It’s sunny in Pittsburgh today. The sun is unseasonably bright, not just for March, but for spring even. Light is coming in through the windows, the screen door – even through the cracks in the blinds and the spaces between the frames. At this house, this where place I am, I’m surrounded by light in the daytime, and it feels amazing.

During the night before, there was nothing but darkness, deep and black. It seems that as warm and bright as it could get in the day, the nighttime was magnified in gloom just as much. I could hear the near-feral cats outside, yowling and howling at the moon, passing cars, whatever. There were dark shapes in my room, bits and pieces of shadows that flit past my pillow. The joy of the sun vanishes in the pale terror of the moon.

This is identical, in almost every way, to the yug we live in today. Maharajji never fails to remind us that if we want to become God-realized, the time for it is running out. We do not know when our next human life will be, our next chance at finding our beloved Radha and Krishna. Kaliyug is the last and shortest in the cycle of the yugas, where we have the least amount of time to follow the guidance of our Guru. To make matters worse, kaliyug is the age of materialism, the time when it feels better to perform selfish or evil actions than it does to promote virtuous ones. If you’ve ever had the feeling that things used to be better when you were younger, or that people are worse now, or the state of affairs is deteriorating, you don’t know how right you are, nor how far we have to fall.

Whatever happiness we get out of this world is fleeting. That’s the lesson of the shining days and fearsome nights. But when we seek happiness in the Divine, in the power of God, we find that the feeling stays. We are blessed with the teachings and love of our Guru, the only one who is capable of leading us to the light of truth. The lesson we need to learn, the understanding we need to get, is not to pray for the day to be eternal, but for the faith that one day, when we find God, the day will be eternal.