Autobiography of a Yogi (Paramahansa Yogananda) An Overrated Spiritual “Classic”
[My 2-star Amazon review (February 14, 2013) of “Autobiography of a Yogi” by Paramahansa Yogananda.]
I have read well over a thousand spiritual texts over the past forty years, and one of the first ones I read was Autobiography of a Yogi. And I not only read the book, I signed up for meditation lessons from the Self-Realization Fellowship. I religiously practiced the SRF lessons for a number of months, but as I devoured other spiritual literature and experimented with other meditation techniques, it became apparent to me that SRF was a limited spiritual vehicle and that Paramahansa Yogananda was a vastly overrated, not fully enlightened, guru. In the monumental spiritual text Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi (which is a quantum leap better than Autobiography of a Yogi), Yogananda visits Maharshi, the foremost twentieth-century Indian guru, and ask him questions that a full enlightened guru would not ask another one. For example, he asks “Why is there suffering?” and “What can be done to get rid of it? As the exchange makes clear, Yogananda was a yogi-seeker, not a Self-realized sage like Maharshi.
In the forty years since I jettisoned the SRF lessons, I have become an ultra-advanced spiritual practitioner and an unsurpassed expert on yoga and mysticism (and I welcome all challenges to my expertise). My viewpoint on Autobiography of a Yogi is this: It’s a moving (though partly fictional) read for the spiritually unsophisticated, but for those into traditions—Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Zen, Mahamudra, Dzogchen, Daism, et al.--that surpass SRF’s Kriya Yoga, it is a worthless one—unless you actually believe that an ageless Mahavatar—Babaji--is forever bopping around in the Himalayas.
I am a yoga teacher and a mystic-scholar. I have been reading spiritual texts for more than forty years, and two of the first texts I read when I began studying the aphorisms of Patanjali were Raja Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda, and How to Know God, by Prabhavananda and Isherwood. Raja Yoga was supposed to be the finest advanced Patanjali text (it isn’t), and How to Know God was supposed to be the best basic, or introductory, text (it was, and as far as I know, still is)—and so I don’t recommend Vivekananda’s book for advanced students of Raja Yoga, but I do recommend How to Know God for beginners, with the caveat that it is for neophytes, not for advanced students looking to really penetrate the deeper “mechanics” of the Self-realization process.
I have read well over a thousand spiritual texts over the past forty years, and one of the first ones I read was Autobiography of a Yogi. And I not only read the book, I signed up for meditation lessons from the Self-Realization Fellowship. I religiously practiced the SRF lessons for a number of months, but as I devoured other spiritual literature and experimented with other meditation techniques, it became apparent to me that SRF was a limited spiritual vehicle and that Paramahansa Yogananda was a vastly overrated, not fully enlightened, guru. In the monumental spiritual text Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi (which is a quantum leap better than Autobiography of a Yogi), Yogananda visits Maharshi, the foremost twentieth-century Indian guru, and ask him questions that a full enlightened guru would not ask another one. For example, he asks “Why is there suffering?” and “What can be done to get rid of it? As the exchange makes clear, Yogananda was a yogi-seeker, not a Self-realized sage like Maharshi.
In the forty years since I jettisoned the SRF lessons, I have become an ultra-advanced spiritual practitioner and an unsurpassed expert on yoga and mysticism (and I welcome all challenges to my expertise). My viewpoint on Autobiography of a Yogi is this: It’s a moving (though partly fictional) read for the spiritually unsophisticated, but for those into traditions—Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Zen, Mahamudra, Dzogchen, Daism, et al.--that surpass SRF’s Kriya Yoga, it is a worthless one—unless you actually believe that an ageless Mahavatar—Babaji--is forever bopping around in the Himalayas.
I am a yoga teacher and a mystic-scholar. I have been reading spiritual texts for more than forty years, and two of the first texts I read when I began studying the aphorisms of Patanjali were Raja Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda, and How to Know God, by Prabhavananda and Isherwood. Raja Yoga was supposed to be the finest advanced Patanjali text (it isn’t), and How to Know God was supposed to be the best basic, or introductory, text (it was, and as far as I know, still is)—and so I don’t recommend Vivekananda’s book for advanced students of Raja Yoga, but I do recommend How to Know God for beginners, with the caveat that it is for neophytes, not for advanced students looking to really penetrate the deeper “mechanics” of the Self-realization process.
