144 Biography of a YogiUnlike Wassan and Hari Rama, whose legacies are preserved only through
their largely out- of- print publications, Yogananda was ultimately able to secure
an impressive organizational platform for his teachings. However, much of
Yogananda’s marketing genius lay in his ability to convey his material in a
manner both relevant and accessible to his audience. Within the first three
years of his sojourn in the United States, Yogananda’s message appears to have
transformed from the type of high- brow philosophical model established by
Vivekananda to a more practically minded, embodied practice. However, when
this shift occurred, it is not the complex tantric practice of Kriya Yoga that was
allotted center stage, but rather the increasingly harmonially influenced system
of Yogoda.
Yogoda on the Western Metaphysical Stage
Even in its simplified form, Kriya Yoga would have been on the fringes of the
mainstream Western metaphysical spirituality. Its general principles of energ y
manipulation would not have been altogether unrecognizable, but the complex
ritual aspect was rather foreign even to Americans versed in traditions such as
Theosophy and New Thought. Based on the locations of Yogananda’s early lec-
tures in the Boston area, it appears that he circulated primarily in Unitarian
communities, which were then heavily dominated by strains of New Thought.
The Boston Brahmins, already steeped in the heritage of Transcendentalism,
were quite amenable to Yogananda’s vision. Although Christian Science has had
a historically problematic relationship with Asian religions,^40 the more diffuse
ideolog y of the New Thought movement freely incorporated Asian metaphysi-
cal concepts. Authors like Haddock, while not explicitly affiliated with New
Thought, espoused ideologies that fell into the even broader and more amor-
phous category of mind cure.
The positive affirmation techniques employed by Haddock and co- opted
by Yogananda, were popularized by Phineas P. Quimby, the first to incorporate
Mesmeric hypnotism into a larger complex of holistic mental healing, and by
Warren Felt Evans, Quimby’s student and perhaps the most prolific of the early
New Thought authors. Boston in particular was seen as an epicenter of conflu-
ence for all those tributaries of the modern New Age movement that ultimately
focus on what Paul Heelas has identified as “Self- spirituality,” or the divinization
of the human self.^41 Yogananda was speaking to an audience already prepared by
New Thought author Ralph Waldo Trine’s claims, in his wildly popular In Tune
with the Infinite (1907), that “when we come to the realization of the fact that we
are God- men, then again we live accordingly, and have the powers of God- men,”