Greetings Reader,

There was barely enough room in the jumbled-up mess of an office to fit the desk, the one adult behind it, and the three pre-teens who were sitting in front of it.

The furnace-level setting on the electric radiator’s thermostat approximated the sensation of sitting inside a combustion chamber.

The smoke from the Rabbi’s cigar displaced every molecule of oxygen in the room and conspired with the radiator to remove every last drop of moisture from my eyeballs.

But enduring the combination of claustrophobia, conflagration, suffocation, and dehydration wasn’t the heaviest price I paid for spending a full fall season of Friday nights at Temple Beth El learning the portion of the Torah I would recite for my Bar Mitzvah.

The real sacrifice was missing the third and final season of my favorite TV show: Star Trek.

I was really into sci-fi as a kid. I liked the idea of tricorders and transporters, but the real hook was Star Trek’s overarching optimism about how advanced technology could unlock human potential.

In the Trekverse, the warp drive was the breakthrough that revolutionized space travel and enabled interplanetary contacts, but the invention of the replicator—a gizmo that gave people a way to instantly synthesize food, clothing, and anything else at no cost—was what liberated people to pursue a higher purpose beyond anything money could buy.

The advent of the replicator spelled the end of scarcity and, with it, the end of Capitalism.

But that our immediate future looked so bright.

The advent of AI spells just the opposite: according to the apostles of technocracy, unbridled Capitalism is the logical conclusion of a future dominated by digital superintelligence.

In the fictional techtopia of the Trekverse, everything costs nothing and the basic causes of human conflict disappear.

In the factual dystopia of the United States, everything costs a fortune and the basic causes of human conflict are escalating by the minute.

Alas, utopias, tech or otherwise, are fictional by definition: the word “utopia” combines Greek roots for "good place" and "no place," indicating that perfect places only exist in our imaginations.

Still, I’m convinced that a better place is possible and that the teachings of traditional yoga wisdom can show us how to get there from here.

Prompted by a few sharp minds who share my conviction in the possibility of a spiritually-informed utopian-ish future, I compared yoga wisdom’s socio-economic system with the post-scarcity socio-economics of the United Federation of Planets.

The first thing worth noting is that they share a cultural foundation that emphasizes the idea that human life is meant to serve a higher purpose than the pursuit of wealth.

The Trekverse and the yogaverse also share the underlying assumption that if human beings are given abundance, we’ll naturally gravitate toward cooperation, ethical behavior, and the pursuit of such higher purposes.

In the Trekverse, higher purpose is seen as the quest of knowledge, personal development, and the betterment of humanity. Poverty and the risk of death for want of basic needs has been eliminated, so people are free to pursue those purposes.

In the yogaverse, higher purpose is seen as the quest for transcendental knowledge, self-realization, and the betterment of all living beings. Poverty and the risk of death for want of basic needs is unlikely because the system is designed to distribute society’s wealth in accordance with people’s needs, so people would, once again, be relatively free to pursue those higher purposes.

There are some significant differences, too. One asks: “What happens when we have everything we want?” The other asks: “Why do we want so much in the first place?”

The role of technology is also different: In the Trekverse, technology replaces obligatory labor, scarcity, and social tensions (unless the script calls for them), which implies that technological advancement precedes and promotes higher consciousness.

In the yogaverse, higher consciousness is the driving force of social organization and technological innovation. The formation of socio-economic systems that support both material prosperity and spiritual upliftment are a product of higher consciousness;

Both models offer a utopian vision, but they have different conceptions of cause and effect. In Trektopia, outer abundance leads to inner evolution; in yogatopia, inner evolution leads to a outer abundance.

We don’t have replicators or warp drives, but we do have a blueprint for a better future in the pages of yoga’s wisdom literature. All we have to do is make it so.

What do you think? If we had replicators and limitless energy tomorrow, would we actually attain peace and pursue our highest purpose? Or would we still need to pursue the higher purpose that yoga prescribes in order to attain peace?

One thing I know for sure: if there had been a replicator in the Rabbi’s office, I would have replicated a fan, a humidifier, and an air purifier.

Okay, that’s not really true: I would have replicated a transporter and beamed myself the #%*! out of there.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k

P.S: Enrollment is open for my next live online mini-course: Practical Sanskrit for Yoga Teachers — Three hours of progressive learning focused on the aspects of Sanskrit knowledge that really matter for yoga teachers. You'll come away with a higher level of confidence in your ability to pronounce Sanskrit words, chant mantras, sutras, and verses, and teach both poses and philosophy on a higher level. CLICK HERE for complete information and registration.

P.P.S: Are you in the D.C. area? Join me tomorrow night for a FREE in-person event at Luneh Yoga. I'll be hosting Luneh's Monday Night Meditation Sangha. We'll do some call-and-response chanting, a guided meditation, and have an open conversation about how looking through the lens of yoga wisdom can help us gain a better understanding of our selves and our world. Luneh Yoga is located at 2000 S Street NW in the DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. This is a FREE event — CLICK HERE to register.