Kali Yuga One of the cosmic time reckonings assigns a certain age to the Earth.
Traditional thinking holds that time has no origin or
conclusion, but rather alternates between cycles of creation and activity,
followed by cessation and qui etude.
Each of these cycles lasts 4.32 billion years, with the
active period known as Brahma's Day and the tranquil phase known as Brahma's
Night.
The Day of Brahma is split into one thousand mahayugas
("great cosmic eras"), each lasting 4.32 million years, according to
one accounting of cosmic chronology.
The Krta Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga are
the four yugas that make up each mahayuga.
Each yuga is shorter than the one before it, ushering in a
more degraded and wicked period.
Things have grown so horrible towards the conclusion of the
Kali Yuga that the only remedy is to destroy and recreate the world, at which
point the new Krta period starts.
The final of the four yugas, the Kali Yuga, lasted
"just" 432,000 years.
It is also regarded as the most degenerate yuga, as seen by
its association with iron—a metal that is sometimes helpful, sometimes
detrimental, not very valuable, and whose black hue is linked to Saturn, the
malicious planet.
The Kali Yuga is said to be the period when human evil is at
its peak, virtue has all but vanished, and the world is inexorably breaking
apart.
The Kali Yuga, according to Hindu belief, started with the start of the great conflict chronicled in the epic Mahabharata, and it is, unsurprisingly, the period in which we currently live.
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