We still live only at the beginning of Dwapara Yuga proper. What may we expect in the years and centuries to come? I see three probable trends, especially.
The first trend will be a reaction against complexity and a return to a new simplicity. At present there is still in every field an ever-increasing burden of details. Complexity is the inheritance that Kali Yuga bequeaths to Dwapara Yuga. It is not a necessity of knowledge. It is merely the reflection of a mind more concerned with the minutiae of knowledge than with the “arrow-flight” of wisdom.
The new simplicity will be the simplicity of intuitive wisdom. Increasingly, people will come to realize that, when the flow is right, the details have a way of taking care of themselves. This simple truth has an even simpler reason: energy has its own intelligence.
The second trend will be a renewed emphasis on the individual human being. People will come to realize that human accomplishments, even the greatest of them, will never be greater than man himself, as their source. For great achievements, in their totality, can only hint at the human potential for greatness.
The third trend will be a growing demand for quality over quantity. “Bigger” will cease to be equated with “better.”
The perception of matter as an absolute reality made kings during Kali Yuga imagine that, the more territory they possessed, the greater they themselves became. It made people think of humanity in the mass, rather than as individuals.
It was what led Karl Marx as late as the last century to exalt the sweating laborer over the man of ideas. (What, indeed, is communism but a dying echo of Kali Yuga?)
Increasingly in human affairs, there is a trend away from the bulldozer mentality which sets material power against material inertia in a struggle for conquest by brute force. The trend in future will be to adapt to reality, not to beat it into submission.
