side-by-side: all war is invasion. The invasion of metal into flesh. Political violence is a game of power and dominance that renders the moral among us victims. It's elites against the people. Those willing to kill against those who would rather speak up and die than be silent. The warlords against the civilians. The bosses against the working class. In the end we're embedded in a sophisticated, technologically advanced, morally bankrupt primate hierarchy based on force and privilege, with the occasional allowance for resilience and competence. And courage.

War requires courage. It means facing death. Blood pacts with comrades. Going into a situation in which one's body might be intentionally pierced by metal, and flesh torn or burned, in which one might pierce others' bodies. What a cowardly use of courage.

There's no need to kill your enemies. Give them some time, they will die all on their own. They will die by her sword:

Satya Yuga — A Golden Thread

And yet, amidst the noise of destruction we can still hear a signal. A calling. A tone. A song. A resonance. A golden thread, running through the heart. The heartstring, plucked. The present is still pregnant with possibility, the future unwritten.

Satya Yuga, the "golden age", is coming. The age of enlightenment. According to the Mahabharata and the The Manusmṛti, Satya Yuga won't arrive for another 426,000 years. The galaxies turning in the vast arches of the universe every so slowly. More numerous than grains of sand on earth. So take your time, it's on your side. Find the golden thread, draw it through the present.

Satya Yuga. The Great Turning. Nature is a gift economy. Life itself is alive and eternal. The commons are alive and we're interdependent, connected, inseparable. A vast web. Our lives are an expression of this: an almost unbearable gift that we at once give and receive. Allow the gift to be given; allow the gift to be received. Allow your gift to be an act of devotion. Allow yourself to be moved, changed by the world. Allow yourself to be woven in participation into the great dance of creation. This might occasionally look like a grand gesture, but more often it's just washing the dishes, asking, offering, listening to understand.

Satya Yuga. The age of virtue. Human beings are pro-social. We're wired for generosity, at times even at our own expense. We are stronger together. Generosity of spirit as well as of material. Love is our nature. Love that is not sentimental but fierce. Love that requires buckets of grit and courage and strength and humility to come to fruition. Love, the driver of virtue and inner work. Love, sweet in all of its tragedy. Life is sweet, in the sharing of trouble. Virtue is sweet: the hard path is sweet. We're here for the real rewards. The Real of our Desires. Cutting through the addiction and sugar to tap what's underneath. Leaning in to the work. Facing the inevitable discomfort of life on our own terms by mining for gold. The gold of inner work. Fasting. Sitting. Doing the thing we're avoiding. Bringing it into the light of virtue and doing what's right. The fruits of a labor of love are more than material. Do the work joyfully, and with song.

Satya Yuga. Life wins, has always won. Her victory is immaculate and undeniable, perfect and complete. The source is eternal, only the artifact dies. Life breaks her vessel open as proof of her victory. The body breaks open, an old coat slowly worn through from the force of living. We eat, and we are eaten as food.

Death is just a small protein snack for life. Life which is cyclic and eternal. You can kill and kill, but you can't kill life itself. The ever present origin remains intact, shedding us as remains. The ouroboros:

Satya Yuga: Competition becomes a redundant, obsolete idea. Collaboration towards shared outcomes an obvious answer. To find agreement. Alignment. Integrity.

It's a matter of wisdom to honor the treaties, to listen to and serve those closest to the land. To listen to and serve the land itself. The water itself. To return to our roots.

Satya Yuga. The apocalypse, the lifting of the veil. It takes real courage to face the humanity of our oppressors, to treat our enemies as ourselves. A warriorship of generosity. A recognition that greed is sickness, and an unwillingness to tolerate it. The courage to hold others accountable, to build a society that is accountable to our nestedness in larger systems. To build a society that is educated about our interdependence, about what it means to be truly human. War is caused by ignorance:

Satya Yuga. Solidarity with what is. Solidarity forever. People are always, already intimately connected to nature. A simple expression of nature. All of nature is cyclic. The eternal return. The inextinguishable source is here, now, in the heart of our experience. At the root of what we are.

The size of mountains towers above our cities. These vast urban centers are like anthills. Wiped away in moments by wind and water. Our bodies are breakable vessels. Temporary, fragile. Life and entropy are dancing, playing the long game.

We will return my friends, and sit by the fire, and sing again and again.