Among the four mythical periods (called yugas), which according to the Hindu tradition continue to articulate cyclically in the sphere of time, the Kali Yuga represents the current era, characterized by the highest level of darkness, malaise and ignorance. I heard about Kali Yuga for the first time when I approached oriental philosophies in the early 70s. Before then, I was convinced to live in the most advanced and evolved era in human history. Later, I realized that the contemporary world was instead the maximum expression of political, scientific and spiritual backwardness and perversion. This observation referred mainly to the dominant Western culture and in particular to my native country, which I believe to be one of the most relevant examples of obscurantism and backwardness.
Between Western and Eastern cultures there is, or more properly there wa, a radical difference in the perception of time. While the West conceives time linearly and even with an evolutionary trend, the East understands it in a cyclical and multidimensional way. From this last perspective, on the one hand, time continues to repeat itself cyclically, passing from light to dark and vice versa, including both evolution and involution, while on the other, time is an illusion. This means that you can travel forward or backward, just as you can transcend it.
The characteristic of the Kali Yuga, exemplifying its darkness and ignorance, is precisely that of trapping their people in a linear time and in the exclusive identification with a single physical body subject to constant abuse and inevitable death. The exclusive perception of linear time represents the highest expression of ignorance, as well as the highest level of perversion, cruelty, pain and soul loss possible. It should be noted here that the Kali Yuga, as the traditions say, began about 5000 years ago, corresponding to the entire linearity of recorded human history. What happened before then is shrouded in mystery, above all because it would refute the entire paradigm on which the contemporary world is based. The society we live in is based entirely on ignorance, and consequently will always continue to prevent any form of true knowledge until its total dissolution. This is precisely in the nature of Kali Yuga, the time when separation radically triumphs, causing all sorts of conflict, hypocrisy, falsehood, violence, madness and perversion, with a continuous crescendo until total destruction. The physical body with which we identify as human beings is in the darkest possible place and time. Paradoxically, this era is characterized by a dizzying growth in births, which is leading to the maximum overpopulation of human history. This is because, being the Kali Yuga a cycle of maximum greed, suffering and death, an ever-increasing number of victims are needed to be tortured and sacrificed. They come from all sides, mostly duped by incessant advertising campaigns or by all sorts of blackmail, seduction and deception.
What I have written does not seem to give much hope, but this is not at all the case. In the linearity of time, one can only be pessimistic. There can be no ultimate positive hopes or developments, since the fate of all that surrounds us is decay and death. In the cyclicity and transcendence of time, that is, in the multidimensional sphere, what happens in the linearity of time is pure hallucination. Kali Yuga is the product of ignorance and illusion. It is the expression of what the philosophical and religious doctrines of ancient India call māyā, “illusion”, the fictitious “creation” of temporal phenomenal appearances, the hallucination of duality, the separation of reality into good and evil. This is the human reality we are in and will remain until we choose to awaken. No awakening and no actual life will ever be possible as long as we insist on existing exclusively in a separate reality.