The cycle runs 5,000 years through four ages — golden, silver, copper, iron — and then repeats identically, down to the detail. Every soul plays the same part again. This is not a metaphor in Brahma Kumaris teaching and it is where the system parts company with mainstream Hindu cosmology, whose yugas run to hundreds of thousands of years. The present moment is the confluence age, the short hinge between iron and golden when God is said to be teaching directly through the Murli. That timing is the reason for the urgency: the window for the teaching is now, and it closes.