To a Spooky start
He had a spooky stare, it was unsettling, I try to change direction and move sideways, but it made no difference, he continued to stare sideways - but this happened without him turning his head even by a fraction of angle in any way. I wondered how one could do that!
Anyway, I continued to ignore and move on with my busy life. Occasionally I still did encounter him, however I refused to give any attention, but I observed that he continued to stare from the cover of his books at every bookstore I went.
I am an avid book reader and visiting bookstores was my favorite hobby. I would read any book given a chance, except for anything that sounded even remotely close to spirituality, philosophy etc. I happily led my mundane life in the modern world, a life of ignorance steeped in deep and yet pointless and unhealthy toxic competition with almost anyone in your life and everything around your life.
The success parameters of life today are skewed and retarded. We measure success against the number of materialistic possessions, wealth, number of houses owned, number of cars owned, inventory of your luxury goods etc.
I mean seriously. What more can go wrong with us humans? How sick and obtuse does this sound? And yet unfortunately most of us are party to it, in fact we contribute exponentially towards this deteriorating way of life and passing it on to the future generation as well.
We can come with all kinds of excuses to stick to this way of life, or we have an option to come out of the rut, escape this great rat race, rise above the clouds, see from up above and get a true perspective of life. But is it really that easy to do this?
No, it definitely is not an easy undertaking. Luckily, we do have some great souls guiding humanity since time immemorial.
One such humble and great soul is my beloved guru Yogananda Paramahansa. No matter what your rank is on the scale of materialism, you can easily rise up, create a meaningful and fulfilling life for yourself. We all have a choice, and we consciously must choose what really matters at every stage. How I came about reading this great masterpiece, the world’s best selling spiritual book for the last 7+ decades is boringly explained below in as little statements as possible in order to not chase you away from my article.
My stride with Autobiography of a Yogi
Yes, I really do wish you read through the end and gain something out of this. Let’s be honest – we all write out of passion, but it still involves the idea of money, we do like it when our articles earn money for that’s how we can make this our mainstream work and continue to churn out interesting anecdotes for everyone’s benefit. But this article is different, I do not write this for money, fame, or recognition, I genuinely want everyone to take away some life changing epiphany from this great book like I did for this masterpiece has a power to change your perception of life and alters your complete thought process.
Coming back to my bookstore ordeal – I still saw him staring at me every time. It was none other than Yogananda Paramahansa staring at me from the cover of his world’s best selling book “Autobiography of a Yogi”. Finally, after several years of ignorance and neglect I decided to let go and buy the kindle version. I started reading with great fervor only for the momentum to fizzle out in few days and banish the book to oblivion.
Years passed, I moved to Canada from India. I continued my materialistic pursuits with pathetic success rate to my self-imposed milestones. However, in parallel I was being exposed to spiritual connotations in form of YouTube videos, blog articles etc. I also got in touch with a long last friend who connected back and was deep routed in spiritualism. She was more like a sister to me, and we connected so well on spiritual topics. I did not know I had so much interest in my culture and traditions, I was proud of it, but I still had my leaning on materialistic life.
In the meanwhile, I was presented with a unique and unfavorable position (or I thought so) where my parents, wife and baby daughter had to travel to India for couple of months, while I stayed put here in Canada. I was alone and continued with my narcissistic life enjoying the pleasures of meat, liquor and the evil box called Television. The repetitive cycle of work-eat-sleep hit me deeply which led to me questioning myself – What is life really? Where do I go from here? Is this all there is to life? What is our purpose here? What is it that we achieve after all these unending and unsatisfying milestones are breached?
The citadel of my normie life came down crumbling and I lost my sanity. Eventually I decided to not touch any social media app and give myself a break. ‘Break’ to me meant going back to my favorite hobby of reading books – except that I had taken a liking to kindle books. I scrolled through my kindle library and found the masterpiece “The Autobiography of a Yogi” from the depths of oblivion. I decided to give it a go, Yogananda still gave me that spooky look even from the cover page of his eBook – gosh he is persistent!
“Fine, you win, and you get to have the last laugh after all these years” I thought and harped on with the book. I race through the chapters one after the other and found nothing captivating or out of ordinary, it was rather boring, and I had to stop myself from sleeping mostly. But I am not sure how or why – something kept me going, I could not stop reading the book unlike my failed first attempt several years ago. I continued to read and read and after few chapters came the real change. I still don’t know at what point I got hooked to this book, it was un-put-downable, and I raced through the book like none other before.
The life and times of Yogananda was filled with miracles galore ever since his childhood and yet the narration never lost its touch with the regular day-to-day affairs and chores of human life filled with anger, ego, happiness, sadness and so on which helps readers connect well with the book.
Yogananda’s life was no different except for the fact that he had several Gurus guiding him to his utter dissatisfaction until he finds his true guru Sri Yukteshwar Giri with whom he finds solace and realizes that he has finally found what he was searching for throughout his life. His days with his Guru are a pleasure to read and teaches us invaluable lessons with no parallels. His tryst with Kriya Yoga which is the fast lane method to reaching the divine is the crux of his lessons.
It really does hit you deep and at some point, you realize that all the materialistic pillars that formed the foundation of your characteristic palace has no real meaning and we all are manifest of the same divine with absolutely no difference except for the fact that we (each fragment of divine) occupy different bodies in this lifetime and are privy to almighty’s divine play. Once your part of the play is done you depart and severe all connections with the material world. Based on all the good and bad deeds (karma) of the sum-total of all your lives as humans on Earth you get to be born again or move on to higher plane!
May be some of you may already know all this and wonder what the heck is so special about this book? To be honest even I do not know! There is some power that this book holds that fundamentally changes you from within.
In about 2 weeks since I started (not even close to finishing the book)
I quit non-veg food (I was an avid carnivore)
I quit alcohol and had no craving of any sort
I performed daily spiritual practice as per my faith
I meditated a minimum of 15 to 30 mins per day
I became more empathetic towards everyone
I was able to keep my temper in check
I had an urge to move past all trivial issues in life and focus on real deal with better clarity
And many miracles that I really can't disclose
I could keep going. Anyway I know how this sounds!
Conclusion
At this point you probably have already concluded that I am a nutcase cooking up superficial nonsense. No matter what you think, I can vouch anywhere with full confidence that all these were result of reading this book.
All I can request you is – why not try this once? I promise you that this book will change you from the core, it will alter your characteristics, your thought pattern, your way of looking at life and your way of interacting with people.
We do spend endless hours on social media, just read this book once and I promise you that you will be a different person by the time you read the last chapter and without doubt your life will change.
You don’t have to take my word alone for this. Famous personalities including George Harrison, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Rajinikanth, Virat Kohli etc. swear by this book.
It’s high time we all strive to live for something better, a better and novel cause, a pursuit to leave behind a legacy for the upcoming generations. Hope you found something interesting and useful from this article. Adios 😉
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