Long before he arrived in the United States to bring the ancient Indian practice of yoga to the West, Paramahansa Yogananda visited a temple in Indian-administered Kashmir and fell into an ecstatic trance. In his vision, he saw the temple transform into a gleaming white mansion. It sat on a hilltop in a distant land. Years later, he visited Mount Washington, a hilltop neighbourhood less than 10km (6 miles) from downtown Los Angeles. And there he saw it, the gleaming white mansion. “I recognised it at once from my long past visions in Kashmir and elsewhere,” he wrote. The mansion was the long-abandoned Mount Washington Hotel, and it would soon become the headquarters for the Self-Realisation Fellowship, the global organisation Yogananda founded a century ago this year. The lasting power and reach of the group is a testament not only to the yogi’s cross-cultural charisma and uplifting message, but to the qualities that made Los Angeles his ideal spiritual home. “Around the world, LA is known for being open-minded and a forerunner in all sorts of things – culturally, technologically and spiritually,” says Brother Chidananda, president and spiritual head of SRF, as it’s known. “He felt that LA was a place where he was most likely to find a receptive audience.” Yogananda bought the hotel in 1925 and immediately set about transforming its grounds into a lush and expansive oasis that includes a wishing well, an outdoor “temple of leaves”, a koi pond, trickling waterfalls and plenty of benches for meditation. Keep calm and breathe on: yoga tips to beat coronavirus fears Today, it houses a visitor centre and gift shop and an administration building that includes his living quarters, left exactly as they were when he died in 1952. (Even the food he was served that day remains preserved under glass.) About 200 monks and nuns live on or near the property, which SRF members call Mother Centre. They care for the garden, participate in prayer circles, publish the guru’s copious writings, offer spiritual counselling and help run the SRF’s more than 600 temples and meditation centres around the globe. “It is perhaps one of the few monastic orders that is growing, not shrinking,” says Lauren Landress, an SRF spokeswoman. Yogananda spent 32 years in the US, addressing tens of thousands in concert halls across the country, writing a bestselling autobiography that has sold more than one million copies, and instructing disciples that included George Eastman, founder of the Kodak company , and the pioneering botanist Luther Burbank. He counted Mahatma Gandhi among his friends, and US president Calvin Coolidge invited him to the White House. His influence on popular culture can still be felt – his face and the faces of his three gurus appear on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album – and on contemporary thought; Apple founder Steve Jobs requested that everyone who attended his memorial service be given a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi . Yogananda was born into a large, well-off family in northern India in 1893, and named Mukunda Lal Ghosh. In Autobiography of a Yogi , he describes a youth informed by encounters with holy men and miracle workers who could levitate or be in two places at one time. After graduating from the University of Calcutta in 1915, he took his vows as a monk, choosing the name Yogananda, which means “divine union with God through yoga”. I often think how followers of this path are so very much blessed, to have the spiritual tools, to have the wisdom, to have the understanding that they can draw upon during times of uncertainty, during times of crisis Brother Chidananda He founded a yoga school for boys in 1917, but three years later he had a vision that it was time to bring the spiritual wisdom of India to the West. The next day, he was invited to represent India at the International Congress of Religious Liberals, to be held that year in the US city of Boston. Days before he left for Boston, Yogananda wrote, he was visited by the mythical figure of Babaji, his guru’s guru’s guru, also known as “the deathless guru”. “You are the one I have chosen,” Babaji said, “to spread the message of Kriya Yoga in the West.” Central to Yogananda’s teaching is the idea that one doesn’t have to renounce worldly life or live in a cave to have a direct encounter with God. He taught that blissful, divine communion is available to all, and that methods developed in India thousands of years ago represent the fastest path to establishing that connection. The physical practice of yoga – known as the asanas or poses – is just one branch of yoga, and it wasn’t what Yogananda particularly focused on. He was more interested in teaching techniques of intense concentration. “What Yogananda brought is a fairly advanced and much more comprehensive meditation practise for people who feel they don’t want to be a dabbler any more,” Brother Chidananda says. Priest combines yoga and faith to treat addicts in India Yogananda called his teachings “the science of religion” because he believed his methods were testable. Faith wasn’t part of the equation. “It’s like chemistry,” Brother Chidananda says. “Regardless of whether you believe or not, if you follow the protocol with precision, you will get a predictable result.” This emphasis on the scientific method, and his belief that people of all races, genders and religious backgrounds could encounter the divine, helped the swami (a title of respect for a Hindu saint or religious teacher) connect with Americans. Today, LA is recognised as one of the most religiously diverse cities in the world – and that was true in the first half of the 20th century as well. The Azusa Street Revival, a three-year ecstatic revival meeting, started in 1906 and helped launch the Pentecostal movement. The flamboyant Aimee Semple McPherson arrived in LA in 1922 and quickly built a following in the tens of thousands, and in 1934 scholar and mystic Manly P. Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society to promote the study of the world’s wisdom literature. When Yogananda arrived in LA in 1924, he fitted right in. “I think what you’ll find connects the dots of all these new spiritual expressions – whether it’s Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or spiritualist – is a creative reinterpretation of traditions,” Soni says. “That was the ethos of Los Angeles when Yogananda came.” Yogananda’s followers chipped in to help him buy the Mount Washington property, which he called “the spiritual White House”. He held the first Easter sunrise service at the site even before the property was out of escrow (when it was held by a third party during the process of being sold). It’s a tradition that continues at many SRF temples today. Yogananda revered Jesus, and he saw it as part of his mission to awaken the Western world to the true meaning of the Gospels and how they aligned with Hindu philosophy. Yogananda continued to travel across America, but to stay in touch with his growing number of students across the country, he created the Self-Realisation Fellowship Lessons, a kind of mail-order yoga and meditation school. Hard copies of the lessons are still sent through the mail from the Mount Washington headquarters. What history can teach us about the coronavirus pandemic It wasn’t all smooth sailing: lawsuits and rumoured scandals were covered voraciously by newspapers at the time, although experts say accusations that Yogananda had inappropriate financial or sexual relations with his followers have not been corroborated. The bad press may have been inspired by racism and jealousy. “He was a brown-skinned Asian man, and he was confronting racial and religious prejudice,” Brother Chidananda says. “How do you think the orthodoxy reacted when he was speaking at the largest auditoriums? It was very threatening. Let’s be honest.” Yogananda arrived in the US as the Spanish flu pandemic was finally receding. Now, in another time of fear and anxiety, interest in his teachings is at an all-time high. With its temples and meditation centres closed, SRF officials say visits to the organisation’s website have more than tripled during the pandemic compared with last year, while interest in online prayer requests has increased by a factor of six. Inquiries about guided meditation are up 77 per cent. In a YouTube video recorded at the beginning of the pandemic, Brother Chidananda reminds Yogananda’s modern-day followers of what their guru had taught them – to arrive on the battlefield of life as a fully equipped warrior. “I often think how followers of this path are so very much blessed, to have the spiritual tools, to have the wisdom, to have the understanding that they can draw upon during times of uncertainty, during times of crisis,” he says. The ability to silence the static noise of fear that threatens divine consciousness. The unshakeable knowledge that within every person lies a wise, loving, joyful, eternal soul. That direct connection with God is always possible, for those who seek it. It’s the message Yogananda brought from India a century ago, since relayed innumerable times from Mount Washington.