Yogi Calisthenics 151
Oct. 16: “Using Super Electrons for Your Highest Success”
Learn to Contact God in Every Activity and Detail of Your Life. Feel His
Presence as a Great All- Enveloping Mantle of Bliss, Energ y and Thrilling
Life... . Greatest and Amazing Demonstration for Recharging Body
Battery.Oct. 17: “Divine Healing by Holy Ghost Christ Power and Yogi Method”
Bring your sick friends. The Swami will intone chants invoking the pres-
ence of the Great Masters and Yogic Saints of the World, as Christ,
Christna, and Buddha. Thousands have been liberated and healed of
bodily and mental sickness and the soul- suffering of ignorance.Oct 18 “Breaking the Bars of Fate by Soul- Force”
Control Your Destiny Thru the Infinite Powers Given You by the Creator!
Overcome Environment, Heredity, and Bad Habits Thru the Untapped
Source of Limitless Strength Within! Learn How to Solve Your Problems,
Spiritual, Matrimonial and Business.Volumes could be written on Yogananda’s creative spelling of Krishna as
“Christna” alone. Learning to bridge the gap between yoga, which Yogananda asso-
ciated with Hindu traditions, and Christianity was instrumental to Yogananda’s
mass appeal. This yielded the sustained use of eclectic terminolog y such as
“Christian Sat- Sanga” and “Yogoda Evangelism” in Yogananda’s materials and is
evidenced in the meditations provided at the start of every issue of East- West, from
1932 onward, that read more like Christian prayers than any Indian style of medita-
tion.^63 Given that Yogananda’s headquarters were firmly situated in the spiritually
eclectic milieu of Los Angeles, birthplace of the Pentecostal Azusa Street Revival
only a few decades prior, it is possible that he was attempting to capitalize on lin-
gering Evangelical fervor. The focus on “miraculous” healing forms a curious point
of intersection between American metaphysical and Evangelical spiritual currents.
However, in this context the use of Christianity also plays a larger purpose: to
establish the unity of religious goals as culminating in the state of perfected super-
humanity. Likewise, the lectures, taken as a whole, demonstrate the breadth of
Yogananda’s eclectic syncretism. In the course of a week’s worth of lectures, we
discover that Jesus, Krishna, and the Buddha are all representatives of a single class
of “Great Masters and Yogic Saints,” a class that every human being can join by
tapping into his or her “true nature of omnipotence” to “achieve the high destiny
of immortality” just as Yogananda’s living teacher had done. Not only this, but the
entire enterprise is entirely scientific— akin to the mechanically accelerated evolu-
tion of plant life— and the average person is only steps away from being able to