Book excerpt: From the fall of Rome to the Renaissance almost nothing new was discovered. Man looked back to the great learning of classical civilization for inspiration: admiring their thinkers and architects but incapable of equaling them. In turn, those ancients looked back further, to a previous “Golden Age.†Why did civilization fall and then rise again? In 1920, the Indian Yogi Paramhansa Yogananda, author of the spiritual classic “Autobiography of a Yogi†, came to the United States with the answer. With his message of simple living and high thinking, he became the most popular speaker in the country. This short book deals with Yogananda and the New Age he described: Dwapara Yuga.