In the Purāṇic texts, the four yugas progress as a kind of inevitable decay in the moral quality of the universe. The Kūrma Purāṇa (1:27, 16–57; 28:1–7) states it elaborately. The text describes the meditational bliss, lack of self interest, and natural habitat of human beings in the first yuga, kṛtayuga; the arising of pleasure and greed in the tretāyuga; the lack of firm resolve and the introduction of war, death, and suffering in the dvāparayuga; and the rampant hunger, fear, and inversion of social order in the final present age of the kaliyuga. Happiness, beauty, homes in the forest, and food dropping from trees gradually give way to the moral decay of the world and then to the development of practices aimed at liberation from such decay. The kaliyuga is considered the worst of the four yugas —the moment right before the final destruction and renewal of the universe. The Purāṇas and many contemporary Hindu thinkers understand the present to be the kaliyuga. The decadence, greed, and confusion of social categories is both inevitable and part of the turning of the cycles of time, and yet the Purāṇas and other Hindu texts exhort each individual to be the moral exception in this period of decay.