JESUS CHRIST One of the essential goals of Paramahansa Yogananda's mission was "to "reveal the complete harmony and basic oneness of original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ and original Yoga as taught by Bhagavan Krishna; and to show that these principles of truth are the common scientific foundation of all true religions." To the public at large, Jesus propounded a simple philosophy of faith, love, and forgiveness. He spoke often in parables, pregnant with timeless morals. But to his close disciples he taught deeper truths, truths that have their correspondence in the deepest metaphysical concepts of the more ancient yoga philosophy. BHAGAVAN KRISHNA Bhagavan Krishna lived many centuries before Christ. Revered throughout India as an avatar (incarnation of God), the historical facts of Krishna's life are interwoven with a maze of legend and mythology. "Krishna is the divine exemplar of yoga in the East; Christ was chosen by God as the exemplar of God-union for the West....The Kriya Yoga technique, taught by Krishna to Arjuna and referred to in Gita chapters IV:29 and V:27--28, is the supreme spiritual science of yoga meditation. Secreted during the materialistic ages, this indestructible yoga was revived for modern man by Mahavatar Babaji and taught by the Gurus of Self-Realization Fellowship/Yogoda Satsanga Society of India." MAHAVATAR BABAJI There are no historical records relating to the birth and life of Mahavatar Babaji. Paramahansa Yogananda has written in Autobiography of a Yogi that the deathless avatar has resided for untold years in the remote Himalayan regions of India, revealing himself only rarely to a blessed few. It is Mahavatar Babaji who revived in this age the lost scientific meditation technique of Kriya Yoga. In bestowing Kriya initiation on his disciple Lahiri Mahasaya, Babaji said, "The Kriya Yoga that I am giving to the world through you in this nineteenth century is a revival of the same science that Krishna gave millenniums ago to Arjuna; and that was later known to Patanjali and Christ, and to St. John, St. Paul, and other disciples." LAHIRI MAHASAYA Lahiri Mahasaya was born on September 30, 1828, in the village of Ghurni in Bengal, India. At the age of thirty-three, while walking one day in the Himalayan foothills near Ranikhet, he met his guru, Mahavatar Babaji. It was a divine reunion of two who had been together in many lives past; at an awakening touch of blessing, Lahiri Mahasaya became engulfed in a spiritual aura of divine realization that was never to leave him. Mahavatar Babaji initiated him in the science of Kriya Yoga and instructed him to bestow the sacred technique on all sincere seekers. Lahiri Mahasaya returned to his home in Banaras to fulfill this mission. As the first to teach the lost ancient Kriya science in contemporary times, he is renowned as a seminal figure in the renaissance of yoga that began in modern India in the latter part of the nineteenth century and continues to this day. ramahansa Yogananda's parents were disciples of Lahiri Mahasaya, and when he was but a babe in arms his mother carried him to the home of her guru. Blessing the infant, Lahiri Mahasaya said, "Little mother, thy son will be a yogi. As a spiritual engine, he will carry many souls to God's kingdom." SWAMI SRI YUKTESWAR Swami Sri Yukteswar was born on May 10,1855, at Serampore in Bengal, India. Sri Yukteswar was a disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya and attained the spiritual stature of a Jnanavatar, or incarnation of wisdom. Sri Yukteswar recognized that a synthesis of the spiritual heritage of the East with the science and technology of the West would do much to alleviate the material, psychological, and spiritual suffering of the modern world. These ideas were crystallized by his remarkable encounter with Mahavatar Babaji, the guru of Lahiri Mahasaya, in 1894. It was to Swami Sri Yukteswar that Paramahansa Yogananda came as a youth. The great guru told his young disciple that, during their meeting in 1894, Mahavatar Babaji had informed him: "You, Swamiji, have a part to play in the coming harmonious exchange between Orient and Occident. Some years hence I shall send you a disciple whom you can train for yoga dissemination in the West. The vibrations there of many spiritually seeking souls come floodlike to me. I perceive potential saints in America and Europe, waiting to be awakened." Sri Yukteswar told Yogananda, "My son, you are the disciple that, years ago, Babaji promised to send me." Under Sri Yukteswar's spiritual training and discipline, Sri Yogananda was prepared to begin his worldwide mission in the West. Sri Yukteswar named Paramahansa Yogananda sole heir to his spiritual mantle and ashram properties. PARAMAHANSA YOGANANDA As described above, Paramahansa Yogananda was personally blessed by Mahavatar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Swami Sri Yukteswar — to carry out the mission of disseminating Kriya Yoga worldwide.

• published: 31 Oct 2013
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