The science of Kriya Yoga, mentioned so often
in these pages, became widely known in modern India through the
instrumentality of Lahiri Mahasaya, my guru's guru. 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 injunctions, I cannot
give a full explanation of Kriya Yoga in the pages of a book
intended for the general public. The actual technique must be learned
from a Kriyaban or Kriya Yogi; here a broad reference must
suffice.
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.
1 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."
2 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 relates3
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.4
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.5
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."6
Patanjali speaks of God as the actual Cosmic Sound of Aum heard
in meditation.7
Aum is the Creative Word,8
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."9
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."
10 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.11
"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 energythe 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
minda 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,12
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 himby circuitous
means as given by proper food, sunlight, and harmonious thoughtsto 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.13
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.
The superior method of soul living frees the yogi who, shorn of his
ego-prison, tastes the deep air of omnipresence. The thralldom of
natural living is, in contrast, set in a pace humiliating. Conforming
his life to the evolutionary order, a man can command no concessionary
haste from nature but, living without error against the laws of his
physical and mental endowment, still requires about a million years of
incarnating masquerades to know final emancipation.
The telescopic methods of yogis, disengaging themselves from physical
and mental identifications in favor of soul-individuality, thus commend
themselves to those who eye with revolt a thousand thousand years. This
numerical periphery is enlarged for the ordinary man, who lives in
harmony not even with nature, let alone his soul, but pursues instead
unnatural complexities, thus offending in his body and thoughts the
sweet sanities of nature. For him, two times a million years can scarce
suffice for liberation.
Gross man seldom or never realizes that his body is a kingdom,
governed by Emperor Soul on the throne of the cranium, with subsidiary
regents in the six spinal centers or spheres of consciousness. This
theocracy extends over a throng of obedient subjects: twenty-seven
thousand billion cellsendowed with a sure if automatic intelligence by
which they perform all duties of bodily growths, transformations, and
dissolutionsand fifty million substratal thoughts, emotions, and
variations of alternating phases in man's consciousness in an average
life of sixty years. Any apparent insurrection of bodily or cerebral
cells toward Emperor Soul, manifesting as disease or depression, is due
to no disloyalty among the humble citizens, but to past or present
misuse by man of his individuality or free will, given to him
simultaneous with a soul, and revocable never.
Identifying himself with a shallow ego, man takes for
granted that it is he who thinks, wills, feels, digests meals, and keeps
himself alive, never admitting through reflection (only a little would
suffice!) that in his ordinary life he is naught but a puppet of past
actions (karma) and of nature or environment. Each man's intellectual
reactions, feelings, moods, and habits are circumscribed by effects of
past causes, whether of this or a prior life. Lofty above such
influences, however, is his regal soul. Spurning the transitory truths
and freedoms, the Kriya Yogi passes beyond all disillusionment
into his unfettered Being. All scriptures declare man to be not a
corruptible body, but a living soul; by Kriya he is given a
method to prove the scriptural truth.
"Outward ritual cannot destroy ignorance, because they
are not mutually contradictory," wrote Shankara in his famous Century
of Verses. "Realized knowledge alone destroys ignorance. . . .
Knowledge cannot spring up by any other means than inquiry. 'Who am I?
How was this universe born? Who is its maker? What is its material
cause?' This is the kind of inquiry referred to." The intellect has no
answer for these questions; hence the rishis evolved yoga as the
technique of spiritual inquiry.
Kriya Yoga is the real "fire rite" often extolled
in the Bhagavad Gita. The purifying fires of yoga bring eternal
illumination, and thus differ much from outward and little-effective
religious fire ceremonies, where perception of truth is oft burnt, to
solemn chanted accompaniment, along with the incense!
The advanced yogi, withholding all his mind, will, and feeling from
false identification with bodily desires, uniting his mind with
superconscious forces in the spinal shrines, thus lives in this world as
God hath planned, not impelled by impulses from the past nor by new
witlessnesses of fresh human motivations. Such a yogi receives
fulfillment of his Supreme Desire, safe in the final haven of
inexhaustibly blissful Spirit.
The yogi offers his labyrinthine human longings to a monotheistic
bonfire dedicated to the unparalleled God. This is indeed the true yogic
fire ceremony, in which all past and present desires are fuel consumed
by love divine. The Ultimate Flame receives the sacrifice of all human
madness, and man is pure of dross. His bones stripped of all desirous
flesh, his karmic skeleton bleached in the antiseptic suns of wisdom, he
is clean at last, inoffensive before man and Maker.
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!"14
1 The noted scientist, Dr. George W. Crile of Cleveland,
explained before a 1940 meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science the experiments by which he had proved that all
bodily tissues are electrically negative, except the brain and nervous
system tissues which remain electrically positive because they take up
revivifying oxygen at a more rapid rate.
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2 Bhagavad Gita, IV:29.
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3 Ibid. IV:1-2.
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4 The author of Manava Dharma Shastras. These institutes
of canonized common law are effective in India to this day. The French
scholar, Louis Jacolliot, writes that the date of Manu "is lost in the
night of the ante-historical period of India; and no scholar has dared
to refuse him the title of the most ancient lawgiver in the world." In
La Bible dans l'Inde, pages 33-37, Jacolliot reproduces parallel textual
references to prove that the Roman Code of Justinian follows closely the
Laws of Manu.
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5 The start of the materialistic ages, according to
Hindu scriptural reckonings, was 3102 B.C. This was the beginning of the
Descending Dwapara Age (see page 174). Modern scholars, blithely
believing that 10,000 years ago all men were sunk in a barbarous Stone
Age, summarily dismiss as "myths" all records and traditions of very
ancient civilizations in India, China, Egypt, and other lands.
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6 Patanjali's Aphorisms, II:1. In using the words Kriya
Yoga, Patanjali was referring to either the exact technique taught by
Babaji, or one very similar to it. That it was a definite technique of
life control is proved by Patanjali's Aphorism II:49.
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7 Ibid. I:27.
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8 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made by him; and
without him was not any thing made that was made."-John 1:1-3. Aum (Om)
of the Vedas became the sacred word Amin of the Moslems, Hum of the
Tibetans, and Amen of the Christians (its meaning in Hebrew being sure,
faithful). "These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness,
the beginning of the creation of God."-Revelations 3:14.
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9 Aphorisms II:49.
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10 I Corinthians 15:31. "Our rejoicing" is the correct
translation; not, as usually given, "your rejoicing." St. Paul was
referring to the omnipresence of the Christ consciousness.
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11 Kalpa means time or aeon. Sabikalpa means subject to
time or change; some link with prakriti or matter remains. Nirbikalpa
means timeless, changeless; this is the highest state of samadhi.
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12 According to the Lincoln Library of Essential
Information, p. 1030, the giant tortoise lives between 200 and 300
years.
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13 Shakespeare: Sonnet #146.
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14 Bhagavad Gita, VI:46.
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