Autobiography of a Yogi

This book has the power to completely evolve you, as a being both human and of divine origin.

Autobiography found me in 2015, during - as Tyler Durden might say - "a very strange time in my life." (If interested, here's a bit of context.)

As structure for this reflection, I feel the only appropriate way of conveying this book's power is to let it speak for itself, with a pinch of interjected commentary on how these selected thoughts changed this particular soul writing to you.

It may be unsurprising to learn that an autobiography by a fully awakened soul contains many stories of others - other great souls who influenced Yogananda on his way and shaped the path that shaped him. Some of the quotes below are from some of those other great souls. Their names are attributed, where applicable. If no name is attributed, Yogananda is the speaker.

If you would like to read the quotes and skip the reflection (or dive into the reflection of just the quotes that resonate with you), I've made all the main quotes 'Headers' in format for visual ease as you scroll. No matter how you choose to proceed, thanks for stopping by, and please enjoy 💙

“Moral: Look fear in the face and it will cease to trouble you.” - Sri Yukteswar Giri

When Sri Yukteswar - Yogananda's Guru - was young, his mother once attempted to control him by frightening him with a ghost story. When told there was a ghost in a particular part of their home, young Yukteswar went immediately to the ghost's supposed hiding place to confront it. Upon arrival, he was disappointed to find no ghost.

Has this ever happened to you: You hear a simple enough piece of advice - nothing you haven't heard before - for some reason, however, right now this advice hits you in the chest as the most profound truth imaginable?

At this point in my life, I had been unconsciously avoiding facing many truths for fear of the change those truths would demand.

The life-course-altering choice I had made only a few months prior to reading these words showed me the truth of this moral.

Was my life difficult at this point? Yes. Painful? Highly.

But was it also better than every day I spent in self-delusion? Cosmically.

“Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire.”

"...an imaginary halo of attractiveness..." YES.

Has this ever happened to you as well? You get what you want - whatever the thing is, be it material, a new job, a new relationship partner, etc. - and you realize you had been blowing it up in your mind to be something greater than it turned out to be?

I realized, during this time, it was not the 'other thing' that failed me. It was the weight of expectation which I had been placing upon it.

My attachment was not to the thing/person - my attachment had been to an expectation - an idea - of what it/they might be... and might do for me.

This was a pivoting lesson for me - a turning point which ultimately led to a fuller embodiment of the awareness: I am complete.

"For the faults of the many, judge not the whole. Everything on earth is of mixed character, like a mingling of sand and sugar. Be like the wise ant which seizes only the sugar, and leaves the sand untouched." - Mahavatar Babaji

Even typing this quote now lights a supernova in my chest - the power of these words.

Within these three sentences lives a complete philosophy of life. Deep understanding of these three sentences can take one to liberation from delusion all on their own.

Absolute thinking - the idea that something must be either good or bad, and labeled as such - is one of the most prevalent poisons which plagues our world today.

In these words, Babaji points to the idea: We may be aware that our world is a mixture of both good and bad. But what good does it do you to focus on the bad? Seize upon the good - the sugar.

He is not advocating for a 'head in the sand' / 'pie in the sky' self-delusive approach of toxic positivity, either.

Yogananda himself said, "The body is literally manufactured and sustained by mind." (Please keep in mind: Yogananda was expounding this in the 1940's.) Modern science confirms the truth of this in almost every study. You yourself may already know the truth of this in the laboratory of your own life experience as well.

When we consistently use our mind to seize upon the good in life, we build our life out of that good in a very real way. That goodness informs our thoughts. Our thoughts inform our actions. Our actions build, and thus become, our life.

I grew up in critical environments (an understatement which could handle the addition of more than a few adjectives and qualifiers). The life which I had just firebombed was a further unfoldment of this phenomenon. Keenly trained to spot the single grain of sand in an otherwise spotless bowl of sugar, these words brought me into direct awareness that - yes - this applied to me.

The past eight years of conscious effort toward embodiment of these ideals has resulted in growth to a degree where my current mind is unrecognizable to my old one. They feel like different people.

Never in my (old mind's) wildest dreams could I have even imagined I could be so happy, satisfied, and content for no reason whatsoever... and for every reason imaginable, simultaneously.

“The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery.” - Sri Yukteswar Giri

Speaking of happiness... the above quote speaks to the single greatest cause of unhappiness in the entirety of our species.

Forget any illness of the physical form - this is the true pandemic; for it infects almost every living human on this planet. The issue is not that there is no cure - the issue is that so few are aware they are ill!

Our human life - such as it is currently - is a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. A game of snatch and grab. A game of acquisition.

Look around our world. How does this philosophy appear to be doing, in terms of its ability to lead us to happiness, satisfaction, and contentment?

What if - instead of snatching and grabbing - we try a game of letting go?

Not letting go of every single desire. No need to swing the pendulum to the other extreme. Start with the desires that are easy to let go. The ones that, when you think about it, you don't really care one way or another anyway. Start there.

I began playing this game eight years ago. Content Content Camels. The opposite of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

At first, it's the absolute worst. Literal withdrawals - i.e. from caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, sugar, sex, porn, harder drugs, etc. The brain is going through the same withdrawal process as it lets go of desire. It will play tricks on you, tell you this is stupid and that having endless desires isn't really all that big of a deal. "That's what we're here to do, right? To live, man." So original. "Isn't that what it is to be human?" Good one. That's what it is to be a basic, animalistic human, I suppose. If that's all one wants to be. And if it is, that's fine. You can do it that way. But if happiness is what you're wanting then, well, it just doesn't live in that direction.

Over time, it gets less awful. A glimmer of hope as the scales begin to balance.

Then, one day, you awaken and realize you are different. No longer driven by impulse and desire, you realize you are more sovereign than you have ever been before.

One point I'd like to clarify - only because I feel as though I've never seen this mentioned, when discussing desirelessness, and I feel it's an important clarification: Understand - your desires are not doing you any favors. This is a big point that gets left out a lot. Desires are not your buddy. They are - both literally and metaphorically - the obstacles you place between yourself and where you are now... and your happiness.

Desires are the way we say, "As soon as [this] happens... then I'll be happy."

Do you see how that is, in fact, us kicking our own can of happiness down the road?

Happiness is a present moment jam. It will always and only live right here and now.

Even if we get what we want. Let's say it works out - we get our heart's desire. We receive it in which moment? Do we receive it in the past? Of course not. The future? Nope.

We receive it in the present. Always the present. It's the only place happiness, contentment, and satisfaction can ever be found.

Past and future are ideation and imagination. Smoke and aether.

Present is life.

“You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you.”

At a certain point in my path, I became consciously aware that everything in my life which was 'wrong with it' was of my own making.

While crushing at first, this truth is ultimately liberating. For encased within this truth is the further implied truth which is: I have sole power over my inner life experience.

This is a sovereignty which no outer circumstance can touch.

I was walking through life as though with a clenched fist. Imagine this for a moment - imagine walking through life, every moment of every day, with your fists clenched tightly closed at all times.

I was walking through life assuming there was something I needed to do in order to find God/Inner Peace/Alignment/Contentment. (This was me 'clenching my fist'.) This is all I had ever been taught: If something in life appears to be missing, then the only way to solve the problem is to go out and acquire it.

In some ways, I did have to do that. However, in many ways, I found the solution was not to acquire something new, but to stop doing something old.

To relax my clenched fist.

To open myself to life, and trust.

As I began to do this, I realized I was making the entire journey harder than it needed to be with my underlying assumption that there was always going to be something 'out there' I had to bring 'into here'.

"God is simple. Everything else is complex."

- Yogananda

The truth of these words unfolds anew daily.

“The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.” - Sri Yukteswar Giri

I had a problem for many years. I was a fixer, in this life. Adept at solving adult problems from an age when most children still could not spell the word, this skill came with a heavy cost: I learned it before I understood how to turn things 'off'.

Solving problems became my wallpaper. Fixing people was, to me, like breathing. It took little effort (or so I deluded myself), and I could do it without thinking.

Only too naturally did I find myself in a career where I was quite literally paid to help fix people. While I happened to be skilled at it, over time I found it weighing on me. Something was not right about the manner in which I was approaching my work.

The lesson I learned here, unpacking these profound words from Sri Yukteswar, is that the primary agent which 'makes the world a better place' is not my actions, it's the spirit with which I charge my actions.

In other words: What I do is not what makes the world a better place. How I do it is what makes the world a better place.

The spirit with which I charge my actions determines the quality of the impact my actions will have.

“Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.” - Sri Yukteswar Giri

In an odd 'coming full circle', my first chapter studying Yogananda's teachings paradoxically concluded with the profound embodiment of this quote from Sri Yukteswar.

At a certain point, I realized I needed to put down the books and go out and live these new understandings I had about life.

I felt like a race car which had been in the shop for two years and the mechanic had forgotten to take it out on the track and let it stretch its legs... drive out and see the impact the tuning had made, once the engine was running and the wheels were spinning.

As I did this, I noticed an unexpected thing: I was kinder, now. More gentle with people. I realized: This is what it is to be 'humbled' by something.

You see... the above quote? This was me. For lots of defensible reasons, reading and learning was a defense mechanism for me throughout the first few decades of my life.

What is indefensible was the way I placed expectations on others to know the same things, and to know them as deeply.

These words unlocked within me a deep reservoir of understanding: Theory is meaningless without practice. Book learning is just words on a page without action. Knowledge is nothing without embodiment.

As I seek (present tense) to further embody that which I know, I find my heart expands in capacity on a daily basis.

Now, when I see others' behavior which formerly would have frustrated me, I often find myself smiling in genuine warmth at the quaint human drama.

This is not to say I am devoid of all thunder. But it would be fair to say there are far fewer storms.

“Stillness is the altar of Spirit.”

As I read this book, I noticed a physiological effect it had on my body. It felt easier to be still, more effortless to be clear-minded, more natural to be calm, patient, and kind.

It would appear the very words on the pages of his book are charged with the same Cosmic Benevolence which powered Yogananda's life (1893-1952), and they resonate to this day.

“Where Ganges, woods, Himalayan caves, and men dream God — I am hallowed; my body touched that sod.”

- Yogananda