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I, Paramahansa Yogananda, was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India into a devout Bengali family on January 5, 1893. From my earliest years, my awareness and experience of the spiritual was far beyond the ordinary. In my youth I sought out many of India's Hindu sages and saints, hoping to find an illumined teacher to guide me in my spiritual quest.

I met my guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, in 1910, at the age of 17. After passing my Intermediate Examination in Arts from the Scottish Church College, Calcutta, I did my graduation in religious studies from the Serampore College, a constituent college of the University of Calcutta and in 1915, I took formal vows into the monastic Swami Order and became Swami Yogananda. In 1917, I began my life's mission with the founding and running of a school for boys in Ranchi, India that combined modern educational techniques with yoga training and spiritual ideals. This school would later become Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, the Indian branch of my American Organization.

In 1920, I went to the United States as India's delegate to an International Congress of Religious Liberals convening in Boston. That same year I founded Self-Realization Fellowship to disseminate worldwide my teachings on India's ancient practices and philosophy of Yoga and its tradition of meditation. For the next several years, I lectured and taught on the East coast and in 1924 embarked on a cross-continental speaking tour. The following year, I established in Los Angeles an international headquarters for Self-Realization Fellowship, which became the spiritual and administrative heart of my growing work. After fifteen years of my services in the West, Sri Yukteswar conferred upon me the title Paramhansa, which means "supreme swan."

In 1946, I published my life story, Autobiography of a Yogi, which was instrumental in introducing vedic philosophy to the West. It has since been translated into eighteen languages and remains a best seller. It includes my and Sri Yukteswar's attempts to explain certain verses and events of the Bible such as the Garden of Eden story, and descriptions of my encounters with leading spiritual figures such as Therese Neumann, the Hindu saint Sri Anandamoyi Ma, Mohandas Gandhi, Nobel laureate in literature Rabindranath Tagore, famous Indian scientist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose and Nobel Prize winning physicist Sir C. V. Raman.

On March 7, 1952, I entered mahasamadhi, a master's final conscious exit from the body. My passing was marked by an extraordinary phenomenon: a notarized statement signed by the Director of Forest Lawn Memorial Park testified: "No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death....This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one....Yogananda's body was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability."

This photo, commonly known as "The Last Smile," is the last known photo of me, taken shortly before I left my body.

My guru lineage was responsible for providing me with the central discipline of my teachings. Sri Yukteswar was the disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya, in turn the disciple of the ageless guru Mahavatar Babaji, who had revived and—through his disciples—begun the spread of Kriya Yoga, described as a "spiritual science of Self Realization." It was through me that Kriya Yoga was brought to the West.

 

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