balinese wood carving - Yogis are holy men and great mystics, many of whom also possess the gift of prophecy. A yogi is a person proficient in yoga. An example of a yogi is Pramanhansa Yogananda. Born Mukunda Lal Ghosh on Jan 5, 1893 in the northern Indian city of Gorakhpur. Died Mar 7, 1952 in Los Angeles, USA. From the age of seventeen, he was trained in the yoga discipline by Swami Sri Yukteswar for ten years. Pramahansa considered his gurus as avatara. He was conferred with the Swami order in 1915, after graduating from the University of Calcutta. He founded a ‘how to live’ school for boys where yoga spiritual training was combined with modern educational methods. He went to the United States, founded a society called Self-Realization Fellowship in 1920 and five years later he settled in Los Angeles. He popularized a form of yoga called Kriya Yoga. He is well known for his ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ and an English translation of ‘The Bhagavad Gita’. In his autobiography, he refers to the part of the brain above and between the eyes as the ‘Christ consciousness center’. His disciples have deified him as an avatar.
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