A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Yogananda’s spiritual autobiography moves from his Bengali childhood and search for a guru through discipleship under Sri Yukteswar, encounters with saints and yogis, and his work establishing Kriya Yoga in the United States. Memoir, spiritual instruction, interreligious interpretation, and hagiographic wonder stories combine to present yoga as a path toward direct realization of God rather than primarily physical exercise.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
It is a historically influential doorway into modern global yoga and Vedantic spirituality, especially for travelers who have encountered yoga mainly as fitness or meditation detached from religious life. The book offers an insider’s devotional world of guru-disciple formation, disciplined practice, mystical experience, and a universalizing conversation between Indian traditions and Christianity without requiring the Library to verify its extraordinary claims.
Good starting place if…
You prefer a spiritually vivid life story to a systematic survey and want to understand why Yogananda and Kriya Yoga became influential in modern Western spirituality.
Know before you begin…
This is devotional autobiography and hagiography, not a neutral history of Hinduism, India, yoga, or Yogananda’s movement. Miracles, reincarnation, subtle laws, divine guidance, and advanced spiritual attainments are narrated within the book’s worldview. Current Self-Realization Fellowship editions also incorporate revisions and additions made after the 1946 first edition, including changes authorized during Yogananda’s lifetime.