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Here Comes the Yogiman
We’re all stories in the end.
— “The Big Bang,” Doctor WhoIn 1948, a seventeen- year- old boy lay bedridden with rheumatoid fever in the
small town of Leavittsburg, Ohio. This boy, struck down in the prime of his senior
year of high school, was Roy Eugene Davis. He would go on to found the multi-
branch Center for Spiritual Awareness, launch the publication of a magazine, and
author nine books. In 1948, however, Davis read more books than he wrote:
I had already read many books that I borrowed from the County Library.
Books on psycholog y and religious movements appealed to me, as did
some poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson and the writings of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. I learned about yoga
practices while reading Francis Yeats- Brown’s Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Paul
B r u n t o n’s Search in Secret India, and Theos Bernard’s Hatha Yoga. I began
to practice Hatha Yoga, which I could easily do, and tried to meditate.
Alone in my upstairs bedroom, I sometimes sat on the floor in a lotus pos-
ture and imagined that I was a spiritually accomplished Himalayan yogi.
While I was confined to bed, I read articles in health- oriented maga-
zines that motivated me to choose a vegetarian diet. In one magazine, I saw
an advertisement for Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda,
published by Self- Realization Fellowship and ordered a copy by mail. As
soon as I received it, I read it, then read it frequently. As I avidly perused
the text and looked at the pictures of saints and yogis, I knew that
Paramahansa Yogananda was my guru.^1Within the year, Davis would travel to the Mt. Washington Center in Los Angeles
to meet his guru, an encounter that would begin over sixty years of involvement
with Kriya Yoga. Like many of Yogananda’s disciples, Davis’s first exposure to the
Yogi was through his narrative. After the release of Yogananda’s Autobiography