Kriya Yoga is known as the mother of all yogas. The Indian scriptures explain that in the Golden Age, satya yuga, there was only one spiritual practice, a universal yoga which later came to be known as Kriya Yoga. Religion, scriptures, priesthood, rites & rituals had not been revealed yet.

With the gradual decline of spiritual consciousness throughout the different ages, yugas, this original yoga underwent a series of specializations. Thus new classes of spiritual tools gradually emerged—the yoga of the Divine sound-stream, nada yoga; the yoga of meditation, raja yoga; the yoga of devotion, bhakti yoga; the yoga of body and mind purification, hatha yoga; the yoga of selfless action, karma yoga; the yoga of self-knowedge, jñana yoga, to name but a few among the 108 classical forms of authentic yoga...

Today what is practiced as "yoga" in the West is largely a series of variations on hatha yoga—physical postures, breathing exercices, and purification techniques designed to achieve enhanced health, reduction of stress, and numerous other physico-mental benefits.

In a West increasingly fixated on bodily youth, power and attractiveness, it is only natural that yoga became quickly reduced to a form of oriental gymnastic and stress-reduction technique. Meanwhile in India, where the study and practice of yoga had undergone a steady decline (accelerated by the introduction of "modern" education by the British colonial power in 1834), yoga is curently undergoing an Asian renaissance, mostly fueled by their importing the Western repackaging of their ancestral spiritual science. Thus yoga's limitless treasure-trove of spiritual development remains to this day virtually untapped, ignored, or, far worse, reduced to a marketable commodity.