Autobiography of a Yogi

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1946

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Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 13 Summary: “The Sleepless Saint”

After six months in Sri Yukteswar’s ashram, Mukunda becomes restless and decides to visit Ram Gopal Muzumdar, a saint in the Himalayas known as the “sleepless saint.” Ram Gopal is not especially welcoming at first, rebuking him for failing to bow to the shrine at the temple, but after that he becomes more friendly and takes Mukunda to his cottage. The guru reveals that for the last 25 years, he has spent 20 hours a day in “yoga union” (157). In this state, he did not need any sleep because he was always with God. He says that one day, Mukunda will not need sleep either. At midnight, Ram Gopal falls silent, and Mukunda becomes aware that the room is filled with light. At dawn, Mukunda prepares to leave. Ram Gopal heals him of a pain in his back that had been troubling him for years. As he returns to Tarakeswar, Mukunda visits the temple again, and this time he makes sure that he prostrates himself before the altar.

Chapter 14 Summary: “An Experience in Cosmic Consciousness”

Back at Sri Yukteswar’s ashram, the guru tells Mukunda that the Himalayan mountains cannot give him what he wants. He touches Mukunda above his heart, and his disciple instantly has an experience of divine illumination. He is no longer confined to his body but has omniscient vision. He feels an indescribable joy and knows that God is bliss, that light is the essence of creation, and that he himself is infinite.

After that, the master instructs him to sweep the balcony floor, and Mukunda realizes that the secret is to live in a balanced way, experiencing the infinite at times but not allowing that to interfere with the performance of one’s day-to-day duties. As the days go by, Mukunda learns that by stilling his own thoughts, he can induce similar cosmic experiences. As his bliss in meditation continues, his guru confirms to him that he has indeed found God.

Chapter 15 Summary: “The Cauliflower Robbery”

Mukunda is spending his summer vacation in Puri, 310 miles south of Calcutta, where his guru has a hermitage. Mukunda presents Sri Yukteswar with six cauliflowers he has grown. As the guru and his disciples walk to the beach, Sri Yukteswar lightly chastises Mukunda for forgetting to lock the door of the hermitage. He says that Mukunda must be punished for his carelessness and that soon there will be only five cauliflowers, not six. Sri Yukteswar then plays a joke on his disciple. He sees a peasant dancing along the road, and he telepathically plants in the peasant’s mind the idea to turn around and go to the ashram and steal a cauliflower. Sri Yukteswar explains that this peasant had been yearning for a cauliflower, so he arranged for him to acquire one.

A few weeks later, Mukunda leads a religious procession across the beach. He thinks it will be too hot to walk barefoot on the sand, but unexpectedly the sky clouds over and there is a refreshing rain. Sri Yukteswar says that God responded to his prayer and changed the weather.

At a winter solstice celebration, Sri Yukteswar’s disciples prepare a feast for hundreds of people. Mukunda works hard at his tasks, and at night Sri Yukteswar allows Mukunda to sleep beside him in his bed.

Chapter 16 Summary: “Outwitting the Stars”

Mukunda does not believe in astrology, but Sri Yukteswar explains that everything in creation is linked through a mutual exchange of influence. He emphasizes that the soul is free and cannot be controlled by the planets, but nevertheless he wants Mukunda to wear an astrological bangle to minimize the adverse effect of past karma. He suggests an armlet of silver and lead, as Mukunda has a difficult astrological period coming up. In a month, he will have a liver illness, which could last six months, but if he wears the armlet, the illness will last for only 24 days.

Mukunda wears the bangle. The illness comes when the master said it would, and Mukunda is in great pain. After 23 days, he is still suffering, and he goes to Sri Yukteswar, who tells him that he has no pain. Mukunda’s pain instantly vanishes. After this, Mukunda accepts the validity of astrology.

Yogananda explains that Sri Yukteswar enlarged his understanding of not only astrology but also scripture. Sri Yukteswar offers insight not only into the Indian scriptures but also the Bible, including a symbolic interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve in which the tree of life represents the human body and the serpent represents “the coiled-up spinal energy which stimulates the sex nerves” (286). Mukunda is delighted to hear the interpretation because he has always been frustrated by the Adam and Eve story, viewing it as unjust that God punished not only Adam and Eve but also all the succeeding generations.

Chapters 13-16 Analysis

These chapters further complicate the theme of Visions, Miracles, Foreknowledge, and Healing as Mukunda continues to accumulate spiritual experience and knowledge.

Chapter 13, in which Mukunda visits the “sleepless saint,” resembles earlier chapters in which he visits saints who are known for a specific supernormal power. Ram Gopal, the sleepless saint, is one of the very few saints—perhaps the only one—in the Autobiography who makes a prediction that does not come true. He says that eventually Mukunda will be able to dispense with sleep, but Yogananda never mentions this again. A guru who never sleeps seems to be an unusual phenomenon even in an India that has so many holy men with unusual powers, and it is not mentioned in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, unless it is subtly implied in a sutra that focuses on some other power of the fully developed yogi.

In the book, Gopal’s sleeplessness is treated as further evidence of the transformation that comes with Realizing the True Nature of the Self. The saint explains to Mukunda why he does not need sleep. He goes into a “superconscious” state in which “all internal organs remain in a state of suspended animation, electrified by the cosmic energy. By such means I have found it unnecessary to sleep for years” (158). By tapping into “cosmic energy,” Gopal is able to remain awake without draining his own body’s energy. Like other miracles in the text, this one relies on a union between the individual self and the universal—one that lies at the heart of Yogananda’s theology. The language in which Yogananda has Gopal explain his miraculous power also advances The Coming Together of East and West. By referring to “suspended animation” and “cosmic energy,” Gopal offers a quasi-scientific explanation for a mystical phenomenon, thus implying a compatibility between “Western” science and “Eastern” mysticism.

When Mukunda returns to Sri Yukteswar’s ashram, there are further miracles, but these are of a decidedly small-scale and even humorous nature. Yukteswar admonishes him that he will not find what he seeks in the mountains, and he seems invested in redirecting his disciple’s attention to the quotidian and away from sublime vistas and spectacular powers. He grants Mukunda an experience of divine omniscience and total spiritual bliss and then immediately directs him to sweep the floor. The implication is clear: He must remain grounded in the ordinary world even as he becomes more and more attuned to cosmic consciousness. Yukteswar’s jocular miracle of the cauliflower—in which he claims to have telepathically induced a hungry peasant to steal a cauliflower from the ashram’s kitchen to “punish” Mukunda for leaving the door unlocked—operates in a similar spirit. He is subtly reminding his disciple to keep a sense of humor and not to get lost in abstractions.

This incident recalls a similar moment in Chapter 9: When Mukunda is bored at the lecture, the master chats with the Divine Mother, who arranges for the lights in the hall to go out so that the master and Mukunda can make their exit unnoticed. This is a miracle operating almost on the level of a schoolchild’s prank—and yet Yukteswar uses this unscheduled moment to grant his disciple a moment of divine vision. He looks around at the bustling street and sees the essential oneness of all people and things. The episode illustrates an idea fundamental to both Yukteswar's and Yogananda’s philosophy: that true wisdom comes from direct experience, not from lectures or books.