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(This page design coming soon) Original Kriya Yoga
at a glance By Swami Satyeswarananda Giri
>stoltz@my-deja.com
(Steven M. Stoltz) wrote: > >>Master wrote
so many lessons on this subject > >And therein lies
another one of many SRF myths.
Yogananda didn't >write the
lessons. He hired a woman,
Louise Royston, to write them. >She wrote so
many of them, and dragged them out as much as she
could >(3 years!) with
the sole intention, approved by Yogananda, to keep
the >student tied to
SRF and held hostage for as long as possible before >giving him all
the good material (which could have easily been >accomplished in
1 year instead of 3) so the student would be giving >SRF his
hard-earned cash for as long as possible, not just
buying >lessons but
books, recordings, calendars, attending Sunday
temple >services and
giving offerings, tithing part of his salary to SRF >(which many
people in SRF), etc. Milking
the cow it's called... Some insiders have leaked
statistics that only about 5% of those who start the lessons ever finish
them. So it looks like their
plan has backfired on
them. Bhagavad Gita
on-line close explanation The Principles of Kriya Yoga by
Yoganiketan, Portland Maine, http://yoganiketan.net/kyv/kyv.htm
From: Marc
Van Uytven (Mvanuytven@hotmail.com) In 1983, two years after I had shifted my main practice from White Tantric Yoga to Daoist internal alchemy, I stumbled onto Kriya Yoga, a Tantric method taught by Swami Paramhamsa Hariharananda Giri ("Baba" to his followers). His Kriya Yoga was definitely not self-invented, but strictly followed the initiations he had received in India from Sri Yukteswar and from his student, Paramhamsa Yogananda, who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) in the USA the 1920's. Baba was later made President of Sri Yukteswar's ashram in Puri, India, and took higher level kriya initiations from other yogis in a lineage extending back to its founder Lahiri Mahasay. Lahiri, a railroad engineer with five children, claims an immortal being named Babaji appear to him in 1862 and taught him six kriyas (Sanskrit root kri, to act, ya, divine soul). These kriyas offered a structured internal map of subtle body development, through six stages of samadhi. To objectively explore these practices, I eventually discontinued my Daoist internal alchemy practices for a few years. Kriya Yoga is Tantric in its divinization of the body. In the first kriya, prana is circulated up and down the spine. In the second kriyas, internal seed (bij) mantras are silently chanted to infuse the spinal pathway and the multi-petalled lotuses visualized in the chakras and fifty body parts. Then the 50 letter-sounds of the sanskrit alphabet are spiralled around the cranium, activating the primordial sound which is gradually captured into the center of the cranial void space in higher kriyas. The higher kriyas drop all use of mantra as one enters the higher void spaces. Like Rajneesh, Hariharananda completely eschews all use of chanted mantra, which he considers an intermediate level of practice: "if you are busy shouting to your Mother, how can you hear God speak to you?" he would ask. In Kriya Yoga there is a typically Tantric progressive internalization of the cosmos within the body, which evolves into the experience of one's inner soul focusing on the subtle current of sound, light, and vibration/heat in the central channel (sushumna). Baba's private deity is Kali, the paramount Tantric goddess, who he claims has intervened to allow him an extremely long life (age 95 at this writing in 2002). He was 75 when I first met him, a few years after he arrived in the West. Kriya Yoga is a interesting case. It was originally designed for householders, who could have sex and children, eat meat, and meditate at home to achieve enlightenment. His original technique was very Tantric in allowing one to indulge these worldly pleasures, but one had to watch from the soul level as one indulged. Lahiri insisted his students get married, and his subtle body teachings were quite sexually explicit: "I beheld the Red Lingam ("penis") of Shiva inside of me; it contained the energy of the Sun. Then I came up to the third eye, and entered the Maha Yoni ("Great Vagina"). (Satyeswarananda, 1988) But the lineage was virtually captured and shifted into the monastic Giri ("mountain") order of swamis who were forbidden from having sex, watching theatre, eating meat or any food cooked by a non-initiate. An American student of Baba's visiting Benares, India ran into the grandson of Lahiri Mahasay, who complained bitterly that Kriya Yoga had been hijacked by Hindu monks. Yogananda did not think Westerners were prepared for Kriya's shakti power, and so only taught the first kriya to his followers, a method of circulating prana up and down the spine without mantras. Nonetheless, the SRF-simplified Kriya Yoga has spawned many splinter schools of American swamis claiming lineage and has achieved widespread acceptance in the West. Meanwhile, the SRF-promoted facade of Yogananda's yogic purity as a celibate is beginning to crumble. I had a student whose father claimed to have been in Yogananda's inner circle, which he reported included sexual affairs. A man closely resembling Yogananda in appearance is about to file a lawsuit to examine genetic tests by SRF to determine if Yogananda was his father. So Hariharananda may prove to be one of the few cases of complete sexual abstinence amongst Tantrics who have come to the West. He claims it was only when he gave up all sexual desire that he achieved enlightenment. I found Hariharananda to be a fountain of illumination and wisdom, a Brahman with a tiger's mind who could recite the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanisads, yet who also radiated a heart that was lovingly pure and had a child-like innocence. It was impossible not to love him. After meditating for decades, at the age fifty Baba attained nirvakalpa samadhi , the sixth kriya and highest level of enlightenment possible. He is famous for his yogic power to stop both his breath and heartbeat for extended periods while in samadhi. Since then, for the last forty-five years, he has been revered as a fully realized "God man" in India. It is not my place to judge anyone's level of spiritual attainment, but I did have the expectation was that such an evolved being would at least be sex-neutral, if not sex-positive in his attitude. I instead discovered he was both female-negative and sex-negative, raising the same question again: was sex and subtle body training incompatible? Or was cultural conditioning at work? Working for some years in close personal contact with Baba while editing his Bhagavad Gita in the Light of Kriya Yoga (I989), I noticed how his aversion to women also manifested itself as subtle attraction to and need for women. Privately he expressed anti-body sentiments ("from the senses down, the body is the domain of the devil"), and made anti-female comments ("if you marry a woman, they will constantly lure you to bed and weaken your power to meditate"). He often publicly recounted a favorite story of how once a foreign woman at his ashram in India had tried to seduce him. She crawled on top of him naked, but his steely control was such that neither his mind nor his penis was aroused. Hariharananda's top-heavy, male-fire crown chakra consciousness seemed to regularly attract yogic successors-to-be who would act out his suppressed lower desires, involving themselves in money scandals and love affairs that invariably resulted in their dismissal. When I last saw him in 1999, he was having severe back pain. I read his pulses using Chinese diagnostic methods, and observed a kidney deficiency, a weakness in his water element. This was likely due to his practicing Fire methods his entire life. The thing that seemed to help his back pain was having teams of young female devotees massage his body, reminding me of the celibate Mahatma Gandhi sleeping beside two young teen girls to rejuvenate himself. The sexual energy Baba denied himself directly his entire life he could only allow himself to receive indirectly through female touch. There may be other systems of Kriya Yoga with different attitudes about sex. The editors of Tantra Magazine in the 1980's were Kriya Yoga practitioners of a different Babaji lineage (Herakan Baba, an immortal whose followers claim he materialized in a body in India in the 1970's) and the magazine was definitely sex-positive. But it appeared their mix of Kriya and Tantra was not by lineage training but rather an integration of their own choice, a part of the trend amongst Westerners to reshape Tantric methods to fit their own sexual and spiritual needs. I recount the details of my experience with Hariharananda to highlight a recurring split amongst some Tantrics (and historically, Daoists) between sexual and subtle body development: it is ok for their lay followers to have sex or get married, but the elite cadre of acharyas and swamis who attain subtle body enlightenment need to be celibate. The equation of celibacy and anti-sexual attitudes with enlightenment led me to question whether his Fire path paradigm of nirvikalpa samadhi as enlightenment was complete. Despite his worshipping Kali and using Tantric meditation methods to divinize the body, underneath he seemed to reflect a widespread patriarchal based Indian spirituality that feared the sexual power of women, and perhaps deep beneath that, an earth centered consciousness. My desire to integrate my sexual and earth nature fully was a key factor in my resuming my Daoist Water and Fire inner alchemy practices.
Extracts by: Roger Adams
(RADAMS@cerritos.edu) More excerpts from Yogananda's writings
on Kriya Yoga: "As soon as you take away the ripples of sensations from the lake of the mind, God's heavenly bliss bursts forth from the soul. His bliss is already there, but it is hidden within you. The more you meditate the more you will feel the endless joy of God." *** "In men under maya or natural law, the
flow of life energy is toward the outward world; the currents are wasted
and abused in the senses. The practice of Kriya reverses the
flow...The yoga technique overcomes the tug-of-war between the mind and
the matter-entangled senses, and frees the devotee to reinherit his
eternal kingdom".
["Neither shall they say, Lo! here or Lo! there; for behold the
kingdom of God is within you" Luke 17:21]
*** "The superiority of this method
[Kriya] over others lies in the fact that it works with the exact
thing that binds us down to our narrow individuality - the life
force...Because the life-force moves outward, sensations and thoughts
disturb and distort the calm image of the Self or soul. This method
teaches us to turn the life force inward. Hence it is direct and
immediate. It takes us straight to the consciousness of Self - the
Bliss-God. ["Be still and know that I am God" Psalms
46:10]
***
The excerpts are taken from Spring 93 issue of Self-Realization
magazine. In his "The Science of Religion", Paramahansa Yogananda exams
all of the spiritual methods for attaining God-realization known to
humankind and to make a long story short, concludes that Kriya yoga
is the quickest and most effective. Now, in a previous post I mentioned
how the science of yoga suffered during the dark ages and it was only
until Mahavatar Babaji revived the ancient science of what he renamed
"Kriya yoga" that this science mentioned by Krishna and
Patanjali was known again to the world at large (so to speak). I mentioned
how many yoga books still mention pranayama as being merely breathing
exercises. These same books speak of kriyas or kriya yoga as
cleansing routines only, such as cleaning the nose (neti kriya) or
cleaning the stomach by drinking lots of warm salt water and then vomiting
etc.. These routines should not be confused with the Kriya Yoga
taught by Paramahansa Yogananda which is a highly advanced technique of
life-force control. I would like to add something I picked up
from the recent SRF convocation but which I knew before and had put in the
back of my mind. Yogananda made a comparison between various meditation
techniques and Kriya Yoga, including the technique of Hong Sau, a
concentration technique which he often called "baby Kriya". He said
that 1 hour of deep Hong Sau practice was equivalent to 24 hours of deep
practice of any other meditation technique know to humankind other than
Kriya Yoga proper. Then he said that 1 hour of deep Kriya
yoga practice was equivalent (in its effects) to 24 hours of deep practice
of Hong Sau. This was meant as a general comparison only, to give an idea
of the relative merits of the various methods of
meditation.
"Yoga shows you the way and gives the method...After freeing
yourself from suffering by finding God, you will have eternal happiness,
eternal joy, eternal wisdom, eternal existence. That state is so
desirable! You will be conscious of your blissful existence, and you will
know that you are immortal. This experience is
indescribable.
"If you tell people that you are following a Hindu religion - or
for that matter, any religion other than their own - prejudice immediately
arises in their minds. But Patanjali goes beyond all personalities and
dogmas. He states that Yoga is the heart of all religions; it is the
science of religion, by which the true principles of religion can be
proven with exact and
known results. Yoga fulfills the purpose of religion; achievement of
oneness, or union, with God - the ultimate necessity of every
soul."
***
"Out of the cosmic tomes of truth, India developed the Yoga system,
the science of oneness - oneness of the soul with God; oneness with the
principles of eternal righteousness; with the universe; and with all
mankind. The sage Patanjali formulated the Yoga system into eight steps
for achieving the goal: 1. Avoid unrighteous
behavior - yama. 2. Follow certain moral and
spiritual precepts - niyama. 3. Learn to be still in body
and mind, for where motion ceases, there begins the perception of God -
asana. 4. While concentrating on
the state of peace, practice control of the life force in the body -
pranayama. 5. When your mind is your
own, that is, under your control through pranayama, then you can give it
to God - pratyahara. 6. Then begins meditation:
first, concentrate on one of God's cosmic manifestations such as love,
wisdom, joy - dharana. 7. What follows in
meditation is an expansion of the realization of God's infinite
omnipresent nature - dhyana. 8. When the soul merges as
one with God who is ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss, that is
the goal - samadhi."
*** ____________________________________
I will continue this in a later post. The excerpts are taken from
Spring 93 issue of Self-Realization magazine. The science of yoga as
taught by Patanjali was blemished and much of it lost during the dark
ages. Even the wisdom of India suffered during the dark ages. Most of the
books I used to read about yoga prior to studying the teachings of
Yogananda spoke of pranayama as merely breathing exercises. This is not
so. Pranayam is control
of the life force. This may be done by using the breath but it is not
breathing exercises. Yogananda has said that the Kriya yoga taught
by him and his line of gurus (Mahavatar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, Swami Sri
Yukteswar) is the same technique that Patanjali speaks of in the Yoga
sutras and the same technique Bhagavan Krishna mentions in the Gita, and
also this technique or one very similar was taught by Christ to his
disciples. The technique was lost to the world by indifference and
priestly secrecy until Mahavatar Babaji revived it in the late 1800's
through Lahiri Mahasaya. Babaji sent Yogananda to the west to teach this
science which Babaji renamed "Kriya" yoga and also to show the
essential unity between orignial yoga as taught by Krishna and original
Christianity as taught by Christ. Dr. Jai Maharaj
(jai@eskimo.com) Some yogis perform the Yajna of worship
to Devas alone, while others offer Yajna itself as offering in the fire of
Brahman by performing the Yajna (of Self-knowledge). (4.25)
Some offer their hearing and other senses (as sacrifice) in the fires of restraint, others offer sound and other objects of the senses (as sacrifice) in the fires of the senses. (4.26) Others offer all the functions of the senses, and the functions of Prana (or the five bioimpulses) as sacrifice in the fire of the yoga of self-restraint that is kindled by knowledge. (4.27) Others offer their wealth, their austerity, and their practice of yoga as sacrifice, while the ascetics with strict vows offer their study of scriptures and knowledge as sacrifice. (4.28) Those who are engaged in yogic practice, reach the breathless state by offering inhalation into exhalation and exhalation into inhalation as sacrifice (by using short breathing Kriya techniques). (4.29) Deep spiritual meaning and interpretation of the practical yogic verses (4.29, 4.30, 5.27, 6.13, 8.10, 8.12, 8.13, 8.24, and 8.25) should be acquired from a Self-realized master of Kriya-yoga. Others restrict their diet and offer their inhalations as sacrifice into their inhalations. All these are the knowers of sacrifice, and are purified by (theirs) sacrifice. (4.30) |