Yuga: An Anatomy of Our Fate
By: Marty Glass
Pub. Date: 6/01
Publisher: Sophia Perennis 
Format: Paper, 384pp.
ISBN: 0900588292
Our Price: 10% off $21.95

Related Books: The Modern World,  Tradition and Religion Today
Related Audio/Video: Interview with Marty Glass for Yuga: An Anatomy of Our Fate

Publisher

In his book Yuga: An Anatomy of our Fate, Marty Glass soberly but compassionately examines the underlying currents of our times. He finds that even as outward ‘progress’ reaches unheard-of heights, something is going very wrong within— nothing less than the loss of our very humanity, the inability to discern, as the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘the nature of what is and what is not.’ Glass’s powerful visionary writing captures, as in a vividly lucid dream, humanity’s struggles through the trap of history, the Fall into Time, the age of Telemanity, the Reign of Quantity, and the Mutation into Machinery, which have led to our present state, where the meaning of our lives is measured in output, net worth, and the accumulation of transient experiences—a state described in the Hindu Doctrine as that of the Kali-Yuga, the Iron Age.

During the cosmic cycle of the Kali-Yuga the distinction between the relative and the Absolute, the world and the Divine, is lost. The authentic spirituality of the revealed religions is replaced with man-made counterfeits. Time tightens its grip on our lives. We watch and wonder how much longer ecological and social decline and the fragmentation and ‘dis-qualification’ of reality can go before the hourglass stands empty. A choice must be made. Plato said, ‘the values of those who have seen the light are completely transformed.’ There is no exit from illusion except by those who, for the love of the real, enter upon one of the great traditional paths to Reality. A perception of outer decadence and decay calls for an answering reawakening to Wisdom, Love, Beauty and Joy within.

Review by Huston Smith

Let me tip my hand at the start. I consider this book a phenomenon.

 Two comparisons suggest themselves right off. In 1951 a most uncommon ‘common man’, a longshoreman named Eric Hoffer, created a literary sensation by writing True Believer, which won acclaim from even the loftiest pundits. By choice, Marty Glass is likewise a man of the people. Father of five children, he was a school janitor for nine years and for the last fifteen years has taught elementary school in rural California, near Arcata. He is a jazz piano player, veteran of the 60s, former Little League coach, lives in an owner-built home 2 miles up a dirt road, and drives a 1965 Ford pickup named Old Brown. Yet his book, while accessible, is as learned—erudite if the word is stripped of connotations of pedantry—as any you will find on Amazon.com this year.

 The second comparison moves from erudition to content, and is with René Guénon’s blockbuster, The Reign of Quantity. As social criticism, that book was strong medicine; too strong for readers in the 1940s to swallow—its warnings were dismissed as the rantings of a spoilsport Cassandra. Now that sixty subsequent years have proved him to be perhaps the most perceptive prophet of the twentieth century, it remains to be seen whether the public is ready to listen to Marty Glass’s update of his central thesis.

 That update distinguishes five historical falls that have carried us into the Kali-Yuga—Yuga for short in this book. Underlying the other four is the Fall into Time. Here the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, sets the pace. Human life is temporal by definition—we are born, mature, and die—but it remained for civilizations to turn time into history by making one age different from another and providing thereby sequential frameworks for human life. Cosmic time (the creation of the world and its denizens) and planetary time (the circlings of days and seasons) are displaced in importance by linear, historical time. This is the most profound revolution humanity has ever undergone, and it will never be reversed. The West has read historical time as setting the stage for progress, but India (with its doctrine of the four yugas that keep recycling themselves) saw deeper. For thirty-eight years, Marty Glass has been a dedicated practitioner of Vedanta, the religion of India.

 The second fall is the Reign of Quantity, and here the aforementioned René Guénon is the advance scout. In its integral, uncompromised state, Reality is an ecstasy of qualities, but the unfolding of history is marked by the progressive displacement of qualities by quantities toward the goal of what Lewis Mumford called a dis-qualified universe.

 Glass calls the third fall the Mutation into Machinery, but because Jacques Ellul has called attention to it most incisively, as Glass himself points out, the Triumph of Technique might be more appropriate. Knowledge today is not taken to be truly such unless it is ‘effective’, which is to say, instrumental in achieving a specified pragmatic aim.

 The fourth fall is the End of Nature. Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature sets the pace here. Ecological awareness permeates Yuga. Wilderness. We long for the vanished world untouched by human hands, ‘the First Place’ Glass calls it. No longer available on earth except in scattered pockets, its archetype lingers to haunt us like a timeless mirage.

 Finally, there is the Prison of Unreality that the four above listed falls have walled us into. Media technology. Entertainment. Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle.’ Internet relationships. The whole brain-blasting uproar of Baudrillard’s ‘hyper-reality’ and ‘cyberblitz’. Our identities are invaded. We become what we sell ourselves into being. Planet Hollywood and the News Team. We have become kapital (Marx), technique (Ellul), and hyper-reality rolled into one.

 These five falls—the Fall into Time, the Reign of Quantity, the Mutation to Machinery, the End of Nature, and the Prison of Unreality—taken together comprise the fate of historical humanity and are, Glass is convinced, one-way trips. And the urban-industrial-vehicular-commercial-technological-pharmaceutical-electronic-information-spectator secular society they have produced has ripped the human world to shreds. These things are in the air; no one reading Yuga will find its thesis surprising. The authors Glass lists in his bibliography are ‘unconscious prophets of the Kali-Yuga,’ and they are widely read.

But now, as ‘Saturday Night Live’ would put it, for something entirely different. The straightforward way in which I have summarized Glass’s argument belies his book’s style, which is, well, quirky. Everything about that style—its loose structure, the absence of a logical consecutive principle of organization, the widely varying chapters lengths, the poetic and novelistic vocabulary combined with exhaustive and blithely eclectic research, the mind-boggling diversity of its sources and references, even its peculiar Table of Contents—is a radical departure from the usual presentation of serious and thorough scholarship. Equally at home with the Diamond Sutra and the Grundrisse of Karl Marx, while being a careful student of magazine displays at the checkout counters of supermarkets, the author cheerfully presents his book as a provocation rather than an argument. But don’t be misled; the reader will never find himself confused and at sea. Glass is an top of his idiosyncratic style which he uses for effect—to drive his points home—and not to debunk linear thinking, as much postmodern writing seems bent on doing.

I have saved for last what I regard as the master achievement of Yuga, which lies in neither its ‘argument’ nor its style, but in its voice. That voice, entirely different from Guénon’s, makes Glass’s writing distinctive even when its ideas are familiar. It speaks so palpably from his heart that we find it resonating in our hearts as well.

And there is something else about that voice. If I failed to state is explicitly, the reader might assume that Glass is a misanthrope, a morbid, disillusioned Cassandra. Nothing could be further from the truth. The final pages of Yuga are celebrations of joy and love, and the discerning reader will detect those qualities lurking between the lines of the book’s every page. For remember, Marty Glass is a Vedantist, and beneath that a spokesman for the truth that underlies all the world’s wisdom traditions. Behind the world of appearances—samsara, maya, and the shadows on Plato’s cave—stands the uncreated light, Reality, which is eternal bliss. It is God, Love, the Tao, the Truth, the Great Spirit, the One, and (when personified) Krishna, Siva, Allah, and Christ.

--Huston Smith

For those seriously concerned with the plight of present-day humanity and the unprecedented crises through which human society is passing today, this book offers many profound insights. It can offer many guidelines and openings onto the understanding of the traditional world and that perennial wisdom whose loss has brought about the present age of spiritual darkness.

—Seyyed Hossein Nasr

This is the Book of our time, or rather a major chapter in that Book. Outraged, tender, vastly erudite, reassuring, terrifying, compassionate, inexorable, a word spoken always from, and always on behalf of, the human form. Jeremiah with a Jewish shrug: ‘End of the world? So what else is new?’ Spoken, because the chapters and sections and paragraphs of denunciation and lament lift and solidify, simultaneoulsyh lengthen an contract till they cross over into the stanzaic, and the lines break—into song. Without which compassion is impotent. The compassion is not in the substance; it is in the beat, the rhythm: of words, and of events too. Which is why all justice, in the end, is poetic.

Marty is as bad as Rumi, or Burroughs, when it comes to last words: ‘And now, no more! I place my hand on my mouth, and all is Silence.’ Then, next stanza, next paragraph, there he is mouthing off again, bringing the world back out of annihilation just so he can say goodby even better this time, with even greater finality and flourish. And greater love. Which is why all of YUGA seems to be packed into every part, but with no more sense of repetitiveness than the act of breathing: nothing is newer, or fresher, than the next breath, the next line. If we can keep him writing on the Winchester Mystery House of his, we’ll all live forever!

No one else I know of has faced the whole range of what we face in these times with all of his critical and emotional faculties both open and intact. He deserves a deep and generous reading.

—Charles Upton