What happens as we grow spiritually? Is there a step-by-step process that everyone goes through—all spiritual seekers, including those of any or no religious persuasion—as they gradually work their way upward, until they achieve the highest state of Self-realization?
About 2200 years ago, a great spiritual master of India named Patanjali described this process, and presented humanity with a clear-cut, step-by-step outline of how all truth seekers and saints achieve divine union. He called this universal inner experience and process “yoga” or “union.” His collection of profound aphorisms—a true world scripture—has been dubbed Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
Unfortunately, since that time many scholarly translators with little or no spiritual realization have written commentaries on Patanjali’s writings that have succeeded only in burying his pithy insights in convoluted phrases like “becomes assimilated with transformations” and “the object alone shines without deliberation.” How can any reader understand Patanjali’s original meaning when he or she has to wade through such bewildering terminology?
Thankfully, a great modern yoga master—Paramhansa Yogananda, author of the classic Autobiography of a Yogi—has cut through the scholarly debris and resurrected Patanjali’s original teachings and revelations. Now, in Demystifying Patanjali, Swami Kriyananda, a direct disciple of Yogananda, shares his guru’s crystal clear and easy-to-grasp explanations of Patanjali’s aphorisms.
As Kriyananda writes in his introduction, “My Guru personally shared with me some of his most important insights into these sutras. During the three and a half years I lived with him, he also went with me at great length into the basic teachings of yoga.
“I was able, moreover, to ask my Guru personally about many of the subjects covered by Patanjali. His explanations have lingered with me, and have been a priceless help in the [writing of this book].”
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One of the foremost spiritual teachers of Yoga principles in the world. In 1948, at the age of twenty-two, he became a disciple of the Indian yoga master and world teacher, Paramhansa Yogananda (author of the classic, Autobiography of a Yogi). At Yogananda’s request, Swami Kriyananda devoted his life to teaching and writing, and helping others to experience the joy and living presence of God within. Over the course of more than sixty years, he lectured on four continents in seven languages. His television programs, audio and video recordings of his talks and music, and his many books in twenty-eight languages have touched the lives of millions.
Swami Kriyananda took the ancient teachings of Raja Yoga and made them intensely practical and immediately useful for people in every walk of life, on a daily basis. His books and teachings cover nearly every field of human endeavor, including spiritualizing business life, leadership, education, the arts, community life, and science. He wrote extensive commentaries on the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita.
Swami Kriyananda was also known as the “father of the intentional communities movement, ” which began in the United States in the late 1960s. Inspired by his guru’s dream of establishing spiritual communities, in 1968 he founded the first of what are now ten Ananda communities worldwide. They provide a supportive environment of “simple living and high thinking, ” where a thousand full-time residents live, work, and worship together. “The time has come for people to live lives of even higher dedication than that which inspired monks and nuns of the past. . . . The time has come for people to direct their spiritual awareness also downward into matter . . . to everything they do: their work, to education, to family life, to friendship, to their communications with strangers, to the way they build their homes — to all the most mundane, practical aspects of daily, human life."
“Men need now to become God-centered from within, and from that center to see God everywhere, in everything.” — Cities of Light by Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters)
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