stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

326 STRIPPING THE GURUS
SRF) is claimed to have been the reincarnation of Leonardo
da Vinci. Her own published writings, however, show none
of da Vinci’s fertile genius. (Those articles are printed in old
SRF magazines, and sometimes available in photocopy to
lucky devotees behind the scenes.) Instead, those writings
bristle with biting and petty condemnations of anyone who
failed to agree with her yogic point of view. In particular,
she expended ridiculous amounts of energy trashing H. G.
Wells and others who endorsed the standard view of evolution
and human cultural development.
The “logical force” of Tara’s arguments, however,
comes down to nothing more than a repetitive mongering of
the fact that such a view is opposed to the Hindu idea of cyclic
spiritual development on the planet, and is therefore
“wrong.” In particular, she predictably trumpeted Yogananda’s
(1946) reading of those cycles as occurring within a
24,000-year period, which he associated with the “precession
of the equinoxes”—a circular motion of the Earth’s rotational
axis with respect to the “fixed” stars. He (via Yukteswar’s
[1977] The Holy Science) further regarded that
precession as arising from our sun being part of a binary
star system—that supposedly accounting for the movement
of the stars in the heavens through that cycle. In connection
with that presumed rhythm, other SRF monks have
suggested that “in the Kali Yuga [i.e., the ‘Iron Age’], the
average height of humans is four feet; in Dwapara
[‘Bronze’], six; in Treta [‘Silver’], eight; and in Satya
[‘Gold’], ten.”
As ridiculous as that idea may be, it has a storied history,
being endorsed also by Sri Aurobindo’s path:
The Puranas state that the duration of each yuga is
in direct proportion to the diminishing Truth. As a
result, man’s life-span diminishes also. In addition,
they say that with the declining Truth man’s stature
too declines. Man’s height, which is fourteen cubits in
Treta, is reduced to seven cubits in Dwapara, and
goes down to four and a half cubits in Kali (Nahar,
1989).
Notwithstanding all that, the real explanation for the
(25,800-year) equinoctial precession is a problem in sopho-