Autobiography of a Yogi

Yogananda Paramahansa, 1946  

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.

Autobiography of a Yogi on Amazon