Levels of kriya

Precaution

Kriya Yoga consists of movements, which give you the best possible result. Is it possible to check if you are doing Kriya yoga in a proper way from outside? No It doesn’t matter how it looks from outside. You are not a trained monkey in a circus. The only thing that matters is the internal feeling, internal harmony.

You should be concentrated on the internal harmony. Do as the treatise says. To the full extent or do not do it. Yoga teachers who want to teach Kriya Yoga must be very careful – because it is very easy to start doing simply aerobics and not Kriya Yoga.

Rhythm

Let’s assume that you have found your own rhythm. Always remember this rhythm can change from day to day. In the lapse of time you forget about your body. The next step: you dive into your thoughts. The first thing that you come across during this diving process is thoughts about your current problems. Mental structures of your body wakes up or fall asleep. .The mental parts of your body appear and disappear depending on the thoughts which are associated with each of these parts. Each organ of sense is connected with a lot of your thoughts. It happens because when a though is born one or several organ of senses are involved in the process. So, as soon as you activate your senses you, immediately, activate connected thoughts. Each of us has our own “map” of thoughts and feelings. Different senses activate different thoughts: positive, negative, frightening, and inspiring. Your subtle body starts moving and you start practicing Kriya at the subtle level. At the same time you continue practicing Kriya at the level of gross body. This process is based one on another: you can’t switch to the level of subtle body before you turn on the physical level. So, at first, you should work on your gross body.

Physical level

So, you pulled your Energy and Consciousness out your gross body, now you have excess of it at the level of subtle body. The excess wakes up your emotions and thoughts. At the same moment your Karma at the subtle body level wakes up. The first thoughts you get are the thoughts about difficulties, problems and unpleasant situations. It reminds the process when you start practicing Kriya at the physical level: you get your Karma as pain and pant. Remember, your untrained body is your Karma. Karma is not something supernatural. Karma is something quite personal. Toxins inside your body are the part of your negative Karma. Toxins are not bad or good by themselves but for you it could be negative Karma. You should understand – Karma is something subtle, it is a situation or a fact, which creates the next situations and facts. Your untrained muscles feel pain and resist when you start practicing Kriya Yoga. The same thing happens on the mental level, at the level of the subtle body.

Emotions and subtle level

At the level of the subtle body emotions pop up then corresponding thoughts pop up in your mind. The thoughts feel excess of Energy and cling to it like leeches. A person is practicing Kriya Yoga and, at the same time, different situations take place at his/her mental level. It could be family problems, squabbles, and troubles at work and so on and so forth. It looks like a colorful dream full of emotions. You can recall your failures and other unpleasant moments. If you recall all these thoughts in a different situation, you could start acting inadequately. But during your practice - Kriya rescues you. It keeps you like a baby in a cradle, doesn’t let you hurt yourself. For instance, a person recalled someone who offended him/her, if a person was at his/her usual environment, there is a great chance - to dial a number of the offender and tell him/her a lot of bad words. But the person can’t grab a phone during the practice. Kriya movements keep the person at a cradle.

Sometimes during Kriya practice you can have a kind of illumination and you would like to run and write it down but Kriya holds you – finish it first then write. And it could be your salvation. Your internal structure finds the right vibration at the subtle body.

Physical and subtle level

Kriya Yoga destroys the fine line between physical and subtle levels, between emotions and malice, which could make you to make an irrevocable action. This fine line contains Karma, because any situation at the physical level provokes emotions and emotions provoke physical reactions. Usually it happens with the speed of lightning, uncontrollably, and hopefully it is good for us. In the Wild West cowboys shot first then watched who it was. Any thought or emotion is followed by an immediate reaction. If you were a shooter in the wild West, it could save your life, but in a civilized society this kind of actions creates nothing but your negative Karma. If a negative thought really clings you, you are inclined to emote: beat dishes, swear, and start doing bad stuff, which are very hard to stop. A person looses his/her temper in this kind of situations. It is the result of the tight connection between all your three bodies: one process changes to the next one and so on and so forth. Kriya Yoga helps you to control it. It helps to unlink physical and subtle: your emotions appear but your gross body doesn’t follow them but asks to wait and see. It happens once, twice… and step by step this chain becomes weaker and weaker, then you can control it and then you get a chance to dissociate this connection.

Causal level

The same idea works for so-called “blind zones”: some of your thoughts at the subtle level are ordinary, some are pretty strange; sometimes they are wonderful, sometimes – exciting. Foremost you meet with gross body’s memories, and then subtle and elusive ones. This process can’t be expressed in words, and it brings you to the knowledge of the subtle body, chakras and nadi (channels). Kriya Yoga says, sooner or later you will get the ability to see your subtle body and feel your channels and chakrasso clearly that you can easily draw it. But remember - these channels, chakras and the sublte body by means of appearance have nothing to do with our physical body and everything we are used to see around us.  Thereby any passionate debate about colors and forms of these structures makes no sense. Each person has his/her own perception of subtle things. That is why in one Yoga Treatise you can read about red chakra and in another one about blue one. You should remember about impossibility to express it in words. All the attempts to express it would be inaccurate. You can just feel it and your feelings and impression would be unique. Yoga urges us not take seriously ideas about “exact definitions” of chakras, channels and subtle body.

Parallel reality

If you jump to the next level, you get more subtle feelings. Nevertheless gross, subtle and causal bodies are the part of the one whole body. It is impossible to say that your gross body is not related to your subtle and causal bodies. Actually, repetitive movements of physical body turn on associative links with the subtle body. During the time when you practice Kriya yoga you automatically start feeling heat in the certain parts of your body, then you start feeling a kind of fever, then subtle excitation. The subtle excitation is impossible to describe in words. Sometimes the excitation can be pleasant, sometimes not. But anyway it opens you the true vision of your internal (subtle) structures like it is a different world. It looks like a parallel reality. The subtle body is like the parallel reality, which covers the gross body as a projection. I want to say again - it is impossible to describe it in words. Our habitual space is four-dimensional reality: there are length, width, height and time. Five-dimensional reality is more than we can imagine, but you can feel and see it clearer than you see our habitual reality. You wouldn’t have any doubts that it exists, when you see it once. If you would try to draw what you would see, you would get the drawingss of chakras, channels and subtle body. Each of us could have different images of these structures.

Uniqueness

Tantra Yoga explains it in the following way: each person has his/her own associative links with each internal centre: feeling, sense, touch. Each person has unique life experience. Feelings of each centre manifest itself in the reverse order: from the first to the last. Experience is different and perception of subtle structures is different for everybody. But it brings us to the same structure of subtle body – the Central channel and chakras located along it. Centers (Chakras) attract our Consciousness and Energy; absorb them so much that outlines of internal structures appear. But when you try to draw it, you get a simple (or complicated) scheme that has nothing to do with your emotional experience. If you hear debate about a number of lotus petals or color of any Chakra – it means only that debaters don’t have the slightest idea about an issue.

Limit of perception

As soon as you feel the subtle level once, you begin to move deeper and deeper into the subtle level. With time subtle vision will become for you more real than five senses.

Our gross body has limit of perception. It can’t transmit more than its limit. It is like TV has volume limit. If you try to exceed it, you just break it down. The same idea is also effective for the physical feelings, and it is also works for pain and pleasure. If you try to overcome limit of pain – you die and if you try to overcome limit of pleasure you also get all chances to die, like an alcoholic or drug addict, which try to get more and more pleasure before they can’t overcome it.

Thoughts and emotions

At the subtle level everything is sharper and clearer – pleasant and unpleasant. It takes a lot of energy to clean it up: to destroy negative associative links, to bring under control negative thoughts and come to the moment when you can control your mind. The fact is when a thought appears in your mind it brings an emotion inside. If you have enough energy the thought stays in your mind until the emotion is there. The thought sucks energy till the last drop. It explains existence of obsessions and some mental diseases.

Our civilization is sick, a very large percentage of people are insane. Many people are healthy before they get a fixed idea. It drains them completely; it could even kill a person. It begins with irrational fear or rational fear: fear of death, fear of losing loved one, and fear of losing job, fear to being killed – any kind of fear. All these fears are negatives thoughts and are colored by emotions. I mean: (Emotion + Negative Thought) x Energy = Fear and (Emotion + Positive Thought) x Energy = Pleasure. It means the more Energy you spend for a thought the more powerful it becomes. If you switch off your Energy from thought – the thought immediately leaves you. Some antidepressant acts this way – it takes away energy and a patient loses ability to think because there is no energy. But as soon as he/she stops using the pills all gone thoughts get all chances to come back. Yoga doesn’t try to replace medicine, but anyway this knowledge can help you to avoid a lot of problems in the future.