Guests leaving Steve Jobs’s memorial each received a small box with a spiritual autobiography inside. The book first appeared in 1946, decades before Apple existed. Its author, Paramahansa Yogananda, wrote about a teacher who returned after death, a yogi who would not show up on a photographer’s plates, and a search for a pupil he believed had been reborn.
Eight of the ten stories below come straight from that 1946 text. The other two belong to the book’s later life: the memorial gift, and a letter a mortuary director wrote after Yogananda died. Each story carries its chapter reference, so you can find the passage yourself and see whether Yogananda is remembering his own experience or passing on something he heard. These are his accounts, and none of them has been independently verified.
1. Steve Jobs left memorial guests a spiritual book
In 2011, as guests left Steve Jobs’s private memorial at Stanford University in California, each was handed a small brown box. Marc Benioff says he opened his in the car. Inside was Autobiography of a Yogi.
He told that story at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2013, and everything here about the gift comes from his account, including his understanding that Jobs had chosen the book for his guests.
By then the book was decades old. Anyone who followed the gift back to the first edition would find a childhood in Bengal, meetings with Indian spiritual teachers, and Yogananda’s journey to the United States in 1920. The memorial put that old book on another generation’s reading list. [1]
2. Sri Yukteswar returned three months after his death
Yogananda dates the death of his teacher, Sri Yukteswar, to March 9, 1936. He buried him at Puri, a grieving student.
Then, he writes, he saw him again. It was June 19, three in the afternoon, in a hotel room in Bombay (now Mumbai). Chapter 43 tells the meeting as a physical one. Yogananda embraces his teacher and hears him explain that the body is newly created. They talk for about two hours, ranging through the spiritual worlds that take up much of the chapter. Then the teacher leaves, and the student carries the encounter into his written account.
He names no one else in the room who could describe it separately. The reunion, touch and conversation included, rests on his account alone. [2, Chapter 43]
3. Trailanga floated and sat on the Ganges
“Thousands of people, including a few who are still living, have seen Trailanga floating on the Ganges.”
Yogananda writes that line in Chapter 31. He doesn’t say he was one of those thousands, and the passage names no witness, so this is a spiritual account the book preserves.
Now picture the man. The chapter sets Trailanga Swami in Benares (now Varanasi, India). Yogananda describes him as very heavy, with a round face and a large belly, weighing more than 300 pounds, and he usually went without clothes. According to the book, he would sit on the water for days or stay underwater for long periods. He sits on the surface of the river itself. [2, Chapter 31]
4. Yogananda followed his search for Kashi to an expectant family
Yogananda’s student Kashi died, and Yogananda promised to find him again. Chapter 28 is the story of that promise.
For about six months he searched through a yoga practice. Then, walking with friends in Bowbazar, Calcutta (now Kolkata), he says he sensed an answer. With his companion Prokash Das, he followed the feeling toward Serpentine Lane. A servant opened the door of a house. The master of the house came down from the second floor, and Yogananda put a strange question to him: had his wife been expecting a child for about six months? The man said yes.
The baby comes later. “Later I visited the child, whose parents had given him his old name of Kashi,” Yogananda writes. He saw a resemblance and felt an affection he took as recognition. That identification is his own reading, and it has not been independently demonstrated. [2, Chapter 28]
5. Giri Bala said she had lived without food for fifty-six years
In 1936 Yogananda traveled to Biur, Bengal, with companions including his secretary, C. Richard Wright. Chapter 46 sets the scene closely. A short woman wrapped in dull gold silk, her head covered, sits cross-legged on the veranda of a two-story brick-and-plaster house under repair. Smaller village homes surround it.
This was Giri Bala. She told him she was 68, and that she had taken neither food nor liquids since she was twelve years and four months old. Her own explanation is in the same chapter, along with a lovely domestic detail: she enjoyed cooking for other people. That detail makes her a person, more than a bare claim about fasting, though it does nothing to establish the claim itself.
Word of testing reached him secondhand. A former neighbor told Yogananda that the Maharaja of Burdwan had tested her during three stays at his palace. His own visit was an interview, and he did not observe her across the decades she claimed. The chapter keeps her testimony and his belief in it. It holds no clinical record, and nothing in it makes surviving that long without food or water a demonstrated human ability. [2, Chapter 46]
6. Lahiri Mahasaya disappeared from twelve photographic plates
This story is secondhand from the start. Yogananda heard it from Kali Kumar Roy, a disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya. Lahiri was guru to both of Yogananda’s parents and to Sri Yukteswar, who became Yogananda’s own teacher.
As Chapter 1 tells it, an earlier group photograph had reportedly come out without the yogi in it. So a photographer named Ganga Dhar Babu tried again. “Taking every precaution for success, he greedily exposed twelve plates.” The plates show the bench. They show the screen. They do not show Lahiri.
The next morning Lahiri agreed to be photographed, and that sitting worked. Yogananda says the result is the familiar portrait reproduced in the book, so the book carries both the story and the picture from the sitting that succeeded. [2, Chapter 1]
7. A photograph and a blinding light filled a childhood sickroom
Yogananda was about eight, he says, when he came down with Asiatic cholera at the family estate in Ichapur, Bengal. Chapter 1 describes a boy too weak to raise his hands, and doctors who could do little for him.
His mother urged him to bow mentally before a photograph of Lahiri Mahasaya, her guru. He looked toward the picture. A blinding light, he writes, filled the room. “My nausea and other uncontrollable symptoms disappeared; I was well.”
According to Yogananda, his mother saw the light too, and he immediately had the strength to bend down and touch her feet. All of it, her experience included, comes through his memory of childhood, and the chapter offers no separate medical record. The photograph is the same Lahiri portrait whose origin he describes elsewhere in Chapter 1, the one from the twelve-plates story. [2, Chapter 1]
8. A mortuary director described Yogananda’s body before entombment
Yogananda died in Los Angeles on March 7, 1952, six years after the first edition came out. Later, Harry T. Rowe of Forest Lawn mortuary signed a notarized letter about the condition of the body before its entombment on March 27.
The line most people know comes from an excerpt published by the Yogoda Satsanga Society: “No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death.” That sentence has become part of Yogananda’s legacy, and it turns up in material published after his death.
Secondary discussions of the fuller letter add what the popular excerpts leave out: it records that the body was embalmed, and it notes a small brown spot on the nose before entombment. The letter’s observations also stop at entombment. They say nothing about what happened afterward, and the dates can’t support any claim stretching past twenty days. Rowe’s famous line and those missing details belong together. [3]
9. The Perfume Saint gave a scentless flower a jasmine fragrance
In Chapter 5, Yogananda meets Gandha Baba, also called Vishudhananda, who offers to produce any fragrance he chooses. Yogananda asks for rose. He says he smelled it coming from his own palm, though the yogi hadn’t touched his hand.
Then he picks up a white flower with no scent at all and asks for jasmine. In his telling, the flower takes on that smell.
He had suspected the experience might be his alone. Later his sister Uma noticed the fragrances, and Yogananda took that as reason to drop the suspicion. Her reaction still reaches the reader through him, and nobody tested any of it independently. He left impressed, and also unsure how much making perfume adds to the spiritual life he wanted to pursue. [2, Chapter 5]
10. Sri Yukteswar predicted the theft of a cauliflower
The last story has a sense of humor. Yogananda had grown six cauliflowers himself, and he brought them as a gift to Sri Yukteswar’s seaside retreat at Puri. In Chapter 15 he tucks them under his bed and joins his teacher and the other students on a walk.
Sri Yukteswar asks whether he locked the back door. Then comes the prediction: “Your six cauliflowers will soon be only five.”
They head back toward the retreat, and Yogananda says he watched a man walk in through the unlocked door and come out with one cauliflower. His money, watch and rings sat untouched in the room. Yogananda credits that oddly precise choice to his teacher’s power to perceive and influence thought, which the episode itself can’t independently establish. The ordinary details are part of the charm: a gift grown with care, a forgotten lock, and a student coming back to find five cauliflowers under his bed. [2, Chapter 15]
