Book Review: The Autobiography of a Yogi

Introduction

During Steve Jobs’ memorial service in 2011, every attendee received a black box containing a book called The Autobiography of a Yogi as a gift. The book has been known for being the only book found on Steve Job’s personal iPad and he re-read it every year in his life for 40 years.

Moreover, the famous cricketer Virat Kohli, musician George Harrison, CEO of Salesforce, Mark Benioff, and the PM of India have all read this book. So what is so good about this book?

Contents

I shall begin the summary and then move on to a simple story I found interesting. Finally, I will progress to the lessons the book teaches us. I recommend you to check it out yourself and I am sure you will enjoy it.

Summary

Paramahansa Yogananda, who is credited for bringing yoga to the west, tells his remarkable journey of spirituality through this magnificent book.

From a very young age, Yogananda was very spiritually inclined. He was the son of a mother who loved to give to charity and a father with a high rank in the Bengal-Nagpur railway company.

His parents were disciples of Lahiri Mahasaya, the guru of Yogananda’s guru. Lahiri Mahasaya was one of the greatest spiritual masters of his age. In fact, Yogananda called him the Yogavatar (incarnation of Yoga) of the age.

When he was 11 years old, Yogananda’s mother appeared before him in a vision that foretold her death.  He would continue to have similar visions throughout his life. After his mother’s departure, Yogananda began searching for his guru and tried to reach the Himalayas, however, when he was 17, he finally found his mentor – Sri Yukteswar Giri.

Soon after, Yogananda gave responsibility for his life over to his guru despite his disapproval for his master’s harsh and stern behavior towards him. However, later Yogananda reveals that Sri Yukteswar had played a huge role in shaping his life.

Yogananda strongly believes in the guru-disciple relationship, a key aspect of the book. Yogananda often spends days at Sri Yukteswar’s ashram in order to hear his mentor’s life stories.

Sri Yukteswar also initiates him into Kriya yoga later. Nevertheless, Sri Yukteswar teaches him the importance of serving one’s duties and purposes and that he must fulfill his obligations of studying.

Yogananda finally received his Bachelor’s degree from the Serampore College in Calcutta in 1915, doing the minimum to get by in school, as he was only interested in the spiritual path.

 In 1917, Yogananda founded a school for boys in Dihika, West Bengal, where yoga was taught along with the typical curriculum.  In 1920, Yogananda went to the United States where his talks about religion and yoga were enthusiastically received. He also founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in order to spread the ideals of yoga to the west.

What makes this book so interesting and enriching is his descriptions of his encounters with various notable people, including Therese Neumann, Sri Anandamayi Ma, Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Sir C. V. Raman, Luther Burbank, and many other swamis.

Below is one such encounter I found enjoyable to read:

The Perfume Saint

When Paramhansa Yogananda was still in his youth, he was searching for his “guru” or someone who could help him achieve his goal. When he returned to Calcutta from Benares, he went to the revered Gandha Baba who was publicly known for being able to create any perfume he wanted just by speaking.

Fascinated by this cool ability, Yogananda went to his house one evening and asked him to give him the smell of a rose. Instantly, the revered saint was able to create the scent of a rose and pass it to Yogananda. At this almost magical creation, Yogananda was greatly shocked.

To further test the powers of the yogi, he plucked a scentless flower and asked it to be permeated with the fragrance of jasmine. Miraculously, this time too, the scent of the jasmine was transmitted to the flower petal.

A few years later, during the festive occasion, Yogananda asked for everyone to receive some out-of-season tangerines to be materialized on their plates. Once again, the oranges appeared on his plate out of nowhere. Yogananda later explains to the readers that a person reacts to different sensory stimuli – olfactory, visual, gustatory, auditory, and tactual – which are produced by the variations in electrons, protons, and neutrons.

The vibrations are regulated by atomic energies intelligently charged with the stimuli for the senses. Yogananda calls these “lifetrons”. However, many people, myself included, remain unconvinced by this explanation.

To this Yogananda answers by saying that the eminent French chemist M. Georges Claude, performed “miracles” at Fontainebleau in 1928 before a scientific assemblage through his chemical knowledge of oxygen transformations. His “magician’s wand” was simple oxygen, bubbling in a tube on a table. The scientist “turned a handful of sand into precious stones, iron into a state resembling melted chocolate and, after depriving flowers of their tints, turned them into the consistency of glass.

By a single whiff of the oxygen blowpipe, he could change sand into sapphires, rubies, and topazes.

This leads to our first conclusion on why so many people like it – It shows us that anything is possible. In fact, after reading this book Steve Jobs decided to create Apple because he believed that what he could accomplish was limitless. Steve Jobs says the book made him believe that “life” was created by people no smarter than him.

Life, its Meaning, and its Purpose

The book delves into the purpose and nature of life. In fact, we can draw many lessons from different chapters and quotes. Firstly, Yogananda talks about the problems and challenges in life and their importance. Yogananda believes that “our trials did not come to punish us, but to awaken us”.

In a way, Yogananda says that instead of seeing challenges as obstacles, he wants us to view them as necessary for development. Yogananda also thinks that believing (in anything) helps in overcoming these disruptions easily.

Next, Yogananda tells us that we are not our mistakes, and he does this beautifully. He asks, “is a diamond less valuable because it’s covered in mud?” Yogananda explains that we are extremely valuable and any shortcomings in us do not make us ‘useless’ or ‘hopeless’. We still have immense capabilities that are untapped.

The Mind and Meditation

The book clearly elaborates on the idea that the mind has extreme power. Yogananda immediately elaborates on a shocking assertion that, “Incredible amounts of energy are hidden in your brain; enough for a GRAM of flesh to run the city of Chicago for 2 days”. I tried reading up more on this fact and realized that an average chess player loses more calories than an average tennis player.

Even Steve Jobs believes that if we were to just observe our brain for a couple of minutes, we would understand how distracted we are and how much we think.

This evading form of self-analysis too is recommended by Yogananda. He believes that only true self-analysis is a form of progress. If we can’t do so, we are mere robots repeating the same mistakes again and again.

We should never let our minds become the slave of our bodies. Because, if we do so, even the greatest of knowledge is in vain.

To control our minds, Yogananda obviously recommends meditation.

Inner Peace

Yogananda thinks that only true inner peace is good – all desires eventually lead to ruin. He says that human greed has no end to it. In fact, only a decade ago, Rajat Gupta scammed wall street with insider trading only because he wanted to be a billionaire. He accepts that when he became a millionaire, he wanted to be a multi-millionaire and finally a billionaire.

Yogananda compares one lacking peace with a person losing dying of thirst while swimming in freshwater.

Conclusion

I believe this book is a great read and I recommend everybody to read it. The first few chapters can be a bit boring for some but if you continue, you will not be let down. Always believe that anything is possible and that your mind is stronger than you think.