How I Met My Guru

by Swami Kriyananda
Direct disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda,
author, Autobiography of a Yogi

I had been born into a well-to-do Western home, and was accustomed to Western luxuries. I had no reason to doubt that I could have a successful life pursuing Western values. All my friends dreamed of having material success, marriage, and a happy home in a well-to-do suburb. I lived in Scarsdale New York, one of the wealthiest suburbs in America. I was miserable!

“What is this all for?” I kept asking myself. What is money but a burden forcing one to earn more and more simply to keep afloat? What is marriage, except bondage to ego-fulfillment? What is a nice home but a glorified chicken coop, where one waits for that butcher, death, to chop off his head? What is happiness itself? I looked about me, and saw no one really happy. Worse still, no one seemed to want to face the all-important question of life’s very purpose.

I was desperate. I had to know God. The churches, unbelievably, hardly mentioned Him. No one seemed to think it realistic to seek Him, nor considered it even possible to know Him. “Don’t be fanatical!” I was counseled when I spoke of my longing to know God. I found no one who could give the answers I so urgently needed, no one who seemed blessed with wisdom."

And then I found Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda. I knew at once that in him I’d found what I wanted.

This was 1948. I knew nothing about the Indian teachings. Words like yoga, karma, guru, and all the Indian terms so widely known in the West today were totally new to me. Yet I knew that this man, Paramhansa Yogananda, had what I was seeking.

I took the next bus across America from New York to Los Angeles—four days and four nights. Meeting him, my first words to him I’d never imagined myself speaking to anyone: “I want to be your disciple!”

And so my life truly began. I was accepted. “I give you my unconditional love,” my Guru told me. I was overwhelmed. He asked me to make the same commitment. How could I not? He asked me to give him my unconditional obedience. Despite my desperate need, I had to be sincere. “What if ever I think you are wrong?”

“I will never ask anything of you,” he replied, “except what God wants.” Gladly, then, I gave him that promise. Never did he disappoint me. Far from making me an automaton, obedience to him greatly strengthened my own will. In his guidance I found ever-increasing inner freedom.

I’d had no idea what it meant to be a master. I knew nothing of saints and gurus. My ignorance may have helped me in that at least I had nothing to unlearn. In him, however, I found a greatness I’d never dreamed existed. It was like living in the presence of God.

I don’t mean his every utterance was like some pronouncement from a mountaintop. He was delightfully human — not that he displayed human flaws, but only that he showed the highest potential in human nature. He was humorous, ever natural, and yet remote also, as though living in perpetual awareness of God. Gazing into his eyes was like looking into infinity. I never saw in those eyes the slightest hint of ego-consciousness, of likes or dislikes, of desires or aversions: only constant, loving compassion.

He wore his wisdom, as I wrote in my autobiography, like a comfortable old jacket: with complete ease. In his presence, however, one felt constantly his emanation of divine joy and love. He was ever conscious of another, higher world. He also showed again and again an intimate knowledge of my nature. Once he said to me: “I know every thought you think.” If ever I held a thought in meditation that was incorrect, he would tell me so the next time I saw him.

And he guided not by words merely, but by inspiring ever-deeper insight in myself. How can I describe what it was like to live with him? The short confines of this article leave me helpless.

I have been his devoted disciple since that day nearly fifty-six years ago. It has been the greatest blessing of my life. I live now only to serve him and his mission. That’s why I have come to India at this late stage in my life, after having founded seven thriving communities in the West where already some one thousand people live. It is my honor and joy to be able to serve here in the land of his birth. As my Guru was Indian, so do I feel, at least partly, Indian myself!








Swami Kriyananda, author of The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita, as Explained by Paramhansa Yogananda, is an internationally respected authority on yoga, meditation, personal development, and spirituality.