I finally finished Autobiography of a Yogi on the second try! That’s what I would holler to my best friend, if she too liked to read extraordinary non-fiction.
The first time I gave the book a go, I had to put it down, because Paramahansa Yogananda kept using Christian language for the people around him. Saints. Divine Mother. Christlike masters. He applied these words to yogis as if the labels were interchangeable. At first that felt not merely foreign but also offensive, like someone had walked into a vocabulary I already loved and rearranged the meanings without asking. I simply had to abandon the book on pearls alone.
But then people kept asking me what I was reading, and I kept naming a book I had already quit. Then I realized, that was the tell. If a title keeps coming out of one’s mouth after one had closed it for good, then one should probably owe it another sitting.
So I started again.
I nearly quit for a second time, about three-quarters of the way through. One master’s name sounded, to my modern humor, too much like “banana.” Then after that most of the names just sounded like gibberish. But I decided to stick to the story and give each character a nickname of my own, just so I could keep up with what was being said.
Another item of contention were how the spiritual ideas, not new to me, but the way they were dressed with such high, ornate, slightly exaggerated English that I wanted to put the book face-down and walk away again. Yogananda does not narrate so much as proclaim. Every encounter was luminous. Every saint is almost too saintly. But also the book was overall inspirational, which was the original intent when I picked up the book.
And then, late, the book became unexpectedly entertaining.
There was a school. Not a metaphor for a school: an actual residential school Yogananda founded, with a curriculum meant to form the whole person, and set on grounds that once belonged to a palace. There are preternatural events treated as ordinary working conditions: a saint with two bodies, levitation, a palace materialized in the Himalayas, a woman who does not eat, Christmas celebrated with a feast that arrived from fifteen thousand miles away—Kashmiri mushrooms, rasgulla, keora-scented ice cream—followed by gifts under a tree and carols. The word diadem even appeared. Feasts appeared. Masters appeared and disappeared, with the casual authority of a prophet.
At times it read like a spiritual cousin of Harry Potter: a hidden school, a lineage of teachers, wonders that the ordinary world would call impossible, and a Christmas table that is allowed to be abundant and strange all at once.
I am not claiming that J.K. Rowling sat with Yogananda’s book and from it sprung aspects of her first novel. I am saying that once you have been inside both worlds, the family resemblance is hard to unsee. A school that trains more than the mind. Feasts that are also held in an enchanted palace. Names that sound like spells until they don’t.
What the book did not do is teach me something I had not met elsewhere. The doctrines, the techniques gestured at, the claim that East and West are describing one reality with different accents. What it did was confirm, in a voice I had to work to trust, that those earlier discoveries might not be private inventions after all. One finishes the last page and still cannot know in the way you know you need to charge your phone. You only know that someone else walked a long way and came back using some of the same words and concepts, you too encountered along a similar path.
I am glad I finished it. The blending of theological labels did not vanish; the blending of Christian titles and yogic lives is still a choice Yogananda makes on every other page, and it will strike some readers as hospitality and others as a kind of trespass. I ended closer to the first camp than I began. The names stopped being banana-sounding and became real people. The high style stopped feeling like a barrier and started feeling like the only register he had for what he he had seen, experienced and sensed.
If you pick up Autobiography of a Yogi, give yourself permission to take a few tries. The book is long yes, but it is also, a deeply inspirational account that will resonate with your bleeding Harry Potter heart!
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