Celebrating 60 Years of BS

File under; The Siddhi of PR

The Los Angeles, California-headquartered Self-Realization Fellowship is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of the book Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda. While the work has brought perhaps millions to the study of yoga philosophy, they've all done so with heads stuffed full of the occluding nonsense Yogananda put in his manuscript in the attempt to make himself more popular than his Indian predecessor and superior, Swami Vivekananda.

It's a mystical romp full of so much mythological delusion as to make a Harry Potter book seem like a skeptics' encyclical. And none of it works very well anyway:

It's not easy, according to fellowship senior spiritual counselor Uma Mata, 71, who was only 9 when Yogananda invited her to join his society.

"I haven't experienced samadhi," she said. "It's what I'm working toward."

All because her head is full of the occluding nonsense about samadhi she's come to believe and promulgate all this time. Maybe Yogananda is getting her back for the coup she engineered in the 60s against his appointed successor, Donald Walters. While that man has had his own problems over the years, we get the feeling he would have kept it all a bit more real than SRF matriarch Mata Daya has.