One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture, and that not in it, but beyond it, lies his own reality.
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Hindu
Paramahansa Yogananda
Hindu1893 – 1952Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India145 quotes· 4 sources
Paramhansa Yogananda was an Indian yogi and guru who brought Kriya Yoga and the philosophy of India's ancient Vedantic tradition to the West, becoming the first great Indian spiritual master to live and teach in America. His Autobiography of a Yogi is one of the most widely read spiritual books of the 20th century.
Born in 1893 in Gorakhpur, Yogananda showed intense spiritual aspiration from childhood and eventually became a disciple of Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, a master in the line of Mahavatar Babaji. In 1920 he traveled to America, where he would spend most of the rest of his life teaching, and eventually founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) with centers across the United States and beyond. His Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) introduced millions of Western readers to the interior world of Indian mysticism through a narrative rich with miraculous events, the portraits of living saints, and a vision of the underlying unity of all true religion. He taught Kriya Yoga — a specific meditation technique — as a scientific path to God-realization, emphasizing direct personal experience over dogma. His influence on the global spread of yoga and meditation is immeasurable, and his book was famously the only one Steve Jobs kept on his iPad, returning to it annually.
Wisdom
Great saints who have awakened from the cosmic mayic dream and realized this world as an idea in the Divine Mind, can do as they wish with the body, knowing it to be only a manipulatable form of condensed or frozen energy.
Cosmic law cannot be stayed or changed, and man would do well to put himself in harmony with it.
Not cruelty but good will arms the universal sinews; a humanity at peace will know the endless fruits of victory, sweeter to the taste than any nurtured on the soil of war.
The effective League of Nations will be a natural, nameless league of human hearts.
The broad sympathies and discerning insight needed for the healing of earthly woes cannot flow from a mere intellectual consideration of man's diversities, but from knowledge of man's sole unity—his kinship with God.
Every nation on earth has its own distinctive misery-producing karma to deal with and remove.
If man be solely a body, its loss indeed places the final period to identity. But the persistent core of human egoity is only temporarily allied with sense perception.
Those simple and apparently harmless phrases, spoken with deep concentration, had possessed sufficient hidden force to explode like bombs and produce definite effects. I understood, later, that the explosive vibratory power in speech could be wisely directed to free one's life from difficulties.
Performances of miracles such as shown by the Perfume Saint are spectacular but spiritually useless. Having little purpose beyond entertainment, they are digressions from a serious search for God.
Hypnotism is trespass into the territory of another's consciousness. Its temporary phenomena have nothing in common with the miracles performed by men of divine realization. Awake in God, true saints effect changes in this dream world by a will harmoniously attuned to the Creative Cosmic Dreamer.
India, materially poor for the last two centuries, yet has an inexhaustible fund of divine wealth; spiritual skyscrapers may occasionally be encountered by wayfarers amazed to see towering above squalor.
My heart needed no tutor when I finally met my master; he taught me by sublimity of example alone the measure of a true teacher.
How short is human memory for divine favors! No man lives who has not seen certain of his prayers granted.
A self-realized master has already left behind the stepping stone of meditation. The flower falls when the fruit appears. But saints often cling to spiritual forms for the encouragement of disciples.
To a man who has realized himself as a soul, not the body or the ego, the rest of humanity assumes a striking similarity of aspect. The impartiality of saints is rooted in wisdom; masters have escaped maya, whose alternating faces of intellect and idiocy no longer cast an influential glance.
All forms of life have equal right to the air of maya. The saint who uncovers the secret of creation will be in harmony with nature's countless bewildering expressions. All men may approach that understanding who curb the inner pride.
The hard core of human egotism is hardly to be dislodged except rudely. With its departure, the Divine finds at last an unobstructed channel.
Enjoyment of wine and sex are rooted in the natural man, and require no delicacies of perception for their appreciation. The land of healing lies within, radiant with that happiness blindly sought in a thousand misdirections.
Personal idiosyncrasies, possessed even by masters, lend a rich complexity to the pattern of life.