Autobiography of a Yogi

by Paramahansa Yogananda

‘God is simple. Everything else is complex. Do not seek absolute values in the relative world of nature.’

Do not imagine that rice maintains you, or that money or men support you! Could they aid if the Lord withdraws your life breath? They are His indirect instruments merely. Is it by any skill of yours that food digests in your stomach? Use the sword of your discrimination, Mukunda! Cut through the chains of agency and perceive the Single Cause!’

‘Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfactions. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love.’

Moral: Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire.

‘The vanished lives of all men are dark with many shames. Human conduct is ever unreliable until anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.’

‘Good manners without sincerity are like a beautiful dead lady,’ he remarked on suitable occasion. ‘Straightforwardness without civility is like a surgeon’s knife, effective but unpleasant. Candor with courtesy is helpful and admirable.’

There are disciples who seek a guru made in their own image.

‘Just as the purpose of eating is to satisfy hunger, not greed, so the sex instinct is designed for the propagation of the species according to natural law, never for the kindling of insatiable longings,’

‘Destroy wrong desires now; otherwise they will follow you after the astral body is torn from its physical casing. Even when the flesh is weak, the mind should be constantly resistant. If temptation assails you with cruel force, overcome it by impersonal analysis and indomitable will. Every natural passion can be mastered.

The forceful activating impulse of wrong desire is the greatest enemy to the happiness of man. Roam in the world as a lion of self-control; see that the frogs of weakness don’t kick you around.’

‘Remember that finding God will mean the funeral of all sorrows.’

‘Wisdom is not assimilated with the eyes, but with the atoms,’

‘Wisdom is better sought from a man of realization than from an inert mountain.’