Rajarsi Janakananda

Rajarsi Janakananda, born James Jesse Lynn (May 5, 1892 – February 20, 1955), was a wealthy American businessman who became the closest disciple of the yogi Paramahansa Yogananda after they met in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1932. Janakananda was the main financial contributor to Yogananda's religious organization, Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), and he helped ensure its long-term success. Within SRF, he is considered a saint who attained union with God through meditation. SRF presented him as an object lesson in the benefits of its teachings, and it represented his relationship with Yogananda as an example of the cultural exchange they advocated between "spiritual" India and "industrial" America. Janakananda succeeded Yogananda as its president from 1952 until 1955, when Janakananda died at the age of 62. He left an endowment of approximately three million dollars to SRF, along with donations to the University of Missouri–Kansas City and Swope Park.

James Jesse Lynn was born into relative poverty to Jesse William Lynn, an itinerant farmer, and Salethia Archibald Lynn on May 5, 1892, in Archibald, Louisiana, United States. His simple education began in a small log schoolhouse.

Leaving school at the age of fourteen, he began working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, sweeping floors for $2 a month. He continued with various railroad jobs for a few years, quickly moving up to the position of chief clerk to the division manager in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1910, he left that position and began working at the Bell Telephone accounting division. During the next few years, he worked during the day and resumed his education by night, alternating between high school, law school, and accounting classes.

Lynn was admitted to the Missouri bar in 1913, before he even graduated from law school. In that year, he married Freda Josephine Prill of Kansas City. Three years later at age 24, Lynn took and passed the Missouri Certified Public Accountant exam, earning the highest score on that exam ever made as of 1952. Soon after, he began working for the largest underwriting insurance company in the country, U.S. Epperson, and he was named its general manager in 1917. Four years later, Lynn loaned enough money to buy the company, launching a successful business career that included insurance underwriting, oil well and orchard ownership, and large investments in the railroad business. He became a millionaire.

In spite of his material success, Lynn was unhappy, and he suffered from nervousness and a short temper, to the point that he had trouble sitting still. According to history professor Eileen Luhr, complaints of anxiety and stress were common among accomplished white-collar workers such as Lynn during the 20th century. In January 1932, Indian yogi Paramahansa Yogananda spoke for several nights at a venue in Kansas City, Missouri. His lectures on Indian spirituality had gained national attention by this time, and Lynn attended the program out of curiosity. Lynn described his experience:

On the second night of the class, I became aware that I was sitting upright, my spine straight and I was absolutely motionless. I looked down at my hands, which were so restlessly moving before and which were now perfectly still… I knew I had found the path that gave me inner peace and satisfaction and that I had found that something tangible I was seeking, my guru.

Yogananda initiated Lynn into Kriya Yoga, and Lynn became his disciple. Yogananda asserted that anyone could experience God directly by practicing the yoga techniques of meditation and concentration that he taught. He believed that his methods were testable, and he called them "the science of religion". Previously, Lynn had rejected religion because it asked him to believe things he could not verify, but Yogananda's experience-based approach appealed to his pragmatism. Lynn had met with another Hindu teacher before and received unfavorable publicity as a result. Because of this, and because Lynn's wife did not approve of Yogananda, Lynn and Yogananda agreed to keep their association a secret. They became close friends – biographer Philip Goldberg writes:

Lynn was the closest of the close disciples. Yogananda's letters and recollections of devotees portray an extraordinary relationship that, at different times, resembled a deep friendship between peers, a father-son or brother-brother devotion, or a traditional guru-disciple dynamic.