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14. THE CONCEPT OF AGES
3) Mahapralaya at the end of a mahakalpa, when all three worlds (physical, subtle and causal) are absorbed into Iswara.
Maha kalpa - the Great Age
"Truthfully, the quantities of years assigned to a Cosmic Day are symbolic. The Cosmic Night arrives when the ingathering of the perfect souls is complete, which means, when the Cosmic Day is absolutely perfected." - The Pistis Sophia Unveiled
If this is true, there are really five ages in a cycle. In this Yuga everything will be perfect, when everything goes and becomes one with the Brahman. It would not mean the end of the individual beings. Only that the beings are all in consonance and there is a resonance in the realm of beings. This may be called the night of the Kalpa. However as long as there is freedom of will, there is a possibility of re-emergence of a new creation world starting with Satya Yuga where righteousness is again defined in terms of life. A new day starts and life again wakes up. We start the process again. This of course assumes an intervention from beyond to terminate the Kali Yuga and put a halt to the life miseries that it brought itself. Alternatively life destroys itself and everything that we know as life comes to an end. The night has set in. It will certainly require a new creation to start a new day. This is the traditional Yuga theory as supported by the Puranas.
In contrast to this intervention from God or self destruction process due to sin, the modern tendency seems to be to avoid any such catastrophe. This was first proposed by Yukteswar Giri in 1894. This model is based on a new cosmic model where the sun goes round an imaginary center called Vishnunabhi - the umbilical of Vishnu. "...the sun, with its planets and their moons, takes some star for its dual and revolves around it in about 24,000 years of our earth-a celestial phenomenon which causes the backward movement of the equinoctial points around the zodiac. The sun also has another motion by which it revolves round a grand center called Vishnunabhi, which is the seat of the creative power, Brahma, the universal magnetism. Brahma regulates dharma, the mental virtue of the internal world." In the period when the earth with its sun moves away from the Vishnunabhi we have a descent of dharma going from Satya Yuga to Kali Yuga. Having reached its furthest distance from Vishnunabhi it now goes towards it thus the righteousness will improve from Kali Yuga to Satya Yuga.
"Yukteswar's model thus differs from the traditional in the following respects:
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A cycle of four yugas takes 24,000 years instead of 4,320,000. The yugas alternate between ascending and descending trends instead of always proceeding in the same order. This alternation becomes necessary once you posit that the ages result from
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