Rating: 
Summary: Yogananda's best
Review: This book has been more important to me than the bible. During the days when there was no one and nothing to soothe me a passage from this book has made me realize why I am alive. This is an uplifting book, however do not expect to pick it up and gubble it down. You must take it bit by bit ans savor it. The book also works for me like an answer to my prayers. I will for sure open THE PAGE that I need to read at that moment. I own every single book Yogananda has written. Any book by him is a sure winner. All his books calm you and soothe you like a lost friend, like a tonic, like a lover, you get transported to a different zone. These are part of my cherished library that I will never lend it to anyone. Yogananda is not just an author, he is a living Master with many followers worldwide.
Rating: 
Summary: Practical Advice from an advanced Soul
Review: This book is a compendium of Yogananda's talks given at his church.I found them very interesting and inspiring. He has several talks on Jesus that shed new light on him. He also gives practical advice on diet and how to think. I subtracted one star because the book focuses mainly on a way of thinking more than Spiritual Exercises you can use to gain experience with Spirit. Another minus is that he contends that you must seek quiet places to experience God (like most Eastern Gurus) like a cave or forest, if possible. While I think by reading "The Secret Language of Dreams" by Mike Avery and "The Art of Spiritual Dreaming" by Harold Klemp and seeing Spirit speak through everyday events, that Spirit speaks to us constantly through creation and going to a cave or mountain is shirking your personal responsibility NOT experiencing God. Nevertheless, anything by Yogananda should make it onto your reading list.
Rating:
Summary: The Heart Quest of all men and women . . .
Review: This collection of fifty public talks and reflective essays spans an amazing universe of human issues from the perspective of a yoga master who was trained in his youth by one of the most revered sages of India and who went on to Europe and the Americas to train tens of thousands of westerners in the practicalities and spiritualities of RAJA YOGA. Raja Yoga means literally, 'royal' or complete yoga - not just the calisthenics of the average superficial class taught in a modern gym. Raja Yoga subsumes the same essence of ethical, cosmological, and practical teaching that runs like a silver thread through the original fabrics of Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, and Hindu teachings (though ignored by dogmatic sectarians and muscle-bound materialists alike). Take as a first gift, chapter one: How Seekers First Found God. For perhaps the first time in the English we have a clear explanation and follow-up to Christ's puzzling pair of directions: Seek first The Kingdom / The Kingdom of God is within you. Yogananda gives us an unsurpassed overview of thousands of years of yoga experimental scientists studied HOW to "seek the kingdom within:" Here we learn WHY we are instructed to "be still and know that I am God" (PS 46:10) -- because stillness is necessary for us to go deeper (and higher) than sense perception to hear the omnipresent whispering of Spirit to our souls. Because the press of "civilization" urges us to be active and outer-directed, we are strangers to the very qualities that would help us experiences our soul-natures and our souls' yearning to express its divinity. The yoga methods of relaxation for body, breath and mind are beneficial to pursuers of ALL religions -- even to those of NO religion who yearn to awaken a higher level of functioning in mind and purer health in body -- for yoga is truly the original WHOLISTIC system. Raja Yoga shows how ALL human functioning can be optimized, including (if you're so inclined) the human search for its divinity. Throughout the variegated chapters of this volume you will find that the lotus of yoga blossoms in every realm of human existence: health, personal relationships, psychotherapy, and all spiritual searches. As the "complete" yoga instruction, Raja Yoga considers the importance of evolving your human work as spiritual work: in outer activity, heart-felt devotion, and discriminative rationality. But Yogananda always takes the reader back to the unique CORE of Raja Yoga: deep, single-pointed meditation upon the Unifying Source of our beings. It is impossible to describe the volume because it is so EXPANSIVE in the applications it makes of yoga teaching. Yet it offers a fundamental yoga lesson because it is also FOCUSED... in ever returning you to the unifying principle of all religions, all human yearnings, all quests: the empowerment of your being with the experience, knowing, and love of the soul. PS: You might reasonably doubt the authority of any author to offer advice that promises so much. The preface by Sri Daya Mata to this volume gives a close student's tantalizing glimpse of the author's stature and of his practices-what-he-preaches authenticity. For a look in more depth at the genuine humility with which this exalted soul expressed his insights, please see his Autobiography of a Yogi in his expanded 1951 edition, in either quality paperback...or mass paperback...
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