Tara Mata

Tara Mata (born Laurie Virginia Pratt) (August 16, 1900–January 18, 1971) was a member of the Self-Realization Fellowship.

Pratt was born in San Francisco, California. She came from an intellectual family related to both Orson Pratt and Joseph Smith, Jr., leaders in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her family is also related to Mitt Romney.

Pratt met Paramhansa Yogananda in 1924 and was immediately drawn to him, joining his organization, Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF Inc). She took monastic vows and became known as Tara Mata, one of a group of women with Latter Day Saint backgrounds, headed by Daya Mata, the current SRF Inc. President.

In 1929, while handling SRF's New York operations, she became pregnant and had a daughter, Mona Pratt.

She was Yogananda's Chief Editor, notably edited during Yogananda's lifetime both Swami Sri Yukteswar's and Yogananda's .

Yogananda's Autobiography has been continuously in print since 1946 and translated into tens of languages. It was voted in 2000 one of the top 100 spiritual books of the last century.

However, later works were so heavily edited that originals were later produced without the edits. One draft was found to be pages and pages of nonsense, supposedly in Hindi.

She was very close to Edgar Cayce and almost joined his ARE group. Her life reading is on file with that organization. In her own right, she wrote Astrological World Cycles and A Forerunner of a New Race, the latter recounting her own spiritual experiences.

She died in Los Angeles, California.

Interest in her has resurged in recent years along with general interest in Dwapara Yuga and the predictions made by Swami Sri Yukteswar in 1894, repeated by Tara in 1933, Yogananda in 1946 and more recently in the book/DVD "The Great Year".

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