Paramahansa Yogananda

Born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, India, in 1893, Paramahansa Yogananda studied under Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri in Serampore, graduated from Scottish Church College in Calcutta and took formal monastic vows in 1915. After arriving in Boston in 1920 to address the International Congress of Religious Liberals, he established Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), headquartered from 1925 in Los Angeles, where he lectured, wrote lesson courses and published Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) before his death in 1952.

Yogananda was among the first Indian teachers to make long-term residence in the West, presenting Hindu devotional philosophy, breath-and-concentration meditation (Kriya Yoga) and comparative readings of the Bhagavad Gita and the Christian Gospels to American audiences. Alongside his monastic meditation instruction, his early works—such as his 1924 volume of spoken affirmations and Metaphysical Meditations—adopted the vocabulary of 1920s American New Thought, teaching listeners to repeat spoken statements progressively from loud voice, to whisper, to silent mental focus.

Reading Autobiography of a Yogi with care means distinguishing between Yogananda’s historical role as a cross-cultural teacher and the book’s hagiographic miracle narratives. His memoir recounts saints who supposedly lived without food for decades, bilocated across cities, materialized palaces in the Himalayas or raised the dead. Within South Asian devotional literature, such marvels function as expressions of reverence for a lineage; they are religious testimony, not verified historical or biological events, and repeating affirmations in a whisper does not alter physical laws or replace medical care.

What translates into ordinary reflective practice is Yogananda’s practical observation about vocal register and attention: moving a chosen statement from spoken voice, to a soft murmur, to quiet inward focus naturally slows breath and settles distraction before a period of stillness.