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| Mahaavatar Babaji |
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| Lahiri Mahasaya |
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| Sri Yukteshwar Giri |
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| Sri Paramahansa Yogananda |
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.
Kriya Yoga is a simple,
psychophysiological 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. Elijah,
Jesus, Kabir and other prophets were past masters in the use of Kriya or a similar
technique, by which they caused their bodies to dematerialize at will.
Kriya is an ancient
science. Lahiri Mahasaya received it from his guru, Babaji, who
rediscovered and clarified the technique after it had been lost in the Dark
Ages.
“The Kriya Yoga which I am giving to the world through you in this nineteenth century,”
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 apan (eliminating current). Thus neutralizing decay and growth, by quieting the
heart, the yogi learns life control.”
Krishna also relates that it was he, in a former incarnation, who
communicated the indestructible yoga to an ancient illuminato, Vivasvat, who
gave it to Manu, the great legislator. He, in turn, instructed Ikshwaku, the
father of India’s solar warrior dynasty. Passing thus from one to another, the
royal yoga was guarded by the rishis until the coming of the materialistic ages.
Then, due to priestly secrecy and man’s indifference, the sacred knowledge
gradually became inaccessible.
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 the sound of the Vibratory Motor. 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 (sabikalpa 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 (nirbikalpa 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.
The astral system of a human being, with six (twelve by polarity) inner
constellations revolving around the sun of the omniscient spiritual eye, is
interrelated with the physical sun and the twelve zodiacal signs. All men are
thus affected by an inner and an outer universe. The ancient rishis discovered
that man’s earthly and heavenly environment, in twelve-year cycles, push him
forward on his natural path. The scriptures aver that man requires a million
years of normal, diseaseless evolution to perfect his human brain sufficiently
to express cosmic consciousness.
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 astrally 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 undecaying 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—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.
So shalt thou
feed on Death, that feeds on men:
and Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
The life of an advanced Kriya Yogi is influenced, not by effects of past actions, but
solely by directions from the soul. The devotee thus avoids the slow,
evolutionary monitors of egoistic actions, good and bad, of common life, cumbrous
and snail-like to the eagle hearts.
Referring to yoga’s sure and methodical efficacy, Lord Krishna praises the
technological yogi in the following words: “The yogi is greater than
body-disciplining ascetics, greater even than the followers of the path of
wisdom (Jnana Yoga), or of the path
of action (Karma Yoga); be thou, O
disciple Arjuna, a yogi!”
The actual technique must be learned from a Kriyaban or Kriya Yogi; of Yogoda Satsanga
Society/Self-Realization Fellowship.
Here a broad reference must suffice.
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Source: Excerpts from the book on “Autobiography of a Yogi” by
Paramahansa Yogananda.
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