Kriya, a Spiritual Yoga Experience

People seeking a deeper spiritual meaning in their lives have found Kriya yoga. Yogananda brought Kriya yoga to the West in the 1920's. He established the Self-Realization Fellowship as a total yoga experience that addressed the spiritual as well as the physical, all most other western yoga disciplines concentrate on.

A Kriya yogi, as described by Yogananda, mentally moves his life energy around the six spinal centers - the medullar, dorsal, lumbar, coccygeal, cervical, and sacral plexuses. These each relate to the twelve zodiac signs. This subtle energy revolution progresses his evolution, and it is said that this 30 seconds of Kriya is equivalent to a year of natural spiritual growth.

Kriya yoga is based on Kundalina yoga and includes similar asana and meditation methods. Kriya adds some spiritual and esoteric guidelines. It does have its detractors that point out Kriya does not maintain your power comes from within, but that you need a teacher, or guru, to release your spirituality. Although it sounds like an admirable goal, Kriya's attempt to eliminate obstacles begs the question, are the obstacles there for a reason? Is the guru the right person to decide how and when to remove them? It is very important to go into Kriya yoga with a strong sense of self. Never allow another to hijack your self-determination!

Advocates of Kriya yoga believe they can achieve self-realization faster by combining three other yoga methods:

1. Karma yoga is concentrated on the movement of the soul, both out in the world and the inner actions of the mind.

2. Bhakti yoga aims to achieve peace with all the elements of your life through the power of love. It is often stated as "oneness with all creation and cosmic consciousness."

3. Jnana yoga is concerned with intellectual discipline leading to wisdom gained from spiritual knowledge giving freedom of the mind.

Thus, Kriya joins the three into a single discipline. It highlights the relationship between breath and mind. Breath control is self control. Breath mastery is self mastery.

Preparation is the first step in Kriya yoga. The body is prepared with a Hatha yoga exercise routine. For beginners or the less flexible, other alternative preparation routines are provided.

Mind preparation comes next. Here you focus your mind by studying general conduct, analyzing your overall health, cleanliness and purity. You may even study your relationship to certain metaphysical principles. These reflective studies help to prepare the mind for later techniques intended to refine and improve the nervous system.

Mantras are taught in Kriya meditation in order to tune the mind and body to a single frequency. Again, the detractors point out, one must be careful that YOU are the chooser of the destination and your mind isn't being controlled by another, even a trusted other.

Although one of a handful of more controversial yoga paths, Kriya yoga has helped many attain spiritual levels they couldn't quite reach with other methods. It may be right for you, but go into it with your eyes open and your protection activated.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Yoga

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How to Install the Neo Geo Emulator the Right Way

Do you like video games? Almost everyone does (even those people who say they don't but secretly wish they could play them anyway.) And the current craze in video games exists in the area of handheld gaming, which may explain why Sony Inc. has created the PSP mini or handheld gaming system. All PSP units are based on the Universal Media Disc proprietary technology exclusively owned by Sony Inc.

With the PSP and handeld gaming growing in popularity by leaps and bounds, it is not surprising that emulators would be created. An emulator, for those who don't know, is a hardware or software product that can imitate one system's functionalities when the emulator is installed into another completely different system. Thus, emulators can come in the form of software which will be run on PCs so that a new software application can be run on such machines; or in the form of hardware which has firmware integrated into it. This hardware's firmware would be responsible for telling your PC how to function once specific game software has been downloaded into that PC.

A free emulator software that has been going around is the Neo Geo Emulator. This emulator, which is now popularly installed in many PSPs, aims to permit end-users to play games which were popularized in the late 1990s in Japan and are based on the Neo Geo Game console. Obviously, Sony Inc. does not officially allow the Neo Geo Emulator to be installed on its PSPs, but that doesn't prevent people from downloading the emulator software into their PSP units free of charge anyway.

It should be explained that Neo Geo Emulators don't come in one version only. One source on the Internet recommends this version - MVSPSP 2.0.6 - and explains how to install it properly. See below details for the installation process:

* To install the MVSPSP 2.0.6, you need to copy the MVSPSP folder into the GAME folder so that you can proceed to run the program in 1.50 kernel. If you can secure some roms for yourself, look for the other folder dubbed romcnv. The romcnv folder has an exe inside that can change your roms into a cache file. This cache file is necessary (just like the roms zip file) for use on the PSP phat due to its low memory.

* After that, you have to create one folder labelled ROMS and another one labeled CACHE within the MVSPSP folder. In addition, you require the neogeo.zip that functions as the console's bios - this permits you to run the Neo Geo games.

* Once done, set it in the ROMS folder. You don't need to create a cache of that info though.

The Neo Geo emulator described here can play Metal Slug 1, Samurai Showdown, and King of the Monsters with 100% precision and functionality too. This source also disclosed that one can now get the MVSPSP 2.2.0 (applicable for the PSP version named PSP Slim) which does not need use of cache files since the PSP Slim has a doubled memory spanning 64mb.

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