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

76 Biography of a Yogi

Vivekananda thus had little patience for the occult and the ostentatious dis-
plays of the supranormal. His diagnosis of Theosophy’s profound Spiritualist
roots is, of course, accurate, though ideologically the Mahatmas are perhaps more
closely related to the Adepts of Rosicrucianism than they are to the parlor spooks
of Spiritualism. It is clear that Vivekananda has no excess of respect for Blavatsky’s
phenomena, which he associates with other elements of a popular Yogi’s unseemly
reputation— that is, “charlatanry” and “mango- growing fakirism.” The latter
refers to the popular street magic trick, mentioned earlier, that appears in the
descriptions of the earliest European travelers in which a mango tree “magically”
blossoms from a seed before the very eyes of the audience. It is significant that in
Vivekananda’s critique he ascribes this trick to the originally Islamic fakir, not
the (Hindu) Yogi. In fact, Raja Yoga might be read as Vivekananda’s attempt to
rehabilitate the persona of the Yogi— though this is not his explicit concern— by
strategically (re)defining yoga in modern and scientific terms.
Vivekananda, while not denying the reality of yogic superpowers, famously
rejected their usefulness in matters of spiritual advancement. Nevertheless, affirm-
ing the power of the Yogi is essential to his argument regarding the universal sig-
nificance of the practice and, more important, the philosophy of yoga. Establishing
yoga as a science is fundamental to the thrust of Vivekananda’s work, and it is
precisely here that the elements that De Michelis has identified with his esoteric
Naturphilosophie— namely the “Prāṇa Model”— come into play. As De Michelis
has observed, Vivekananda’s cosmolog y represents an odd departure from tra-
ditional Sāṃkhyan and even Vedāntin notions of cosmogonic emanationalism.
Rather than relying on the commonly accepted cosmic substratum of prakṛti and its
composite guṇas, Vivekananda identifies two primary universal principles: prāṇa
and ākāśa. He proceeds to describe their relationship in Raja Yoga as follows:

By what power is this Akasha manufactured into this universe? By the

power of Prana. Just as Akasha is the infinite, omnipresent material of

this universe, so is this Prana the infinite, omnipresent manifesting power

of this universe. At the beginning and at the end of a cycle everything

becomes Akasha, and all the forces that are in the universe resolve back

into the Prana; in the next cycle, out of this Prana is evolved everything

that we call energ y, everything that we call force.^48

As others have noted,^49 Vivekananda was not a remarkably systematic writer. Even
more significantly, he was not a metaphysician in the primary sense. Nevertheless,
this schema is carried through the entirety of his collected works and therefore
clearly constitutes a coherent metaphysical vision. Other sections of the same text
indicate that Vivekananda is aware of Sāṃkhyan metaphysics, the role of ākāśa,