“Kriya Yoga is an instrument that can accelerate human evolution,”
Sri Yukteswar explained to his students.
– “The ancient yogis discovered that the secret of Cosmic Consciousness is intimately connected with the mastery of breathing. This is India’s unique and immortal contribution to the world’s knowledge treasury. The vital force, which is normally devoted to maintaining the heartbeat, must be released for higher activities by means of a method which calms and arrests the incessant demands of the breath.”
The practitioner of Kriya Yoga mentally directs his vital energy up and down, around the six spinal centers (medullary, cervical, dorsal, lumbar, sacral and coccygeal plexuses), corresponding to the twelve astral signs of the Zodiac, the symbolic Cosmic Man.
Half a minute of revolution (30 seconds) of the energy around the sensitive spinal cord makes subtle progress in the evolution of man. This half minute of Kriya is equivalent to a year of natural spiritual development.
The astral system of a human being, with six internal constellations (twelve by polarity) 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 internal and an external universe. The ancient rishis discovered that man’s earthly and celestial environment, in a series of twelve-year cycles, propels him forward on his natural path. The scriptures assert that man requires a million years of normal, disease-free evolution to perfect his brain and express cosmic consciousness.
One thousand Kriyas, practiced in eight and a half hours, give the practitioner of Kriya yogi, in one day, the equivalent of a 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 that nature makes happen in a million years.
This shortcut of Kriya Yoga can only be trodden by deeply developed yogis. And with the guidance of a guru, these yogis carefully prepare their body and brain to withstand the force generated by intensive practice.
The beginner of Kriya yoga practices this yogic technique only fourteen to twenty-four times, twice a day. Some yogis attain emancipation in six, twelve, twenty-four, or forty-eight years. A yogi who dies before attaining complete realization carries with him the good karma of his past effort from the practice of Kriya yoga; and in his next life he is naturally impelled to the Infinite Goal.
The body of the average man is like a fifty-watt light bulb, which cannot withstand the billion watts of energy generated by an excessive practice of Kriya Yoga.
Through the regular and gradual increase of the simple and perfectly safe exercises of Kriya Yoga, the body of man is astrally transformed day by day, and is finally prepared to express the infinite potential of the Cosmic Energy which constitutes the first materially active expression of Spirit.
Kriya Yoga has nothing in common with unscientific breathing exercises, taught by a few confused fanatics. Attempts to force the retention of breath into the lungs are artificial and decidedly unpleasant. The practice of Kriya Yoga, on the contrary, is accompanied from the beginning by feelings of peace, and soothing sensations, with a regenerating effect on the spine.
This ancient yoga technique converts the breath into mental substance. Spiritual advancement enables the devotee to know the breath as a mental concept, an act of the 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 fully concentrated, such as when following an intricate intellectual argument or attempting some delicate or difficult physical feat, automatically breathes very slowly. The fixity of attention depends on slow breathing; rapid or irregular breathing, which inevitably accompanies unhealthy emotional states: fear, lust, or anger. The restless monkey breathes an average of 32 times per minute, in contrast to the human average of 18 times. Elephants, turtles, snakes and other animals known for their longevity have a slower respiratory rate than humans. The giant tortoise, for example, can reach the age of 300 years and it breathes only 4 times per minute.
The rejuvenating effects of sleep are due to the temporary loss, in the human being, of body consciousness and breathing. Sleeping, the human being becomes a yogi: every night he unconsciously performs the yogic rite of freeing himself from bodily identification, and of fusing his life force with the healing currents in the central area of the brain and in the six subdynamos of the spinal centers. Without knowledge, man, when sleeping, is recharged by the cosmic energy that sustains all life.
Making use of his will, the yogi performs a simple and natural process, consciously – not with the unconsciousness and slowness of the sleeper.
The Kriya Yogi uses the technique to saturate and feed all his physical cells with imperishable light and thus keep them spiritually magnetized. Scientifically, it makes breathing unnecessary, without entering (in the hours of practice) into the negative states of sleep, unconsciousness, or death.
In men subject to natural law or maya, the flow of vital energy is directed to the outer world; the currents are wasted and abused in the senses. The practice of Kriya Yoga reverses the flow; the life force is mentally guided into the inner cosmos and rejoins the subtle energies in the spine. By means of such reinforcement of the vital force, the yogi’s body and neurons are renewed by a spiritual elixir.
With proper food, sunlight and harmonious thoughts, men who are only led by nature and her divine plan, will attain Self-realization in a million years. Twelve years of normal healthy life are required for the slightest refinement of brain structure to take place; a million solar years are needed to purify the brain abode sufficiently for it to manifest Cosmic Consciousness. A Kriya yogi, however, by the exercise of spiritual science, frees himself from the need for a long period of careful observance of natural laws.
Untying the breathing cord that connects the soul to the body, Kriya Yoga serves to prolong life and expand consciousness to infinity. The yogic technique overcomes the tug-of-war between the mind and the senses entangled with matter, freeing the devotee to inherit his eternal kingdom again. He knows, then, that his real being is not limited either by his physical envelope or by his breath – symbol of man’s mortal slavery to the air, to the elemental compulsions of Nature.
Master of your body and mind, Kriya Yoga finally conquers the “last enemy”, Death.
Thus you will feed on Death, which feeds on men; and when Death is dead, then there will be no more dying.
Introspection, or “sitting in silence,” is an unscientific process of forcing the mind and senses, bound by the life force, apart. The contemplative mind, in its attempt to return to divinity, is constantly drawn back to the senses by the currents of life. Kriya Yoga, 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 and uncertain “oxcart” that is the theological way to God, Kriya Yoga can justly be called the “airway.”
Yogic science is based on the empirical consideration of all kinds of concentration techniques and meditation exercises. Yoga enables the devotee to turn on and off, at will, the vital current that goes to the five sensory telephones: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Attaining this power to turn off the senses, it is simple for the yogi to unite the mind with divine realms or with the world of matter, at will. He is no longer pulled back by the vital force, against his will, into the mundane sphere of disordered sensations and restless thoughts.
The life of an advanced Kriya Yoga practitioner is influenced not by the effects of past actions, but only by the guidelines of the soul. The devotee thus avoids the slow evolutionary monitors of the selfish actions, good and bad, of ordinary life—dull and slow as snails to eagle hearts.
The higher method of living by the soul frees the yogi; Emerging from his ego prison, he breathes the deep air of omnipresence. The slavery of natural living, by contrast, takes on a humiliating rhythm. By adjusting his life only to the evolutionary order, man cannot make Nature grant him an extraordinary acceleration. Although living without committing mistakes against the laws that govern the body and mind, he still needs a million years of the disguise of incarnations to achieve final emancipation.
The telescopic methods of a yogi, dissociating him from physical and mental identifications for the benefit of the individuality of the soul, are therefore recommended to those who revolt at the prospect of a million years. This numerical horizon is broadened for the common man, who does not live in harmony with Nature and, much less, with his own soul; on the contrary, it pursues unnatural, complex complexities and offends Nature’s gentle wisdom with body and thoughts. For him, twice a million years are barely enough for liberation.
The ordinary man rarely, if ever, realizes that his body is a kingdom, ruled from the throne of the skull, by the Emperor “Soul,” with subsidiary rulers in the six spinal centers or spheres of consciousness. This theocracy extends to a multitude of obedient subjects—twenty-seven trillion cells (endowed with the sure, though apparently automatic, intelligence with which they perform all bodily duties of growth, transformation, and decomposition) and fifty million essential thoughts and emotions, besides the variations of alternate phases in man’s consciousness, in an average life span of sixty years.
Any apparent insurrection in body or mind against the Emperor “Soul,” manifested as disease or irrationality, is not due to the disloyalty of the humble subjects, but springs from man’s misuse, past or present, of his individuality or free will—conferred upon him along with a soul, and never revocable.
Identifying himself with a superficial ego , man believes that it is he who thinks, wills, feels, digests food, and keeps himself alive; never admitting by reflection (just a little would suffice) that in his ordinary life he is but a puppet of past actions (karma) and of Nature or environment. The intellectual reactions , feelings, moods, moods, habits of each man are mere effects of past causes, of this or of a previous life. However, above these influences, hovers his sublime royal soul. Rejecting transitory truths and freedoms , the Kriya Yogi goes beyond all this illusion and enters into his unrestricted Being. The scriptures of the world declare that man is not a corruptible body, but a living soul; in Kriya Yoga he finds the method that proves this statement.
“Outward ritual cannot destroy ignorance, for they are not mutually contradictory,” Shankara wrote in his famous Century of Verses. “Only the knowledge that has been experienced destroys ignorance (…) Knowledge can only come about through inquiry. – “Who am I? How was this universe born? Who created it? What is its material cause?’ – This is the kind of investigation I am referring to.” The intellect has no answer to these questions; Thus the rishis (sages) developed yoga as a technique of spiritual investigation and research.
The true Yogi, withdrawing the thoughts, will, and feelings of false identification with bodily desires, uniting the mind with the unconscious forces in the sanctuaries of the spine, thus lives in the world as God intended; he is not impelled by impulses of the past nor by recent motivations of human folly. Having received the fulfillment of his Supreme Desire, he is safe in the final shelter of the inexhaustibly blessed Spirit.
Referring to the methodical and safe efficacy of yoga, Lord Krishna praises the technological yogi in the following words: “The yogi is greater than the ascetics who discipline the body, even greater than the adepts of the path of wisdom (Jnana Yoga), or the path of action (Karma Yoga); be you, O disciple Arjuna, a yogi!”
Kriya Yoga is the true “rite of fire,” often exalted in the Bhagavad Gita. The yogi throws his human longings into a monotheistic bonfire consecrated to the incomparable God. This is the true yogic ceremony of fire, in which all past and present desires are the fuel consumed by divine love. The Last Flame receives the sacrifice of all human folly, and man is freed from dross. His metaphorical bones stripped of all sensual flesh, his karmic skeleton, bleached by the antiseptic suns of wisdom, harmless before man and the Creator, he is finally clean.
Chapter 26 of the book “Autobiography of a Yogi”, written by the master Paramahansa Yogananda
