Autobiography of a Yogi. Paramahansa Yogananda

guru with a hand-made palm-leaf punkha. When the devotee finally left the room, I followed him.

      "'Ramu, how long have you been blind?'

      "'From my birth, sir! Never have my eyes been blessed with a glimpse of the sun.'

      "'Our omnipotent guru can help you. Please make a supplication.'

      "The following day Ramu diffidently approached Lahiri Mahasaya. The disciple felt almost ashamed to ask that physical wealth be added to his spiritual superabundance.

      "'Master, the Illuminator of the cosmos is in you. I pray you to bring His light into my eyes, that I perceive the sun's lesser glow.'

      "'Ramu, someone has connived to put me in a difficult position. I have no healing power.'

      "'Sir, the Infinite One within you can certainly heal.'

      "'That is indeed different, Ramu. God's limit is nowhere! He who ignites the stars and the cells of flesh with mysterious life- effulgence can surely bring luster of vision into your eyes.'

      "The master touched Ramu's forehead at the point between the eyebrows. ^4–7 "'Keep your mind concentrated there, and frequently chant the name of the prophet Rama ^4–8 for seven days. The splendor of the sun shall have a special dawn for you.'

      "Lo! in one week it was so. For the first time, Ramu beheld the fair face of nature. The Omniscient One had unerringly directed his disciple to repeat the name of Rama, adored by him above all other saints. Ramu's faith was the devotionally ploughed soil in which the guru's powerful seed of permanent healing sprouted." Kebalananda was silent for a moment, then paid a further tribute to his guru.

      "It was evident in all miracles performed by Lahiri Mahasaya that he never allowed the ego-principle ^4–9 to consider itself a causative force. By perfection of resistless surrender, the master enabled the Prime Healing Power to flow freely through him.

      "The numerous bodies which were spectacularly healed through Lahiri Mahasaya eventually had to feed the flames of cremation. But the silent spiritual awakenings he effected, the Christlike disciples he fashioned, are his imperishable miracles."

      I never became a Sanskrit scholar; Kebalananda taught me a diviner syntax.

4–1: Literally, "renunciate." From Sanskrit verb roots, "to cast aside."

4–2: Effects of past actions, in this or a former life; from Sanskrit kri, "to do."

4–3: Bhagavad Gita, IX, 30–31. Krishna was the greatest prophet of India; Arjuna was his foremost disciple.

4–4: I always addressed him as Ananta-da. Da is a respectful suffix which the eldest brother in an Indian family receives from junior brothers and sisters.

4–5: At the time of our meeting, Kebalananda had not yet joined the Swami Order and was generally called "Shastri Mahasaya." To avoid confusion with the name of Lahiri Mahasaya and of Master Mahasaya (chapter 9), I am referring to my Sanskrit tutor only by his later monastic name of Swami Kebalananda. His biography has been recently published in Bengali. Born in the Khulna district of Bengal in 1863, Kebalananda gave up his body in Benares at the age of sixty-eight. His family name was Ashutosh Chatterji.

4–6: The ancient four Vedas comprise over 100 extant canonical books. Emerson paid the following tribute in his Journal to Vedic thought: "It is sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble poetic mind. … It is of no use to put away the book; if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond, Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal necessity, eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence. … This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment- these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods."

4–7: The seat of the "single" or spiritual eye. At death the consciousness of man is usually drawn to this holy spot, accounting for the upraised eyes found in the dead.

4–8: The central sacred figure of the Sanskrit epic, Ramayana.

4–9: Ahankara, egoism; literally, "I do." The root cause of dualism or illusion of maya, whereby the subject (ego) appears as object; the creatures imagine themselves to be creators.

CHAPTER: 5

       Table of Contents

      A "Perfume Saint" Displays His Wonders

       Table of Contents

      "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

      I did not have this wisdom of Solomon to comfort me; I gazed searchingly about me, on any excursion from home, for the face of my destined guru. But my path did not cross his own until after the completion of my high school studies.

      Two years elapsed between my flight with Amar toward the Himalayas, and the great day of Sri Yukteswar's arrival into my life. During that interim I met a number of sages-the "Perfume Saint," the "Tiger Swami," Nagendra Nath Bhaduri, Master Mahasaya, and the famous Bengali scientist, Jagadis Chandra Bose.

      My encounter with the "Perfume Saint" had two preambles, one harmonious and the other humorous.

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

      These philosophical finalities gently entered my ear as I stood silently before a temple image of Kali. Turning, I confronted a tall man whose garb, or lack of it, revealed him a wandering sadhu.

      "You have indeed penetrated the bewilderment of my thoughts!" I smiled gratefully. "The confusion of benign and terrible aspects in nature, as symbolized by Kali, ^5–1 has puzzled wiser heads than mine!"

      "Few there be who solve her mystery! Good and evil is the challenging riddle which life places sphinxlike before every intelligence. Attempting no solution, most men pay forfeit with their lives, penalty now even as in the days of Thebes. Here and there, a towering lonely figure never cries defeat. From the maya ^5–2 of duality he plucks the cleaveless truth of unity."

      "You speak with conviction, sir."

      "I have long exercised an honest introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one's thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of 'self-expression,' individual acknowledgments, results in egotists, sure of the right to their private interpretations of God and the universe."

      "Truth humbly retires, no doubt, before such arrogant originality." I was enjoying the discussion.

      "Man can understand no eternal verity until he has freed himself from pretensions. The human mind, bared to a centuried slime, is teeming with repulsive life of countless world-delusions. Struggles of the battlefields pale into insignificance here, when man first contends with inward enemies! No mortal foes these, to be overcome by harrowing array of might! Omnipresent, unresting, pursuing man even in sleep, subtly equipped with a miasmic weapon, these soldiers of ignorant lusts seek