The Holy Science

The Holy Science, written by Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri and dated 1894 in its own introduction, though its first complete printing was in Calcutta in 1920 and the widely available standard edition is the Self-Realization Fellowship printing, is a primary text of Yukteswar's own reading of Sankhya philosophy and Christian scripture as one unified science. Its best known claim recalculates the Hindu yuga cycle at 24,000 years, one turn of the precession of the equinoxes, in place of the Puranic figure of 4,320,000 years for one mahayuga. As Yukteswar's own foundational statement within the Kriya Yoga lineage he founded, it is the direct and authoritative source for what that specific modern reinterpretation itself holds. Its limit is that it is a primary teaching text of one particular modern spiritual lineage, not independent scholarship or an astronomical claim tested outside that lineage's own framework, so it is cited here as Yukteswar's own position on the yuga cycle, not as an established chronology.