Autobiography of a Yogi

Paramhansa Yogananda

4 ideas

1. Ten years under Sri Yukteswar's discipline

   Yogananda, then the teenager Mukunda, met Swami Sri Yukteswar on a lane in Benares in 1910 and spent roughly the next decade training at his hermitages in Serampore and Puri. Yukteswar corrected his faults bluntly and publicly, dismissed displays of emotion or psychic ambition, and insisted that Yogananda finish a university degree he wanted to abandon for the Himalayas. Yogananda presents this sternness as the loving discipline that prepared him for his later mission in the West.

2. Kriya Yoga as accelerated spiritual evolution

   Kriya Yoga is presented as a breath-and-life-force technique in which the practitioner mentally directs energy up and down the spine, which the book says decarbonizes the blood and quiets the body. It claims that half a minute of Kriya produces the equivalent of a year of natural spiritual unfoldment, so the practice compresses what would otherwise take lifetimes. The book frames this as a scientific method rather than a matter of belief, taught through a guru's initiation.

3. Miracles as unknown natural law

   In "The Law of Miracles" the book argues that feats attributed to saints, such as materializations and appearing in two places at once, do not suspend natural law. It says a master who directly perceives matter as condensed light and consciousness can work with that substrate deliberately. The book cites modern physics on light and energy as consistent with, though not proof of, this view.

4. The householder yogi ideal

   Lahiri Mahasaya was an accountant in a government Military Engineering Department with a wife and children. According to the book, the deathless master Babaji initiated him into Kriya in the Himalayas in 1861 and told him to return to ordinary working life rather than renounce it. The book presents him as proof that full realization is open to people with jobs and families, not reserved for monks, and this rationale was used to justify offering Kriya widely.

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