One book to Re-read every Year!

TheDawnChorus
2 min readJan 31, 2022

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Photo by the author Rajani Singh. Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramhansa Yogananda

You could be a believer or a skeptic, I don’t care.

Something that I initially started to keep my old flame of physics alive, led me to discover this book. I don’t exactly recall how I made the leap.

The journey goes — from peeking into great theoretical physicists' minds to leaning on their advocacy for Quantum Physics and String theory. Reading through them as quickly as I could, and grasping every big and small detail, I still felt unsatisfied and was left wanting for more. By now I understood the big questions but where and how do I find the answers to the big questions.

It's deeply humbling how little we know about our own universe.

That thought and hunger alone led me to a long-lasting lust for spiritual awareness. An interesting path sprinkled with a taste of meditation, a reflection on my life philosophy, and a strong appreciation of nature and the cosmos. For me, this journey was not new in retrospection but I was rediscovering myself again through this journey. I spent more time dwelling on books of spiritual devotion, poetry, philosophy, and such. And somehow I knocked myself into this epic finding, ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’.

My pen is not mighty enough to review this masterpiece. But what it led me to discover is strange openness to new ideas and possibilities.

If you know it, you know it.

This isn't a self-help book by any standard, as many would agree. But that's what I took away from it. Beats any other personal development book or framework I have read so far. Why? This book gave me a strong grounding for a positive mindset, which like my cycle comes and goes. Only when I realized how tiny speck is my knowledge, my journey, my idealogy, did I understand how little I am in control of it. So my biggest takeaway was BELIEF. Believing in the power of my thoughts, as the book says ‘Thought is a force, even as electricity and gravitation’.

Sometimes we look for proof and validation before adapting something new into our lives, and sometimes we find proof as we adapt. If you have read this book, you may have found yourself chuckling and shrugging off, thinking no way these things could have actually happened. Maybe not, but even if 80% of this book is exaggerated reality and only 20% is the truth, oh man where does that leave us?!. Rather than wasting my time questioning it, I decided to believe in it. This is one book I strive to read every year, as I can't get enough! After all, it gave birth to my new favorite genre of Metaphysics. Wonder what I would discover the next time I read it.

Thank you for reading!

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TheDawnChorus

Thinker. Writer. Dogs & Philosophy — are what I am here for.