Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and this is the Spiritual American. Looking at the way the world is now, do you wonder, is this the end times as prophesized in the Bible and in many other scriptures and spiritual traditions? What time is it? That's what we're gonna talk about today in lesson five of the Raja Yoga Foundation course here on the Spiritual American. Welcome back everyone. Thank you for joining us. This is the fifth and final lesson of the Raja Yoga Foundation course. In the first lesson, we talked about the soul. Second lesson, we talked about the three worlds or the three levels of consciousness and the Supreme Soul. We talked about God. The third lesson, we talked about karma. Fourth lesson, we talked about the eight powers of the soul, and now we're going to talk about time. What time is it? Is there some knowledge around what's happening now? Is there something that I can understand that will help me to feel more stable or maybe know what I can do better at this time in history? We're gonna go over some very simple principles of time, as understood in the Brahma Kumaris. One principle of time is that normally we think of time as linear. It has a beginning and an end, and it moves forward in a forward fashion. And on one hand that is correct. I can't go backwards in time. I mean, not withstanding what Hollywood has done and all these other theories, but time continues to move forward. So yes, that is true that that circumstances continue to move forward. That is right, but does time, is time actually linear? In the knowledge we understand that time is cyclical. So what does that mean? Think about the seasons. Winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall. Always changing, always moving forward. Yes. But it recycles itself, right? Sometimes I think about, you know, I've used this example before, the wild flowers here in Florida. They come out in the spring and then they disappear and they're gone for 10 months, and then at the right time they come back again. I'm like, where did they go? Where did they go? How did they know when to come back? There's something beautiful and natural about cycles in nature. I'm thinking now about other, you know, literary examples of this circle of life in nature and so forth. Also, you could think of birth and death is a cycle. For instance, this body was once a baby and the body grows up and so forth, and then the soul leaves the body and goes. The body gets old and then the body goes back to the earth and then the soul goes into another baby. So it's like begins again from the beginning. There's something natural about that that we understand intuitively. So we can leave that there for a minute. So if we, the first principle is that time is cyclical. It repeats. Different aspects, repeat themselves, they're cyclical. Second aspect to understand is the aspect of eternal, being eternal. So in the linear way of thinking of time, you have birth and death, like nothing was there before you were born. And then after you die, you just disappear. But in the soul, we understand that in spirituality, nothing dies. It may change form, but the soul doesn't die. You could say the body dies, or you could say the body goes back to the elements. The body gets broken down and goes back to the elements, but the soul goes on, so the soul is eternal. And also matter is eternal also because matter changes form. This is all physics. The laws of physics. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It just changes form. So these are very powerful principles that I'm going through quickly 'cause this is a short video. But think of those principles. So the first one is cyclical time. Nature is time cyclical. Second one is, eternal energy can't be created or destroyed. Matter can change form. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Third principle that I wanna talk about is the law of entropy. This is also in physics, in the law of thermodynamics, where they talk about how things start out as pure and solvent and working, and over time it becomes more chaotic, getting older, less valuable, and so forth over time. If you buy a home. If you buy a house, let's say, and it's brand new, and you're walking around the house and you're saying, wow, this is brand new house feels great in a year, only a year goes by. The house is not going to feel the same. Things get older, things break down over time. That's the law of entropy. That's the way it goes. It's not going to, you can't go backwards. It goes that way. As time progresses, things break down and get more chaotic over time. And also more complex, more expanded, more complex over time. So that is, think about a tree. This is a good example. Think about a tree. A tree starts out with a little seed or an acorn or something. And then it comes out, one little branch, two leaves, and then a couple more leaves and a couple more leaves. Eventually you have a trunk and more and more leaves, and what happens in 40, 50 years? You have a huge trunk with huge trees and millions of leaves. Look at the complexity that came, so you could call that growth. You could call that expansion. You could also call that entropy. The simplicity and the, and the power and the purity of that beginning is not the same energy as the energy of the expanded, fully expressed version of that tree. So that's the law of entropy. So that definitely happens. So what about time? So let's look at this picture now. So now I'm gonna put the picture up. There's a picture. If we look at these principles in terms of history. We at the Brahma Kumaris understand that time is a cycle. The cycle of history has four equal sections. Golden age, Silver age, Copper age, and Iron Age. Each of these eras have a certain quality. So the first one is the Golden Age, and that's the beginning. You can imagine it like a heaven on Earth. Eden. Atlantis. Things like that where there's technology, there's society, there's purity. Like Eden would be purity and the relationship with nature, soul, consciousness, all the beings there are soul conscious. This was a long time ago when the world was pure and then over time it got a little bit less pure. And now we're in the silver age, more people are coming. The population is expanding. Things are moving out into different areas, but everybody is still soul conscious. It's still very pure, still in harmony with nature, and everything's going great. We call that heaven. So the first two sections, the Golden and Silver Ages, we call heaven because we're soul conscious and we're in harmony with nature and with each other. At the end of the Silver Age, the entropy is still happening, so we're losing power. And something changes. There's a shift There's a shift in the world. There's cataclysmic changes in the world and so forth, and then we lose our soul consciousness at that time. We become body conscious. Now, if you've been watching these episodes, you've been hearing, I'm a soul. My nature is peace, versus like, I am Anne and I have to defend my rights and I have to like that ego kind of body consciousness. In the beginning of the Copper Age is when body consciousness began. We kind of lost our connection with nature to some degree. We lost our soul consciousness and we started expanding in a new way. Philosophy, math, science, all the civilizations, the great civilizations were created at that time. That's when the religions came on the scene. So we have the Abrahamic religions, we have Christianity, Buddhism, and of course Muslim, Mohammad came, and Islam in that sense. So all the religions came, the founders of religions came. And then, so we have great societies, we have religions and so forth. That's the copper age. Towards the end of the copper age. Another energy came in, and again, we're still in the entropy, right? We're still coming down. More and more people are coming, we're expanding. The tree is getting bigger, we're getting larger. We're growing and expanding, and towards the end of the copper age, what I like to say that came into the world is the energy of conquering. Conquering consciousness. So this is your Alexander, the great. The Roman Empire, this kind of, especially the Roman Empire, this kind of conquering consciousness. We're gonna go and take you over and assert our culture dominate you with our culture. On one hand you could say that's negative. There was violence there and there wasn't a respect for the culture that was there. A lot of it was destroyed in lieu of the new culture that was being dominating, dominating that area. But you could also say that the technology of the Roman Empire actually unified the world. So the Western civilization began at that time, and we have the conquering consciousness came in this kind of imperialistic kind of attitude where we're gonna conquer you and take you over. So that was like at the end of the Copper age, toward the beginning of the Iron Age. So the copper age is signified by the great civilizations and everything, and all the religions are coming in, and all the sciences and the philosophies are growing. It'd be wonderful time for everyone. Then the conquering consciousness comes in. Technology is brought into another degree, and now we're in the Iron Age. Iron Age is signified with technology, more and more people coming in. Actually, I am 53 years old. I was born in 1971. And when I was born, there were 3 billion people on earth. Now there's 8 billion people, so in 50 years 5 billion more people are here. That's a big change. So the tree has become way bigger at the very end. Now we're at the very end of this life cycle of time where the tree has expanded so much. And I'll put up a picture of the tree too. Put up the tree also. The tree of life. So here we are now, we're in the Iron Age. We have the vices, lust, anger, greed, attachment, ego has expanded so much, and we see what's happened with that. We see technology exploding. We see population exploding. Everything's becoming more complex and more degraded in some ways. So the tree is way expanded. We're way down in entropy. We've lost a lot of our spiritual power. And so where are we in terms of the cycle? We are at the end of the cycle. We are right at the end where if you see on the picture of the cycle, the circle, you see this little sliver of time there. And that's the fifth age, the Confluence age. That's the age of transition from the Iron Age to the Golden Age, again, because we're cycle, right? It's a cycle. We're going from the winter to the spring. We're going back to the beginning again. That middle little slice there the Confluence Age is when spiritual knowledge disseminates into the system. Into the human psyche, we become connected to. You could say God comes, God makes himself known. The spiritual truth becomes known. You could call it revelation in the Bible, it's known as revelation, so that the, this spiritual truth is made available to humanity. And at that time, people begin to wake up. If you've noticed more and more people, millions and millions of people are becoming more interested in spirituality, in learning about the mind, in learning about consciousness and so forth. There's a lot out there. So this shift is part of the Confluence Age. So on one hand there's the Iron Age, winding up the way, way expanded, chaotic vices, violence, everything. On one hand and on another hand, consciousness of humanity is preparing for the Golden Age, preparing for peace, preparing for the transition from this painful sorrowful situation that we're all in this weakened situation, to a place where we feel peaceful, where we feel complete, and then getting ready for the Golden Age to start again. In the Bible, they talk about salvation, they talk about rapture. They talk about all different, there's many, many different accounts or different ways of describing this phenomenon that I'm talking about now that we call the Confluence Age. It is the return of the purity or the return of the energy of the souls. So if I've been weakened over time, like. Entropy, right? I get weaker over time. The Confluence Age is the time to build up, fill up my cup again. And what does that mean for each of us? Does that mean that you all have to become Brahma Kumaris? No. Does that mean that you all have to become any religion one or the No. It means that now is the time for each of us to start to reflect. It's an opportunity, let's say, for each of us to start to reflect on spiritual truth. That maybe we've noticed by now that all the things that we've been paying attention to in the world are not stable. Maybe that we've been depending on are not stable, whether it's money or politics or religion or family or whatever, relationships, none of it's really stable. Maybe I'm not getting the full answers for myself. I'm talking to those of you out there who feel that way. Some of you may feel perfectly content and that's fine. But this time, this Confluence Age is the time for all souls to, I wanna say, put your house in order. Get your house in order, let's say, and get ready for that transition. Now, I'm not gonna tell you what that transition's gonna look like. We've all heard the end times accounts natural calamities, breakdown of institutions. We're seeing that already. But in terms of spirituality, this is an a unique time to be able to study, to be able to contemplate what consciousness is all about. I am a soul. I understand what time it is, and then the final opportunity for the Confluence Age is service. And I can't underline this enough. The Confluence Age is a time where there is opportunity for world service, like no other time. Perhaps in the past I was able to help people in a limited way. I'm making my time or my money, or I'm doing charity or something where I can go help people that are unfortunate or disadvantaged, and that's fine. Wonderful. Now with the Confluence age, if I understand what time it is, if I understand this knowledge that I've been listening to over these episodes. If I'm starting to understand it and something resonates, like, yes, this is this, I wanna be a part of this. Then service is the other aspect to consider. That because of the time, because of all the souls being here, the, the expanded nature, every, all the souls are in the collective, the human consciousness, meaning that we're all here on earth, we all have bodies, we're all here, we're all in that kind of shared consciousness. Because of that, whatever I think and whatever I do, has an potential impact on the whole system. So service. Use your knowledge, use your love, use your care. Use whatever transformation that you've been able to achieve and give it over for service. Wish that everyone else could feel that too. This is why this channel exists. This is why the Brahma Kumaris exists. We're here to serve, to share knowledge, to teach meditation, to help everyone transition in this time of transition, to turn away from the old ideas, old painful thoughts, painful behaviors, painful, forgive, move forward. There's no need to hold onto anything now. Look at what time it is. The tree is fully expanded. We're at the end of the cycle. It's time to go home let's say. It's time to return to peace for all of us, all of us. It's time to return to peace, so I will leave it there. That is a lot to digest. We don't usually do this lesson until there's like an advanced class, but I wanted to give a just a thumbnail sketch of what it's about. If you want to learn more, please look in the description. There will be online classes available. The Brahma Kumaris website, you can find a center near you. There's 120 countries, 8,500 centers all over the world. You could look for Brahma Kumaris Center and get in contact to learn more. And also to begin your own practice, your own exploration, to self-respect to healing, and also for service. That you can actually be a part of helping everyone at this time. So I will leave it there. And I hope that you enjoyed this Raja Yoga course. I do recommend replaying it over and over again. My email is there if you wanna get in touch with myself, or like I said, there's classes and resources available in the description. Thank you all very much for your attention and for joining me during this course and take care.
