Sri Yukteswar
Bengali Hindu monk, astronomer, scholar, and Kriya Yoga master who is most widely known as the guru of Paramahansa Yogananda — through whom his teaching reached the West via Yogananda's 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi, one of the bestselling spiritual books of the twentieth century. Born Priya Nath Karar in 1855 in Serampore, Sri Yukteswar studied Sanskrit, astronomy, and the scriptures, married, raised a family, and at the death of his wife took monastic ordination as a swami of the Giri branch of the Shankaracharya order. His own guru was Lahiri Mahasaya, transmitter of the modern Kriya Yoga lineage. In 1894, at the request of Mahavatar Babaji, Sri Yukteswar wrote The Holy Science (Kaivalya Darshanam) — a short book that proposes a unified framework for Vedic and Christian scripture, and that introduces the Yuga theory of the precessional ages of consciousness that has been widely cited in the contemporary integrative spirituality literature. He died in 1936 in Puri, Odisha. His ashram and lineage continue today in the Self-Realization Fellowship.
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Quotes by Sri Yukteswar
111 quotes“All religions point to the same truth, though they use different words.”
“Truth must be experienced, not merely believed.”
“What you experience, you know. What you only believe, you do not know.”
“Spiritual life is to be lived, not just talked about.”
“Most people only talk about spirituality.”
“Few are willing to live it.”
“Be among the few.”
“Forget the past. The vanished lives of all men are dark with many shames.”
“Human conduct is ever unreliable until anchored in the Divine.”
“Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.”
“Nothing is impossible to him who, anchored in the Soul, fearlessly faces life.”
“You may control a mad elephant.”
“You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger.”
“But the mind, with its hosts of restless thoughts, is harder to subdue.”
“Therefore, master the mind through meditation.”
“There is nothing that meditation cannot accomplish.”
“As long as the soul lives in the body, it can experience the Divine.”
“After death, what remains is the merit of the experiences had during life.”
“Cease being a slave to the senses, and become master of the soul.”
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