From Yogananda’s original Bhagavad Gita commentaries
For Kriya Yogis: It seems wise to deeply meditate on Yogananda’s descriptions, applying them to your Kriya Yoga practice. See if it is powerful for you to visualize in the spine the “fire of Spirit (Brahma)”; or to offer your life-force “to the seven deities who reside in the seven astral fires in the spine”; or to feel “electrified with the spinal elixir”; or to unite your mind “with the superconscious forces in the seven spinal shrines”; gradually being “safe in the haven of all-satisfying, ever-blessed Spirit.”
The “oblation of the senses” into the fire of Spirit (Brahma) is a “sacrifice” which may easily and naturally be made by anyone, even by a worldly man who is willing to pursue methodically a definite scientific technique of God-realization–the greatest of which being the Kriya Yoga technique given to the earth in this era by Lahiri Mahasaya, my guru’s guru.
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The performance of fire ceremonies to please the devas has another significance. Real yogis who practice Kriya Yoga withdraw the fluid of life force from the body cells and sensory and motor nerves, and offer it to the seven deities who reside in the seven astral fires in the spine, beginning from the coccyx and rising to the cerebrum.
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The real or inner fire ceremony is to unite life with greater life, by practice of Pranayam or Kriya technique of life-control.
In sleep, the bodily life retires into the fires of spinal centers. This is an unconscious performance of the fire ceremony, by which the sleeper is made to unite his life-current with the superior currents in the spine; thus he unknowingly moves toward the cosmic energy which sustains all life.
By life-control technique, the yogi consciously retires his life-current from body muscles, and from heart into the spine. He saturates and feeds all his bodily calls with this undecaying light, and keeps them in a magnetized state.
This practice makes the body healthful, filled with divine life, as the yogi realizes that the body, too, is a shadow of the Infinite Energy, and can be transmuted into it. This is the astral way of feeding the body cells, superseding the lower method of physical food and oxygen. By the astral methods, the body can remain magnetized or in a suspended state, registering no decay.
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By Kriya, the outgoing life-force is not wasted and abused in the senses, but constrained to reunite with greater currents in the plexuses [chakras]. By such reinforcement of life, the yogi’s body and brain cells are electrified with the spinal elixir… This, then, is the real Yajna or Fire Rite mentioned in the Gita. The life-current in the senses is withdrawn and united in the vaster flame present in the main brain region and the sub-dynamos of spinal centers [chakras].
This fire ceremony alone can give true knowledge to one who understands how to practice it, and differs much from the little-effective outward fire rites, where perception of truth is oft burnt, to chanted accompaniment, along with the incense!
The real yogi, withholding all his mind, will and feeling from false identifications with bodily desires, uniting them with the superconscious forces in the seven 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 haven of all-satisfying, ever-blessed Spirit.
This is indeed the true fire ceremony, in which all past and present desires are fuel consumed by love for God. This Ultimate Flame receives the sacrifice of all human madness, and man is pure of dross. His bones stripped of all desirous flesh, his skeleton bleached in the antiseptic suns of wisdom, he is clean at last, offending not the delicacies of neutral cosmos.
O Man! Offer thy labyrinthine longings to a monotheistic bonfire dedicated to unparalleled God! Burn desire for human affection in aspiration for God alone, a love solitary because omnipresent! Throw faggots of ignorance to incandesce the blaze of insight! Devour all sorrows in sorrow for God’s absence! Consume all regrets in meditative bliss!