Why the World Feels Chaotic: Dwapara Yuga and the Age of Energy

Asha Nayaswami opens a talk recorded in Paris in October 2026 by admitting the obvious: this is a difficult time in the history of the world. Not an unprecedented one, she says, because history is full of rapid changes that threw people into confusion. What she offers instead is a framework older than any of those changes. Drawing on Sanatan Dharma, the ancient teaching she describes as a way of perceiving "that which is," she argues that humanity is passing through a cosmic cycle of ages, moving from an Age of Matter into an Age of Energy known as Dwapara Yuga. In her account, the upheaval of the present is not a malfunction. It is what a transition between ages feels like from the inside, and the single factor she returns to again and again is the consciousness each person cultivates. The talk is built on a surprising spine: energy itself, she suggests, is not a fixed quantity that every era understands the same way. Each age has its own sense of what power is, and when that sense changes, the world changes with it.

What Is Sanatan Dharma, and Why Does Asha Say It Is Not Hinduism?

Asha opens with a careful disclaimer about her own place in the story. She represents a particular spiritual lineage of gurus and disciples, she says, but "what we're really representing is a very ancient teaching." She is explicit that this teaching is rooted in India without being bound to a religion: "it's the Indian tradition, but it's not Hinduism. Um it's not any religion." The name itself, Sanatana Dharma, she glosses as meaning "that which is," a description of reality as it can be perceived by those with the consciousness to see it.

She then makes the bridge that organizes everything else in the talk. The reality the sages of India have described for thousands of years, she says, is "exactly the same reality" that physicists of our time, beginning with Albert Einstein, have been circling. The crucial move is her treatment of invention. "All of those things which we call inventions are actually discoveries," she says. Human ingenuity, on this view, is the recognition of subtler laws that already exist, and cooperating with those laws is what makes new things possible. Her example is almost casual: the translation headsets many in the room were wearing, with French coming through a device that has no wires. Nobody thinks about it anymore, she notes, which is exactly the point. The miracle has become furniture.

Why Does the Meaning of Energy Change From Age to Age?

The most striking idea in the talk is that our everyday sense of energy is historically specific. Asha uses the automobile to make the point. When early cars, which she calls the "horseless carriage," were first measured, their power was expressed in horsepower, a unit that communicated instantly because people knew how much a horse could pull. Then she asks a question that lands with the audience: does anyone know how much a horse can pull now? The laughter in the room signals the answer. The concept that was once universally understood has quietly lost its reference point.

Her argument is that this kind of drift is what happens when a civilization's perception of energy moves away from the physical and toward the subtle. She is careful about how it happens. "There was no government edict," she says. "It's just people began to see energy in a more and more subtle form." Light and sound, she points out, carry energy too, and modern medicine uses sound in the ultrasound that lets expectant parents see a picture of the baby, a process most people accept without understanding. From there she makes a claim she attributes to others rather than asserting as her own: "Many people say that the way those pyramids were built was that they knew how to use sound to move physical objects." The point is less the pyramids than the question she leaves hanging: "who are we to say that can't be done now?"

"Light has a tremendous amount of energy. Sound has energy."

Asha Nayaswami, in a talk recorded in Paris, October 2026 (published on YouTube, November 2026)

How Do the Four Ages and a Galactic Orbit Explain the Chaos?

Asha's cosmology rests on a claim she frames as shared by both science and spiritual tradition: that the solar system moves in an elliptical orbit around a dual centered on the galaxy, and that enormous energy emanates from that center. As the system moves closer to it, more energy reaches the planet, and civilization tends toward greater subtlety of perception; as it moves away, that perception recedes. She is candid that she is not an expert on the astronomical details and would point listeners to other books for them. She also stresses that she is "not trying to persuade" anyone. "I'm just talking," she says. "You don't have to like it."

The full cycle, she says, takes 24,000 years, which is why no one gets to stay at the bright end and experience all of it. Within that cycle sit four ages that ascend and descend: the Age of Matter, the Age of Energy, the Age of Thought, and the Age of Spirit. She places the nadir of the cycle around 500 AD, and says the civilization has only recently begun to climb out of the deepest part of the descent. Around 1700, she says, a transition began, and the Industrial Revolution is an early sign of it. Her reading of that revolution is pointed. Machines that did work faster, easier, and cheaper wiped out things that had always existed, and she draws a direct line to present anxieties about AI taking jobs. "So did the Industrial Revolution," she says. Her summary of the ethic that drives the era is blunt: "faster, easier, cheaper is the basic motto of this planet."

Why Is the Transition So Turbulent?

If the ages are shifting, Asha argues, then the disorientation people feel is structurally predictable. Each age trains its people to perceive a particular kind of reality, and when the reality begins to change, the old perceptions stop working before the new ones have formed. She describes the present as a battle of consciousness, a phrase she develops in the chapter on the forces shaping the world, and she frames the question of chaos with a deliberate turn toward the individual rather than the headlines. The talk moves from the state of the world to the state of the person who lives in it, which is where her argument becomes most practical.

What Do Karma and the Voice in Your Head Have to Do With It?

Asha treats karma and identity as inseparable questions. Her talk moves through the limitations of our personal identity, then into karma, then into what she calls the voice in your head and the question of who is listening to it. Her approach here is interrogative. Rather than asking listeners to accept a doctrine, she asks them to observe how they identify themselves. In a passage in the early part of the talk, she draws the familiar contrast between the self and the body, "We wear this body," and emphasizes how much of ordinary life is organized around the belief that one is simply the body. The implication is that a person who has mistaken the vehicle for the driver will experience the turbulence of the age as a personal threat rather than as part of a larger movement.

Her explanation of why people incarnate follows the same logic. "So we incarnate to have the experiences" that teach us what we do not already know, she suggests, and the planet provides the conditions for those lessons. This is where karma becomes less a verdict and more a curriculum. The circumstances of a given life are the material through which a soul learns, and a difficult era is still an era in which learning is possible.

Why Does Consciousness Matter More Than Circumstances?

This is the central claim, and Asha states it plainly: "Spiritual perception is completely independent of the circumstances." A great soul can incarnate at a time when the civilization as a whole is not subtle, she says, and that lifetime can still make spiritual perception possible. To illustrate, she recounts a story about Swami Kriyananda, who as a young monk asked his teacher, Yogananda, whether human beings are really earthlings. Yogananda laughed, she says, and answered that there are countless inhabited planets with different opportunities, and that we choose our place from the astral world. Asha admits the story rests on several assumptions and asks listeners only to follow the logic: if one thing is true, the other may be too.

The inner map she offers is the part of the talk where the abstract becomes a practice. The chapters move through the chakras and levels of consciousness, then to what Asha identifies as our ultimate destiny, which she names as bliss. From there she turns to the layered structure of mind, the subconscious, the conscious, and the superconscious, and describes karma as a means of finding freedom. The sequence is deliberate: the external cycle sets the stage, but the consciousness a person develops determines how they meet it.

How Do Thoughts and Energy Become Reality?

Asha's position on creation is among the most provocative in the talk. If energy is what structures reality, and if the subtle energies of thought are as real as the physical energies of an engine, then the mind is not a passive observer of the world but a participant in shaping it. Her chapters on how we are creating the future and on how thoughts and energy become reality develop this idea, and they connect it to her call to become what she describes as instruments of light. The argument is not that one can wish the world into a better shape. It is that the quality of inner life is part of the material from which outer life is made, and that the discoveries of physics and the teachings of the sages point in the same direction.

What Does Preparing for Uncertain Times Look Like?

Asha's answer is quieter than the diagnosis that precedes it. She returns to the theme of preparing spiritually for uncertain times and to the idea that a new world is built through higher consciousness, one person at a time. In the closing passages she points listeners toward inner stillness and the still, small voice. "We have to be spiritual," she says near the end of the talk, and the phrase carries the weight of everything before it. In her framework, the greatest contribution anyone can make to the future is not a plan or a protest but the quality of consciousness they bring into the world.

Where to go from here

The talk is best approached as an invitation to test a framework rather than a set of conclusions to adopt. Listeners who want to follow the astronomical and historical claims should note that Asha herself points to other books for the details, and that claims such as the pyramid theory are presented as things "many people say." Those who want to explore the ideas she draws on can start with the core concepts she names: Sanatan Dharma, the four ages, karma, the layers of mind, and the still, small voice. The full European tour of which this talk was part is available as a playlist on Asha's YouTube channel, and the talk itself rewards a second viewing with a notebook, especially for the passages on identity and thought.