A World out of Balance

Rage Against the Machine

A simple desultory phillipic

Megacity in China

The 21st Century kali-yuga Necropolis knows no ideology. It is both machine and organism, but has no soul. The machine has absorbed human souls and feeds off them when needed. Humans supply the crucial algorithms to systems that control everything from financial markets to hospitals and border crossings. But the system that runs the mechanical necropolis of the 21st century knows no distinction between capitalism and communism, between Islam and the Judaeo-Christian ethic. It is out of control. The algorithms now rule other algorithms that run the robots that crank the machine. The city is no longer a metropolitan cosmos that thrives on human culture and ideas. It is a robotic entity with no regard for human values. As time advances the Necropolis takes on a cannibalistic character; the only thing that matters to the system is further growth. It has no ideology other than continued growth. This kind of unconcontrolled growth is cancerous. It tends towards the destruction of the organism, in this case, human society. As a consequence we have uncontrolled violence, anger, crime and drug addiction and war.

Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Necropolis: Greater Tokyo

When villages became towns and towns became cities, the human element was still important. Control was ceded to mechanisms run by technocrats as the cities became metropolis. Control was lost when cities became monstrous megalopolis or heartless Tyrannopolis. Now we are entering the last phase of urban desolation: the Necropolis, the City of the Dead. https://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/21/megacities-explosive-growth-poses-epic-challenges.html

The Necropolis knows no ideology: GuanZhou, China

The City of the Dead is no longer controlled by human intelligence. We have delegated control to machines that never sleep, networks, and electronic systems. You might ask, "Is Articial Intelligence upon us?" But the question is beyond academic; it is moot. The algorithms that control financial markets, currency conversion, and access to health control no longer need us and have already gone rogue. https://www.wired.com/story/tim-oreilly-algorithms-have-already-gone-rogue/amp

Map of Megalopolis

The tendency for uncontrolled growth and the acceptance of control algorithms in the City of the Dead doesn’t distinguish between religious persuasion, sexual preference, or racial identity; it feeds on all souls equally, rending sweat and blood into liquid gold and silver, boiling flesh and bone into Dollars and Euros, Deutschmarks and Drachma, and even smelting currency down into the ones and zeros of the digital combine.When Machines Rule

Mexico City, Aerial view

The Kali-yuga Necropolis is indiscriminate. The city of the dead uses the technology of metamorphosis to transform potatoes into potato chips, cows into hamburgers, pigs and horses into dog food, life into ashes and the human spirit into stone.

Bombay Kali-yuga Necropolis: the City of the Dead

Even Satan, the fallen angel of Paradise, had a soul. Necropolis has none. The human soul exists only to provide the city of the dead with the precious algorithms that fuel the robot culture. But the machine knows neither remorse nor contrition. Moloch, the golden calf, bloody god of child sacrifice, would run terrified from the kali-yuga monster that is the Necropolis.

Chicago Housing Projects

A frog in gradually heated water doesn’t notice that he is boiling. We may ask how we came to the boiling point, but again,  the point is moot. Cities became metropolis over the centuries. The metropolis became megacities and necrotic necropolis in my lifetime.  We were educated to believe that all growth is good. The cancer that is upon us is unstoppable. While millions self-medicate themselves with recreational drugs, there is no chemo-therapy that can stop the Necropolis.
With the world poised on the brink of nuclear destruction, lamentably perhaps only radiation therapy could halt the progress of the Necropolis, the city of the dead. But reducing the world to ashes in order to rebuild human civilization is unacceptable not only to us, but it is anathema to the prevailing algorithms as well. The machine must grow to survive; no apocalypse is permitted.  Only a gradual eclipse of human culture and life by speeding up the machine and grinding us into soul-less ashes. Thus we spin in an eccentric orbit. We are off balance.

The indigenous native American word for a "world is out balance" is koyaanisqatsi. As the unbalanced world of the Necropolis alters our priorities and values we don't notice since we are busy being forced to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.

With the uncontrolled growth demanded by the urban evolutionary process, Metropolis must morph into Megalopolis; Megalopolis must morph into Necropolis. The laws of the machine, the algorithms of the corporations must be followed; they are encoded into the system. Human life just isn't as valuable as it used to be. Why should it? A human life is now only a cog in the machine.

It is not a question of being a Republican or a Democrat; Black or White; Catholic or Islam. We all subscribe to the same system. In order to operate we need to co-operate with the system. And now that we have ceded control to the algorithms that run the machine, we can't even question how the system works. You cannot defeat the system. The house always wins.

As Leonard Cohen observed:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes Everybody knows.

whats up?

I owe my readers an apology for waxing so prolix. Sometimes I start riffing on ideas and just can't stop. I'll try to be more concise in future. A big shout out to all the folks on parikrama. Gaura hari bol.

Metropolis and Necropolis

Lewis Mumford’s analysis of civilization is hard to find. His Myth of the Machine is unavailable online, his Pentagon of Power has become a rare publication. He swam against the tide of 20th Century boosterism, the optimism of the technological society, and became unpopular.

Lews Mumford: not optimistic enough for the roaring twenties

However, many of his ideas have been adopted by those who value the idea of “Small is Beautiful,” such as economist E.F. Schumacher. Some of the ideas Mumford pioneered in the 1930s, for example, Appropriate technology and sustainable development have become watchwords of the post-modern industrial world.

Mumford’s analysis is worth looking at, since he was writing before the collapse of the economic system in the United States. He correctly predicted trends in urban development long before they happened. At the same time, he analyzed the problems that would arise with that development and questioned the ethos of the paradigm of absolute growth.

In the early part of the twentieth century the lack of development in “third world” countries was seen as the great human tragedy. The solution to the humanitarian disasters of the 1930s was seen in increasing agricultural and industrial production. Stalin’s policy of agrarian collectivization after the shortfalls in grain production is a notable example. While grain production was increased, Stalin’s policies had disastrous results. Stalin’s determination to grow wheat devastated the culture and spiritual growth of entire sectors of Russia and Ukraine where his growth policies were adapted.

Analogous to Stalin’s “growth” policies in the communist world the economic growth policies in the West have had similar devastating results.

While the 20th Century was a period of great economic growth and development, the focus on infrastructure and the creation of employment for people in urban centers has avoided more humanistic concerns, especially those of personal and spiritual development.

While many of the development programs undertaken in the twentieth century have certainly contributed to a more prosperous society in the material sense, the focus on economic concerns has impoverished the human spirit with disastrous results.

How would one explain the recent massacre in Las Vegas to a time traveler from the 1930s? One would need to explain how a small town in the desert became a mecca to gamblers and prostitutes and an entertainment venue for Frank Sinatra. For that matter, one would have to describe how Frank Sinatra became a star, how the mafia rose to prominence, and why hotels built in the middle of nowhere attract great crowds.

To our astonished listeners ground down by the poverty of the great depression of the 1920s this future would seem incredible indeed. That the mafia together with prostitutes, gamblers and movie stars had built a giant metropolis based only on sin, cheap alcohol, slot machines, prostitutes and strip shows would strain all belief. But to go further and report to our shocked listeners that in this decadent milieu of moral blight everyone is allowed to carry handguns would further strain belief and stagger the imagination. Perhaps some of our ancestors from the 1930s would remember the need for shotguns to scare off varmints. But they certainly knew better than to carry their shotguns into town or to church.

To learn that sophisticated fire-arms are not only legal but endorsed and encouraged, that shotguns are primitive compared to the light-weight and deadly machine guns that can be carried openly would certain surprise our grandfathers.

And to discover that an entire arsenal might be carried into a luxury hotel with no one raising an eyebrow would further baffle our ancestors. A traveler who ventured into 1930 from our own time would lose his audience if he began to describe the attack carried out on country fans by an enraged madman armed with machine guns.

That it would be possible and permissible for a millionaire to rent a luxury hotel room in Las Vegas with the purpose of murdering a large number of country fans would be dismissed as the worst kind of pulp fiction by any thinking intellectual of the 1930s.

No such city as Las Vegas could exist in the first place, since it would contradict all moral sense and decency to allow mafiosos and prostitutes to create a city with the express purpose of carrying out sinful activities. In the second place, even if such an atrocity as Las Vegas could exist in a weird science fiction story, the author of the story defies all common sense by setting his city in a desert with no water for the millions of residents. How could they possibly survive? Such a metropolis is obviously a fiction. In the third place, even if shotguns might be allowed on the ranch for self-protection in the Wild West, there is no way that any sane society would allow people to roam the streets of a town dedicated to alcohol, gambling, and prostitution armed with machine guns. All these premises of the science fiction story are unthinkable.

But Lewis Mumford saw this coming. An American social critic, he wrote about cities and the metropolis. As a public intellectual writing on architecture and society for the New Yorker in the 1930s he found that there were 6 levels of urban development. He describes the Culture of Cities from primitive tribal life to the decadence of the Nekropolis as follows:

1.Polis

Tribes and communities grow together into a town on the basis of a shared agricultural economy. From prehistoric times to the feudal townships of small nobles and princes.

2. Eopolis

The town grows gathering into it a collection of smaller villages whose tribes and communities have developed not only agricultural economies but small industries, trade, and commerce. The town gradually becomes a city. Ancient Eopolis include Cairo in Egypt and Hastinapura in India, Timbuktu in Africa and Macchu Picchu in Peru.

Towns and villages are gradually knitted together into larger communities coalescing around cities. In Europe, Rome was built as a number of settlements that began on seven hills and grew to include a Coliseum for games and a senate fore governing an empire that lasted 1000 years.

In Mexico, the Toltecs and Mayans, Aztecs and Mixtecs coalesced around Teotihuacan, forerunner of Mexico City where merchants would trade honey, feathers, obsidian glass, ceramic pots, weapons, women, slaves, avocados and tomatoes and thousands of other products, goods, and services in their vibrant markets in the shadow of the pyramids.

In Indochina the various peoples of the Khmer civilization created Angkor Wat and the city of Bayon around the Tonle Sap Lake and the Mekong River in land rich for rice cultivation. Ruled by Jayavarman VII this peaceful Buddhist Eopolis grew to a population of over 100,000 long before London and Paris figured in the imagination of the Western mind.

3. Metropolis

With the dawn of the machine age, technology is a blessing. The town is now a complete city, reaching full stature, its population dense with complex systems of water and energy. Mechanical energy abides. Electricity is introduced along with the exploitation of steam engines or petroleum products and heavy industry: This level of development begins in cities like London, Bombay, and Paris and continues well into the 20th Century. Small communities morph into cities, and soon achieve the status of metropolis. The metropolis is cosmopolitan; driven by a vibrating economy, it pulses with culture and absorbs peoples from all walks of life, all nations, all languages.

4. Megalopolis

A Megalopolis is an overgrown machine, a giant city. The city has snarled into a mass of urban blight and decadence over more than a century. Gardens and breathing spaces have disappeared. Since land must be developed and subdivided into apartments and commercial space it is too expensive to allow for green areas. Economy exists only to feed the machine. Growth is pursued as an end to itself. Since growth fuels the machine it is a virtue. Unbridled growth is cancer; but cancer is necessary for all growth is good, even mutation.

Cultural values are being lost; religion is subordinate to money and economics. Corruption is rampant. Crime becomes normal.

The Megalopolis can no longer breathe. Public Transportation is choked with human bodies struggling to arrive to work areas on time. The original residential areas are chopped into smaller spaces and further subdivided to allow for more shops and stores. Houses become apartments. The gentry disappear from urban centers and are replaced by low-income residents. Overcrowding and poverty breeds misery, epidemics, and violence.

A Megalopolis is a city bursting with its own capacity. Human culture is no longer the essential define feature of a city this large. Economy is the only common denominator.

Lewis Mumford: “Megalopolis ushers in an age of cultural aggrandizement: scholarship and science by tabulation: sterile research: elaborate fact-finding apparatus and refined technic with no reference to rational intellectual purpose or ultimate possibilities of social use: Alexandrianism. Belief in abstract quantity in every department of life: the biggest monuments, the highest buildings, the most expensive materials, the largest food supply, the greatest number of worshipers, the biggest population. Education becomes quantitative: domination of the cram-machine and the encyclopedia, and domination of megalopolis as concrete encyclopedia: all-containing. Knowledge divorced from life: industry divorced from life-utility: life itself compartmentalized, dis-specialized, finally disorganized and enfeebled.

“Over-investment in the material apparatus of bigness. Diversion of energy from the biological and social ends of life to the preparatory physical means. Outright exploitation of the proletariat and increasing conflict between organized workers and the master classes. Occasional attempts at insurance by philanthropy on the part of the possessing classes: justice in homeopathic doses. Occasional outbursts of savage repression on the part of frightened bourgeoisie, employing basest elements in the city. As conflict intensifies rise of a coalition between landed oligarchy, trained in combat, and a megalopolitan rabble of speculators, enterprisers, and financiers who furnish the sinews of war and profit by all the occasions for class-suppression, price-lifting, and looting that it gives. The city as a means of association, as a haven of culture, becomes a means of dissociation and a growing threat to real culture. Smaller cities are drawn into the megalopolitan network: they practice imitatively the megalopolitan vices, and even sink to lower levels because of lack of higher institutions of learning and culture that still persist in bigger centers. The threat of widespread barbarism arises. Now follow, with cumulative force and increasing volume, the remaining downward movements of the cycle.

When do we become machines?

5. Tyrannopolis

The next to last step in the downward movement of urban life is what Mumford calls “Tyrannopolis.” The City is in decline: it can no longer contain or control its inhabitants through culture, religion, common heritage or other normal restraints. Force and military control are necessary to maintain order. Citizens are registered and their movements monitored. The is Orwellian. Economies swing between boom and bust, between wild prosperity and bankruptcy. Inflation, monetary devaluation, and poverty are endemic. The machine is out of control. Culture has collapsed into popular entertainment. Traditions are cannibalized into trends and fashions. People do meaningless work just to feed the machine. Values have fallen. Morality is nil. Disorder is the new norm. As Orwell put it, Ignorance is Knowledge and War is Peace.

In the Culture of Cities, Lewis Mumford describes the Tyrannopolis as follows:

Extensions of parasitism throughout the economic and social scene: the function of spending paralyzes all the higher activities of culture and no act of culture can be justified that does not involve display and expense. Politics becomes competition for the exploitation of the municipal and state exchequer by this or that class or group. Extirpation of organs of communal and civic life other than “state.” Caesarism. Development of predatory means as a substitute for trade and give-and-take: naked exploitation of colonies and hinterland: intensification of the cycles of commercial depression, following overexpansion of industry and dubious speculative enterprise, heightened by wars and war-preparations. Failure of the economic and political rulers to maintain the bare decencies of administration: place-hunting, privilege-seeking, bonus-collecting, favor-currying, nepotism, grafting, tribute-exacting become rife both in government and business. Widespread moral apathy and failure of civic responsibility: each group, each individual, takes what it can get away with. Widening of the gap between producing classes and spending classes. Multiplication of a Lum pen proletariat demanding its share of bread and shows. Overstress of mass-sports. Parasitic love of sinecures in every department of life. Demand for “protection money” made made by armed thugs and debased soldiery: organized looting, organized blackmail are “normal” accompaniments of business and municipal “enterprise. Domination of respectable people who behave like criminals and of criminals whose activities do not debar them from respectability.

Imperialistic wars, internal and external, result in starvation, epidemics of disease, demoralization of life: uncertainty hangs over every prospect of the future: armed protection increases all the hazards of life. Municipal and state bankruptcy. Drain of local taxes to service increasing load of local debt. Necessity to appeal to the state for further aid in periods of economic disorganization: loss of autonomy. Drain of national taxes to support the growing military establishment of the state. This burden penalizes the remnants of honest industry and agriculture, and further disrupts the supply of elementary material goods. Decrease in agricultural production by soil-mining and erosion, through falling off in acreage, through the withholding of crops from the city by resentful husbandmen. Decline in rate of population-increase through birth control, abortion, mass slaughter, and suicide: eventual absolute decline in numbers. General loss of nerve. Attempt to create order by external military means: rise of gangster-dictators (Hitler, Mussolini) with active consent of the bourgeoisie and systematic terrorism by pretorian guards. Recrudescence of superstition and deliberate cult of savagery: barbarian invasions from “within and without. Beginnings of megalopolitan exodus. Material deficiencies and lapses of cultural continuity: repression and censorship. Cessation of productive work in the arts and sciences.”

6. Necropolis.

The last stage in the rise and decline of the metropolis is the necropolis. Mumford is prolix; his prose is dense and often difficult, but it is worth quoting him at length. Mumford applies the term Nekropolis to Babylon and Nineveh and the decadence of Rome.

But let’s see if the definition of Necropolis or “the dying city” may be applied to Detroit or Las Vegas, to Los Angeles or Mexico City, to Paris or London, Bombay or Moscow. Is this not a refined intellectual’s description of the final days of the age of Kali?:

“War and famine and disease rack both city and countryside. The physical towns become mere shells. Those who remain in them are unable to carry on the old municipal services or maintain the old civic life: what remains of that life is at best a clumsy caricature. The names persist; the reality vanishes. The monuments and books no longer convey meaning; the old routine of life involves too much effort to carry on: the streets fall into disrepair and grass grows in the cracks of the pavement: the viaducts break down, the water mains become empty; the rich shops, once looted, remain empty of goods by reason of the failure of trade or production. Relapse into the more primitive rural occupations.

“if at all, in the provinces and the remote villages, which share the collapse but are not completely carried down by it or submerged in the debris. First the megalopolis becomes a lair: then its occupants are either hunted out by some warrior band, seeking the last remnants of conquest in gold or women or random luxuries, or they gradually fall away of their own accord. The living forms of the ancient city become a tomb for dying: sand sweeps over the ruins: so Babylon, Nineveh, Rome. In short, Nekropolis, the city of the dead: flesh turned to ashes: life turned into a meaningless pillar of salt.”

Lewis Mumford’s critique was considered alarmist in his day. It was not optimistic enough for an American society recovering from the Gread Depression. In later life he had the audacity to criticize American involvement in the War in Vietnam. His writings were ostracized and forgotten. Americans like a more hopeful message.

Recently interviewed by late-night talk-show host Steven Colbert, another public intellectual, Ta-nehisi Coates waxed pessimistic about racism and the future. Colbert encouraged him to end his analysis on a note of hope. Coates refused, saying, “To answer your question in a positive way, I would have to make shit up.”

“So there’s no hope?” asked Colbert.

“No,” replied his guest.

Mumford’s critique is not meant to deprive us of hope, but to provide us with a realistic picture of what’s going on. The word “vision” may mean a dream or divine hallucination; it may also mean just seeing what is. Returning to my imaginary time traveler and his 1930 ancestors: if they had read Mumford’s analysis of the decline of cities they would not at all be surprised at a sin city in the desert where millionaire visitors rent hotel rooms to shoot country fans with machine guns. It would not be the stuff of fiction to discover that the President of the United States occupies his time by shooting rolls of toilet paper at hurricane victims while maniacally laughing about the “calm before the storm” and the prospect of nuclear war with hydrogen bombs. This is not the stuff of science fiction, but the reality of the nekropolis in Kali-yuga.

The great prophet Chaitanya Mahaprabhy appeared in the 16th Century in Bengal and advised that the best hope in the nekropolis of Kali-yuga is to take shelter of the holy name by vibrating the great chant for peace:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna

Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama

Rama Rama Hare Hare.

We would do well to take his advice.

End of the World vs. Future so Bright

The End of the World,

or the Future is so bright I need sunglasses

Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

The events of the last few weeks have been eye-opening: Hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico left a trail of devastation. Earthquakes in Mexico left Mexico City destroyed. An armed man shot thousands of rounds into a crowd of concert-goers in Las Vegas. A madman in Korea has threatened the madman in Washington with Hydrogen bombs. Is the end of the world near?

I think it was Alexis de Tocqueville who said that Americans prefer sentiment to truth. As I comb through sources looking for meaning this seems to ring true.

In the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, for example, News sources ask us to focus on everything from the firing mechanism of automatic rifles to the Facebook pages of killers. We hear the compelling personal stories of panicked country music fans who were stampeded by a rain of bullets at an outdoor concert at a tragic massacre.

The President is flown in to offer his condolences. Cable News, Twitter, Facebook, cover the minutiae of every moment. But there is no attention to what it all means, no interest in understanding the cause of so much urban blight. Nowhere are we encouraged to think about the ethos that leads to this kind of dysfunctional society.

Politicians on the right call for moments of silence and prayers for the family; politicians on the left call for legislation that restricts gun ownership. Religious figures claim that this is punishment from God for the hedonism of our times.

We are offered a constant diet of sentiment, but little perspective, truth, or meaning. Absent from the public forum are any public intellectuals who are willing to give perspective on our culture of violence. Apart from the analysis of the killer given in an FBI psychological profile, we have no insight into the motives involved in the massacre.

The killing is all the more shocking for the lack of motives we are told. But perhaps the riddle may be solved by looking in the mirror. Perhaps the motives for massacre can be found in the endless culture of exploitation that molds our daily life. There may be some deep thinkers would could give some insight into these events, but perhaps their voices have been silenced. After all, introspection might threaten the bottom line of corporate media sponsors. We are to avoid the prophets of doom.

And then again analysis seems to fall into two camps: the optimism of progress vs. the apocalyptic. The prophets of doom tell us these massacres presage the end of the world where prophets of progress tell us not to worry. There is a warring dichotomy between "the end of the world is near" and the “future is so bright I need sunglasses.”

These different perspectives on the future have been around for a while. I grew up in the 1950s when the space race was on. The future was full of endless wonder. We felt that by the year 2000 we would conquer Mars, commute with flying cars, wear invisibility suits and anti-gravity belts. Engineers were optimistic about atomic motorcars, using uranium generators. Science fiction was no longer the stuff of fantasy.

Counter-posed to the optimism of engineers and science fiction aficionados, some Christian sects predicted the end of the world. During the Cold War of the 1960s it seemed perfectly credible that the world would end in atomic war.

As the year 2000 approached, many millenarian movements felt that the world would end. The ancient Mayan calendar was calculated to the year 2012, at which time it was predicted that time would stop.

I have watched the battling dichotomy between these two world-views for a life-time: the technocrats claim that the future holds only progress, while the prophets of doom tell us the end of the world is near. According to the prophecies of the ancient Vedas, the world is not to end soon. The Mahabharata predicts a gradual decline into what is called Kali-yuga or the “Age of Iron.” This prophecy holds that the age of technology began some 5,000 years ago and will continue for another 400,000 years or so as humans gradually decline into barbarism. The world ends as T.S. Eliot put it, "not with a bang but a whimper."

It seems that today there are two camps; either you follow the optimism of the futurisitc technocrats or you are branded as a doom-saying Luddite. But it wasn't always so. Many intellectuals in the last century grew to question the prevailing model. One of the most prescient minds of the 20th century studied the decline of Western Civilization through the rise of the megalopolis in the iron age. Lewis Mumford was a scholar, a literary and social critic who wrote extensively on cities, architecture, technology, literature, and modern life.

Lewis Mumford

He was one of the last great intellectual humanists of the 20th Century. the whose most important views are found in The City in History, 1960, Technics and Human Development, 1967, and The Pentagon of Power, 1970.

His analysis of civilization is noteworthy. While most 20th scientists expressed the optimism that we are in an age of continuous discovery and technological progress, Mumford was less sanguine:

“Plainly, a civilization that terminates in a cult of barbarism has disintegrated as civilization; and the war-metropolis, as an expression of these institutions, is an anti-civilizing agent: a non-city. To assume that this process can go on indefinitely is to betray an ignorance of social facts: decay at last halts itself. While the tasks of building, co-operation, and integration are never finished, unbuilding may be completed in a few generations. The chief question now before the Western World today is whether disintegration must be complete before a fresh start is made.”

Mumford's works explore how modern life while apparently offering opportunities for personal growth, for wider expression and development, really subverts spiritual growth and promotes an empty, soul-destroying conformity. He focuses on the paradox of progress. Scientists propose to explain everything, but end in the meaninglessness of a random universe.

Mumford could see even in the 1950s that the advance of technology while promising the utopia of endless development ends in the dysfunctional megalopolis.

The Megalopolis

In books like The Myth of the Machine, Mumford shows in lucid detail how the modern ethos of karmic exploitation released a Pandora's box of mechanical marvels which eventually threatened to absorb all human purposes into the religion of science and the myth of technology. An interesting example of his study of architectural dystopia in the age of iron is his article critiquing the building of the giant World Trade Center in New York, in 1970. Mumford Article on World Trade Center

The Myth of the Machine

In his later years, Mumford was more optimistic: he held out hope that the problems we face might be solved through spiritual advancement:

Certainly it is not in extensive cosmonautic explorations of outer space, but by more intensive cultivation of the historic inner spaces of the human mind, that we shall recover the human heritage.

 The Pentagon of Power, 1970.

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - I Won't Back Down

Tom Petty passed on yesterday. Here he is doing "I won't back down" with some great musicians including Beatle members Ringo Star and Sriman George Harrison, a friend of the Hare Krishna movement back in the 1960s.  I hope Tom Petty found the peace he was looking for.  He will be missed. I think this is a song about a faith that perseveres in spite of all obstacles: "You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down."

Adios Amigo.

Times vs. Eternities

The Culture of Amnesia

By Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

I’ve been writing this blog now for almost three years. Sometimes I feel that it’s hard to stay relevant. I like the motto “Read not the Times, read the eternities.” Spiritual contemplation, yoga, and Krishna consciousness are based on perennial wisdom.

The morning news with its ephemeral sensationalism is as easily forgotten as the tweeting of sparrows. At sunrise we find out that there’s a chance of rain followed by a mass shooting with possible electoral corruption. By lunchtime we can’t even remember where the new disaster or shooting took place. There’s a different reason for panic on the horizon. By evening time in the 24 hour news cycle there's a new earthquake or hurricane on which to focus our attention.

With all the latest gossip on social media, it’s impossible to remember what happened yesterday or last week. How can we be expected to pay attention to any long-term problems or solutions, when the incessant focus on the latest scandal has captured us so totally.

It may be that there is some conspiracy to increase this forgetfulness of our true self-interest. After all, the greatest creative and literary minds of our generation have been co-opted to create the mythology of consumerism. The best critical minds of the day now work at developing the algorithms that curate your entertainment options. Giant companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple are moving away from buying and selling products. They are getting into the business of repackaging and selling your privacy and attention span. With all the focus on selfishness, forgetfulness of self is the coin of the realm.

Absorbed in forgetfulness we are unable to evaluate what is critically important. When the Buddha was asked, “What is the most wonderful thing?” he answered, “The most wonderful thing is that everyone is dying and everyone is going to die, but no one thinks he is going to die.” Absorbed with ephemera, we fail to consider our place in the cycle of birth and death.

Forgetfulness serves the interests of the masters of the universe who sell eternal youth and enjoyment. It is inconvenient to remember that the material world is temporal, that death is real and imminent. It is impolitic to consider the consequences of unlimited exploitation.

Whether there is a conspiracy afoot to increase forgetfulness, or whether it is simply the tendency for conditioned souls inflated with ego to forget their own self-interest, forgetfulness is our disease.

And corporate advertising for the consumer society promotes our forgetfulness of self. In his letters to his son, Cicero counseled that Old Age has the advantage of allowing us to contemplate the self. Who would consider this to be wisdom today? There is no need to contemplate the eternal soul. Why be morbid? With cosmetic surgery and viagra you can be sexy forever.

The fascination with “News” promotes the culture of forgetfulness, since it is impossible to focus. Confronted with constant urgency, we lose perspective. The concentration on “News” means we lose all interest in history.

As a consumer-friendly fascism allows a small global elite to destroy and monetize cultures and traditions, we stumble quietly into darkness, peering into hand-held screens, watching videos of the world shrinking into chaos and corruption.

Forgetful of our own self-interest, our eternal spiritual nature, we suspend our disbelief and submit to the endlessly repeated “big lie” that sensual pleasure leads to self-realization. We eschew “religion” as dirty fanaticism even while embracing the alternate mythology: we can live forever surrounded with the hedonistic fun of empty technology.

The destruction of memory is viral. It is a self-inflicted wound. Camels enjoy eating thorn-bushes. When their tongues are pierced by the thorns the taste of their own blood makes their food more delicious. Our self-inflicted amnesia helps us pretend that ignorance is bliss. But ignorance is not enlightenment.

Absorption in scandal and disaster helps us forget our own self-interest, the life of the soul. In this sense constant absorption in the latest scandal is insidious, for it destroys our capacity for reason and disregards history.

Forgetfulness fuels a contorted view of history. At the present moment, with so many earthquakes, hurricanes, mass shootings and hydrogen bomb tests, many people think that we are at a unique moment in time. We are coming to the end of the world. But, again, this is forgetful of history. This is not the first time that the end of the world has been discussed.

Are we coming to the end of the world?

In 1981, I had the good fortune to find shelter at the ashram of His Divine Grace Bhakti Rakshak Shridhar dev Goswami. He was generous with his time and allowed us to pepper him with questions about everything from the Bhakti Rasamrita Sindhu to the end of the world.

At that time there was a class of truth-seekers promoting apocalyptic doom. According to their view, their guru had predicted the end of the world. They were convinced that the end of the world was coming soon.

It seems that one day they found their guru reading the news instead of the eternities. They were shocked and asked what he was doing. He explained that he was concerned about the situation between India and Pakistan. When they asked for a further analysis, the master scratched his head. He said, “Well, India has the bomb. Now, Pakistan has the bomb. Russia is backing India, and Pakistan has the backing of your United States of America. So, it may be that in the conflict between India and Pakistan, if there is an attack it may lead to a wider conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.”

His students immediately saw the logic. Long after the master had thrown the newspaper into the trash they promoted the idea: World War III is coming soon. I remember when the Master’s students sold atom-bomb survival suits with vegetarian canned food to be opened in case of nuclear war.

When these truth-seekers went to Shridhar Maharaja, they wanted confirmation. In those days, many people would come and go from the ashram, trying to get Shridhar Maharaja to confirm something for them. Everyone wanted the magic touch.

They asked him about the war after carefully laying out the argument: “Pakistan and India would enter into clash; The United States would back Pakistan. The Soviet Union would back India. Atomic war between the different parties was inevitable.”

Shridhar Maharaja responded as follows:

Student: Many people are worried about nuclear war. They think it may come very soon.

Sridhar Maharaj: 

That is a point on a line, a line on a plane, a plane in a solid. So many times wars are coming and going; so many times the sun, the Earth, and the solar systems disappear, and again spring up. We are in the midst of such thought in eternity. This nuclear war is a tiny point; what of that? Individuals are dying at every moment; the Earth will die, the whole human section will disappear. Let it be.

We must try to live in eternity; not any particular span of time or space. We must prepare ourselves for our eternal benefit, not for any temporary remedy. The sun, the moon, and all the planets appear and vanish: they die, and then again, they are created. Within such an eternity we have to live. Religion covers that aspect of our existence. We are told to view things from this standpoint: not only this body, but the human race, the animals, the trees, the entire Earth, and even the sun, will all vanish, and again spring up. Creation, dissolution, creation, dissolution—it will continue forever in the domain of misconception. At the same time, there is another world which is eternal; we are requested to enter there, to make our home in that plane which neither enters into the jaws of death, nor suffers any change.

In the Bhagavad-gita (8.16) it is stated:

abrahma-bhuvanal lokah
punar avartino 'rjuna
mam upetya tu kaunteya
punar janma na vidyate

"Even Lord Brahma, the creator himself, has to die. Up to Brahmaloka, the highest planet in the material world, the whole material energy undergoes such changes."

But if we can cross the area of misunderstanding and enter the area of proper understanding, then there is no creation or dissolution. That is eternal, and we are children of that soil. Our bodies and minds are children of this soil which comes and goes, which is created and then dies. We have to get out of this world of death.

We are in such an area. What is to be done? Try to get out. Try your best to get out of this mortal area. The saints inform us, "Come home dear friend, let us go home. Why are you suffering so much trouble unnecessarily in a foreign land? The spiritual world is real; this material world is unreal: springing and vanishing, coming and going, it is a farce! From the world of farce we must come to reality. Here in this material world there will be not only one war, but wars after wars, wars after wars.

There is a zone of nectar, and we are actually children of that nectar that does not die (srnvantu visve amrtasya putrah). Somehow, we are misguided here, but really we are children of that soil which is eternal, where there is no birth or death. With a wide and broad heart, we have to approach there. This is declared by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and the Bhagavad-gita, the Upanisads, and the Srimad-Bhagavatam all confirm the same thing. That is our very sweet, sweet home, and we must try our best to go back to God, back to home, and take others with us.”

So, the point I’m trying to make in writing this blog is that the “eternities” are more important than the “Times.”

The eternal wisdom of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, and the Srimad-Bhagavatam cannot be ignored, and serve as a guide even in these turbulent times. By taking advantage of that wisdom we will gradually come to our true self-interest, leaving behind the amnesia that so shockingly afflicts us.

Mindpower and reading

Reading the Bhagavat

by Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

Through the curious form of mental telepath known as reading we may traverse the physical universe and enter into the minds of great seers and wise men who lived and wrote thousands of years ago.

An eminence of oracles appear in the pages of the Bhagavat: There is Shaunaka, president of the forest sages; Suta whose edition of Mahābharata was learned from Vyāsa and amplified by Vaishampayana at the snake sacrifice of Janamejaya. Suta heard the Bhagavat from Shukadeva when that son of Vyāsa spoke the Bhagavat before Mahārāja Pariksit, the grandson of Arjun when that great king had less than a week to live, condemned to die from snakebite. Shukadev is compared to a parrot who picks only the finest, ripest fruit, for he picked the juiciest essence of Vedic truth to include in his edition of Bhagavat.

The pantheon of prophets who preach the Bhagavat includes not only Vyāsa and his sons and disciples but Nārada, acharya to the gods, and his transcendental conversations with Lord Brahma, the universal creator.

No other scripture makes the claim that the creator of the universe himself is involved in the conversation. The Koran cites the Angel Gabriel and the Bible has prophets like Ezekiel. But the Bhagavat’s truths include conversations with the universal creator Himself.

In the beginning Cantos Shukadev answers Maharaj Pariksit’s questions by referring to older dialogues between revered and saintly brahmins. When Vidura, elder statesmen and advisor to both Kurus and Pandavas at the time of the great Kurukshetra war had doubts that troubled his spiritual conscience he sought help from Uddhava. Uddhava had received instruction from Krishna Himself in the Uddhava-Gita which occupies the 11th Canto of the Bhagavat. But with typical humility Uddhava recommends that Vidura study with Maitreya.

The great Maitreya reminds Vidura of the teachings given by Lord Kapila to his mother Devahuti. The names of Kapila and Maitreya resound in Indian lore; this Kapila is not the atheist founder of the Sankhya analytic school of philosophy, but an incarnation of God Himself.

In this way, Shukadev and later Suta make reference to a fellowship of prophets, seers, mentors, and adepts on the spiritual path. They describe the teachings of rishis, gurus, munis, and wise men, even conjuring their words from former lives, ancient incarnations and distant kalpas explaining the essence of teachings that have come down from other worlds, parallel universes, different bardos of consciousness, and former creations.

It must be remembered that the Bhagavat is the natural commentary on the Vedanta Sutra--and so it is dangerous and impossible to summarize the Bhagavat. If the Bhagavat is the commentary on Vedanta, then the most appropriate summary of the Bhagavat would be the terse sutras of the Vedānta. If we could write the message of the Bhāgavat in short, haiku-like phrases we would have the sutras of the Vedānta or the syllables of the Gayatri mantra.

The best summary of the intent of the Bhagavat is the Brihad-Bhagavatamrita of Sanātana Goswāmi which has been summarized in the Search for Sri Krishna by His Divine Grace Bhakti Rakshak Shridhar dev Goswami. Shridhar Mahārāja explains that the proper answer to our inquiry athāto-brahma-jijñāsa is achieved through the search for Śrī Kṛṣṇa which is revealed in the 18,000 verses of the Bhagavat and and uncovered in the glorious pastimes of the Personal Godhead, Bhagavan Śrī Kṛṣṇa as Gopijanavallabha, the Lord of the Dance. Surrender to Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the true meaning of the Bhagavat.

This should color our reading of the book. If surrender to Krishna is the internal purport of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, then all the other ideas, suggestions, recommendations, tales and mythological digressions, cosmology, geography and measurements found in that book are to serve this meaning. All else is superficial.