Autobiography of a Yogi

Yogananda Paramhansa

Description

A Top 100 Spiritual Book of the Twentieth Century

This is a new edition, featuring previously unavailable material, of a true spiritual classic. Autobiography of a Yogi is one of the best-selling Eastern philosophy titles of all-time, with millions of copies published.

New Bonus Materials added to this edition include: a) the last chapter that Yogananda wrote in 1951 covering the years 1946–1951 that was not originally available in the first edition (and without posthumous changes), b) the eulogy that Yogananda wrote for Gandhi, and c) a new afterword by Swami Kriyananda, one of Yogananda's closest direct disciples.

Yogananda's masterpiece has been named one of the greatest and most influential books of the twentieth century. This highly prized verbatim reprinting of the original 1946 edition is (unlike other publishers' editions) free from textual changes made after Yogananda's death. Yogananda was the first yoga master of India whose mission brought him to live and teach in the West. His firsthand account of his life experiences in India includes childhood revelations, stories of his visits to saints and masters in India, and long-secret teachings of yoga and Self-realization that he first made available to the Western reader.

Sujets

• Religious
• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• Autobiography
• Paramahansa Yogananda

Informations

• Publié par: Crystal Clarity Publishers
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781565896154
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Introduction
What you hold in your hand is not an ordinary book. It is a spiritual treasure. To read its message of hope to all truth-seekers is to begin a great adventure.
Paramhansa Yogananda was the first yoga master of India whose mission it was to live and teach in the West. In the 1920s, as he crisscrossed the United States on what he called his spiritual campaigns, enthusiastic audiences filled the largest halls in America.
His initial impact was truly impressive. But his lasting influence is greater still. This single volume, Autobiography of a Yogi , first published in 1946, helped launch, and continues to inspire, a spiritual revolution in the West.
Only rarely does a sage of Paramhansa Yogananda s stature write a firsthand account of his life experiences. Childhood revelations, his visits to saints and masters of India, the years of training he received in the ashram of his guru, and long-secret teachings of Self-realization are all made available to the Western reader.
Followers of many religious traditions have come to recognize Autobiography of a Yogi as a masterpiece of spiritual literature. Yet for all its depth, it is full of gentle humor, lively stories, and practical common sense.
Yogananda stressed the nonsectarian and universal aspects of yoga and its relevance in daily life. He has inspired hundreds of thousands to pursue the spiritual quest to discover their own divine nature. Today his techniques of meditation and Kriya Yoga are widely practiced around the world by those who considersider themselves his spiritual disciples.
Autobiography of a Yogi has sold more than four million copies and been translated into over fifty languages. This monumental classic continues to be the best-selling spiritual autobiography of all time.
Publisher s Note
This reprint is identical to the text of the original edition of Autobiography of a Yogi , published in 1946 by Philosophical Library in New York City. We have closely followed the layout of the original. The look and feel of the first edition have been preserved through the use of typefaces which are comparable to the hand-set type used in 1946. This volume also contains reproductions of the photographs from the original edition.
Although Yogananda himself participated in preparing both the second and third editions of his autobiography, there is a unique power to the original that we feel is particularly worth preserving.
Subsequent printings introduced thousands of revisions after the author s death in 1952. The few thousand copies of the original edition, however, have long since disappeared into the hands of collectors.
With Crystal Clarity s 1995 verbatim reprint, the 1946 edition was made available again, with all its inherent power, just as the great master of yoga first presented it.
In preparing the 1951 third edition, Yogananda added a new, forty-ninth chapter, The Years 1940-1951. He wrote this chapter both to answer philosophical questions raised by readers of the original 1946 edition and to complete the telling of his life-story, giving the reader a glimpse of his activities in those final years before his death in 1952.
Additionally, in sidebars to this chapter, Yogananda reflects on two key events that transpired after the publication of the 1946 edition: the independence of India from British rule in 1947, and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.
We have included chapter 49 , its text unchanged, as an appendix.
Included also are a foreword and afterword, both written by Swami Kriyananda, one of Yogananda s foremost and best-known direct disciples.
This 2021 edition is being published to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Autobiography s first printing in 1946. This more compact edition with its colorful cover has been designed in the hope that the increased convenience and appeal of this smaller-sized book will help it find its way into many new hands.
Crystal Clarity Publishers is the publishing house of Ananda Sangha. Ananda, dedicated to the dissemination of the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, was founded in 1968 by Swami Kriyananda.
FOREWORD
by Swami Kriyananda
(J. Donald Walters)
I met Paramhansa Yogananda as a result of reading this book. Finding it was, I must say, a complete surprise. There it was, sitting innocently on a shelf in a book shop on Fifth Avenue in New York. I d no idea how utterly this volume would revolutionize my life.
That was late in the summer of 1948. I was desperate to know truth. Nothing I d encountered had persuaded me that people were right in what they were urging on me as my destiny. My father was a geologist working for a large oil company. My mother was respected and happy in her social milieu. Both were, in many ways, ideal parents; I d never, for example, known them even to have an argument. Their love and respect for one another were an inspiration to their many friends.
Yet even so, I was not happy. Life must have more to offer, I felt, than marriage, a nice home in a nice suburb, a socially acceptable job, and cocktail party friendships. I was desperately un happy. I wanted God, and had no idea how to go about finding Him.
That was when I came upon this book. Reading it was the most moving experience of my life. As I launched on this literary adventure, I found myself fluctuating between tears and laughter: tears of joy, laughter of even greater joy. Here, I knew , I had found someone at last who had what I so urgently wanted: someone who knew God!
I took the next bus nonstop across the American continent: a journey of four days and four nights to Los Angeles where he lived. The first words I addressed to him would have been inconceivable to me a scant week earlier. Words such as guru, yoga, karma , and many others that, nowadays, are part of common parlance were utterly new to me. Yet my first words to him were, I want to be your disciple. I knew to my core that here, before me, was my own so long-needed guide to the Infinite.
To my indescribable joy, I was accepted. His life, an epic of compassion, added further proof that day of his unfathomable kindness: He took in a callow twenty-two-year-old, wholly ignorant in spiritual matters, yet earnestly desirous of being taught. He must have realized what a Herculean task he was assuming. Yet he resolved to do what he could to mold this lump of unwieldy clay into some semblance of a yogi.
My own story, and what it meant to live with this great man of God, is related in The Path (Autobiography of a Western Yogi) . 1 The present brief testimony is only an invitation to you to read the following pages.
No man, it has been said, is great in the eyes of his own valet. The saying becomes null and void in the life of Paramhansa Yogananda. He remains the greatest man I have ever known. The people closest to him were the ones who held him in the highest reverence and esteem.
There were, I confess, things in his book that I had to place mentally on a shelf-certainly not because I disbelieved them, for my faith in him was complete-yet things nevertheless for which my skeptical modern upbringing had not prepared me. The longer I lived with him, however, the more aware I became that wonders-well, why mince words? miracles! -were an everyday feature of his life.
Dear Reader, if you are willing to risk a complete change in your life-outlook, read this book! I promise you, it won t devastate you. Rather, you will gain from it joyful new insight into what life is really all about.
I met Paramhansa Yogananda fifty-six years ago. Since then I have remained his devoted disciple. And I become more certain every day that what he brought to the world was something of which the whole human race stands in desperate need.

1 I ve since edited the book extensively, and reissued it under the title The New Path: My Life with Paramhansa Yogananda . -S.K., 2009
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI

Copyright, 1946, by
Paramhansa Yogananda
1946 First Edition, First Printing Published by
THE PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY, INC.
15 East 40th Street
New York, N.Y.
2022 Reprint of the 1946 First Edition Published by
CRYSTAL CLARITY PUBLISHERS
1123 Goodrich Boulevard
Commerce, California 90022
Printed in United States of America
11 13 15 17 18 16 14 12

ISBN 978-1-56589-212-5 (print)
ISBN 978-1-56589-615-4 (e-book)
ISBN 978-1-56589-800-4 (audiobook)

The Joy Is Within You symbol is registered by Ananda
Church of Self-Realization of Nevada County, California.
Dedicated to the Memory of
LUTHER BURBANK
An American Saint

PREFACE
By W. Y. Evans-Wentz, M.A., D.Litt., D.Sc . Jesus College, Oxford; Author of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Tibet s Great Yogi Milarepa, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines , etc.
T HE VALUE OF Yogananda s Autobiography is greatly enhanced by the fact that it is one of the few books in English about the wise men of India which has been written, not by a journalist or foreigner, but by one of their own race and training-in short, a book about yogis by a yogi. As an eyewitness recountal of the extraordinary lives and powers of modern Hindu saints, the book has importance both timely and timeless. To its illustrious author, whom I have had the pleasure of knowing both in India and America, may every reader render due appreciation and gratitude. His unusual life-document is certainly one of the most revealing of the depths of the Hindu mind and heart, and of the spiritual wealth of India, ever to be published in the West.
It has been my privilege to have met one of the sages whose life-history is herein narrated-Sri Yukteswar Giri. A likeness of the venerable saint appeared as part of the frontispiece of my Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines . 1 It was at Puri, in Orissa, on the Bay of Bengal, that I encountered Sri Yukteswar. He was then the head of a quiet ashrama near the seashore there, and was chiefly occupied in the spiritual training of a group of youthful disciples. He expressed keen interest