Autobiography of a Yogi

Book Summary

Born in Gorakhpur in 1893 to a devout Bengali family, Mukunda Lal Ghosh — later Paramhansa Yogananda — opens his story with a childhood already touched by visions and unusual devotion: memories of a former life, a mother's death that leaves behind a mysterious sealed message, and a run of encounters with wonder-working ascetics that convince him God can be directly experienced, not merely believed in. These early chapters set the book's central claim — that India's yogic tradition is an exact, verifiable science of union with the divine, not a matter of blind faith.

The turning point arrives when the teenage Mukunda finds his guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, in Serampore, and spends a decade under his exacting, often silent discipline. Life in the hermitage, a sudden flash of cosmic consciousness during meditation, and a procession of remarkable figures — a saint who never sleeps, a "perfume saint," the levitating monk Bhaduri, the scientist Jagadis Chandra Bose, and the immortal Himalayan master Babaji — build a composite portrait of a hidden spiritual lineage running beneath ordinary Indian life. Through Sri Yukteswar, Yogananda receives his monastic vows and the meditation technique at the heart of the book, Kriya Yoga.

The second half follows him out of the hermitage and into public life: founding a boys' school at Ranchi that fused yogic training with modern education, comparing notes with Tagore on education, and then — at his guru's urging — sailing to America in 1920 to teach Kriya Yoga in the West. Chapters on the horticulturist Luther Burbank, the Catholic stigmatist Therese Neumann, Mahatma Gandhi, and the ascetic Giri Bala keep widening the book's argument that saintliness and disciplined inner science appear across cultures and religions, not only within Hinduism.

The narrative's climax comes with Sri Yukteswar's death and Yogananda's account of his guru appearing to him afterward in a resurrected, luminous body to describe the nature of life beyond death — the clearest statement of the book's core teaching that consciousness survives the body and can be directly known through yoga. Yogananda closes by returning to the West to continue his teaching, framing his own life as evidence for the claim repeated throughout the book: that every genuine religious path leads to the same direct, experiential knowledge of God, reachable by ordinary people through disciplined practice.