The science of Kriya Yoga,
mentioned so often in these pages, became widely known in modern India through Lahiri
Mahasaya. The Sanskrit root of Kriya is kri, to do, to act and
react; the same root is found in the word karma, the natural principle
of cause and effect. Kriya Yoga is thus “union (yoga) with the Infinite
through a certain action or rite.” A yogi who faithfully follows its technique
is gradually freed from karma or the universal chain of causation.
Because of certain ancient yogic
agreements, a full explanation of Kriya Yoga is not available to the
general public. The actual technique must be learned from an authorized
instructor.
It may suffice to say Kriya Yoga
is a method by which the human blood is decarbonized and recharged with oxygen.
The atoms of this extra oxygen are transmuted into life current to rejuvenate
the brain and spinal centers. By stopping the accumulation of venous blood, the
yogi is able to lessen or prevent the decay of tissues; the advanced yogi
transmutes his cells into pure energy. It is suggested, that Elijah, Jesus,
Kabir and other prophets were familiar with Kriya or a similar technique.
Kriya was a science that was forgotten
for a long time but was re-enacted by Lahiri Mahasaya who received it from his
guru, Mahavatar Babaji, who rediscovered and clarified the technique after it
had been lost in the Dark Ages.
Kriya Yoga was given to the West century by
the author of the best selling classic, The Autobiography of a Yogi,
Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) who is considered one of the preeminent
spiritual figures of modern times.
Yogananda came to America in 1920
from his native India, and was the first great master of yoga to live and teach
in the West for more than 30 years. He is now widely recognized as the Father
of Yoga in the West. He founded Self-Realization Fellowship in 1920.
Babaji told Lahiri Mahasaya, “is a
revival of the same science which Krishna gave, millenniums ago, to Arjuna, and
which was later known to Patanjali, and to Christ, St. John, St. Paul, and
other disciples.”
Kriya Yoga is referred to by Krishna, India’s
greatest prophet, in a stanza of the Bhagavad Gita: “Offering inhaling
breath into the outgoing breath, and offering the outgoing breath into the
inhaling breath, the yogi neutralizes both these breaths; he thus releases the
life force from the heart and brings it under his control.” The interpretation
is: “The yogi arrests decay in the body by an addition of life force, and
arrests the mutations of growth in the body by apana (eliminating
current). Thus neutralizing decay and growth, by quieting the heart, the yogi
learns life control.”
Kriya Yoga is mentioned twice by the ancient
sage Patanjali, foremost exponent of yoga, who wrote: “Kriya Yoga
consists of body discipline, mental control, and meditating on Aum.“
Patanjali speaks of God as the actual Cosmic Sound of Aum heard in
meditation. Aum is the Creative Word. Even the
yoga-beginner soon inwardly hears the wondrous sound of Aum. Receiving
this blissful spiritual encouragement, the devotee becomes assured that he is
in actual touch with divine realms.
Patanjali
refers a second time to the life-control or Kriya technique thus:
“Liberation can be accomplished by that pranayama which is attained by
disjoining the course of inspiration and expiration.”
St. Paul knew Kriya Yoga, or
a technique very similar to it, by which he could switch life currents to and
from the senses. He was therefore able to say: “Verily, I protest by our
rejoicing which I have in Christ, I die daily.” By daily withdrawing his
bodily life force, he united it by yoga union with the rejoicing (eternal
bliss) of the Christ consciousness. In that felicitous state, he was
consciously aware of being dead to the delusive sensory world of maya.
In the initial states of God-contact
(savikalpa samadhi) the devotee’s consciousness merges with the Cosmic
Spirit; his life force is withdrawn from the body, which appears “dead,” or motionless and rigid. The yogi is fully aware of his bodily
condition of suspended animation. As he progresses to higher spiritual states (nirvikalpa
samadhi), however, he communes with God without bodily fixation, and in his
ordinary waking consciousness, even in the midst of exacting worldly duties.
“Kriya Yoga is an instrument
through which human evolution can be quickened,” Sri Yukteswar explained to his
students. “The ancient yogis discovered that the secret of cosmic consciousness
is intimately linked with breath mastery. This is India’s unique and deathless
contribution to the world’s treasury of knowledge. The life force, which is
ordinarily absorbed in maintaining the heart-pump, must be freed for higher
activities by a method of calming and stilling the ceaseless demands of the
breath.”
The Kriya Yogi mentally
directs his life energy to revolve, upward and downward, around the six spinal
centers (medullary, cervical, dorsal, lumbar, sacral, and coccygeal plexuses)
which correspond to the twelve astral signs of the zodiac, the symbolic Cosmic
Man. One-half minute of revolution of energy around the sensitive spinal cord
of man effects subtle progress in his evolution; that half-minute of Kriya
equals one year of natural spiritual unfoldment.
One thousand Kriya practiced
in eight hours gives the yogi, in one day, the equivalent of one thousand years
of natural evolution: 365,000 years of evolution in one year. In three years, a
Kriya Yogi can thus accomplish by intelligent self-effort the same result
which nature brings to pass in a million years. The Kriya short cut, of
course, can be taken only by deeply developed yogis. With the guidance of a
guru, such yogis have carefully prepared their bodies and brains to receive the
power created by intensive practice.
The Kriya beginner employs
his yogic exercise only fourteen to twenty-eight times, twice daily. A number
of yogis achieve emancipation in six or twelve or twenty-four or forty-eight
years. A yogi who dies before achieving full realization carries with him the
good karma of his past Kriya effort; in his new life he is harmoniously
propelled toward his Infinite Goal.
The body of the average man is like
a fifty-watt lamp, which cannot accommodate the billion watts of power roused
by an excessive practice of Kriya. Through gradual and regular increase
of the simple and “foolproof” methods of Kriya, man’s body becomes
astral transformed day by day, and is finally fitted to express the infinite
potentials of cosmic energy the first materially active expression of Spirit.
Kriya Yoga has nothing in common with the
unscientific breathing exercises taught by a number of misguided zealots. Their
attempts to forcibly hold breath in the lungs is not only unnatural but decidedly
unpleasant. Kriya, on the other hand, is accompanied from the very
beginning by an accession of peace, and by soothing sensations of regenerative
effect in the spine.
The ancient yogic technique converts
the breath into mind. By spiritual advancement, one is able to cognize the
breath as an act of mind a dream-breath.
Many illustrations could be given of
the mathematical relationship between man’s respiratory rate and the variations
in his states of consciousness. A person whose attention is wholly engrossed,
as in following some closely knit intellectual argument, or in attempting some
delicate or difficult physical feat, automatically breathes very
slowly. Fixity of attention depends on slow breathing; quick or uneven breaths
are an inevitable accompaniment of harmful emotional states: fear, lust, anger.
The restless monkey breathes at the rate of 32 times a minute, in contrast to
man’s average of 18 times. The elephant, tortoise, snake and other animals
noted for their longevity have a respiratory rate which is less than man’s. The
tortoise, for instance, who may attain the age of 300 years, breathes only 4
times per minute.
The rejuvenating effects of sleep
are due to man’s temporary unawareness of body and breathing. The sleeping man
becomes a yogi; each night he unconsciously performs the yogic rite of
releasing himself from bodily identification, and of merging the life force
with healing currents in the main brain region and the six sub-dynamos of his
spinal centers. The sleeper thus dips unknowingly into the reservoir of cosmic
energy which sustains all life.
The voluntary yogi performs a
simple, natural process consciously, not unconsciously like the slow-paced
sleeper. The Kriya Yogi uses his technique to saturate and feed all his
physical cells with un-decaying light and keep them in a magnetized state. He
scientifically makes breath unnecessary, without producing the states of
subconscious sleep or unconsciousness.
By Kriya, the outgoing life
force is not wasted and abused in the senses, but constrained to reunite with
subtler spinal energies. By such reinforcement of life, the yogi’s body and
brain cells are electrified with the spiritual elixir. Thus he removes himself
from studied observance of natural laws, which can only take him, means as
given by proper food, sunlight and harmonious thoughts by circuitous means as
given by proper food, sunlight, and harmonious thoughts to a million-year Goal.
It needs twelve years of normal healthful living to effect even slight
perceptible change in brain structure, and a million solar returns are exacted
to sufficiently refine the cerebral tenement for manifestation of cosmic
consciousness.
Untying the cord of breath which
binds the soul to the body, Kriya serves to prolong life and enlarge the
consciousness to infinity. The yoga method overcomes the tug of war between the
mind and the matter-bound senses, and frees the devotee to reinherit his
eternal kingdom. He knows his real nature is bound neither by physical
encasement nor by breath, symbol of the mortal enslavement to air, to nature’s
elemental compulsions.
Introspection, or “sitting in the
silence,” is an unscientific way of trying to force apart the mind and senses,
tied together by the life force. The contemplative mind, attempting its return to
divinity, is constantly dragged back toward the senses by the life currents.
Kriya, controlling the mind directly through the life force, is the
easiest, most effective, and most scientific avenue of approach to the
Infinite. In contrast to the slow, uncertain “bullock cart” theological path to
God, Kriya may justly be called the “airplane” route.
The yogic science is based on an
empirical consideration of all forms of concentration and meditation exercises.
Yoga enables the devotee to switch off or on, at will, life current from the
five sense telephones of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Attaining this
power of sense-disconnection, the yogi finds it simple to unite his mind at
will with divine realms or with the world of matter. No longer is he
unwillingly brought back by the life force to the mundane sphere of rowdy
sensations and restless thoughts. Master of his body and mind, the Kriya
Yogi ultimately achieves victory over the “last enemy,”
death.
