Paramahansa Yogananda was a great spiritual teacher who lived in the early part of the 20th century and started the Self Realization Fellowship, a ‘church of all religions’ for all truth seeking souls, with temples throughout the USA.

His seminal work, “Autobiography of a Yogi” is a spiritual classic. 

It was a favorite of Steve Jobs, Elvis Presley and George Harrison, who was known to have kept multiple copies of the book on hand to give people he encountered.

Yogananda came to this country as a young man in 1920 with a vision of uniting the East and the West. This was at a time when meditation and various Indian practices were not well known. In his weekly sermons, he made a point of always including related passages from both the Christian Bible and the Bhagavad Gita as a way of demonstrating the commonality of the messages of all religions. Although he died in 1952, he left behind detailed lessons in meditation and ‘how to live’.

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Here’s a trailer for Awake, the 2014 documentary about the life of Paramahansa Yogananda.

Here are some other videos showing a glimpse of Yogananda.