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OCEAN (The Big Five)
Do Not Ignore Evidence

OCEAN (The Big Five)

Research and self-understanding should walk hand in hand.

The "Big Five" (each trait exists on a high/low scale) is the most used current psychometric measurement perspective in personality psychology. The five dimensions are:

Openness - also: Culture, Originality, or Intellect
Conscientiousness - or Consolidation, or Will to Achieve
Extroversion - or Surgency
Agreeableness - or Accommodation
Neuroticism - including: Need for Stability, Negative Emotionality

The recently developed OCEAN's five factors (an acronym for the Big Five) have emerged and are considered the most reliable personality factors today. They are rooted in statistical findinds (and also go back to Gordon Allport thinking from the 1930s).
OCEAN has five dimensions, and they were crystallised from "cluster statistics". OCEAN is currently the most reliable and well-validated system of trait description - fit for times of peace, more unfit for war", because openness and agreeableness that are desirable in times of peace, may hinder combating, and extroversion too may not fit secrecy making and desorientation (lying) that often goes along with warfare. Compare the traits above. [MORE]
You can test yourself - find out a bit about your personality - by using the Big Five Personality Test. You can get a free personality test thereby: www.outofservice.com/bigfive/

Do Not Ignore Evidence

Self is a worthy experience. Alas for some other experiences.

One night miss Laurie Pratt, who became Yogananda's editor for many long years, saw Yogananda in the mirror when she was alone in a room, but it is regarded in SRF as a good experience, a worthy gift:

Into [the] dark night of his soul came the light . . . this man felt the heavy weight of despair lifting from his heart . . . There . . . the face of the Hindu teacher. [F1]

As Yogananda's editor she did not steer him away from writing articles that praised fascism, dictatorship, and Benito Mussolini in the early thirties.

Kriya Ideology

Yogananda changed his catchwords about kriya as a means of speeding up human evolution some way or other . . . In the early days his parole was that about half a minute's kriya (a round) equalled a month's natural development. Later he taught it equalled a year's natural, diseaseless development. By this he greatly changed the doctrine of his own guru, the Hindu swami Sri Yukteswar. He too taught "one kriya equals one month's development". Could Yogananda have made the handed-over kriya twelve times more effective? Traditionalist kriya yogis in India think no.
A former disciple of his explains it:

After five years of effort in America, beginning in 1925 . . . Yogananda began to modify and adapt his teachings to the West . . . to overcome the . . . resistance of Christians who were suspicious of the foreign teachings of a Hindu swami. As a result, Yogananda began to enjoy remarkable popularity. . . . However, in his attempts to attract Westerners to the path of Yoga, he tended to focus on the miraculous, and most readers of his "Autobiography" come away with many romantic notions of the path. They are left with many unrealistic expectations. - Marshall Govindam.
[www.babajiskriyayoga.net/english/babaji_2.html]

After popularity had been won by dispensing with original teachings and adjusting to get accepted among Christians back then, Yogananda established a headquarters on a hill in Los Angeles in 1925.

Former SRF Monastics and Control Issues

"Far from court, far from care." Some disgruntled SRF members and several former SRF monastics have quite recently stopped being affiliated with SRF. One third of the SRF monastics left the premises and tried to "move on".
Others who once were heavily involved with SRF and served as lay persons there, have got second thoughts, and a few of them have come to think blackly about the guru's meditation techniques:

We ought not to fear to practice conscious death, i.e., give rest to the internal organs. Death will then be under our control. [Yogananda, in Scp 78]

Find more gist from Yogananda's book, The Science of Religion on-site [LINK], or see or chapter 26 in the guru's famous Autobiography of a Yogi.
In SRF - which is not really a do-it-and-die-fast cult - they also teach an old meditation method called Hamsa (variously spelled). It is used to calm down. I have not seen any reliable evidence that the guru's methods are maddening or dangerous, but a "fool with a tool" can manage to damage himself and others in surprising ways at times. As they say, "Children and fools shouldn't play with sharp tools. [Ap 606]" "A bad workman always blames his tools. [Dp 207]" Neat meditation methods should not be declared harmful until it is proven.
I have not seen any scientific evidence that it brings about cosmic consciousness after a million well done kriya rounds either, and till it is proved, it is most likely better to treat that claim as one more marketing blunder, at least in the light of the teachings of Yogananda's own guru, who thought the goal was reached at least 144 times slower. "At least" because Yogananda also left out parts of the kriya system that are taught to be essential for the practice, and simplified other parts - in addition to bringing a 144 times more speedy scenario than his guru, whom he called a jnanavatar (glorious wisdom incarnated). Honour him thus?
One should learn to inspect. An alternative to it is to be taken in.The alternative, to be taken in.
Yogananda renders a hoax book by a Notovitch, he "buys" it wholesale. Experts have debunked the book. [MORE]
Yogananda stands up with a "spiritual commentary" to the medieval Persian poem Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam. Yogananda's approach revolves around "key symbols" that Yogananda "finds" and uses, but most of them seem to be missing in any original. "Spiritualizing" non-existing keys denotes a masquerade. [MORE]
The ultimate "trick teaching": Babaji teaches the universe is unreal. and Yogananda: "The world is nothing more than a cosmic dream — this life is a dream," said Paramahansa Yogananda [Ak 237, 240]. Hence, that teaching is unreal too. But he did not stop to consider that.

Punk Yogi: "Sometime after I was born, I joined a cult — one of the nicest cults you could ever hope to be damaged by. . . . Lacking a purpose, I've found a new one in criticizing my cult."

Literature
Ak: Yogananda, Pa.: Man's Eternal Quest. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1982.
Ap: Mieder, Wolfgang (main editor), Stewart A. Kingsbury, and Kelsie E. Harder: A Dictionary of American Proverbs. (Paperback) New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Dp: Fergusson, Rosalind. The Penguin Dictionary of Proverbs. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
Scp: Yogananda, Pa. The Science of Religion. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1953.

[F1] Tara Mata (Laurie Pratt). "Forerunner of a New Race". Self-Realization Magazine [www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/7587/NewRace.htm]

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