Yogananda, Paramahansa, 1893-1952; Yogis -- India -- Biography
The yogic science is based on an empirical consideration of all
forms of concentration and meditation exercises. Yoga enables the
devotee to switch off or on, at will, life current from the five
sense telephones of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Attaining
this power of sense-disconnection, the yogi finds it simple to unite
his mind at will with divine realms or with the world of matter.
No longer is he unwillingly brought back by the life force to the
mundane sphere of rowdy sensations and restless thoughts. 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. {FN26-13}
The life of an advanced KRIYA YOGI is influenced, not by effects of
past actions, but solely by directions from the soul. The devotee
thus avoids the slow, evolutionary monitors of egoistic actions,
good and bad, of common life, cumbrous and snail-like to the eagle
hearts.
The superior method of soul living frees the yogi who, shorn of
his ego-prison, tastes the deep air of omnipresence. The thralldom
of natural living is, in contrast, set in a pace humiliating.
Conforming his life to the evolutionary order, a man can command no
concessionary haste from nature but, living without error against
the laws of his physical and mental endowment, still requires about
a million years of incarnating masquerades to know final emancipation.
The telescopic methods of yogis, disengaging themselves from physical
and mental identifications in favor of soul-individuality, thus
commend themselves to those who eye with revolt a thousand thousand
years. This numerical periphery is enlarged for the ordinary man,
who lives in harmony not even with nature, let alone his soul, but
pursues instead unnatural complexities, thus offending in his body
and thoughts the sweet sanities of nature. For him, two times a
million years can scarce suffice for liberation.
Gross man seldom or never realizes that his body is a kingdom,
governed by Emperor Soul on the throne of the cranium, with subsidiary
regents in the six spinal centers or spheres of consciousness. This
theocracy extends over a throng of obedient subjects: twenty-seven
thousand billion cells-endowed with a sure if automatic intelligence
by which they perform all duties of bodily growths, transformations,
and dissolutions-and fifty million substratal thoughts, emotions,
and variations of alternating phases in man’s consciousness in an
average life of sixty years. Any apparent insurrection of bodily
or cerebral cells toward Emperor Soul, manifesting as disease
or depression, is due to no disloyalty among the humble citizens,
but to past or present misuse by man of his individuality or free
will, given to him simultaneous with a soul, and revocable never.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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