Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Buddhist
HELLO GOODBYE: Living in the Kali Yuga with a Little Help from the Beatles

HELLO GOODBYE: Living in the Kali Yuga with a Little Help from the Beatles

Last updated on: December 29, 2021 at 8:12 am by James Ford

HELLO GOODBYE: Living in the Kali Yuga with a Little Help from the Beatles 2021-12-29T08:12:22-08:00 James Ford

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“Hello Goodbye”
Living in the Kali Yuga with a Little Help from the Beatles

Silvio Nardoni

(My friend Silvio Nardoni is a Unitarian Universalist minister as well as a practicing attorney. He shared this with me and I thought it a perfect New Year’s reflection. I asked for permission to share it, and he graciously agreed.)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .” — Charles Dickens

I’m fortunate to have friends and family who inhabit both ends of the political spectrum. While they obviously disagree on many issues, I’ve recently noticed that the ones with the most extreme positions, nevertheless agree on this: the world is in terrible shape, the worst it has ever been. I’ve learned not to try to talk anyone out of such a strongly professed opinion, but still, I’d like to offer a perspective that might soften their views or provide some consolation (if nothing else, at least for the listener).

In order to do that, I need to talk about time.

Broadly speaking, there are two descriptions of how human beings have experienced (or tried explain the experience of) time. One is the “linear” or “historical” notion of time, in which the direction is one-way from the past to the future. Again, speaking generally, this attitude about time is characteristic of Western thought. From the God of the Hebrew Scriptures who acts in history, to the cosmic evolutionary story told by modern astrophysics, which posits a beginning with the superheated “Big Bang” and perhaps some entropic endpoint (“The Big Chill”), the linear model has demonstrated remarkable explanatory and pragmatic power.

The other approach to describing our relationship to time is the “cyclical” or “non-historic” worldview. Agricultural societies all adhere to a prime paradigm based on the seasonal fluctuations of the vegetal cycle. First the Spring seeding, then the Summer of burgeoning growth, the Fall harvest, and the fallow season of Winter. For agriculturalists, orienting oneself to these apparently unchanging rhythms was key to survival. The reliability of the sun’s orientation to the planting fields from year to year allowed for advances in art, written literature, and social organization.

But not all cyclical temporal schemes use the year as the interval of greatest significance. Ancient Hindu thinkers wrote of a dimension of much greater magnitude in their description of the “Yuga Cycle.” According to these texts, the cycle consists of four eras, the longest lasting 1,440,000 solar years and the shortest (the “Kali Yuga”) expiring after “only” 360,000 years. According to Hindu philosophy/cosmology, we are currently in the Kali Yuga, which began in 3102 BCE. If we take these writings literally, that means we are at the “dawn” of this age. The remarkable fertility of their imagination introduced enormous spans of time, far beyond what any historical record could have intimated (assuming they kept or considered “historical” records at all).

Of course, not only Hindu writers have mused about vast spans of time. In “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce gives an agonizingly detailed description of “eternity,” in which a bird appears once every million years to carry away a single grain of sand from a beach of immense proportions. According to Joyce when the bird has carried away the last grain, only a single instant of eternity has elapsed.

The significance of the Kali Yuga lies not its length, but in its “moral qualities.” Although it is the shortest era, it is the “worst” of times. The current era is named after the demon Kali (perhaps not to be confused with the goddess Kali).

So much for the hippie astrology of the 1960’s which claimed we were at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the polar opposite of the Kali Yuga. In the Kali Yuga human consciousness is at a low point; rulers become unreasonable and a danger to the world, rather than protecting the subjects of their governance.

Even while contemplating stages of history on such a grand scale, these sages still manifested a concern for and consciousness of the current state of the political or social dimension of life. As with much of Hindu thought, they resolved the perceived tension between the opposites of the “eternal” and the “now” by including both perspectives.

This concern with the immediate mirrors my own quandary in trying to reconcile other experiences in the political and social dimension of my own life. In “The Second Coming,” a dystopian and apocalyptic description of the modern age, W.B. Yeats opined that the “center will not hold.” If Yeats is right, what does someone who rests somewhere in the “center” of the political spectrum use as a roadmap through the morass of the Kali Yuga, which has hundreds of thousands of years yet to run? (Full disclosure: I expect friends and others on the left might employ the epithet “weak-kneed liberal” to describe my views while those on the right possibly resort to ”high-minded (read: naive) progressive.” Or perhaps more visceral epithets not worthy of repetition.

To bridge this gap I propose that we consult the Fab Four to counteract the influence of the Four Horsemen. And while many of the Beatles songs speak more expansively on timely or timeless concerns, I’ve chosen one of the more lyrically sparse chapters in their songbook. With the prospect of hundreds of thousands of years yet to run until the expiration of the Kali Yuga, what comfort or consolation can one find in “Hello Goodbye?”

Despite (or maybe because of) the simplicity of its lyrics, this song neatly summarizes the interpersonal dynamics of the Kali Yuga. “You say yes, I say no/ You say stop and I say go go go.” If the “worst of times” emerges when deep polarization occurs, we hear the essence of diametric opposition in this simple phrase. What sliver of psychological or political “space” lies between the affirmation of “yes” and the negation of “no?” How can we remain at rest in “stop” position, when so many are saying “go go go” (apparently three measures of “go” are needed to overcome the inertia of “stop”)?

The tension between the initiation (“hello”) and termination (“goodbye”) of relationships also speaks of our times. In describing the Kali Yuga, the Mahabharata prophesies that “avarice and wrath” will be common, and that “truthfulness. . .tolerance and mercy” will continuously diminish. I need not look far to find vivid and current examples of all these human failings.

The isolation born of the pandemic has made starting or maintaining friendships much harder, and frankly left many of them in a kind of limbo between hello and goodbye. Even so, the emergence of quarantine “pods” during the most intense interval of the pandemic testifies to the enduring need for the “hello” of social connection. At the same time, more workers than ever (especially in fields where labor is poorly paid or treated) are saying “goodbye” to their jobs, even when the next one is unknown.

What happens in these deeply meaningful dimensions of our lives pales in comparison to the ferocity of the “hellos” and “goodbyes” unleashed by political affiliations or differences: Bands of aroused citizens bond with one another in physical or virtual space; volunteer teams arise spontaneously to meet hitherto unrecognized needs. We cannot know whether these enactments of “hello” mentality will issue in ill or good, but the existential reality is impossible to escape. On the flip side, we hear of families riven by drastically different world views; friendships foundering on the rocks of overheated rhetoric. The “goodbyes” are often unspoken, but real nevertheless.

In the end, maybe both Dickens and the Hindus are right: it is the best of times, it is the worst of times, and we’ve only a few hundred thousand years to go until things turn again for the better. For the Yuga Cycle, as long as it is, is not eternal. Joyce’s bird eventually gets all the sand off the beach and the cycle starts again. And following the Kali Yuga, the cycle reverts to the the Satya Yuga, a sort of Golden Age.

But it’s pretty cold comfort to think that our distant (about 12,000 generations) descendants will emerge from this vale of tears as the Kali Yuga phases out. Of course, that’s if we take these scriptures literally.

And that’s a leap I’m not prepared to take. We see where that technique leads when applied to the Bible. According to Bishop Ussher, his reading of the Hebrew Scriptures yields a view the Earth was created in 4004 B.C., which according to the geological record means that dinosaurs and humans co-existed on the planet at about the same time as the Exodus. This and other contradictions of the historical record lead me to conclude that whether divinely inspired or not, religious writings are at their most dangerous when viewed through the cramped lens of literalism.

It is common to note that modern life proceeds at a much faster pace than earlier times. When I was in high school, stopwatches used at track meets were calibrated in tenths of a second. We now commonly use hundredths of a second to establish records, and the mechanisms providing this information actually have an even greater degree of precision.

The ubiquitous smart phone operates at a clock speed in the gigahertz range, meaning that each cycle lasts less than one billionth of a second (a so-called nanosecond). And beyond that, we have atomic clocks and other more sophisticated devices which can slice each second into a quadrillion pieces (the femtosecond).

Since I feel no compunction to evaluate the lengthy cycles of the Kali Yuga in a literal way, perhaps it’s time to turn things on their head and imagine that the cycles move a bit more quickly in modern times. Borrowing from the language of computer processors, maybe we should increase the “clock speed” when interpreting these writings. For those familiar with speed-reading techniques, this approach resonates with the admonition to keep the eyes always moving forward through the text.

Equating one second with one year in the Yuga Cycle leads to a projection that the Kali Yuga results in a cycle last 100 hours, a little more than four days. But I find even four days spent in that kind of dispiriting environment a daunting prospect. Moving to the millisecond yields a cycle of six minutes. But anyone in pain will readily testify that six minutes can seem a lifetime. And the smartphone clock rate reduces the Kali Yuga to 0.36 seconds (or less, depending on the model), what A. N. Whitehead might call a “droplet of experience.”

Scaling it down this way sounds comforting, since the Kali Yuga claims such a short stretch of time. But it also means that it returns again in another few seconds. It’s as if we would be saying “Hello” and “Goodbye” nearly simultaneously.

For me anyway, that’s the comfort offered by this song: We are always saying (singing) “Hello Goodbye” in every moment, not only to the Kali Yuga, but to the other components of the cycle as well. Each part of the cycle has something to teach. Even the bleak atmosphere of the Kali Yuga gives clear warnings about the consequences of disregard of moral duty. Even Winter allows for “down time” as part of the cycle.

But we have a choice on which part of the cycle we tap into. We are not merely passengers strapped into assigned seats on the whirling mandala of existence (or to put it in “linear” terms, strapped into our seats on the wide-body jet hurling us and a cohort of a few hundred souls into the future). We have within us both the power to say “Stop” and simultaneously “Go, go, go.” Resolving these apparent contradictions is the existential work given to all who seek to “suck the marrow of life” as Thoreau aptly put it.

Of course, none of us experience time using a frame of reference of 360,000 years nor can we distinguish one femtosecond from another. Our lives unfold in the context of and relation to the milestone events and formative relationships that undergird the narrative of our journey from birth to death.

Both the historical and cyclical conceptions of time can comfortably address this narrative framework. The historical dimension gives length and perspective to the passage of time. The cyclical view allows for celebrating (or observing) the recurring moments in the domains of the personal (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), social (tax “season”, the “election cycle”), and natural (the great migrations of birds and insects, the accumulation and melting of the snowpack).

But here we encounter the limits of both the linear and cyclical notions of time. The presentational immediacy (to borrow from A.N. Whitehead) of the flow of time seems to reside in neither camp. As we live in the moment, everything that we are is brought to bear on whatever confronts us, so the notion of a “past” seems “anachronistic.” And that immediacy similarly diminishes the contemplation of cycles, no matter how finely woven into the tapestry of our existence they might be.

It is a precisely this point where “Hello Goodbye” brings me both relief and consolation. In each moment I feel the “Hello” to both the familiar and unknown as well as the “Goodbye” to the distressing and delightful. Each droplet of existence is one of excitement and dread.

The humorous adage of physicists (often wrongly attributed to Einstein) that “Time is Nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once” might be necessary for explaining in lay terms the need of a fourth dimension to the physical world. But “Hello Goodbye” says quite the opposite: everything is happening at once, at least from my interior experience of time. It is, in that sense, prophesying that each moment contains the “best of times and the worst of times.” It’s not a neat solution to my encounters with friends and acquaintances on the political extremes, but life is a messy thing and sometimes “good enough” is the good I can embody.

In closing, I offer the wisdom of William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

You say yes, I say no
You say stop and I say go go go, oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello

I say high, you say low
You say why and I say I don’t know, oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello
(Hello goodbye hello goodbye) Hello hello
(Hello goodbye) I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello
(Hello goodbye hello goodbye) Hello hello
(Hello goodbye) I don’t know why you say goodbye
(Hello goodbye) I say hello/goodbye

Why why why why why why do you say goodbye goodbye, oh no?

You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello

You say yes (I say yes) I say no (But I may mean no)
You say stop (I can stay) and I say go go go (Till it’s time to go), oh
Oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello hello

Hela heba helloa
Hela heba helloa, cha cha cha
Hela heba helloa, wooo
Hela heba helloa, hela
Hela heba helloa, cha cha cha
Hela heba helloa, wooo
Hela heba helloa, cha cah cah [fade out]

Uncategorized

Previous Post

December 28, 2021

Bodhisattva Fu's Poems on the Four States

Next Post

December 30, 2021 The Tiniest Recollection of the Mad Monk

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A Christmas Carol Abolitionist African-American Ahmadiyya Alan Watts Aldous Huxley Allen Ginsberg Amedkar Jayanti American politics American Zen Anaheim Zen Sangha Anglican Annie Besant April Fool Armageddon Art and Religion artificial intellegence Atheist Awakening B R Ambedkar Barlaam & Josaphat Beatnik Between Bhagavad Gita Bible biography birthday bodhisattva Bodhisattva Precepts Book burning Book of Common Prayer Book of Mormon Brahmo Samaj Buddha Buddhism Buddhist Buddhist Lord's Prayer Butterflies Calendars cartoons cat ChatGPT Chicken Tortilla Soup choices Christian atheism Christian mysticism Christian origins Christian Science Christian Zen Christianity Christianity and Buddhism christmas Christmas Truce Christopher Isherwood Church of Later Day Saints Cinco de Mayo circus covenant critical thinking culture D. T. Suzuki Dalit Buddhism Daniel Defoe Desert Fathers and Mothers dharma talk Dogen Donald Trump Dongshan's Five Ranks Dorothy Day dream Duty Easter ecology Edwin Arnold emptiness Empty Moon Zen Network Episcopal Church Eternal Now Ethics evolution existentialism Faith fantasy Fathers Day film film review fire Five Ranks Folk music food Form and emptiness Four Seals Francis of Assisi Francis Xavier Free thinker friendship George MacDonald Gerald Heard Glenn Taylor Webb God Good Friday Gospel of Gospel of Mark Gospel of Thomas grace Graduate Theological Unioin Graduate Theological Union Guanyin H R Blyth Hakuin Ekaku Hanamatsuri Hanukkah Harada Yasutani Zen Heart Sutra Henry David Thoreau Hermann Hesse Hinduism History and Religion history of religion Holy Spirit home Hospitality Icon Ides of March Isaac Newton Islam Islamic mysticism Jack Kerouac James Luther Adams Jiddu Krishnamurti Joan of Arc Johannes Gutenberg John Donne joke Judaism justice karma kensho King James Bible koan Koun Yamada Kyoto School Lewis Carrol Liberal Christianity Liberal Religion Life Plan Community Liminal literature Literature and Religion Liturgy Lord's Prayer Love Mahatma Gandhi Mahayana Martin Luther King Jr Mary Baker Eddy Mary Magdelene Mary Oliver Mayflower Compact Meditation memories memory metaphor money money and religioin Mormons Mother's Day movie review mysticism mythic Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church New Thought Nichiren Buddhism Nonduality not knowing Omar Khayyam Pacific School of Religion pagan Palm Sunday Passover peace Pentecost perennialism Phantastes Philip Kapleau philosophy Pilgrimage poetry Poetry and Religion politics Prayer Precepts Printing Press prophecy prophetic spirituality psychology Pure Land Queer religion queering religion Quietism Ram Mohan Roy rebirth recipe Relationships and religion religion religion and history Religious syncretism Resistance Retirement Retreat review Rissho Kosei Kai Ritual Robert Aitken Roshi Robert Ingersoll Rohatsu Romani religion Rosie the Riveter saints samadhi SanboZen Sangha Satyagraha science science and reigion science and religion science fiction seminary sermon Sesshin Sex and Religion Shinran Sikh Sikh tradition silence Social Justice Socially Engaged Buddhism Society and religion Soto Zen soul spiritual community spiritual practice Spirituality Sufism Suicide superstition Taoism Television Teresa of Avila Thanksgiving theological schools Theosophy Thomas Merton Time Transcendentalism Transcendentalist Trinitarian Trinity Uncategorized unitarian Unitarian Christianity Unitarian Universalist Universalism Vajrayana Vedanta Walking war Willa Cather William Ellery Channing wisdom women and religion women in religion World Teacher Writing zazen Zen Zen Center Zen inspired retriement zen meditation Zen Precepts Zen women

Select a Month September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What language was the Old Testament mostly written in?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Aramaic Greek Latin Hebrew