Avatār Effect

The Harder Problem

We have seen the hard problem of consciousness, how to objectively characterize subjective experiences for an individual, and here we discuss the harder problem for the experiences of the collective Mind.

Collective Pursuit

The Avatār

In its original usage in the Yoga model, Avatārs represent collective Ideals appropriate to the needs of the age we find ourselves in.

In modern tech parlance, an avatar is our digital persona to navigate the online world, but here in Yoga, the Sanskrit word Avatār literally means a conscious Being that descends to Earth (terra), from a highly idealized plane of existence of a Rishi's Mindscape, into a group psyche.

Examples

• in a foetus there is a stage when the Atman/soul is said to enter the body thus giving it that integrated collective shared experience of the individual

• when all the cells in the human body feel they are part of just one narrative, that is the one person who embodies them, then it is like the cells and the person are all having an Avatār experience:

• as the individual grows in conflicted environments, they get a fragmented identity, and then their search for sva-Dharma again leads the whole body-mind complex to be fully in sync.

So too when a group of individuals, such as families or teams, are fully synchronized in the above manner is when we have an Avatār effect, and the collective conscious Being forms.

Mythical Stories

When no one knows how to manifest an Avatār then all we can do is entertain ourselves as though these were mere mythical stories, wait patiently for one to magically appear, and parrot religious texts in the interim, for example:

For example, in much of Hindu civilization today we are awaiting the Kalki Avatār to take us out of the Kali Yuga, a word which may have two meanings, related:

• • kal which derives calendar literally means past/future, and “ki” derives krit meaning to create

  • “Kali’ literally means a bud that is waiting to flower in the fullness of time.

But actually, through Yoga, we can erase any past, and flower into any future - our choice!

For another example, in Biblical culture we await the second coming of the Saviour to save us

• • This grand event is timed with the Apocalypse

    • The Greek apo, also in Sanskrit apo, is the linguistic root of the English word opposite, 

    • and Greek calypse, also in Sanskrit lupt, means to hide,

    • thus actually & literally apocalypse means the "opposite of hide", or rather to uncover, in this case, the Truth of our existence.

Of course such a revelation will shake up the existing world order so most are reluctant to wish for one - whether accompanied by physical floods & the plague is a different matter.

History

Unfortunately Itihās has been mistranslated as ‘history’, a factual recounting of events, that happened uniquely in the past, and this “His”-story is usually told of conquering Kings written by men in their employ, which are really no more than hagiographies, or paeans to royalty, by loyal court poets.

The word "History" of course, begs the questions then, of where is :

• “Her”-story ostensibly meant to empower the weakened sex, but which stands to get co-opted by feminists to drive a particular agenda ? or 

• "Our"-story wherein lies the perspective to uplift the oppressed masses, but which gets framed as Subaltern or Race exploitation concepts crafted by ivory tower intellectuals opening the doors for incendiary politics ?

Thus, history-based narratives although undeniably useful from a shared national cultural perspective, could also become divisive tools to fragment society by propaganda, because they ignore the "lesser" narratives.

As a counterpoint, great Itihās scripts also have sub-scripts embedded from related stories, and the mark of a great storytelling raconteur is how they are able to jump across sub-scripts while still keeping the overall thread hanging coherently.

Although these stories are portrayed as having stemmed from the Yogic Mind, we are also not ruling out their past historicity, albeit embellished with poetic license, for these characters could very well have had actual lives too.  

Conversely, we ourselves could all be characters living right now in some cosmic virtual reality play!

Itihās 

A first-person grand narrative of an Avatār's complete story, actually experienced by a RIshi, is called as इतिहास Itihās in Sanskrit - or literally “actually happened”. 

These grand stories weave a plausible & entrancing plot that also reveals the structure of the collective Mind, such as the story of the Rāmāyana, the Mahābhārata, or the ultimate plot that the Universe itself could be a Conscious Being.

Prophets

It’s a widely prevalent notion that Avatārs manifest but rarely - but this is because the art & science of Avatār manifestation has not been detailed & propagated thoroughly. 

Many self-realized beings on this planet have stumbled upon a massive and spontaneous neuropsychological experience, but did not have had the cosmology of Yoga in which in to explain it.

When they descend from the mountain top or emerge from a cave in the desert, they do so bearing prophetic messages and claiming to be the sole messenger of 'God'.

Unfotunately when such prophets are not trained in Yoga, the Avatār effect is distorted, and this leads to blind monotheistic religion.

Story Web

In Yogic model, an Avatār is an involution of a highly idealized Self into Human form, accompanied by instilling of a grand mental narrative as a single, but composite, conscious Being into our Mindscape - and this impacts a whole collective.

In evolutionary Biology, there is something called the co-evolutionary vortex, when one particular mutual co-evolution pair draws in other species, creating a larger web of interactions where they all co-evolve with each other.  

So too, an Avatār is a full web of idealized characters, instilled with one main character alongside which all the other characters fit in their stories, and feels very personalized to all in the collective.

These characters interact in our Mindspace as neuropsychological processes, rubbing off on each other, and as we use this knowledge to resolve our relationships with the people/objects around us, thus too these characters all co-evolve in our Mindscape.

Eventually these characters no longer need to tell stories, so too our Mind stops telling stories, at least this particular one, which means we have liberated them, given them Moksha.

The Yuga

A Yuga is the collective subjective experience of Time. 

Psychological Group Time

Of course physical time exists in a one-way flow, but large groups of society feel as though they are together stuck in a particular experience of Time - maybe it's prosperous, or difficult, or mundane.

From the perspective of Yoga, such a feeling of Time is actually psychological. Just as much as we could step into Sukha and Dukha spaces, by cultivating the sense of the Now, so too societies can shift their Yuga experience.

Thus we we are spiralling in this dimension of psychological Time called युग Yūga cycles.

There are considered to be 4 Yūgas that repeat in cycles:

• कलि युग Kali Yuga , like most of the world today, even if we talk we misunderstand each other - which is the reason we are picky about linguistic precision in this book.

• द्वापर युग Dvāpara Yuga, for example in the famed Krishna’s Time, we can communicate clearly through our vocal apparatus,

• त्रेट युग Threta Yuga , for example in the noble Rāma’s Time, we can communicate even through sheer Thought alone,

• सत्य युग Satya Yuga , at the start of the grand Yūga cycle, we communicate through just our Heart’s Intent alone.

Together these constitute a महा Mahā Yuga.

The Yuga is actually a collective choice we make, so in order to pick which Yuga we wish to experience we need to shift the societal awareness. 

Psychic Group Time

The famed Avatār effect can shift the Yuga in a long-lasting experience which is why a particular type of Avatār is associated with each type of Yuga.

These Yuga periods are said to, thankfully, increase from Kali to Satya in the ratio of 1:2:3:4.

In psychological Time, the Yoga model indicates that we should be spending a lot more time crafting the desired Avatār, rather than tearing our hair out waiting for the next Avatār to somehow magically land on Earth.

There are different mentions of the exact number of years in physical time, which of course we are meant to transcend. 

Most of these physical time periods fall into the multiples of the number :

• 432 =  2^4 * 3^3, in which,

• 2 is the dualities to overcome,

• 4 is the number of Yugas in the cycle, 

• One of the 3's is the three Lokas to transcend in each Yuga

• The second 3 is that we have to do this three times to get to Satya Yuga, because we are usually in Kali Yuga, at the bottom of the pile.

In other mentions of Yuga periods we will see other such factorization into prime numbers, and it's obvious that these are also symbolic, and simply need to be mapped thoughtfully into the different dimensions we have observed of the Yoga mind.

Realizing that Time is but a mental concept means that at some point, while we incrementally work in physical Time towards a “psychological evolution”, reaching for a projected Future with a limited Mind, the end goal is always just out of reach.

When we realize this charade of incrementalism, then one day it all just clicks as a psychic jump, and we transcend these time periods.

Remember, psychic means the emergence of a novel experience in the psyche, hence a psychological evolution.

In other words, incrementally seeking happiness is a tiring endeavor, and at some point we realize that we might as well go for the perpetual bliss of Ananda itself.

Sandhyā

Sandhyā literally means San (perfected) + Dhyā (to do meditation), and it is typically used for the start/end time periods of any Yuga.

Typically considered to be 1/10th of the whole Yuga, they are considered really important times in which to get into the really deepest meditation to invoke the next Avatār we desire.

So for example, if we are living a life embodying a particular Avatār, for say 10 hours in the day, then one of those hours should be to invoke the next Avatār, and this period would be the Sandhyā period.

Typically the Sandhyā times are aligned with daily transition times of dawn, midday, dusk.

The Story as a Conscious Being

The Conscious Being architecture can be applied to the entire Story of the Itihās itself, that is literally modeling it as a single composite Conscious Being that contains other Conscious Beings as part of the same package.

This is how we characterize the collective experience.

The Kosha model from the Taittiriya Upanishad is useful to model this, starting at the outermost level from the Anna-maya Kosha, which is the most obvious, to the Ānanda-maya Kosha which is the most subtle.

Computational Model

• All our past civilizational stories, epic and otherwise, are in fact story-Apps that run in our psyche, that outwardly exhibit the phenomenon of religiosity.

• These apps are scripted using psycholinguistic languages, Sanskrit as a predominant example.

• All of this runs on a psychic OS with a very specific structure to generate evolutionary states.