Many new agers fail to see the larger background to various practices such as yoga, and here we have an example with the now ancient periodization of the ‘yugas’. This historical model is archaic, obsolete and a confusion that at its extreme produced fascist attacks on modernity as the Kali yuga.
The yogas are very ancient, that is true, but the explanation does not contradict historical progression and the new era of modernity. Here the eonic model can help: a progression of epochs actually exists and we see modernity as the real new age that it is.
This is no contradiction with the antiquity of yoga. Some things progress but human consciousness does not as such evolve in history because it is an already evolved potential in man at all times ancient and modern but too often devolving to a mechanical state. This is the plight of all times ancient and modern. To posit an earlier age superior to modernity is thus likely to miss point. That might be said of inventors of new things, but not of any given culture as a whole. The eonic model works far better and suggests that the sources of the yogas is deep in the Neolithic period (with intimations going back to the dawn of man) which was strangely primitive and yet seminal. Some ancient age of higher spirituality is thus an illusion, but the fact remains that the source of many aspects of human culture find a starting point in deep antiquity in a completely natural way. Ordinary progressive history as in the eonic model makes much more sense but doesn’t claim that earlier ages might have shown men of higher consciousness. Such men exist in all ages, but the larger tide of human culture tends to carry rather than exhibit that high potential.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 