By Swami Yogananda
(Excerpt from Inner Culture, March 1937)
Sunlight and food change the human body, brain, and mind every seven years (there is a twelve-year cycle also), provided there is no physical sickness. It takes one million solar years to evolve the healthy human body, brain, and mind so that they are able to manifest Cosmic Consciousness.
Since the human body cannot last so long, Lahiri Mahasaya devised the Kriya technique, which so changes the brain-cells, spine, and body that they can express Cosmic Consciousness in three, six, or twelve years (in determined, advanced students) and in twenty-four to forty-eight years (in ordinary students).
Christ gave techniques of salvation to St. John and the disciples, promising to send to them the Comforter, about which people understand little.
Lahiri Mahasaya’s teaching is the Second Coming of Christ, not through a mere claim, but in actuality. His Kriya technique of meditation expands the cup of concentration so that it can be large enough to hold the ocean of Christ-consciousness (consciousness that was present in the life of Jesus).
Lahiri Mahasaya’s technique can reveal to each soul that God belongs to him by divine birthright and has not to be evolutionarily attained. But actual step-by-step meditation is necessary in order to destroy self-created delusion. The prodigal son walked away from God. Each of his retracing footsteps back to God consists of a mental technique which actually enables him to return.
Praying Unceasingly
Jesus Christ spoke of praying unceasingly or with ever-increasing concentration until God was realized. Do most of the modern Christians try to meditate as Jesus commanded? Most of them pray for a little while, with an automobile ride or a chicken dinner remaining in the background of their minds.
Christ spoke of the Holy Ghost, or the great sacred ghostlike invisible intelligent Cosmic Vibration, which is responsible for the creation of all solid, liquid, gaseous, and energy substances.
In the beginning of the creation of finite things like solids, liquids, gases, and energy substances was the Word (the combination of cosmic vibration and cosmic intelligence) and God is the Word, or intelligent cosmic vibration. Science agrees with this fact, that intelligent cosmic vibration differentiates itself into an ordered creation of solids, liquids, gases, etc.
This cosmic vibration manifests as cosmic light, cosmic sound, and cosmic ever-new joy of which St. John speaks: “I was in the Spirit (God-contact) and heard (realized through intuition) behind me the voice as of a great trumpet (cosmic sound).”
Lahiri Mahasaya’s Kriya technique is the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s promise to send the Comforter. Through Kriya, the devotee can expand his consciousness from the body to infinity, without losing consciousness, by tuning in with the actual cosmic sound or the Holy Ghost sound emanating from the vibration of all atoms and electrons. When the devotee tunes himself with this sound, he finds the greatest all-sorrow-quenching comfort and perceives his spirit present not only in his little body but in all vibrating space.
Patanjali speaks of listening to this cosmic OM. Science knows that there is a cosmic hum emanating from all atoms.
St. John says, “I heard behind me… a great trumpet.” Lahiri Mahasaya speaks of tuning and expanding the soul into cosmic vibration. All Christians and truth-seekers need not believe forever what Lahiri Mahasaya taught, but need to believe only for the purpose of demonstrating the truth of the teachings in their own Self-realization.
After the passing of a prophet, his inspiration usually is changed into a dogmatic creed by his blind adherents, but the followers of Lahiri Mahasaya are given step-by-step wonderful methods of meditation which work, and which yield results of ever-increasing divine joy from the beginning, if practiced intensely. Therefore, Self-realization of divine bliss-contact of God, and not beliefs, holds the followers of Self-Realization Fellowship together.
Hence, Christians and all truth-seekers who have suffered long from theological indigestion, ought to try Lahiri Mahasaya’s world-emancipating technique with scientific steadiness, just as they might join a university, and find for themselves that God can be contacted in this life, now.
Meditation Temples
Lahiri Mahasaya’s teaching is to more or less discard the morning service system used in churches just to entertain the church members with new ideas every Sunday, when they seldom practice what they heard the previous Sunday. We desire that Self-realization teachers should first of all realize God in themselves and then lecture only to explain how God can be contacted. Instead of a one-day Sunday morning service, we propose to have daily meditation in temples of Self-realization to be started all over the world.