stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

312 STRIPPING THE GURUS
A notarized statement signed by the director of Forest Lawn
Memorial-Park testified: “No physical disintegration was
visible in his body even twenty days after death.... This state
of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from
mortuary annals, an unparalleled one.... Yogananda’s body
was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability” (in
Yogananda, 1998).
The editors at Self-Realization Fellowship (in SRF, 1976) then
waxed eloquent:
This is as it should be. Paramahansa, flawlessly perfect soul
that he was, could not possibly have chosen for tenement a
body that was not in pre-established harmony with the purest
conceivable soul.
And yet, as Robert Carroll (2004b) has noted:
The statement [quoted by SRF] of the director of Forest
Lawn, Harry T. Rowe, is accurate, but incomplete. Mr. Rowe
also mentioned that he observed a brown spot on Yogananda’s
nose after twenty days, a sign that the body was not
“perfectly” preserved. In any case, the SRF’s claim that lack
of physical disintegration is “an extraordinary phenomenon”
is misleading.... The state of the yogi’s body is not unparalleled,
but common. A typical embalmed body will show no
notable desiccation for one to five months after burial without
the use of refrigeration or creams to mask odors.... Some
bodies are well-preserved for years after burial.
And indeed, with regard to embalming, in the full text of Mr.
Rowe’s letter, reprinted in the SRF-published (1976) Paramahansa
Yogananda, In Memoriam, we find:
Paramahansa Yogananda’s body was embalmed on the night
of March 8 th , with that quantity of fluid which is customarily
used in any body of similar size.
And the “miracle” then was ... what, exactly? Apparently, only
that the body was relatively well preserved even with the funeral
home having used no creams to prevent mold, in addition to the
embalming. Yet even there, Harry Edwards’ (1995) research in soliciting
the opinions of a pair of independent, licensed embalmers,
disclosed the following experience on their parts: