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Natural Sciences     Social Sciences     Humanities     Arts     Applied Arts and Sciences     Recreation An encyclopedia project—and more! Welcome to Citizendium, a wiki for providing free knowledge where authors use their real, verified names. We welcome anyone who wants to share their knowledge by writing and improving articles on virtually any subject. Expert authors can be recognized with a special role, but membership is open to all. See Recent Changes—an overview of articles we are writing now. Join us Join here and start a new article or improve existing ones. Get started: How to collaborate | How to format pages Wikipedians are very welcome! For more details on participation, see Why Citizendium? and Why I Contribute. Our help system Questions and answers to help you find the information you need More about the project We have a Charter to provide a framework for governance. We have 16,918 articles at different stages of development, of which 145 have expert-approved citable versions. Our community is collegial and congenial; everyone writes under his or her verified real name. We prefer new material but allow work from other sites to be imported and improved under certain conditions. For a brief guide on what Citizendium is and is not, see Myths and Facts; for more details, see the frequently-asked questions page. Students in higher education write here as part of their courses under our Eduzendium initiative. To learn more about the project, see our article on ourselves, our Help System, our financial report and our Statistics page. Follow us on Twitter (general news; new pages), Facebook or Google+. Comment on articles nominated for approval. You can discuss any article on its Talk page. We Need Support From Donations! Please help! Funds are used to pay for hosting our servers. See our financial report for complete details. Please make your donations here.

Some of our finest Citable Articles (145) Developed Articles (1,136) (16,918 total articles) Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality. — Jackson Browne, Life's Little Instruction Book        —add a quotation about knowledge or writing •Did You Know? •Citizendium Blog - Latest entry: 01-Jan-2013 Monthly Donation Day  |  Monthly Donor Honor Roll CZ:Monthly Honor Roll of Users Editing the Wiki Featured Article about Paramhansa Yogananda circa 1920. Paramhansa Yogananda (5 Jan 1893–7 Mar 1952) was one of the first Indian teachers from the Hindu spiritual tradition to reside permanently in the West, and in particular, he was the first to teach yoga to Americans. He emphasized the universality of the great religions, and ceaselessly taught that all religions, especially Hinduism and Christianity, were essentially the same in their essence. The primary message of Yogananda was to practice the scientific technique of kriya yoga to be released from all human suffering. He emigrated from India to the United States in 1920 and eventually founded the Self-Realization Fellowship there in Los Angeles, California. He published his own life story in a book called Autobiography of a Yogi, first published in 1946. In the book, Yogananda provided some details of his personal life, an introduction to yoga, meditation, and philosophy, and accounts of his world travels and encounters with a wide variety of saints and colorful personalities, including Therese Neumann, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Luther Burbank, and Jagadis C. Bose. Paramhamsa, also spelled Paramahamsa, is a Sanskrit title used for Hindu spiritual teachers who have become enlightened. The title of Paramhansa originates from the legend of the swan. The swan (hansa) is said to have a mythical ability to sip only the milk from a water-and-milk mixture, separating out the more watery part. The spiritual master is likewise said to be able to live in a world like a supreme (param) swan, and only see the divine, instead of all the evil mixed in there too, which the worldly person sees. Yogananda is considered by his followers and many religious scholars to be a modern avatar. In 1946, Yogananda published his Autobiography of a Yogi. It has since been translated into 45 languages, and in 1999 was designated one of the "100 Most Important Spiritual Books of the 20th Century" by a panel of spiritual authors convened by Philip Zaleski and HarperCollins publishers. Awake: The Life of Yogananda is a 2014 documentary about Paramhansa Yogananda, in English with subtitles in seventeen languages. The documentary includes commentary by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, among others. Footnotes