72 pages • 2 hours read
Paramahansa YoganandaAutobiography of a Yogi
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Blissful Devotee and His Cosmic Romance”
Mukunda is in the presence of Master Mahasaya, in the same house where his mother died. Not only does he miss her, but he also feels separated from the Divine Mother. After asking Master Mahasaya to intercede for him, he returns home and receives a vision of the Divine Mother, in which she tells him that she loves him. One day, he and the master travel to Dakshineswar and the Temple of Kali, where a figure of the Divine Mother rests on a chiseled silver lotus. Master Mahasaya chants her name; he is engaged in a cosmic romance with her. They make many such pilgrimages, and Mukunda learns about the sweetness of God in his aspect as Divine Mother.
One day, the master takes Mukunda to see some bioscopes (motion pictures). They enter a lecture hall at the university in Calcutta, where a lecture with slide illustrations is in progress. Mukunda is bored. The master arranges with the Divine Mother for the electric lights to fail, at which point he and Mukunda make a quiet exit. As they stand on the sidewalk, the saint arranges for Mukunda to see a different kind of bioscope. Silence descends. Mukunda watches the bustle of people, trolley cars, carts, and carriages as if the sound has been turned off. He seems to have an omnipresent perspective. A “mellow luminescence” penetrates everything (92). This vision produces in Mukunda a state of ecstasy.
Chapter 10 Summary: “I Meet My Master, Sri Yukteswar”
The final examinations at high school are approaching, but Mukunda spends little time studying. His friend Nantu coaches him, and he passes all his examinations, including Sanskrit. He leaves home with his friend Jitentra and joins a Benaras hermitage, although he is sad to leave his family. It takes him a while to settle into life at the hermitage, with its fixed routines. One day, Mukunda opens the locked box in which he keeps the amulet bequeathed to him by his mother. The amulet has vanished, just as the holy man had predicted.
Mukunda is unhappy in the hermitage and prays to the Mother of the Universe for relief. He hears a woman’s voice saying that he will meet his master today. Mukunda goes to the Benaras marketplace, where he meets Sri Yukteswar Giri, whose face he has seen thousands of times in visions. He follows Sri Yukteswar to his residence, where master and disciple pledge unconditional love to each other. Sri Yukteswar tells Mukunda to leave the hermitage and go back to Calcutta. Mukunda says he will not return home but will follow his new master wherever he lives. Sri Yukteswar tells him that his main residence is at Serampore, 12 miles from Calcutta.
However, the guru is displeased that Mukunda has refused his instruction to return to his family. He tells Mukunda to come to him in four weeks. He adds that the young disciple will have to reawaken his, the master’s, interest in him, and he will not accept him easily. Thus, their first meeting ends on a note of discord. Mukunda returns to the hermitage, where he becomes increasingly isolated. After three weeks, he leaves. He suggests to Jitendra that they visit Sri Yukteswar in Serampore.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Two Penniless Boys in Brindaban”
Mukunda’s brother Ananta, now living in Agra, wants him to concentrate on a career. He devises a plan to discourage Mukunda’s belief that he can always rely on God to provide for him. He sends Mukunda and Jitendra to Brindaban, a nearby city. They must not take any money or beg, but they must not miss a meal and must not be stranded in the city. They are to return home by midnight.
As the train nears Brindaban, two strangers befriend the boys, promise them food and shelter, and escort them to a stately hermitage. It transpires that the boys’ benefactors had intended to bring two princes with them to Brindaban, but the princes had been unable to come. The strangers brought the boys instead. Thus, Mukunda and Jitendra receive royal treatment and eat a sumptuous meal. After lunch, they want to see the sights in the ancient city, and a young man stops and says he will be their host and guide. They visit a temple and other sites associated with Lord Krishna. Mukunda teaches the young man Kriya Yoga. When the two boys return home, the skeptical Ananta is impressed by their story and asks his brother to initiate him in Kriya Yoga.
The two boys bid Ananta farewell and visit the Taj Mahal. Mukunda then travels to Serampore to keep his appointment with his master. It is four weeks since they met.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Years in My Master’s Hermitage”
Sri Yukteswar greets Mukunda coolly, but they soon reach an accord. The master tells him he must attend college in Calcutta, and Mukunda accepts his decision. The next day, the master initiates him into Kriya Yoga.
Mukunda returns home to Calcutta feeling fulfilled. He enrolls in a college, although he spends most of his time at his master’s hermitage. He regards Sri Yukteswar as a living manifestation of God, and from him he absorbs many spiritual lessons. He had always been thin and often had an upset stomach, but Sri Yukteswar tells him to believe in the creative life force, which will make him well and strong. He does so and becomes healthier and gains weight. Later, he witnesses his guru healing people of ailments such as diabetes, epilepsy, tuberculosis, and paralysis.
Sri Yukteswar tells Mukunda that his own guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, helped him overcome illness and develop health and strength by training his mind to think positively. Sri Yukteswar also hints at his knowledge of Mukunda’s future regarding the institutions he will later create. Mukunda makes spiritual progress, learning how to discipline his mind and show more responsibility in his worldly tasks. His master is strict and rebukes him whenever he fails to meet the required standard. Mukunda is grateful for this stern treatment, which he knows is necessary for his spiritual development.
Kumar, a young villager, is accepted for training at the ashram. For a while, he excels, but after he visits his childhood home, he acquires bad habits that make him unsuitable for life at the hermitage. Sri Yukteswar regretfully asks Mukunda to tell Kumar to leave.
Sri Yukteswar does not read often, other than the scriptures, and on one occasion he shows his impatience with mere book learning. A scholar visits the ashram and recites many Indian scriptures, which he has learned by heart. But Sri Yukteswar asks him for original commentary about what he has learned from those scriptures from his own direct experience. Has he made any particular text his own and thoroughly absorbed its teachings in himself? The scholar, unsettled by this questioning, admits that he has no inner realization of the divine. Later, Sri Yukteswar emphasizes that book learning is not necessary for spiritual realization.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
These chapters map out important stages in Mukunda’s mental and spiritual development. He dislikes school and writes with self-deprecating humor about his casual approach to his studies. He also does not enjoy the hermitage he moves into after he graduates from high school. He chafes at the restrictions it imposes, and he does not get on well with the other students. However, he continues to encounter spiritual sages who help him along his way. When he meets Sri Yukteswar, who shares his disdain for book learning, he starts to make real progress, although even then the process is slow and full of setbacks.
In Chapter 9, Master Mahasaya’s blissful cosmic romance with the Divine Mother exposes Mukunda to the spiritual path known as bhakti yoga. Bhakti yoga refers to the devotional path to God realization, with God being understood as the “Cosmic Beloved” (92). “Devotional bhakti” (164) is clearly the path to which Mukunda is attracted and that suits his nature. He is not an intellectual; his temperament is more attuned to feeling and emotion, so he is at home with bhakti yoga. As he states in Chapter 9, “My own temperament is principally devotional” (141).
The Bhagavad Gita is considered a bhakti text. In Chapter VIII, Lord Krishna explains to his disciple Arjuna, “By singlehearted devotion, O son of Pritha (Arjuna) that Supreme Unmanifested is reached. He alone, the omnipresent, is the abode of all creatures” (8:22). Yogananda comments on this verse: “The sole gift a human being may present to the Infinite Giver is love. […] By pure humble bhakti man becomes fit to enter even the ultimate haven, the Immutable and Unmanifested” (Yogananda, Sri Sri Paramahansa. God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita. Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, Vol. II, Chapters 6-18, 2005, p. 739).
The notion of bhakti sheds light on the meeting, in Chapter 10, between Mukunda and Sri Yukteswar, the guru whom he is so delighted to find. They walk hand in hand and pledge unconditional, eternal love to each other. This marks their mutual devotion, which will enable Mukunda to advance on the spiritual path. The expressions of love between Sri Yukteswar and Mukunda at times sound almost romantic, but the love they describe is of a fundamentally different kind: a pathway to the manifestation of divine love.
The lesson that Mukunda learns in Brindaban (Chapter 11) is that he can always rely on the divine for all sustenance. He has always sensed this anyway, and the test set by his brother offers yet more confirmation of his intuition. It is safe to trust God. Yogananda’s defines Kriya Yoga here as a simple technique that “embodies the art of quickening man’s spiritual evolution” and shortening the time required for Realizing The Nature of the Self and gaining liberation from the illusion of duality (115). He does not explain how to practice Kriya Yoga since the technique requires personal instruction from teacher to student.
In Chapter 12, he offers a simple definition of the master as “one who has realized himself as the omnipresent soul, not the body or the ego” (124). Sri Yukteswar is clairvoyant and has many yogic powers: He has the ability to prevent mosquitoes from biting him; when a menacing cobra approaches him, he directs love to it, and the cobra turns and goes away. Sri Yukteswar also has healing powers, but in this respect the story he tells Mukunda about what his own guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, once said to him when he complained about his ill health is significant. Lahiri Mahasaya pointed out that his disciple was himself the cause of his ill health and also possessed the key to getting well:
You have seen how your health has exactly followed your subconscious expectations. Thought is a force, even as electricity or gravitation. The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass (130).
This is an unusual passage because it gives power not to the master, as so often occurs in these pages, but to the disciple and the power of his own mind. An individual can, in effect, think himself well. This notion, which derives from the often touted mind-body connection, remains widespread in contemporary self-help discourse.
