Why Aren’t We All Wanting to Be Babaji?
“The ancient Vedic scriptures declare that the physical world operates under one fundamental law of maya, the principle of relativity and duality.”
Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi is a powerful, life-changing book. It’s a modern-day account of the spiritual masters of India, written by someone who is himself considered a spiritual master of India.
Yogananda could have chosen to write allegories or long form poems, but he didn’t. He wrote a full-length autobiography, telling his story of Indian yogic life from childhood all the way to his eventual founding of two spiritual centers in California. He writes about his daily life, yogic philosophy, and performing miracles with humor and in everyday language, as if he were recounting it all for a friend.
Throughout the book, he spends time with masters, saints, mystics, and Gandhi. He introduces us to his guru, Sri Yukteswar, his guru’s guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Lahiri’s guru, the Maha Yogi, the Great Avatar—the incomparable, Babaji.
Yogananda was born in 1893. He wrote this book in the 1940s. This isn’t ancient history—it happened within recent memory.
It is said that Babaji plays with maya, “as a child plays with bubbles.” Sri Yukteswar resurrects himself. The female saint, Ananda Ma, touches a dying man’s forehead and cures his illness. By the end of the book, the ability to materialize, dematerialize, and levitate starts to seem like a common occurrence.
“God, the Sole Life, is an Absolute Unity; He cannot appear as the separate and diverse manifestations of a creation except under a false or unreal veil. That cosmic illusion is maya.”
Autobiography of a Yogi left me with one persistent thought:
We’ve set our aspirations too low.
Western culture has taught us that our highest aspiration is… A nice house? A successful career? Some Instagram followers? We’re conditioned to dream of being celebrities, sports stars, and influencers.
Meanwhile, there are humans halfway around the world who’ve achieved states of consciousness that make those goals seem laughable. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, or with material life, but because we’re aiming at the wrong target entirely.
We know the left brain has dominated the Western world and taken over the Master’s role. We’ve seen the historical sweep of patriarchal control and the neurological mechanism that locked it in. And we’ve seen what a right-brain-led life can look like.
Luther Standing Bear’s people showed us right-brain mastery in community life, and now the yogis show us just how far that consciousness can take us.
Our deeper goal, as Yogananda confirms, is to move beyond the left brain:
“To surmount maya was the task assigned to the human race by the millennial prophets. To rise above the duality of creation and perceive the unity of the Creator was conceived of as man’s highest goal.”
Maya—the illusion that we’re separate material objects in a meaningless universe—is the left brain’s worldview. The ego’s perspective. It sees life in terms of opposites and individual parts that are stuck in time. It believes it knows how the world works, because it has measured it, categorized it, and created a map for us to follow.
But what it doesn’t like to admit is that its map is just a useful tool. It’s not the ultimate reality.
Transcending maya means living from the right brain’s worldview. The soul’s perspective. It sees life as an ever-changing, interconnected, flowing whole. It alone perceives the oneness, the unity of creation. The Master looks up from the emissary’s map and understands the true nature of reality.
And knows that sometimes it needs to commission the emissary to make a new map.
Yogananda’s life story shows us that what the left brain believes is possible doesn’t even begin to express our full human spiritual potential. Sometimes you find just the right book to expand your mind, so you can start to question the boundaries of the map you’re using.
The yogis understood that perceiving unity requires living from the Master, not the emissary.
They put the Master in charge, just like Standing Bear’s people did.
What if we did that too? How far could we go?