Here Comes the Yogiman

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI (498 pp.) --Paramhansa Yogananda--Philosophical Library ($3.50).

Some of the most literate practitioners of the English language have written about yoga. Several of them have even sweetened their message with some of their best sex-novel tricks. But despite the literary followers of Indian philosophy --Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, John (Voice of the Turtle) Van Druten and Gerald Heard--yoga is still as mystifying as Sanskrit to the average American.

One trouble is that there are. no bar associations or synods to set standards among swamis (holy men, monks)--almost anyone in the U.S. can set up shop as a swami if he can find any followers. As a result there are devout swamis who lead the good life and there are swamis who simply enjoy a good life. Few of either kind write their autobiographies, so this life story by California's Paramhansa Yogananda (a Bengali pseudonym meaning approximately Swami-Bliss-through-Divine-Union) is something of a document. It is not likely to give the uninitiated much insight into India's ancient teachings. It does show exceedingly well how an alien culture may change when transplanted by a businesslike nurseryman from the tough soil of religious asceticism into hothouses of financial wealth and spiritual despair.

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 as man and wife only once a year, for the purpose of having children" (they had eight).

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 at his photograph," Yogananda recalls, "and saw there a blinding light. . . . My nausea and other uncontrollable symptoms disappeared; I was well."

Mukunda also drew inspiration from local yogis who were possessed of "miraculous powers." Among his inspirations was Gandha Baba ("The Perfume Saint") who could transform the "mundane vibrations" of the surrounding air into delicious tangerines ("The method, alas! is beyond the reach of the world's hungry hordes"). Another, Bhaduri Mahasaya ("The Levitating Saint"), often hung in the air, meditating without visible means of support. Another, called Krishnananda, shared his hermitage with a lioness, which he had taught to appreciate a strictly vegetarian diet and to utter the mystical word "Aum" (meaning "cosmic vibratory power") "in a deep, attractive growl."

The 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 and gold . . . with a quaint wishing-well").

"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."

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