Yogananda's Gold Lotus Domes

Those gold lotus domes you can see from the coast highway did not arrive here by accident. Paramahansa Yogananda, the Indian mystic who introduced millions of Americans to yoga and meditation through his autobiography published in nineteen forty-six, came to this specific cliff above the Pacific in nineteen thirty-seven because he wanted to establish his North American hermitage at the edge of the continent. He chose Encinitas. He chose this promontory.

The tower he dedicated here in nineteen forty-eight has been visible from the highway ever since, gold against the Pacific sky, which means that every traveler who has driven this coast for the past several decades has passed a working meditation retreat without necessarily knowing it. The Self-Realization Fellowship hermitage and gardens are listed on the California historical register. They remain an active religious institution.

Look directly below the domes. That surf break is called Swami's. It was named by local surfers for the monastic order Yogananda belonged to, because the domes were what they saw from the water. Swami's is now one of the most well-known point breaks in Southern California, a place where the language of a centuries-old Hindu tradition got absorbed into surf culture so completely that most people who use the name do not think about where it came from.

This spot sits at the center of something that runs the entire length of the California coast. Eighteen miles south of here, the first California mission was founded in seventeen sixty-nine. Roughly three hundred miles north, at Big Sur, the Esalen Institute opened in nineteen sixty-two to channel a different strain of the same impulse. The California spiritual coast is not an invention of the nineteen sixties counterculture. It is a continuous human tendency expressed first by the Kumeyaay in their ceremonial mountains, then by Spanish priests, then by an Indian mystic who chose a cliff above the Pacific for his North American home, and then by the surfers who named their break for the domes they could see from the water.