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Natural Sciences     Social Sciences     Humanities     Arts     Applied Arts and Sciences     Recreation      Click on the buttons above for workgroups An encyclopedia project—and more! Welcome to Citizendium, an endeavor to provide free knowledge with the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness. We welcome anyone who wants to share information by writing well-researched and authoritative articles on virtually any subject. Please read through our easy registration procedures, then join us as an Author and perhaps also as a recognised expert Editor. We have 16,405 articles at different stages of development, of which 0 are expert-approved. Our community is collegial and congenial; everyone writes under his or her verified real name. Even this, our home page, can be edited by any Citizen. We welcome anyone who has knowledge, broad or narrow, about any subject. Sign up—we need Authors, and from amongst them, specialist Editors. We prefer new material over improving other sites' work. Students in higher education write here as part of their courses under our Eduzendium initiative. We have a Charter to provide a framework for governance. For more details on partipation, see Why Citizendium?, Myths and Facts and Why We Contribute; to learn more about the history of the project, see the Citizendium article. Follow us on Friendfeed, Twitter (general news; new pages), Facebook or Google+. Join us Join here and start a new article or improve existing ones. See Recent Changes—an overview of articles we are writing now. Get started: How to collaborate | How to format pages Wikipedians are very welcome! Comment on articles nominated for approval. You can discuss any article on its Talk page. From the HOME page you can get started, get technical help, see our policies, and explore our articles and organization in detail. We Need Support From Donations! Please help! We have a continuing need for funds to pay for hosting our servers. See our financial report for complete details. Please make your donations here. See also WatchKnowLearn, a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video website which Citizendium founder Larry Sanger also helped to start.

Some of our finest Approved Articles (0) Developed Articles (1,125) (16,405 total articles) The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …” — Anonymous, attributed to Isaac Asimov        —add a quotation about knowledge or writing •Did You Know? 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