Autobiography of a Yogi

Autobiography of a Yogi — summary

The book Steve Jobs gave to every guest at his memorial

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, his loved ones found a strange gift waiting at the memorial service. Each attendee received a small brown box. Inside was a single book, hand-picked by Jobs himself: "Autobiography of a Yogi" by an Indian monk named Paramahansa Yogananda. Jobs had read it once a year, every year, since he was a teenager in India. The book sat on his iPad as the only one he ever bothered to download. He wanted his last conversation with the people he loved to be a book about a Bengali boy who saw God.

That alone should make you curious. A man who built the most rational, design-obsessed company on earth used his final moment to hand out a 600-page book full of flying saints, resurrected gurus, and a Himalayan master who supposedly never aged. Why? What did Jobs see in this strange, dazzling, sometimes baffling autobiography that made it the one book he wanted his friends to walk away with?

This summary answers three questions. What actually happens in the book, beyond the miracles people argue about? What can a 21st-century reader, with bills and deadlines and a healthy skeptical streak, actually use from a yogi's life story? And why has it kept selling for over 80 years, in 50 languages, when most spiritual memoirs disappear in a season? You do not need to believe in levitation to get something out of this book. You only need to be willing to sit with someone who took the inner life as seriously as a scientist takes data.

A boy who remembered being someone else

Yogananda was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in 1893, in a Bengali family that took religion seriously but lived a normal middle-class life. His father worked for the railway. His mother ran the household. The strange thing about Mukunda, from the beginning, was that he claimed to remember a previous life. As a tiny child, he said he could feel himself sitting in a Himalayan cave, snow-covered and silent, in a body that was not his current one. He could not yet speak in full sentences, but he could already feel the loss of that older identity.