Hagiography of a Yogi 175
them back into physical rebirth, those who have achieved the state of nirvikalpa
samādhi in their final physical incarnation permanently advance to one of the
astral planets in full consciousness of their trajectory. The physical body of the
last incarnation is in this case “resurrected” as an astral body of lifetrons. Thus,
Yogananda effectively combines Indian notions of the perfected body that a real-
ized tantric sādhaka achieves by virtue of his practice and Christian notions of the
resurrection body as a youthful and the perfected form of one’s earthly self that is
accessible at endtimes, as witnessed by the resurrected body of Jesus.
Yogananda’s exposition about the causal body is comparatively much more
brief. The causal body, which is made up of the minutest particles of differentiated
God- thought, does not appear to have a visible form beyond that of pure light.
Although causal bodies are still held together by desire, their desires are for per-
ceptions only and are immediately satisfied due to their ability to spontaneously
manifest anything through sheer thought. As there is no further differentiated
schema to lay out, the astral Sri Yukteswar simply paints an impressionistic pic-
ture of causal- bodied beings whose “bright thought- bodies zoom past trillions of
Spirit- created planets, fresh bubbles of universes, wisdom- stars, spectral dreams
of golden nebulae on the skyey bosom of Infinity”^51 for as long as they choose not
to or are unable to relinquish the final bonds of desire that delimit their subjec-
tivities from the undifferentiated cosmic absolute.
Beyond Metaphysics
Up to this point, even at the level of the extremely subtle causal materiality,
Yogananda has been dealing with the material world. Beyond this system of the
three bodies (and their correlating universes), however, Yogananda also adopts
a twofold classification of liberated beings: jīvanmukta, or “freed while living,”
and paramukta, or “supremely free.”^52 The first term is never fully elucidated by
Yogananda, but it seems safe to assume that this is the level of attainment that he
wishes to ascribe to realized Yogis such as Lahiri Mahasaya and Sri Yukteswar.
Jīvanmuktas enjoy the state of liberation while living for a limited time in their
physical bodies, after which they cast off their mortal forms at the time of death
and ascend to the higher astral realms. At the stage of paramukta, however, we
find a superhuman conflation of siddha and avatāra that describes the one being
who mostly closely approximates divine status in Yogananda’s work: Babaji.
The paramukta is a being who has completely surpassed the realms of māyā and
rebirth— that is, he exists entirely beyond all three forms of embodiment. If the
paramukta chooses to return to a human- like material body— which is, in accor-
dance with the traditional notion of an avatāra, a rare occurrence having a very
specific purpose— his body appears as a “light image” composed of lifetronic