“He had not found any insuperable obstacle to mergence of human with Divine. No such barrier exists, I came to understand, save in man’s spiritual unadventurousness.”
Autobiography of a Yogi
A Path for Heroes
This blog presents a dimension of Kriya Yoga which is meant for the most courageous devotees… for those who are ready to die.
Kriya can indeed make you die to your little personality, to be reborn as a being of Spirit. This is not a little thing at all. It requires your absolute spiritual adventurousness. It is the path of heroes.
The heroism required is the courage implied in the words of a chant by Yogananda, paraphrased here: “I will drown myself in the Infinite to find my true Self to be infinite.”
Are you ready to die to yourself, to everything you knew and believed about who you are? Are you ready to let go of the idea that you have two legs, two arms, and a head? Can you accept the possibility that you are ultimately not a human being, and work on dissolving that false identification?
Are you open to having no name, no form, no definition? Are you ready to die to all that? If so, keep reading. Through Kriya Yoga, you will be moving toward your formless immortality.
East and West
Complete death and rebirth, without physically dying, is a profound ancient teaching of both East and West, one which Kriya Yoga makes practical.
Yogananda explains in his Kriya Lessons:
“Jesus said: ‘Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God’ (John 3:5). That is, until a man born of flesh (‘water’-blood) undergoes the birth of the Self as Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That is why in India the higher castes are called ‘twice-born’ (dvija).”
He explains:
“Dvija (twice-born) means the second birth, when one’s consciousness is awakened in the spine. This is the baptism by the Spirit.”
Soon we shall understand his reference to the spine.
Similarly, a “born-again Christian” is not one who merely joins an outward belief or organization, nor one who is physically baptized, but one who is born in Spirit: dying to the illusion of being a mortal being, a body, a specific person.
This is what Christ, who taught Kriya or a similar technique, meant when he said: “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” (Mat. 10:39)
In his chapter on Kriya Yoga in Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda cites St. Paul, who knew how to die and be reborn as a being which was no longer defined by his human identity, his Jewish culture, his age, his gender, his appearance, his characteristics, or his personality: “Verily, I protest by our rejoicing which I have in Christ, I die daily.”
In that same chapter, Yogananda further explains that most mystical aspect of Kriya Yoga: how one dies and is reborn as an immortal being, so that one will never die again:
“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.’”
Are you ready for that? For the death of your momentary identity? It is not easy at all. The ego intensely clings to its form, to its humanness, to the sense of “I” that it has known for incarnations.
Prepare
To prepare for this specific Kriya Yoga journey, you may sing with me these mystical words about dying and being reborn by Tukaram, the great poet-saint from Maharashtra, India, during the seventeenth century. Someone at Ananda Sangha put them to music. To this version I add here the second verse Tukaram wrote (in a poetic English translation):
“Before my eyes my dead self lies;
O, bliss beyond compare!
Joy fills the worlds, and I rejoice,
The soul of all things there.”
Now prepare further. Sing along with Yogananda’s words, a couplet he wrote and which he quoted in various talks:
“When this I shall die, then shall I know who am I.”
How Does Death and Rebirth Work Through Kriya Yoga?
Yogananda explains in his Autobiography of a Yogi:
“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.”
What is this “method” which Kriya Yoga gives us? How, practically speaking, do we go about dying spiritually and becoming reborn as a deathless soul? It is not only about being purified and becoming a better person. It is a true death and being reborn as another kind of being.
Concerning the method, the crucial point is this: you feel yourself as a human body, as this person, only because your energy and consciousness flow into the nervous system. You feel the body, and it feels like you, all day long. The body masquerades as yourself through the nervous system. When you hurt your body, it makes you feel, “I hurt.” When you see something, it tells you that it is “I” who sees it, meaning the body.
It is a vast setup, a great bewitchment of consciousness: we are being fooled all the time.
In Kriya Yoga, once you truly withdraw your consciousness from the nervous system, you will no longer feel yourself as a body.
Where do we withdraw the energy and consciousness? Into the spine. There, once you are truly in the spine with your awareness, you are no longer a man or a woman, but ageless, deathless, formless.
The deep spine is the sphere of formless eternity. It has a completely impersonal atmosphere. You are That.
Sleep gives a taste of it
This withdrawal and shift from “I am Susan” to “I am a formless soul”, actually happens every night in deep sleep. Sri Yukteswar explains in Autobiography of a Yogi:
“In sleep, you do not know whether you are a man or a woman. Just as a man, impersonating a woman, does not become one, so the soul, impersonating both man and woman, has no sex. The soul is the pure, changeless image of God.”
The Kriya Yogi performs this act of dying consciously, rather than unconsciously like the subconscious sleeper. It is blissful, completely liberating, and the greatest adventure ever.
What we need to learn is to enter, with our consciousness, into the spine. When we practice Kriya Yoga, we need to learn not to act from outside onto our spine, directing the energy there, but to feel ourselves inside the spine, inside the tunnel, with all our energy and consciousness.
If you go deep enough, you die to the body, realizing: “I am not [your name]. I simply am. I am consciousness, nothing else.”
That is when you are reborn in Spirit. You have a new identity, a new birth, a new life. Later on, people will still see you as a body, but you know you are not.
Meditate on Yogananda’s precious words which reveals the deep Kriya Yoga process:
“Man’s consciousness is ordinarily identified with the senses. By Kriya practice the consciousness is transferred to the spine and brain and thus transmuted into superconsciousness and ultimately into Cosmic Consciousness… Kriya is the scientific way of changing material body-consciousness into spiritual Cosmic Consciousness.”
The Breath
The difficulty is that the passport for entering the deep spine is non-breathing: as long as you breathe, you remain bound to body consciousness. You don’t gain full entrance. The breath in Kriya needs to become less and less, until it is only an energy breath.
There are various layers of the spine, ever more subtle. You withdraw ever more deeply inside, becoming freer and freer, and finally completely free, becoming Spirit, or consciousness, becoming everything.
Here is how Swami Kriyananda explains this deep feature of Kriya Yoga:
Meditate on his words that deep inside “you are everything.” The “you” at that point is your reborn Self, not the person you feel yourself to be right now, while you read these words.
You have died. And you are reborn as Spirit. That Spirit is everything.
A Vision
Once, in Badrinath, I had an inner vision of who Swami Kriyananda really was, of how he perceived himself. He had killed Kriyananda long ago. We students saw the person, Swami Kriyananda, but he felt himself differently.
Here he sings about that inner state: “Blessed Spirit, I am He”. It is autobiographical for all highly advanced yogis:
When he died in 2013, nothing died for him, only for us. He had died long before, and had been reborn in Spirit. He knew no death and sang about it beautifully long before his passing, in a song called To Death I’m a Stranger: “The stranger I feared is a stranger no more.”
Daily Life
Some years earlier, when I was working on my own inner process of spiritual death and rebirth, I asked Swami Kriyananda: “How, in meditation, can I move from ego-consciousness to the formless consciousness?”
His answer surprised me: “Read my book Sadhu Beware.” This book talks about daily life, about the attitudes which help us loosen the grip the ego has on us. It helps us perform a relentless and uncompromising work on our ego. So I realized: If I don’t do that in my outer life, the meditative process won’t work. The ego remains simply too heavy, too strong.
The Hero Goal
We too, like Swami Kriyananda, must practice Kriya Yoga until death is no longer a stranger. We die in meditation, realizing that we can never die. We are Spirit. That happens deep in the spine. There alone we find ourselves to be the wave that can sing, “I am the bubble, make me the Sea.”
In body consciousness we can never expand into the Sea. It is too heavy, too dense, too confined. Only “I am pure consciousness” can expand to the Sea of Spirit and find the great Union which yogis have spoken about for millennia.
Here is the precise method given by Yogananda in his Praecepta Kriya Lessons, actually as the very first point when he sums up the Kriya technique:
“Remember the following key points in the practice of the Kriya technique:
-
Get mentally inside the spine. Put the whole mind and feeling there.”
If you apply this, you are walking on the hero path.
Detached from the body, from the outer nervous system, there is no “body-I” anymore, but pure consciousness. Tat tvam asi, the Masters have always taught: “You are That.”
This is the Kriya Yoga for heroes. It is about dying. It is about rebirth. It is about a radical change of identity.
Hero of God, prepare to die and be reborn!