96 Biography of a Yogithe Himalayas to become a saṃnyāsin, only to be retrieved within days by his
older brother.
Swami Satyananda, then Manamohan Mazumder, was a childhood friend of
Yogananda and accompanied him through many of his early adventures. He later
became a close associate in the maintenance of Yogananda’s organizations and
came extremely close to joining him in America. In addition to these administra-
tive duties, Satyananda became one of Yogananda’s chief biographers outside of
Yogananda himself. From him we know that, at the age of approximately fourteen
or fifteen, Yogananda became interested in visiting graveyards and performing
sādhana on corpses. Satyananda, who had been prevailed upon by Yogananda to
join in these outings on occasion, specifies that strictly speaking no sādhana had
really taken place but only some japa (chanting ) and contemplation. Yogananda’s
brother Sananda Lal Ghosh likewise reports that Yogananda for some time
dabbled in tantra. He would often visit the Nimtala charnal grounds, where his
mother’s body had been cremated, until one time he brought home an impos-
ing red- eyed sādhu. The pair would disappear into Yogananda’s attic room, where
his brother discovered one day a human skull along with two bones resting on
a wooden stand. Quite disconcerted, he reported these findings to their father,
who warned Yogananda about the potential harm of tantric practice. After this,
Ghosh claims, Yogananda ceased his experimentation and would later come to
warn others against tantric ritual.^13
From a young age, Yogananda appears to have been fascinated by the concept
of yogic superpowers. This is evident from the extensive cataloging of his visits
to various Yogis and the preoccupation with supernatural occurrences that color
his Autobiography. However, the accounts of his biographers affirm that this was
more than a gimmick to titillate the Western imagination. Satyananda reports:
[Yogananda] was very much attracted to the effects of yogic powers, frui-
tion through willpower, and what could be learned from supernatural
accounts and other such things. And at this time, he was also seized by
the desire to follow practices that would bring about these powers within
himself. He was always firmly convinced in the depths of his being that
the instrument of intense power of will in a human being’s mind empow-
ered by union with the Divine Infinite Power, or the Divine Power using
the instrument of the power of human will, could make the impossible
possible.^14Once Yogananda, with Satyananda at his side, spent a few days harassing lizards
in an attempt to implement of some method that he had reportedly learned from
a tantric sādhaka in the hope of gaining some superpowers of his own. Eventually