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Paramahansa Yogananda
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Autobiography of a Yogi Kindle Edition

by Paramahansa Yogananda (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 out of 5 stars 10,995 ratings
Autobiography of a Yogi introduces the reader to the life of Paramahansa Yogananda and his encounters with spiritual figures of both the Eastern and the Western world. Paramahansa Yogananda was born as Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, India, into a Bengali Hindu family.

The book begins with his childhood family life, to finding his guru, to becoming a monk and establishing his teachings of Kriya Yoga meditation. The book continues in 1920 when Yogananda accepts an invitation to speak in a religious congress in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He then travels across America lecturing and establishing his teachings in Los Angeles, California. In 1935, he returns to India for a yearlong visit. When he returns to America, he continues to establish his teachings, including writing this book.

Autobiography of a Yogi is an introduction to the methods of attaining God-realization and to the spiritual wisdom of the East, which had only been available to a few in 1946.

The author claims that the writing of the book was prophesied long ago by the nineteenth-century master Lahiri Mahasaya (Paramguru of Yogananda) also known as the Yogiraj and Kashi baba. Before becoming a yogi, Lahiri Mahasaya’s actual name was Shyama Charan Lahiri.
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  1. Print length
    498 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Colossal Publications
  4. Publication date
    11 Sept. 2021
  5. File size
    2.1 MB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09G6XJ9Z5
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Colossal Publications (11 Sept. 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2.1 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 498 pages
  • Customer reviews:
    4.5 out of 5 stars 10,995 ratings

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Paramahansa Yogananda

Paramahansa Yogananda

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1893 – 1952 Hailed as the “father of Yoga in the West,” Paramahansa Yogananda is regarded as one of the great spiritual figures of our time. Born in northern India, he came to the United States in 1920, where he founded Self-Realization Fellowship, to disseminate his writings and teachings worldwide. Through his best-selling classic, Autobiography of a Yogi, and his numerous other books, he has introduced millions throughout the world to the spiritual principles of yoga meditation and the universal truths underlying all world religions.

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4.5 out of 5 stars
10,995 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book insightful and uplifting, providing an engrossing study of spiritual culture and beliefs. They praise the writing style as poetic at times and accessible. The book stirs a desire for peace and compassion. However, some customers feel the edition is poor.

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30 customers mention ‘Insight’30 positive0 negative

Customers find the book uplifting and thought-provoking. They appreciate its exploration of spiritual culture and beliefs of Indian holy men. The book offers insights that expand the mind and explain the true purpose of life. It can be a catalyst for personal spiritual growth and provide an amazing perspective on life.

"I loved this book. It renewed my faith in God. Miracles are possible. The only true life is the spiritual life. I must continue to seek." Read more

"...And then there is the small matter of it changed my life." Read more

"For those seeking introduction to yoga this adds perspective to the vastness one should prepare for in the path of Kriya Yoga...." Read more

"...love this book so much and I recommend it to everyone, it truly is life changing, but make sure to buy a quality authentic copy." Read more

7 customers mention ‘Writing style’7 positive0 negative

Customers find the writing style wonderful, poetic at times, and accessible. They describe it as a great classic with simple language that provokes thought.

"A great classic, poetically written at times, accessible (barely any Sanskrit unlike many other yoga books), a must for those on the yoga path but..." Read more

"A perfect read but this version has no pictures, so buy another version." Read more

"...It is a beautiful book." Read more

"Essential reading & mind blowing reading." Read more

3 customers mention ‘Peace’3 positive0 negative

Customers find the book uplifting and enjoyable. It stirs their desire for peace, compassion, and spiritual growth.

"This book stirs one's yearning for peace, compassion and ascension. Wonderfully inclusive and interesting parallels...." Read more

"Enjoyable, in a peaceful sort of way........" Read more

"A must read for those interested in devotion, yoga, meditation, world peace..." Read more

3 customers mention ‘Edm’0 positive3 negative

Customers dislike the edition.

"...The quality and lay out of the book wasn't very good and I had bought it as a present...." Read more

"...some chapters seem to be merged, no page numbers and very poor quality overall. Would not recommend and we are immediately returning this...." Read more

"Wonderful text, bad edition..." Read more

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Lynn
    5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 January 2025
    Verified Purchase
    I loved this book. It renewed my faith in God. Miracles are possible. The only true life is the spiritual life. I must continue to seek.
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  • Donna Waldron
    5.0 out of 5 stars Auto of a Yogi
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 January 2025
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    This arrived very quickly, a lot earlier than June/July, so thanks for that. It is on my "to read" list. Sorry I did not get time to take a picture, but very pleased.
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  • Grazia Gironella
    4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful text, bad edition
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 June 2016
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    The text in itself is a great reading, and that's what matters; but I would advise a different edition. The book is heavy, printed on glossy paper that reflects the light, and full (really full!) of typos and misprints. There are even whole lines of words without separating spaces! I guess the text had to be compressed in a certain number of pages, but this is no good reason to ruin it.
    20 people found this helpful
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  • Mrs Egle Petrauskiene
    5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely good book
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2025
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    Absolute recommendation to read this book if you are into spirituality or personal growth. It’s a must book. I loved every page of it. And learned so many things.
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  • Benjamin
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very spiritual and a joy to read
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 October 2023
    Verified Purchase
    "This is the cosmic motion picture mechanism." A voice spoke as though from within the light. "Shedding its beam on the white screen of your bed sheets, it is producing the picture of your body. Behold, your form is nothing but light!" - The Law of Miracles - Autobiography of a Yogi - Paramhansa Yogananda
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Gifty Enright
    5.0 out of 5 stars Best book ever
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 December 2022
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    I have read this book at least 3 times and every time I get more out of it. And then there is the small matter of it changed my life.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • Nithy
    5.0 out of 5 stars A long book worthy of time and patience. Great for those soul-searching
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2015
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    For those seeking introduction to yoga this adds perspective to the vastness one should prepare for in the path of Kriya Yoga. This book is about the simple lives of many enlightened souls alongside that of Swami Paramahansa Yogananda himself. If anyone can approach this with open mind, he or she could find a treasure trove of information, not the technique, leading to yoga and meditation. Thanks to that saint who collected and brought to the public so much info from normally reclusive great souls who used to live among us.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • DebGrif
    3.0 out of 5 stars This wasn't an authentic copy so returned
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 March 2024
    Verified Purchase
    This wasn't an authentic copy by the self realisation fellowship so I returned it. The quality and lay out of the book wasn't very good and I had bought it as a present.
    I love this book so much and I recommend it to everyone, it truly is life changing, but make sure to buy a quality authentic copy.
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Nichanan Kesonpat
    5.0 out of 5 stars The lessons they don't teach you in school
    Reviewed in the United States on 23 April 2020
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    A few months ago I met a guy at a work event and the conversation got to the topic of his meeting with Steve Jobs. He told me that two of them spent most of their encounter talking about this book. A little while later, a woman joined our conversation and it turned out that she too had read the book. I could see that the enthusiasm both of them shared for it was distinct from the usual "what-a-great-book-right?!" excitement. It was as if they had a shared secret or immediately established a deeper connection somehow. I later found out that Steve Jobs made a point to reread it every year, and made it a parting gift for all the attendees of his funeral. My interest was piqued.

    Meditation is a core theme in Autobiography of a Yogi. It was introduced to me at an early age thanks to my Buddhist upbringing. In recent years I've come to appreciate the practice outside the scope of organized religion, for the benefits it brings on its own in thought-clarity and groundedness.

    I seldom talk to people about their experiences in meditation let alone read a book about what a Yogi experiences. I see that some people have written off the book as soon as they encounter the many miracles that Yogananda has written of. So I'd like to offer my thoughts as I think his commentary on these events are insightful even if you struggle to believe that the miracles themselves actually took place. It invites a closer examination of our own biases and limited frames of thinking, and I think the world would be a better place if we increased our awareness of both.

    As an analogy, let's look at the current pandemic. COVID-19 has made us acutely aware of how easily diseases can transmit. Before all this, what % of the population was constantly thinking about what bacteria or viruses they might be exposed to in daily life? The virus has been a microscope that forced us to take a closer look at our habits and systems, revealing flaws that we just couldn't take the time to scrutinize before.

    Meditation serves as a microscope for our thinking. The habit of concentration releases you from the grip of your thoughts, allowing you to take a step back to see the bigger picture. Meditation disassociates us from our "thinking self": the self that is influenced by things outside of our control, like helpless leaves in the wind. By taking a step back to *observe* our thoughts, like watching a movie as opposed to living it, we disidentify from the highs and lows that the protagonist is subject to. We are no longer leaves blowing back and forth at the mercy of the wind, but instead are merely observing the phenomenon whilst grounded in ourselves. Let the thoughts be, and then let the thoughts go. This is the first step towards inner peace.

    Luther Burbank, a renowned American horticulturist, had a nice cameo in Autobiography of a Yogi. I came across this quote of his that isn't from the book but nicely illustrates the above point:

    "The God within us is the only available God we know, and the clear light of science teaches us that we must be our own saviours if we are to be found worth saving."

    Terms like "God", "the Infinite", and "the Creator" come up frequently in the book. We have become accustomed to associating these words with institutional religion and so at a quick pass, your interpretation of them is at the mercy of whether or not you subscribe to these religious institutions. Only after grappling at what these words might mean for me personally (as someone who leans towards rationality over mysticism) did I begin to appreciate them in a new light.

    For me, this meant substituting the word "God" with the *ability to create* and the "Infinite" with *imagination and creativity*. Given the countless inventions and works of art that humans have produced throughout our history, I think we can agree that our ability to create and imagination exists despite the differences in our spiritual beliefs.
    In reading Luther Burbank's quote above with this new framework, I interpret it as saying something along the lines of our own abilities to think and create is the only thing that we can rely on to survive and continue the progression of our species. We can access these abilities by tapping into our seemingly "infinite" creativity and imagination. This interpretation is nicely accompanied by JC Bose's quote in the book:

    "The burning Indian imagination, which can extort new order out of a mass of apparently contradictory facts, is held in check by the habit of concentration. This restraint confers the power to hold the mind to the pursuit of truth with an infinite patience"

    In taking the time to sort out our inner lives through meditation, we clean the lens through which we navigate the external world, notice what's broken, and look to our abilities to create to solve problems. Just as coronavirus made us aware of how powerful invisible-to-the-naked-eye things like viruses can be, meditation allows us to appreciate the subtle forces that shape our lives: how connected we are to each other, other species, and the environment, despite our thinking selves' skewed focus on the differences.

    I can't speak for the miracles in the book because I haven't achieved even a fraction of the levels of awareness and fierce concentration of the people in it. I like to interpret the world through logic and facts. So as I was reading, I couldn't help but attempt to make sense of Yogananda's miraculous accounts through a scientific and evolutionary lens.

    If I were to travel back in time 50000 years and spoke about atoms, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have probably thought I was crazy. If I travelled back 10000 years and spoke of gravity, I'd probably get similar reactions. Just because we can't observe something (yet), does that mean it can't exist?

    By writing these phenomena off I can't help but think we're subjecting ourselves to a species-level end-of-history-illusion. This is a psychological phenomenon where we think that the person we are at this moment in time is the person we'll be for the rest of our lives, despite recognizing our significant maturity and growth from the past up until this point. Here's a quote from Dan Gilbert explaining the phenomenon:

    The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It’s as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It’s a watershed on the timeline. It’s the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life change."

    If this is true for individuals, can we not extrapolate this to humankind as a whole? We appreciate the progress sapiens have made from being hunter-gatherers to farmers and peasants, then to bankers and engineers. Why should this be our end-state if there even is one? Science is a young field on the evolutionary time scale, so what might be scientific truths for the Homo-(maybe sapiens, maybe something else) tens of thousands of years from now might seem like miracles today. Fire probably seemed like a miracle to the cavemen that discovered it. Some of the accounts nevertheless were hard pills to swallow but this line of thought helped me keep an open mind.

    One of the things I appreciated most about the book was its lesson that, even though most of us will not reach yogic levels of awareness and concentration in our lifetimes, we can become happier and kinder to each other just by making an effort to keep our attention and egos in check. You don't have to strive to thought-manifest yourself into teleporting to different cities, but you can "manifest" more positive relationships with people by recognizing that you have your own biases and agendas as much as they have theirs. By striving to first understand each other, we can reduce the conflicts that arise from misinterpreting someone's intentions through the foggy lens of our own fears and biases.

    Yogananda recounted his life with joy and passionate confidence. My favourite chapters were the stories about his time with JC Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, and Luther Burbank (inventor, lawyer/ethicist, and botanist respectively). Admittedly at some points, it did feel like I was drinking from the firehose of his elated storytelling. For the more "out-there" accounts, the unique use of language and word-concatenation to describe his experiences in itself made those parts an interesting read at least.

    I gave the book 5 stars because it made me think about the points raised above. My personal philosophy has been greatly influenced by Meditations (Aurelius), Letters (Seneca), and Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl). This book is a stark difference in tone but invited plenty of introspection nonetheless.
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  • Parmantier
    5.0 out of 5 stars Best book ever
    Reviewed in France on 10 January 2025
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    Before reading this book, I didnt believe in God or miracles, it opened a whole new world to me ! Cant be thankful enough to know about Yogananda, Kriya Yoga and SRF. Life changing for me.
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  • AminRahman
    5.0 out of 5 stars Book
    Reviewed in Australia on 17 November 2023
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    My wife wanted. She is happy
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  • Eva
    5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinarily elevating read
    Reviewed in Germany on 6 June 2023
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    One of the fundemantal books when it comes to authentic spirituality
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  • Amazing book
    5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting
    Reviewed in the United Arab Emirates on 8 December 2023
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    Amazing one
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