Biography of a Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda and the Origins of Modern Yoga

6 Introduction

White’s definition thus effectively encompasses everyone from the stock- charac-
ter Yogis of folk narratives who go around possessing unwitting victims, to world-
renouncing meditators, to cosmos- encompassing gods. At the root of the Yogi’s
identity— indeed, his very being as a Yogi— is the superpower of tele- conscious-
ness, which can manifest in all of the other tele- phenomena with which we are
now familiar: television, telekinesis, and so forth— down to an absolute conjunc-
tion with the cosmos, which White refers to as “a self- magnifying self that has
become fully realized as the ‘magni- ficent’ universe.”^7 Lee Siegel boils down this
complex metaphysical concept to a much more familiar term: hypnotism.^8
If Siegel’s move makes the Yogi seem a bit too quotidian, consider that William
R. Pinch, in his study of armed Yogis in the medieval and (pre- )colonial period,
goes so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of the Yogi can be tied to a near-
universal definition of what it means to be “religious.” He declares:

Let us speak truth to power. There are certain universals that bind us.

Death is one of them. We are not bound by how we choose to confront

it. But confront it we must. And when we confront it and conquer it, we

enter the province of religion... . What if the definition we settle upon

allows wide latitude for the conjunction of religion and power? Surely such

a definition answers the original, justifiable complaint. As the “essence”

of religion, victory over death is precisely such a definition— because not

only does it allow for power, it is rife with it. With death as the common

denominator, the armed yogi is not a contradiction in terms: his conquest

of death requires that we see him as religious, and his conquest of death

guarantees worldly power.^9

In the Yogi we encounter a fundamental repudiation of the only certainty that
characterizes the experience we term as human. This certainty is death, or, as a
famous skeptic who was prone to having supernatural experiences and liked to
call himself Mark Twain said, “death and taxes.” To be human is to die. The Yogi is
the human who has transcended this condition. It may be due to this precise fact
that the yogic is so often conflated with the superhuman in modern popular nar-
ratives. It is also true that the Yogi’s conquest of death, as a human undertaking,
is inevitably enmeshed in worldly implications, goals, and consequences. This is,
perhaps, where the taxes become relevant.
However, modern- day practitioners of yoga are neither superpowerful armed
agents (or opponents) of the state, nor are they frequently witnessed possessing
the bodies of others or, indeed, attaining immortality. What linkage then, if any,
is to be found between pre- modern and modern yoga practice if the pre- modern
occupation with immortality (bodily or otherwise) has faded into the rationalism