Parmamahansa Yogananda was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh January 5, 1893, in Gorakhpur, India. He was very spiritually aware even as a child, and looked for an illumined teacher to guide him. In 1910 at 17 he became a disciple of the revered Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri and learned loving spiritual discipline for the next 10 years. After he graduated from Calcutta University in 1951, he took formal vows as a monk of India’s monastic Swami Order, at which time he received the name Yogananda (signifying bliss, ananda, through divine union, yoga).
Yogananda began his life’s work in 1917. He founded a “how-to-live” school for boys, where modern educational methods were combined with yoga training and instruction in spiritual ideals.
In 1920, he was invited to serve as India’s delegate to an international congress of religious leaders convening in Boston. His address to the congress, on “The Science of Religion,” was enthusiastically received. That year he founded the “Self-Realization Fellowship” for world wide teachings. He was a pioneer of yoga in the west, and for the next 10 years he traveled and lectured – from New York’s Carnegie Hall to Los Angeles.
Yogananda emphasized the underlying unity of the world’s great religions, and taught universally applicable methods for attaining direct personal experience of God. Yogananda’s life story, Autobiography of a Yogi, was published in 1946, a best seller and is regarded as a modern spiritual classic.
On March 7, 1952, he entered mahasamadhi, a God-illumined master’s conscious exit from the body, at the time of physical death. |
