Here Comes the Yogiman 105
will have to come here to join in this work with huge potential. Both of
you, be ready. Whomever I call will have to come without delay.^33Satyananda, being too busy with Sri Yukteswar’s various projects as well as the
management of Yogananda’s Ranchi school, expressed his wish to remain in India,
which was a disappointment to Yogananda. Dhirananda set off to the United
States in 1922 in his stead and for the next seven years would be indispensable
in promoting and maintaining Yogananda’s organization and helping with his
numerous lectures and publications.
Yogananda began to expand his lecture campaign in late 1923 and early
1924, traveling to give multiple lectures in New York. There he met Mohammed
Rashid, who at the time had just completed his university degree but had in fact
arrived in America four years earlier on the very same ship that carried Yogananda
there. Rashid, who had been intrigued by Yogananda’s teachings even when he
had briefly encountered the Swami on board the boat, became a kind of secretary
to him. In this capacity Rashid took on the promotional aspects of Yogananda’s
campaign. Reportedly, he was in fact responsible for the majority of Yogananda’s
rather sensational posters during this period, which Yogananda in fact objected to
as he considered them to be “fulsome.”^34
The publicity did prove to be effective, despite Yogananda’s misgivings,
and he quickly became a well- known lecturer and a favorite of New York high
society. No doubt Rashid, who appeared to be endowed with a certain acumen
for representation, was instrumental in Yogananda’s already ongoing adapta-
tion to the American social climate. According to Satyeswarananda, “When
Yogananda realized after Capt. Rashid had joined him that a poor looking
man could not expect social recognition in that affluent country, he gradually
turned himself into an affluent person.”^35 Although Satyeswarananda is argu-
ably the most critical biographer in his accounts of Yogananda— especially
with respect to his Westernization of Kriya Yoga practice and fondness for
organizations— there must have been some truth to this observation. As
actress Shirley MacLaine would inform Bikram Choudhury some half- a-
century later, “in America, if you don’t charge money ... people won’t respect
you.”^36 Yogananda waged something of a personal war with materialism for
the rest of his life— acquiring what was, according to the Los Angeles Times,
a “swanky automobile” but giving away his stylish new overcoat. The affluent
air of his Mt. Washington and Encinitas estates, even as he was still receiving
aid from his father in India and scraping together funds from his wealthy
disciples, illustrates that he came to fully internalize the idea that in America
even spiritual capital was difficult to accrue without the backing of material
wealth.