"From my guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, a master of Vedic wisdom with a universal spiritual understanding, I received a new appreciation of the Christian Bible....Listening to Master expound the Christian scripture with the same natural ease he felt among the esoteric depths of his native Hindu heritage, I experienced a wondrous expansion in the realm of truth, which has no boundaries or religious demarcations. Sri Yukteswar had written, at the request of his paramguru, Mahavatar Babaji, an amazingly compacted analysis of the unity of the Hindu and Christian scriptures: The Holy Science. That commission was the seed of my future mission − to show the harmony between the original science of yoga given by Bhagavan Krishna and the original teachings of Lord Jesus."

The Yugas, or World Cycles

Of special interest to many readers of The Holy Science is Swami Sri Yukteswar's unique explanation of the cycles of world civilization. He explains that the earth is in a new ascending age in the life of our planet. Therefore, we are destined to witness far-reaching modifications in the religious, social, economic, and political institutions of humanity.

 

The Hindu scriptures, he explains, teach that the earth goes through repeated cycles of evolution and devolution, called yugas. These world cycles consist of 24,000 years each, and are divided into four yugas or ages − 12,000 years of ascending through these yugas to increasing enlightenment, and then 12,000 years of descending through the yugas to increasing ignorance and materialism.

 

Swami Sri Yukteswar outlines in The Holy Science the details of this endless progression of historical progress and regression. At the present time, he revealed, we are in the early stages of the upward cycle − Dwapara Yuga (Atomic Age), which began around AD 1700 and will last 2,400 years.

 

This present era marks the transition from the purely materialistic consciousness prevalent in the lower Kali Yuga to a worldwide awareness and use of the subtler atomic and electronic energies of creation.

 

In the higher ages that come after Dwapara Yuga, humanity as a whole will understand and utilize the highest potentials of mind and divine consciousness, culminating in an advanced spiritual Golden Age thousands of years from now.

Light of Kriya Yoga from a Higher Age

The testament of the Hindu scriptures is that India's civilization goes back far earlier than contemporary Western historians acknowledge. Swami Sri Yukteswar in The Holy Science calculates that the Golden Age, in which India's spiritual and material civilization reached its pinnacle, ended about 6700 B.C. − having flowered for many thousands of years before that. India's scriptural literature lists many generations of kings and sages who lived prior to the events that are the main subject of the Mahabharata. In the Gita itself, Krishna describes the long descent of India's spiritual culture from a Golden Age to his own era, as the knowledge of yoga gradually was lost.

Paramahansa Yogananda wrote:

"During the descent of man from a Spiritual Age to a Material Age, the knowledge of the science of yoga declines and is forgotten. Nevertheless, as Spirit is eternal, so yoga − the art of reuniting the outgoing differentiated soul-ray with the omnipresent Spiritual Sun − also is imperishable. Even though almost completely buried during the Material Age, the science of yoga can never be annihilated, for it is linked to the Reality within man....

"The year AD 1951 has already left the Material Age behind (by over 250 years). In this once-more-ascending Atomic Age, the indestructible science of Raja Yoga is being revived as Kriya Yoga.

"In bestowing his blessings on me before I came to America in 1920, Mahavatar Babaji told me that I had been chosen for this sacred mission: 'You are the one I have chosen to spread the message of Kriya Yoga in the West. Long ago I met your guru Yukteswar at a Kumbha Mela; I told him then I would send you to him for training." Babaji then predicted: 'Kriya Yoga, the scientific technique of God-realization, will ultimately spread in all lands, and aid in harmonizing the nations through man's personal, transcendental perception of the Infinite Father.'"