If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

One of the most meaningful and inspiring books I have ever read is Autobiography of a Yogi written by His Holiness Paramahansa Yogananda, who came to the USA from India in the early 1900s to teach westerners Kriya Yoga. Yogananda’s Param-Guru’s guru was the legendary Babaji, who is said to live in the Himalayan mountains since the year 400 A.D. Some gurus teach that Babaji is an incarnation of Krishna, while others teach that Babaji is the Hindu God “Shiva”. In any case, it was Babaji who imparted the spiritual science and practice of Kriya Yoga, which eventually would be disseminated into mainstream society since Babaji taught Yogananda’s Param-Guru, Lahiri Mahasaya.

Kriya Yoga is a breath-control technique that allows for the physical decay of the body to stop, so that the practitioner may complete all necessary karmic debts in this lifetime, and then at the time of passing, the practitioner may experience final liberation into higher realms. In the Hindu Classic, Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God), Krishna, who speaks as God, briefly describes the sacred and blessed path of Kriya Yoga.

Yogananda established the “Self Realization Fellowship” to provide a structured setting in which Kriya Yoga could be taught. “Autobiography of a Yogi” is a book where Yogananda shares all of his lifetime experiences that led up to his establishment of SRF as well as his mastery of the Kriya Yoga practice.

The following are the chapters of Autobiography of a Yogi:

1. My Parents and Early Life
2. Mother’s Death and the Amulet
3. The Saint with Two Bodies
4. My Interrupted Flight Toward the Himalaya
5. A “Perfume Saint” Performs his Wonders
6. The Tiger Swami
7. The Levitating Saint
8. India’s Great Scientist and Inventor, Jagadis Chandra Bose
9. The Blissful Devotee and his Cosmic Romance
10. I Meet my Master, Sri Yukteswar
11. Two Penniless Boys in Brindaban
12. Years in my Master’s Hermitage
13. The Sleepless Saint
14. An Experience in Cosmic Consciousness
15. The Cauliflower Robbery
16. Outwitting the Stars
17. Sasi and the Three Sapphires
18. A Mohammedan Wonder-Worker
19. My Guru Appears Simultaneously in Calcutta and Serampore
20. We Do Not Visit Kashmir
21. We Visit Kashmir
22. The Heart of a Stone Image
23. My University Degree
24. I Become a Monk of the Swami Order
25. Brother Ananta and Sister Nalini
26. The Science of Kriya Yoga
27. Founding of a Yoga School at Ranchi
28. Kashi, Reborn and Rediscovered
29. Rabindranath Tagore and I Compare Schools
30. The Law of Miracles
31. An Interview with the Sacred Mother
32. Rama is Raised from the Dead
33. Babaji, the Yogi-Christ of Modern India
34. Materializing a Palace in the Himalayas
35. The Christlike Life of Lahiri Mahasaya
36. Babaji’s Interest in the West
37. I Go to America
38. Luther Burbank — An American Saint
39. Therese Neumann, the Catholic Stigmatist of Bavaria
40. I Return to India
41. An Idyl in South India
42. Last Days with my Guru
43. The Resurrection of Sri Yukteswar
44. With Mahatma Gandhi at Wardha
45. The Bengali “Joy-Permeated Mother” (Ananda Moyi Ma)
46. The Woman Yogi who Never Eats (Giri Bala)
47. I Return to the West
48. At Encinitas in California

If you are serious about Self-Realization, then Autobiography of a Yogi is a must read for you

Tags: general //