Usually when we talk about a medical diagnosis there's this very strict expectation of precision right it kind of feels like engineering it's very mechanical right like you break your arm the x-ray shows this jagged white line on a black background and the doctor just pointed at it and says well there it is it's visible you know it's measurable and that gives us a really profound sense of comfort I mean human beings are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity especially when it comes to our physical survival let's unpack this for someone who has never studied him do philosophy what exactly is a yoga philosophy time isn't a straight line progressing from primitive to advance which is how we generally view it in the West the linear timeline exactly instead time is cyclical it moves. Either our job today is to imply unpack fascinating historical and technological arguments presented any specific tax exactly basically treating this material like a complex architectural blueprint we want to understand how the argument is built not not to pass judgment on whether it should've been built in the first place and understand the physical biological crisis of superbus that these texts are warning us about they actually can't start with biology we have to start with metaphysics which is such a pivot right it really is the sources establish this psychological and spiritual lens through which they diagnosed the entire modern world and they start with this concept of the Cayuga so let's unpack this for someone who has never studied and do philosophy what exactly is a yoga philosophy isn't a straight line progressing from primitive to advance which is how we generally view it in the West the linear timeline exactly instead time is cyclical it moves through for great ages or you like the seasons of a year and the sources argue that humanity is currently deep into the Kaliyuga this is the fourth and final age of the cycle and it's not exactly the fun age no not at all it is fundamentally characterized by darkness spiritual confusion global conflict and a really profound descent into materialism basically the age where the spiritual gives way entirely to the physical and the text describe this incredibly intense paradox of modern civilization I mean think about it on one hand we possess unprecedented technological power we have like external comforts and digital conveniences that ancient emperors couldn't have even imagine air-conditioning smartphones global travel all of it but on the other hand look at the internal state of humanity millions of people feel spiritually exhausted deeply anxious chronically depressed and just fundamentally lonely and the source is explain this paradox through a foundational concept called Maya which translates broadly to illusion now it's really crucial to understand that Maya isn't a cheap magic trick it doesn't mean the chair you're sitting on literally doesn't exist it's not the matrix where nothing is real physically Maya is more about the spiritual ignorance that masks are divine interconnected core the texts argue that in the Cayuga humanity becomes completely hypnotized by the external material reality we start believing that we are our bank accounts our bank accounts our job titles are physical bodies are social media profiles we are just endlessly distracted by screens entertainment and the insatiable demands of the ego I was trying to visualize this one reading the sources and the best analogy I could come up with is comparing the modern human mind to a smart phone a yeah imagine a phone running 100 complex high bandwidth app simultaneously in the background the battery is just constantly aggressively draining but because we're utterly terrified of the silence that's required to actually plug the phone in put it down and let it recharge we just keep frantically opening more exactly