Spiritual Portal

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ixue8wTCoqgC&pg=PA100&lpg=PA100&dq=yogananda+on+ancient+hindu+writings&source=bl&ots=gexM3cpxZg&sig=15Kmi7Q59FoSV7unvPAwJJfEhKU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz5M2Rp4vOAhXHSCYKHWWTAc4Q6AEIOTAF#v=onepage&q=yogananda%20on%20ancient%20hindu%20writings&f=false

Tara Mata makes some fascinating assertions in this article. One is that the faster a person breathes the less conscious he/she is. Taking longer breaths is the shortest cut to concentration of mind. If one is intensely interested in any subject their breath involuntarily becomes slower and slower. The consciousness becomes more and more fixed as the breath slows down. We can see the relationship between higher states of consciousness and the stillness of breath.

We have arrived about 6000 in BC at the “dawn of history” and the first-known cities and civilizations of the Samerians. From then down to the present day, historians claim to discern or more or less steady growth and expansion of civilization in progress among men.

“There are setbacks, massacres, pestilence;” writes A. G. Wells, but the story is, on a whole, one of enlargement. For 4000 years (BC) this new thing, civilization...grew as a tree grows; now losing a limb, now stripped by a storm, but always growing and resuming its growth.

 This theory of Wells is the theory of nearly our representative modern scholars. Their conception of civilization as a growing tree first planted, like  an acorn seed of an oak not earlier than 10,000 B. C. and increasing in stature by slow degrees to the majestic elevation and girth it has no attained is their primary premise, from which are drawn all their conclusions about the relative importance and height of all civilizations within historic limits. Stated as a solid syllogism in logic the argument of historians is this: (1) The path of civilization seen as a whole has pursued a straight upward line through the centuries; (2) The civilizations of ancient Egypt, India, China, Mesopotamia Cnossus and other centers of early culture, predate modern progress by many thousands of years; (3) Therefore, the ancient world must necessarily have been inferior to those of modern civilization. as a representative by the leading note nations and greatest minds of our era.

Simple but not true

Simple, isn’t it? It is also a possibly accurate and workable hypothesis, so far as it concerns the evidence of the really well known historical periods, which date as we have seen only from the founding of Rome and the beginning of the Kali Yuga of the descending arc. Alas,  for a theory of such simplicity and one so flattering to the builders of modern culture, heir to all the ages, “ — it is not true. It will not and cannot fit the facts and records of those mighty civilizations which passed through their golden, silver, and bronze ages during the years 11,502 BC to 702 B.C.