Awake: The Life of Yogananda (2014)

Anupam Kher: Narrator

Quotes 

• Narrator : Will is that which changes thought into energy.

• Narrator : I see behind the scenes. The visible man is a shadow. As soon as I change my consciousness, I see everything just as if it were a motion picture.

• Narrator : Steve Jobs apparently had only one book on his iPad. Lo and behold, that book turns out to be "The Autobiography of a Yogi."

• Narrator : Lahiri Mahasaya predicted my birth and that through this body many shall receive the spiritual enlightenment of India. The message of yoga will encircle the globe, he said. It will aid in establishing the brotherhood of man. But when I heard the word guru, it frightened me. For I knew what that responsibility meant.

• Narrator : The spine and the brain are the altars of God. That's where the electricity of God flows down into the nervous system, into the world, and the searchlights of your senses are turned outwards. But when you will reverse the searchlights, through Kriya Yoga, and be concentrated in the spine, you will behold the Maker.

• Narrator : That's what Self-Realization teaches-- the technique of meditation, recharging the body battery with cosmic energy. For it is not a creed or dogma, but a science of the soul and spirit. How the soul descended from the cosmic consciousness into the earth, and the body and the senses is the purpose of this work.

• Narrator : This earth is nothing but movies to me. Just like the beam of a motion picture, so is everything made of shadows and light. That's what we are-- light and shadows of the Lord, nothing else than that. There's one purpose: to get to the beam.

• Narrator : My guru could not be bribed, even by love.

• Narrator : The hard core of egotism is difficult to dislodge, except rudely. This flattening to the ego treatment was hard to endure. I sometimes felt that metaphorically he was discovering and uprooting every diseased tooth in my jaw.

• Narrator : Many teachers will tell you to believe and then put out your eyes of reason. My guru said, I want you to keep your eyes of reason open. In addition, I will open in you the eye of wisdom.

• Narrator : It's not about religion at all. It's about what's behind religion-- meditation. Meditate. That's what he said. Meditation is the catchword.

• Narrator : In America everybody is busy. And if you keep on running after too many hobbies, you won't have any time left for bliss.

• Narrator : Most important is to create a church within yourself where you are the minister in the temple of your own soul.

• Narrator : You had a kind of paranoia on the part of the husbands and law enforcement officials that, you know, we couldn't trust our women with these dark-skinned foreigners.

• Narrator : I mean, this was a period where miscegenation laws-- you know, you were forbidden in America if you were white to marry a brown-skinned man or woman. So I mean, it was illegal to mix the races at that point.

• Narrator : Walking only under the guise of renunciation or non-attachment is the easy part. It shows more spiritual fiber to live a godly life in the jungle of civilization.

• Narrator : Repeated performance of an action creates a mental blueprint, causing the formation of subtle electrical pathways in the brain, somewhat like the grooves in a phonograph record. Your life follows the grooves that you yourself have created in the brain.

• Narrator : A man who has reformed himself will reform thousands.

• Narrator : On the way out of the memorial service for Steve, they handed us a copy of Yogananda's book. Steve's last message to us was actualize yourself. That was Yogananda's message.

• Narrator : In the yoga tradition, there is a sacred practice of knowing when you will leave your body, and soul consciousness moves to a grander space.