From Conversations With Yogananda

You can be in a room twenty years, trying to get out through the walls, the ceiling, the floor.  It is when you finally discover the door that you find your way out.  That's how it is with the soul.  The average devotee may struggle his whole life trying to escape the bodily limitations by unscientific means and by paths only of devotion and discrimination.  By kriya yoga, however, if he is sincere, he can escape quickly.  Kriya yoga takes one to God by the universal highway:  the spine.