Bindu 23 - engelsk 7.p65 - Scandinavian Yoga and Meditation School

Kriya Yoga III
- a Silver jubilee article by Swami Janakananda
Time for learning... time for insight... time for teaching...
Kriya Yoga can be compared to a fire
that burns constantly during the
meditation, cleansing the body and
mind of limitations, inhibitions and
confusion; whatever stands in the way
of clarity, energy and balance and for
which you have no use.
Consistency is necessary if you want
to reach the essential. All roads lead to
Rome, it is said. Yes, but you have to
choose one road to get there. It is not
knowledge of all kinds of methods and
therapies that matters, but knowledge
of yourself. What matters first and
foremost is stability, investigation
through one’s meditation and gaining
insight. I see how difficult it is for
people who have tried all sorts of
things to take the final steps and break
through the wall isolating us from a
deeper insight and an experience of a
greater reality - they become rich with
understanding, with opinions and
theoretical knowledge, yes, even with
certain experiences, but the eye of the
needle has become too small for them
to pass through.
Life is a creative process
When I planned these articles on Kriya
Yoga, I did some fundamental thinking
about the content. This third article
should, among other things, be about
conditions for teaching and learning
Kriya Yoga, and about Kriya Yoga
itself. However, I saw that I couldn’t
just write an article based on rules and
facts that everybody should adhere to
just because I wrote it.
I therefore decided to write this third
© 1995 Lars Magnusson
article as an account based on my own
life and experiences. It is then up to the
reader to decide whether there is any
meaning in what I say, especially in
relation to who teaches advanced yoga
and how it is taught. I think that such
teaching ought to have other conditions
than ordinary weekly yoga and
elementary meditation.
Here I will write about what made
me investigate and use precisely yoga,
in light of the experience I have had as
a teacher for 25 years, and about the
influence of yoga in my life.
Creativity can have many
expressions, particularly when it is
about human evolution and one’s
insight into oneself. And when I
describe my life in relation to yoga and
my “truth”, then I must also accept
other’s truth - the life they lead, their
background and the experience they
have had.
Still, I do not wish to be gentle on
anyone who is trying to get away with
making the teaching “easy”, and in so
doing spoiling something unbelievably
valuable for all those who are
searching for real tools on the path of
self realisation.
Of course, one cannot guarantee that
all the teachers one trains have the
same attitude towards life as oneself -
and it would be absurd to expect so.
But it is not as simple as it appears. A
yoga teacher can, for example, be
materialistic and “capable”, and firmly
believe that the limited reality he sees
is the whole reality. His or her teaching
or propagating will stem from that
notion. When one has the whole thing
in one’s head and no longer uses yoga
in practice or meditates for real, then
how can one keep open the doors to
mysticism and insights? A teacherstudent,
for whom career and position
are more important, and who has
finance and material needs as a goal in
itself, can only take students to a
certain limit, no matter what his (or
her) ideas are about his own worth...
He has not awakened his psychic
abilities or realised his spiritual gifts,
those gifts that reach beyond the
limitations of the mind. A student once
asked such a teacher: “What have you
got out of yoga?” “I’ve got a good
job,” was the reply.
For the mystic, all possibilities are
open, also those that he does not know
himself, but which are possible for
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