No siddha leaves this world without having given some truth to mankind. Every free soul has to shed on others his light of God-realization.” How generously Paramahansa Yogananda fulfilled this obligation! — scriptural words voiced by him early in his world mission. Even if he had left to posterity nothing more than his lectures and writings, he would rightly be ranked as a munificent giver of divine light. And of the literary works that flowed so prolifically from his communion with God, the Bhagavad Gita translation and commentary may well be considered the Guru’s most comprehensive offering — not merely in sheer volume but in its all-embracing thoughts....

Paramahansaji manifested utter mastery of the yoga science of meditation cited by Lord Krishna in the Gita. I often observed how effortlessly he would enter the transcendent state of samadhi; each of us present would be bathed in the ineffable peace and bliss that emanated from his God-communion. By a touch, a word, or even a glance, he could awaken others to a greater awareness of God's presence, or bestow the experience of superconscious ecstasy on disciples who were in tune.

A passage in the Upanishads tells us: “That sage who has solely engaged himself in drinking the nectar which is no other than Brahman, the nectar which is the outcome of incessant meditation, that sage becomes the greatest of ascetics, paramahansa, and a philosopher free of worldly taint, avadhuta. By the sight of him the whole world becomes consecrated. Even an ignorant man who is devoted to his service becomes liberated.”

Paramahansa Yogananda fit the description of a true guru, a God-realized master; he was a living scripture in wisdom, action, and love for God. As the Gita advocates, his spirit of renunciation and service was one of complete nonattachment to material things and to the acclaim heaped on him by thousands of followers. His indomitable inner strength and spiritual power resided in the sweetest natural humility, in which a self-centered ego found no place to dwell. Even when he made reference to himself and his work, it was without any sense of personal accomplishment. Having attained the ultimate realization of God as the true soul-essence of one’s being, he knew no other identity apart from Him.

In the Gita, the zenith of Krishna’s revelations to Arjuna comes in Chapter XI, the “vision of visions.” The Lord reveals His cosmic form: universes upon universes, inconceivably vast, created and sustained by the infinite omnipotence of Spirit which is simultaneously aware of the tiniest particle of subatomic matter and the cosmic movement of the galactic immensities — of every thought, feeling, and action of every being on the material and heavenly planes of existence.

We witnessed the omnipresence of a guru’s consciousness, and therefore his sphere of spiritual influence, when Paramahansa Yogananda was blessed with a similar universal vision. In June 1948, from late evening throughout the night until about ten o’clock the next morning, a few of us disciples were privileged to glimpse something of this unique experience through his ecstatic description of the cosmic revelation as it unfolded.