Journey to Self-Realization

“The kingdom of God is not in the clouds, in some designated point of space; it is right behind the darkness that you perceive with closed eyes. God is Consciousness; God is absolute Existence; God is ever new Joy. This Joy is omnipresent. Feel your oneness with that Joy. It resides within you; and it encompasses infinity. Beyond the gross vibratory boundaries of matter, the Immutable Infinite reigns in all His majesty and vastness. Endlessness—that is the kingdom of God; conscious Bliss, eternal and boundless. When your soul has expanded and feels its presence everywhere, then you are united with Spirit. […]

It is an insult to your Self to be born, live, and die without knowing the answer to the mystery of why you were sent here as a human being in the first place. To forget God is to miss the whole point of existence. Learn to feel God, and to enjoy Him. Make it a habit and you will see in time how much you have gained.”

Once you see this world as God’s dream, even a nightmare loses its power to hurt you – and Kriya Yoga offers you a fast route to this awakening.

Between 1938 and 1952, audiences at California temples brought Paramahansa Yogananda the same ordinary troubles anyone brings to a teacher today: a nervous system worn ragged by city life, a business swallowing a person's peace, a marriage short on patience, a fear of dying. Journey to Self-Realization, the third volume of his collected talks and essays, is Yogananda meeting every one of those troubles with the same teaching: that God-realisation is not a retreat from such things but the direct, scientific answer to them. He teaches Kriya Yoga, the ancient technique revived through his own line of gurus, as a means of accelerating the soul's return to the Infinite, compressing lifetimes of ordinary effort into a single sincere life. But the talks range far beyond meditation technique alone: will power and habit, prosperity and simple living, nervousness and magnetism, karma and prayer, resurrection and death all receive the same instruction – bring your consciousness, right now, into whatever you are doing, and you will find the kingdom of God already there.

Journey to Self-Realization opens with encouragement: the goal you are seeking, Paramahansa Yogananda tells his listeners, is already close at hand – the kingdom of God is not somewhere else but “right behind the darkness you perceive with closed eyes.” From there, his talks and teachings are remarkably detailed and practical, addressing the full breadth of ordinary life.

He begins with the mind. “We are what we think we are,” he teaches, illustrating it with a story about his own guru, Sri Yukteswar, who once fell seriously ill and grew thin. When Sri Yukteswar described his condition to his own guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, he was told simply that he had made himself sick, and would feel better by tomorrow – and he did. Habits are not fixed, Yogananda insists; will joined to discrimination lets you think away undesirable thoughts. In that same opening talk he offers a physical image for what is a technique of mind: “If you coat your mind with the oil of nonattachment, then material desires cannot cling to you.” Underneath all of it sits a teaching about identity itself: “We are souls, individualized Spirit… we must think of ourselves as souls, not as fleshly beings” – which is why habit is never fully fixed.

The same discipline of mind extends into the whole of modern life. Business, for example, need not be a self-serving material pursuit – “Business is nothing but serving others materially in the best possible way” – and real success is not accumulation but “the power to create at will what you need.” Nervousness, he teaches, is fed by unkind speech and quarrelling, and even a spouse's anger is no excuse to answer in kind: “take a little walk and cool off before responding.” Even death he reframes in the same practical register: “Death is just like a refreshing sleep”, a "complete rest.”

That kind of reframing scales up, in one of his most memorable teachings, to the whole of human history – its wars, its reversals, its repeating troubles. He tells his listeners to “look upon life as a movie, and then you will know why God created it,” since, just as “you wouldn't sit through the same movie repeatedly” without variety and incident, the Creator has built contrast and drama into history “to give variety to the entertainment in this cosmic movie house.” Pain and injustice remain real while you're inside the story, exactly as a film's danger feels real while the lights are down, but the frame itself changes everything: “when we have finished seeing the motion picture, we know that nobody was killed; nobody was suffering.” The same is true of this world: it is “nothing but an electrical shadow-show, a play of light and shadows … It is not born nor does it die.” Going further, he evokes the metaphor of the cosmic dream: “if you are attached to human happiness, you are in for a lot of trouble, because nightmares are inevitable along with the beautiful dreams. But if you will think of a dream as a dream, whether it is enjoyable or dreadful, you will have peace. When you realize that life is a dream, then you are free.” And in the same breath he explains: “that is what Kriya Yoga will give to you.”

Kriya yoga, Yogananda teaches, focuses on revolving the life current around the spine and can effect enormous transformation when practised, even just twenty minutes a day. A sincere practitioner will “gain the result of one year's ordinary physical evolution.” Quoting from his famous work, Autobiography of a Yogi, he shares the memorable formula: “one half-minute of revolution of energy around the sensitive spinal cord of man effects subtle progress in his evolution; that half-minute of Kriya equals one year of natural spiritual unfoldment.” More personally, he speaks of his own experience: “when by Kriya Yoga I open my spiritual eye, the whole world drops away from my consciousness, and God is with me.” Of its many practical effects, he reassures that “nervousness will never again be able to touch you once you are permanently anchored in the realization of God's Presence.” The destination, for Yogananda, is the same for everyone, businessman and renunciate alike: “you will realize that He is your Self, and that He exists equally and impartially in all beings.”

Those drawn to learn more about Yogananda’s universal teachings can find support and resources through the Self-Realization Fellowship, the organisation he founded, which continues to offer lessons, Kriya yoga instruction, and temples worldwide dedicated to helping individuals discover greater peace, purpose, and divine connection.