Thoughts on Autobiography of a Yogi

I finished the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda this past week on Audible. It was a very intriguing book and I didn’t fully retain everything that the book offered but I’ll jump into some of my thoughts here.

Listening to this book

This was a difficult book to listen to. The ideas it talked about were deep and abstract, which I have learned is more difficult over audio (at least for me).

The world of meditation

One reason I’m so high on this book is because of Steve Jobs. He arranged to give it to each attendee at his funeral, and raved about it.

I only internalized about a third of the book (that might even be a stretch), but from what I was able to take away I think I understand the surface of Jobs’ love of this book. It dives into some of yoga’s origins, and it shows the complexity of life.

This gets a little deep, but I believe in a greater being and in a purpose for us to be here. There are a variety of reasons behind that that I don’t want to get into very much here, but the stories that are shared by Yogananda in this book reaffirm to me this idea.

There’s an entire world of spirituality, meditation and yoga that I want to explore, and this book reminded of that.

In general

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing I retained less than I had actually thought but here are my overall thoughts on the book.

I walked away from it with the following:

• I think there’s this world beyond the living that you can only understand once you have a really good grasp of who you are and about the world. I don’t quite understand what it’s like, but it seems like a place where you can read signs that foretell of future events and you can understand people at a totally new level
• I want to spend some portion of my life (sometime in the next 5 years) exploring my spirituality. From an economic perspective (since I sort of like to look at things like that), I’m going to be spending many years of my life in a profession and around other people. So the sooner and the better that I understand myself, where I get my energy, what I like & dislike, what I’m good at, etc. the better off I am going to be, and I think a big piece to those puzzles is exploring spirituality. Especially for me, given my current religious standing and the connection that I have felt during the time I have spent in Israel
• People like Steve Jobs are so much different and impactful than everyone not because they were born like that. He was always a special person, but the connection that he had to his spirituality, and the fact that he advocated for this book so heavily makes me think there’s this key in spirituality and meditation
• I now want to go to India more lol
• I need to re read this book as a paper copy

• Thoughts on this review/the book in general? Comment or send me a note :)
• Rest of my reading list here