In Chicago in 1907, on the upper floor of a brownstone that housed the Yogi Publication Society, a Baltimore-born lawyer named William Walker Atkinson signed a fresh manuscript with a name that was not his own — Yogi Ramacharaka. He had never set foot in India. He had spent his thirties losing a law practice to what his physicians called nervous exhaustion, recovering through the unorthodox American discipline known as New Thought, and reading — voraciously, sometimes hungrily — every English translation of the Upaniṣads that had reached the bookshops of the Midwest. Out of that long convalescence and that unending reading came this small book of one hundred and three pages: A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga —…