Autobiography of a Yogi

If you don’t invite God to be your summer Guest, He won’t come in the winter of your life.

Moral: Look fear in the face and it will cease to trouble you.

Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire.

Stillness is the altar of spirit.

God is simple. Everything else is complex. Do not seek absolute values in the relative world of nature.

The body is literally manufactured and sustained by mind.

Seeds of past karma cannot germinate if they are roasted in the fires of divine wisdom.

The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.

Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.

Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself......

You may control a mad elephant;You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger;Ride the lion and play with the cobra;By alchemy you may learn your livelihood;You may wander through the universe incognito;Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful;You may walk in water and live in fire;But control of the mind is better and more difficult.

You have come to earth to entertain and to be entertained.

The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery

You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you

Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.

TO EVERY THING there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man’s slavery.

Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfactions. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love.

The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass.

Why be elated by material profit?” Father replied. “The one who pursues a goal of evenmindedness is neither jubilant with gain nor depressed by loss. He knows that man arrives penniless in this world, and departs without a single rupee.

He fitted the Vedic definition of a man of God: “Softer than the flower, where kindness is concerned; stronger than the thunder, where principles are at stake.

Man's conscious state is an awareness of body and breath. His subconscious state, active in sleep, is associated with his mental, and temporary, separation from body and breath. His superconscious state is a freedom from the delusion that "existence" depends on body and breath. God lives without breath; the soul made in his image becomes conscious of itself, for the first time, only during the breathless state.

You go often into the silence, but have you developed anubhava?” He was reminding me to love God more than meditation. “Do not mistake the technique for the Goal.

Forget the past,” Sri Yukteswar would console him. “The vanished lives of all men are dark with many shames. Human conduct is ever unreliable until man is anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.

A man will be beloved if, possessed with great power, he still does not make himself feared.

The reflection, the verisimilitude, of life that shines in the fleshly cells from the soul source is the only cause of man's attachment to his body; obviously he would not pay solicitous homage to a clod of clay. A human being falsely identifies himself with his physical form because the life currents from the soul are breath-conveyed into the flesh with such intense power that man mistakes the effect for a cause, and idolatrously imagines the body to have life of its own.

The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindus say, ‘traveling the path of existence through thousands of births’ ... there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge; no wonder that she is able to recollect... what formerly she knew.... For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all.”-Emerson.

Astrology is the study of man’s response to planetary stimuli. The stars have no conscious benevolence or animosity; they merely send forth positive and negative radiations. Of themselves, these do not help or harm humanity, but offer a lawful channel for the outward operation of cause-effect equilibriums which each man has set into motion in the past. “A child is born on that day and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his individual karma. His horoscope is a challenging portrait, revealing his unalterable past and its probable future results. But the natal chart can be rightly interpreted only by men of intuitive wisdom: these are few.

The poet is intimate with truth, while the scientist approaches awkwardly.

{Yogananda on the death of his dear friend, the eminent 20th century scientist, Luther Burbank}His heart was fathomlessly deep, long acquainted with humility, patience, sacrifice. His little home amid the roses was austerely simple; he knew the worthlessness of luxury, the joy of few possessions. The modesty with which he wore his scientific fame repeatedly reminded me of the trees that bend low with the burden of ripening fruits; it is the barren tree that lifts its head high in an empty boast.I was in New York when, in 1926, my dear friend passed away. In tears I thought, 'Oh, I would gladly walk all the way from here to Santa Rosa for one more glimpse of him!' Locking myself away from secretaries and visitors, I spent the next twenty-four hours in seclusion...His name has now passed into the heritage of common speech. Listing 'burbank' as a transitive verb, Webster's New International Dictionary defines it: 'To cross or graft (a plant). Hence, figuratively, to improve (anything, as a process or institution) by selecting good features and rejecting bad, or by adding good features.''Beloved Burbank,' I cried after reading the definition, 'your very name is now a synonym for goodness!