Word: yogananda
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Swami Yogananda belongs outside the most publicized U.S. Indian movement-the Vedanta-which includes Huxley, Isherwood, et al. He is also scorned by them. Yogananda, born plain Mukunda Lai Ghosh 46 years ago, is the son of the vice president of the Bengal-Nagpur Railway. Father Ghosh scorned money, food and sex, spent his free hours meditating, with his legs crossed. Both father & mother Ghosh were devout practitioners of the basic tenet of yoga: absolute discipline of the body and senses through concentration on the idea of union with God. "Your father and myself," said Mrs. Ghosh, "live together...
Second Time Around. Yogananda says that his earliest memories, as a mere infant, were of a previous incarnation, in which he was "a Yogi amidst the Himalayan snows." Crying spells and "prayerful surges" welled up in the precocious little nipper when he realized that he was no more than a mewling suckling. At the age of eight, he was struck down by Asiatic cholera. He was at death's door when his mother gestured frantically toward a photograph of her favorite yogi, and screamed to her son: "Bow to him mentally [and] your life will be spared!" "I gazed...
...vast majority of India's swamis spend their lives in retirement from the world, eating only enough to keep body & soul together, passing their time in exemplary meditation. Swami Yogananda was inspired by more practical aims. The "Cosmic Director" ("who writes His own plays") ordered him to move on to the U.S. Soon he became a popular lecturer, initiated "tens of thousands of Americans" -to whom he dedicated his first volume of poems, Whispers from Eternity, which appeared in 1929 with an introduction by Opera Singer Amelita Galli-Curci...
Soon, "with the help of large-hearted students," Yogananda built his first U.S. GHQ: the Self-Realization Fellowship, near Los Angeles. Favored disciples-such as his barefooted, youthful American secretary, Mr. Wright; and Miss Ettie Bletch, "an elderly lady from Cincinnati" -accompanied the master on triumphal speaking tours. Another group of disciples, U.S. businessmen, built their Guru a splendid hermitage near San Diego ("jutting out [into the Pacific] like a great white ocean liner"). The hermitage was soon followed by two Self-Realization Churches of All Religions, one in Washington, D. C., one in Hollywood ("finished in blue, white...
...Eternal Anchorage." "Sometimes -usually when the bills rolled in," muses Anchorite Yogananda (who is now a rather stout, smiling gentleman), "I thought longingly of the simple peace of India." But he looks forward with unruffled demeanor to the "enigmatic Atomic Age." Yogananda is thought by other swamis to be too successful, but, seated before the sweet-toned organ of his San Diego church, he himself believes that in California he has effected not merely a meeting between East and West, but also an "Eternal Anchorage...