The man who took yoga to the West 100 years ago, and his ‘spiritual White House’ in Los Angeles: the journey of Paramahansa Yogananda
- The Indian monk had a vision of a white mansion. Years later, he saw it in Los Angeles, bought it and made it the centre of a global spiritual organisation
- His teachings, which he called ‘the science of religion’, were so popular with Americans that his face appeared on the cover of an album by The Beatles
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.
