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

58 Biography of a Yogi

grounded phenomena continued to filter into the public imagination. Whether
the Yogi— or the more domestic Spiritualist medium— actually controlled physi-
cal reality or simply its perception in the minds of others, the mechanisms of his
method still required elucidation.
Ultimately the vision of the Yogi as a superpowerful mystic proved appealing
because it was an alluringly exotic but ultimately familiar instantiation of an already
pervasive Western trope of the perfected human being. Emerging out of the per-
fectionistic concerns of Western esotericism and alchemy, this notion of the super-
man, glorified in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891), manifested
its darker side in the eugenics fervor and Social Darwinism movement of the late
nineteenth century. As has been argued by Mark Singleton, the growing enterprise
of modern yoga was by no means uninvolved in these developments.^4 In American
metaphysical spirituality, however, the notion of human perfection took on a sun-
nier disposition and a more optimistic tone aimed at healing and the transcendence
of human limitations. The Yogi found himself quite at home amidst those tributar-
ies 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.^5 In the
figure of the Yogi rested a concrete example— supported by millennia of “Oriental”
wisdom— of the cosmic destiny of human potential. Only a year after the publi-
cation of Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (1896), Ralph Waldo Trine’s wildly popular In
Tune with the Infinite (1897) would proclaim that “in the degree that we open our-
selves to this divine inflow are we changed from mere men into God- men.”^6
In Trine’s words, we see the second half of the superhuman equation. Human
evolution, whether it be understood materially or spiritually, could not be ren-
dered intelligible without a complementary vision of the cosmos that could
accommodate the superhuman telos. If humans can become superpowerful, it is
only by means of approaching the ultimate reservoir of that power, the cosmos
itself, and if evolution is a fundamentally natural process, then the cosmos has to
hold a natural answer to the forces that seem profoundly supernatural. Catherine
Albanese, who has given us the most thorough historical account and theoretical
understanding of the purview of metaphysical traditions to date,^7 has stated that

for metaphysical believers everything is linked to everything else— cut of

the same cloth, as it were— and in metaphysics life becomes holographic.

One piece of the universe can operate or act on any other piece of the

universe, and, with the guiding power of Mind for steerage, seemingly

miraculous change can become common- place and ordinary.^8

But what is this “cloth”? Depending on the particular school of metaphysics, it
might ultimately come down to God, or Spirit, or Mind. For Albanese, the least