Biography of a yogi book

This book will change the lives of millions.

Autobiography of a Yogi was completed, and Paramahansaji gave copies to all of us. The New York Times proclaimed it “a rare account.” Newsweek reported, “Yogananda’s book is rather an autobiography of the soul than of the body....It is a fascinating and clearly annotated study of a religious way of life, ingenuously described in the lush style of the Orient.”

A second edition was quickly prepared, and in 1951 a third.

Huge tables (flat boards on sawhorses) were set up in the office, ready for assembly-line wrapping of each individual book in brown mailing paper off a huge roll, hand-cutting it to just the right size, affixing labels and postage stamps moistened first from wet sponges. Autobiography of a Yogi was one of those books.

He opened to a few pages, saving for last the illustration of Mahavatar Babaji. Despite the newly born atomic age having enlarged the collective consciousness of humanity with a growing understanding of the subtle unity of matter, energy, and thought, the publishers of the day were hardly ready for such chapters as “Materializing a Palace in the Himalayas” and “The Saint With Two Bodies”!

For a year, Tara Mata lived in a sparsely furnished, unheated cold-water flat while making the rounds of publishing houses.

One of the seminal figures in the renaissance of yoga in modern times, the revered nineteenth-century master Lahiri Mahasaya (1828–1895), had foretold: “About fifty years after my passing, an account of my life will be written because of a deep interest in yoga that will arise in the West. Recognizing that the author had spiritual insight beyond that of anyone he had ever encountered, Brother decided to write to Paramahansa Yogananda.

Little did Brother Premamoy know that as he mailed the letter, the Guru was living the last day of his earthly life.

Brother Premamoy learned of the Guru’s passing some time later, when Sri Daya Mata replied to his letter.

My father was a Self-Realization Fellowship member and attended services at the temple in San Diego. This book will change the lives of millions. We were delighted: At last Autobiography of a Yogi was going to be available to people everywhere!

Shortly after I entered the ashram in 1939, Paramahansaji spoke with a couple of us on the verandah of the Administration Building at Mt.

Washington. My uncle was a musician, a member of a symphony orchestra. Though he had been a voracious reader when younger, those days were over (he later said that he had read more books before the age of fifteen than he read for the entire rest of his life). No automation or mailing machines in those days! How uplifted we had been hearing him recount many of those same events personally, and through this book all can share in that.

I vividly recall when Autobiography of a Yogi was first released.