We live in a dualistic system composed of Earth and Moon. Women know this instinctively. And in this little charabanc we travel within the body of the Sun, around and around.
The Sun in turn travels within the body of the star cluster to which She belongs, the Pleaides, and revolves with that greater body, moving towards and away from the centre which Sri Yukteshwar calls the Centre of Mental Virtue.
This is the 24000 year cycle of the Hindu Yugas in which 4000 years of Golden Age is followed by 3000 years of Silver, 2000 years of Bronze and 1000 years of Iron. Each of these has a rising, or dawn, and a setting, or evening, of as many hundreds of years as the Age has of thousands. This means that the descending cycle, from Golden to Iron looks like this.
Satya – 400 + 4000 + 400; Treta – 300 + 3000 + 300; Dwapara – 200 + 2000 + 200; Kali – 100 + 1000 + 100
which is a total of 12000 years.
This is followed immediately by the inverse, beginning with the Iron age and progressing up to the Golden Age, in the same numbers of years. This makes the full complement of 24000 of the Great Year.
We stand today (2019) at 120 years into the Bronze Age. When we reflect on the progress of the last 120 years we see the enormous steps that have been taken – from flight to landing a man on the Moon and everyone carrying mobile devices with which to see their friends and talk with them.
But from our point of view what is important is that just as we live in the Earth Moon, and within the Sun, so too we live within the Cosmos (Pleiades – called a Brahma in the Hindu pantheon) and that lies within the Nebula around which a number of Cosmoi rotate. When we speak of a day of Brahma, we are speaking of the time it takes our star cluster to revolve (see it as a sphere, not a flat mishmash) and the Sun to move into daylight away from the night-time of the ages of Kali we left some hundreds of years ago.
The Industrial Revolution took place within the dawning of the Bronze Age (1699-1899) which saw the end of slavery and the establishment of the nations of Europe. The colonization of the world by Europe and the commencement of slavery on such a devastating scale, took place during the dying of the ascending age of Kali, or Iron. It carries with it the mentality of the Iron Age. There are those who would like to enforce this mentality still.
The midnight point that Sri Yukteshwar gives – when the two Iron ages collide, the setting of the descending and the dawning of the ascending Kali Yugas– was in 499 AD.