Paramahansa Yogananda

Birth Data

Biography

Born into a devout and well-to-do Bengali family as Mukunda Lal Ghosh, Yogananda was encouraged to pursue his own spiritual path at an early age. By age 11, he was having mystical experiences, and, in one such episode in 1904, his mother, who was traveling away from home at the time, appeared to him in a vision. The vision informed him of her imminent death before anyone else in the home even knew that she was ill, and she died just as he had divined. Fourteen months later, he received a message left to him by his mother prior to her death, informing him of his destiny and leaving him an amulet, which brought a “blaze of illumination,” which attuned him to the guidance of teachers from past lives.

A spiritual seeker from the time he was very young, he was now impelled to visit sages and saints, even fleeing home and school occasionally, in a burning desire to find his guru whose face had appeared to him. His quest led him to Swami Sri Yukteswar in 1910, and, for the next ten years, he studied under this master’s loving discipline. In July 1915, just after graduating from Calcutta University, he received the name Yogananda when, joining the monastic Swami Order, he vowed to devote his life to the love and service of God. The name indicates bliss (ananda) through divine union (yoga).

Two years later, in 1917, Yogananda founded a school for boys that combined yoga training and spiritual instruction with modern educational methods. He joked in his autobiography that, having renounced family life, he became father to more boys than he ever would otherwise have had. In 1920, he was asked to be one of the international delegates to a congress of religious leaders to be held in Boston. His speech in front of that body was enthusiastically received, and, in that same year, he founded Self-Realization Fellowship, an organization that, to this day, disseminates his teachings.

For the next several years, he traveled widely in the United States, establishing Los Angeles as international headquarters for the Self-Realization Fellowship in 1925. During the next decade his work and spirit brought him many famous students, including Luther Burbank, George Eastman, and Leopold Stokowski. In 1927, he was invited to meet President Calvin Coolidge at the White House.

In 1935, he initiated an 18-month tour of Europe and India on which he met statesmen, scientists, and spiritual figures. That year, his guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, bestowed the title Paramahansa, India’s highest spiritual title, meaning “supreme swan,” a symbol of spiritual discrimination, signifying “one who manifests the supreme state of unbroken communion with God.” At about 7:00 PM on March 9, 1936, Yogananda’s beloved guru, Sri Yukteswar, died. A few months later, on June 19, while Yogananda was meditating a beautiful light appeared before him. It was Sri Yukteswar in his resurrected body to reveal through speech as well as through thought transference the laws of the universe, including the causal, astral and physical bodies.

Yogananda’s best-known written works include his “Autobiography of a Yogi,” published in 1946. Since its initial release, this book, which he later expanded, has been in continuous publication and translated into 18 languages. Through his writing he was able to disseminate to a wide international audience his belief in the unity of the world’s religions and to teach his methods for attaining direct personal experience of God. To serious students he taught Kriya yoga, a spiritual science including soul-awakening techniques that had been lost in the Dark Ages but revived by his Giri lineage of enlightened masters.

His physical death came on March 7, 1952, reportedly a conscious exit made after a speech given at a banquet. Twenty days later, according to a signed and notarized statement from the director of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, “no physical disintegration was visited upon his body…it was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability.”

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