Body Text
Paramahamsa Yogananda was born in 1893 at Gorakhpur, U.P. India in a Bengali family. His birth name was Mukunda Lal Ghosh. As a youth he visited many holy men looking for a spiritual guide. In his autobiography ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ Yogananda relates how he met many famous persons as a young man including the eminent sceintist Jagadish Chandra Bose, Rabindranath Tagore and other prominent people of that time. In 1910 he met his guru, Swami Yukteswar Giri at the age of 17.
After attending Scottish Curch College in Calcutta and graduating at Serampore College he spent time with Yukteswar and in 1915 he became a mendicant with the name Swami Yogananda Giri. In 1917 he opened a school in Bengal where students were given a modern education combined with yoga and spirituality. One year later he relocated the school to Ranchi in Bihar.
In 1920 he travelled to America as a delegate of the International Congress of Religious Liberals held in Boston. That same year he founded the Self Realization Fellowship whose purpose was to spread the teachings of Yoga and meditation. For several years he gave lectures on the east coast. He established the headquarters of the Self Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1925. Yogananda stayed in the US from 1920 till 1952.
He returned to India in 1935 in order to visit his guru and to establish his society in his motherland. During this time he met with Gandhi annd C.V. Raman, the eminent physicist. The next year while Yogananda was in Calcutta, Yukteswar died in th etemple town of Puri.
Yogananda returned to America where he continued to lecture on Indian philosophy and Yoga until he passed away in 1952.
Yogananda taught his students the need for direct experience of truth, as opposed to blind belief. He said that “The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God.”
Echoing traditional Hindu teachings, he taught that the entire universe is God's cosmic "movie show", and that individuals are merely actors in the "divine play" who change "roles" through reincarnation. Any harm that would befall an innocent person would therefore be the result of karma from a past life. Yogananda advised against taking this "divine delusion" any more seriously than a movie theater or television presentation because life is secondary to our own understanding. He taught that mankind's deep suffering is rooted in identifying too closely with one's current 'role', rather than with the movie's 'director', or God. This could also be a result of karma and therefore not identifying with the 'director.'
To that end, he taught certain yoga techniques that help people achieve self-realization. He said that “self-realization is the knowing in all parts of body, mind, and soul that you are now in possession of the kingdom of God; that you do not have to pray that it come to you; that God’s omnipresence is your omnipresence; and that all that you need to do is improve your knowing.” Therefore knowing yourself is the key to understanding God because God is within.
SOURCE:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogananda)
