Paramahansa Yogananda

India, Los Angeles, 1893-1952

Sources: The Self-Realization Fellowship; personal recollection

Summary

Paramahansa Yogananda was the first Indian guru to make a big splash in the States. He founded his Self-Realization Fellowship here in 1920, lectured widely, and in 1925 moved the organization to its present home in Los Angeles (the SRF currently maintains 470 meditation centers of in 54 countries). In 1927 he was invited to the White House by Calvin Coolidge. Too cool, Cal!

In 1946, Yogananda published Autobiography of a Yogi, a delightful, moving work that has become a modern spiritual classic. (The book is available from the SRF.)

In 1970 I visited the Ananda Community, founded by Swami Kriyananda (Donald Walters), a Yogananda disciple. (The community is about 20 miles north of Nevada City, Ca., in the Sierra foothills.) Kriyananda showed us a book he had just written, called The Road Ahead, and I purchased a copy. The book was based on conversations Kriyananda had had, many years before, with Yogananda, on the subject of coming developments in the world. The book is no longer available (and I no longer have mine); but I remember that Yogananda predicted massive global conflict in the '90s, which would be resolved by the turn of the century.

Does anyone have a copy of the book?

Commentary

The question that must be asked is, were these Yogananda's predictions, or Swami Kriyananda's? Kriyananda has achieved a degree of notoriety in recent decades for persistent serial and parallel involvements with female disciples, which behavior landed him in court in the mid-'90s, where a judgment was rendered against him, whereupon he fled to Italy, leaving Ananda's residents to shoulder the financial burden of the judgment.

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