- Narrator: I see behind the scenes. The visible man is a shadow. As soon as I change my consciousness, I see everything just as if it were a motion picture.
- George Harrison: While I was in India, I was with Ravi Shankar. He gave me "Autobiography of a Yogi." I just looked at the cover, and he just zapped me with his eyes. I mean, I can't imagine-- if I hadn't read that, I probably wouldn't have a life, really. I probably would have kicked the bucket, or I'd just be, you know, some horrible person, have a pointless life. It just gave meaning to life.
- Narrator: Steve Jobs apparently had only one book on his iPad. Lo and behold, that book turns out to be "The Autobiography of a Yogi."
- Narrator: Lahiri Mahasaya predicted my birth and that through this body many shall receive the spiritual enlightenment of India. The message of yoga will encircle the globe, he said. It will aid in establishing the brotherhood of man. But when I heard the word guru, it frightened me. For I knew what that responsibility meant.
- Narrator: The spine and the brain are the altars of God. That's where the electricity of God flows down into the nervous system, into the world, and the searchlights of your senses are turned outwards. But when you will reverse the searchlights, through Kriya Yoga, and be concentrated in the spine, you will behold the Maker.
- Narrator: That's what Self-Realization teaches-- the technique of meditation, recharging the body battery with cosmic energy. For it is not a creed or dogma, but a science of the soul and spirit. How the soul descended from the cosmic consciousness into the earth, and the body and the senses is the purpose of this work.
- Narrator: This earth is nothing but movies to me. Just like the beam of a motion picture, so is everything made of shadows and light. That's what we are-- light and shadows of the Lord, nothing else than that. There's one purpose: to get to the beam.
- Self - Physician and Physicist Harvard University: An individual is sort of an organized packet of consciousness that is part of a bigger ocean of consciousness, in that when you are meditating and going deep within, such as in yoga, your inner consciousness is combining with that higher consciousness.
- Brother Chidananda: You couldn't have described to a Westerner what Yogananda was teaching prior to the 20th century. There simply wasn't a vocabulary for it. The apparently solid body is made up of these whirling atoms, and protons, and electrons, and those are composed of energy-- the basic substance of creation.
- Narrator: The hard core of egotism is difficult to dislodge, except rudely. This flattening to the ego treatment was hard to endure. I sometimes felt that metaphorically he was discovering and uprooting every diseased tooth in my jaw.
- Narrator: Many teachers will tell you to believe and then put out your eyes of reason. My guru said, I want you to keep your eyes of reason open. In addition, I will open in you the eye of wisdom.
- Narrator: It's not about religion at all. It's about what's behind religion-- meditation. Meditate. That's what he said. Meditation is the catchword.
- Narrator: In America everybody is busy. And if you keep on running after too many hobbies, you won't have any time left for bliss.
- Narrator: Most important is to create a church within yourself where you are the minister in the temple of your own soul.
- Narrator: You had a kind of paranoia on the part of the husbands and law enforcement officials that, you know, we couldn't trust our women with these dark-skinned foreigners.
- Narrator: I mean, this was a period where miscegenation laws-- you know, you were forbidden in America if you were white to marry a brown-skinned man or woman. So I mean, it was illegal to mix the races at that point.
- Narrator: Walking only under the guise of renunciation or non-attachment is the easy part. It shows more spiritual fiber to live a godly life in the jungle of civilization.
- Herb Jeffries: And I said, Guruji, all my life I heard thou canst not, thou shalt not, thou must not. These are the rules of the religious teachings that I've heard around my relatives. What I want to know from you is, what canst thou?
- Herb Jeffries: But I will not promise you that as you continue to study these teachings that the desire to do these things will not fall away from you.
- Narrator: Repeated performance of an action creates a mental blueprint, causing the formation of subtle electrical pathways in the brain, somewhat like the grooves in a phonograph record. Your life follows the grooves that you yourself have created in the brain.
- Deepak Chopra: Modern times as it is now is based on what is called the subject-object split. I am the subject, and there is the universe. Whereas spirituality says that there is a consciousness that includes the subject and the object.
- Narrator: On the way out of the memorial service for Steve, they handed us a copy of Yogananda's book. Steve's last message to us was actualize yourself. That was Yogananda's message.
- Narrator: In the yoga tradition, there is a sacred practice of knowing when you will leave your body, and soul consciousness moves to a grander space.
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Top Gap
By what name was Awake: The Life of Yogananda (2014) officially released in Canada in English?
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