SWAMI VIVEKANANDA's VIEWS ABOUT AMERICANS

[Guest guest]

Vivekananda on Americans

 

Dolores Wood

 

Dolores Wood of Boston, USA, is a journalist and a Vedanta devotee of

Sri Ramakrishna. Amongst her writings is the book How to End

Suffering: Teachings of Sri Eknath Easwaran on the Power of the Human

Spirit (Penguin India, 2001). ¨

 

close students of Swami Vivekananda's work will note that at times he

was delighted with Americans and at times he almost despaired of them.

This article was written at the anniversary of an extremely emotional

event in U.S. history to remind Americans of their highest potential

during a period of doubt and confusion. —Author

 

He came to the United States to sound India's spiritual note at the

World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He also hoped to raise money

to help the starving masses back home. But Swami Vivekananda stayed

longer than he expected. After making a second trip and spending more

than four years in this country, he returned to India not only

persuaded of America's spiritual potential, but also more urgently

aware that the time had come for a global leap in consciousness.1

 

Was it coincidence or something more profound that Vivekananda gave

his first major public address on September 11, 1893? Was it simply

chance that he talked about the bitter costs of religious hatred on

the very day which 108 years later became a potent symbol of

fanaticism and religious intolerance? Perhaps, but it's interesting to

note that he warned:

 

Sectarianism, bigotry and its horrible descendant fanaticism have long

possessed this beautiful earth, they have filled the earth with

violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed

civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for

these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than

it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope the bell that

tolled this morning in honour of this convention may be the deathknell

of all fanaticism, of all persecutions, with the sword or with the

pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their

way to the same goal.2

 

That a holy man would condemn religious hatred was nothing new, but in

this powerful message Vivekananda voiced his belief that the world

would one day wake up from its bloody nightmares. The future is bright

with the most marvellous work, he told his audiences. `What is my plan

then? My plan is to follow the ideas of the ancient Masters. They were

the great originators of society. They were the great givers of

strength, and of purity, and of life.'3

 

Ultimately Vivekananda abandoned his intention to raise money and

began looking for the singular American characteristics on which to

build spiritual awareness. `Each nation,' he said, `like each

individual has a theme in this life, which is its centre, the

principal note round which every other note comes to form the

harmony.'4 In the United States the principle note was a mixture of

enormous practicality and a belief that nothing is impossible.

 

Americans were particularly open to new ideas, Vivekananda said, `I

love the Yankee land. In America is the place, the people, the

opportunity for everything … nothing is rejected because it is new. It

is examined on its own merits, and stands or falls by these alone.'5

Even the very air in America seemed to bring out an individual's faith

in himself or herself to achieve, he said.6

 

Here was a unique opportunity to work out ancient principles in the

modern world, a place to experiment with how his message of `one

spirit'7 would operate in daily life. `Where on earth is there a

better field than here for propagating all high ideas?' he asked.

`Here, where if one man is against me, a hundred hands are ready to

help me.'8 When a U.S.

audience discovered an enthralling idea, immediately they wanted to

put it to the test. `I cannot preach even religion to Americans

without showing them its practical effect on social life,'9 he said.

Later on he would confide to his audience back in India, `Ay, you may

be astonished to hear that as practical Vedantists the Americans are

better than we are.'10

 

The timing was none too soon. Globally, spiritual progress had run

into a roadblock.

India was a land of many spiritual seekers, but they generally

confined themselves to the world within.11 The United States (with its

energy and efficiency) excelled in the external world but understood

little below the surface level of consciousness. The West is practical

in one way and the East in another, Vivekananda noted. In the East, if

a man is told he will find Truth by climbing the Himalayas to meet a

sage on top, there will always be some to follow that method, such is

the eagerness for spiritual progress. In the West, if a man hears that

gold exists somewhere in an uncivilised country, thousands will face

the dangers there, though perhaps only one will get the gold.12 The

time has come, he said, to combine the excellent impulses of both the

worlds and to bring the mystery of individual spiritual experience

into daily life.

 

`It shall no more be a Rahasya, a secret; it shall no more live with

monks in caves and forests, and in the Himalayas; it must come down to

the daily, everyday life of the people; it shall be worked out in the

palace of the king, in the cave of the recluse; it shall be worked out

in the cottage of the poor, by the beggar in the street, everywhere;

anywhere it can be worked out,' he said. Do not fear that you are too

weak to do the job, he advised his students, and remember the words of

Krishna in The Bhagavad Gita: `Even a little of this practice brings a

great amount of good.'13

 

But before the people of the United States could achieve excellence on

the spiritual plane, spiritual aspirants had to learn what it was to

dive beneath the surface level of consciousness. Spiritual seekers

must want spiritual prosperity at least as much as business people

desire the material wealth so abundant in this country. Seekers would

have to cast off narrow mindedness to see that the unity which science

had discovered through particle physics also exists on the spiritual

plane.14 Through microscopes, he pointed out, the scientist could see

the molecules and atoms that make up a table or a chair. They had

discovered that matter was not as solid and impenetrable on the atomic

scale as it is to the naked eye. Similarly the spirit within is not so

isolated as the body would make it appear.15

 

`There is only one thing that you are; you can see it either as matter

or body—or you can see it as mind or spirit. Birth, life, and death

are but old superstitions,' he said. `None was ever born, none will

ever die; one changes one's position—that is all…. Man is an infinite

circle whose circumference is nowhere, but the centre is in one spot;

and God is an infinite circle whose circumference is nowhere, but

whose centre is everywhere. He works through all hands, sees through

all eyes, walks on all feet, breathes through all bodies, lives in all

life, speaks through every mouth, and thinks through every brain.'16

Awareness of this truth, therefore, was the important element to

understand for spiritual progress.

 

Thus Vivekananda traced the flaws in denominational religion here, and

he predicted the decline many churches are witnessing today. People do

not want to be told to accept on blind faith that God exists, he said.

They seek verifiable truths. `They want facts in their own

consciousness.'17 He mentions a `recent' U.S. survey in 1896, in which

many Americans declined to identify with any particular form of

religion. The days were numbered for religious sects, he told a Sunday

Times of London interviewer. `I am sure that they [religious sects]

are bound to disappear. Their existence is founded on nonessentials;

the essential part of them will remain and be built up into another

edifice.'18

 

He saw that too many church services were becoming empty rituals

without revealing the higher truths. `I cannot get ready my religious

feelings at a moment's notice,' he said. `What is the result of this

mummery and mockery? … How can human beings stand this religious

drilling? It is like soldiers in a barracks. Shoulder arms, kneel

down, take a book, all regulated exactly. Five minutes of feeling,

five minutes of reason, five minutes of prayer, all arranged

beforehand. These mummeries have driven out religion.'19 And again:

`God sitting up on a cloud! Think of the utter blasphemy of it! It is

materialism—downright materialism.… It is all matter, all body idea,

the gross idea, the sense idea.'20

 

Let churches preach doctrines, theories, philosophies, he would say,

but for real worship the individual must explore the meditative side

of religion, assimilate much more than a moral list of do's and

don'ts. He or she must delve into their deepest consciousness where

anger, fear and greed are transformed, where the individual discovers

the Divine effulgence within which connects all life together.21

Vivekananda said it was possible for a large number of individuals to

discover that unity.

 

`I am sure the day will come when separation will vanish and that

Oneness to which we are all going will become manifest,' he said. `A

time must come when … the whole of mankind will become

Jivanmuktas—free [aware

of the Divine] whilst living. We are all struggling towards that one

end through our jealousies and hatreds, through our love and

cooperation.'22

 

Is it really possible for so many to become aware of the inner Divine

light while living on this earth? Those who are familiar with Swami

Vivekananda's history know that he was not a man given to false

optimism or sentimental hopes. His very name, Vivek, attests to his

`discrimination,' his capacity to choose between the ephemeral reality

of earthly living and the unchanging, timeless reality of the spirit.

 

Vivekananda was the foremost disciple of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa,

the towering holy man of India who practised the

disciplines of many faiths and who realised God in many forms, such as

the Divine Mother, Krishna, Shiva, Jesus the Christ, Muhammad, as well

as the formless absolute. Swami

Vivekananda's spiritual lineage was apparent in his teachings, `All

religions are different expressions of the same truth,' he said. `All

march on or die out. They are the radii of the same truth, the

expression that variety of mind requires.'23

 

Vivekananda was a wandering monk, a sannyàsin (which he described as a

`divine outlaw'24). Indeed, he had ignored thethreats of the religious

hierarchy in India and its taboo on travel across the ocean to come to

this country. For this, the orthodox Brahmins declared the swami

outcaste, forbidden to enter a Hindu temple for the rest of his life.

But Vivekananda was not affected by censure and would not be held

hostage by ambition.

 

He was a thundering realist who experienced both the bright and the

dark side of the United States firsthand. Arriving in Canada on an

ocean liner in the summer of 1893, he travelled unknown and alone to

Chicago for the Parliament of Religions. Because of a communications

mixup, however, he arrived months early without enough money to last,

and unaware that the wandering mendicant so revered in India would be

seen as a vagrant in this country.

 

He suffered cold, privation, and prejudice before he was welcomed as a

celebrated wise man of the East. And even after his widespread

acclaim, he was the target of derision from envious clerics, those who

had been missionaries and raised their funds criticising the `pagan'

religions. They spread vicious rumours about India and about the swami

himself.

 

`There is not one black lie imaginable that these latter did not

invent against me,' Vivekananda said. `They blackened my character

from city to city, poor and friendless though I was in a foreign

country. They tried to oust me from every house and to make every man

who became my friend my enemy.'25 But attempts at character

assassination did not rob him of tremendous support.

 

`I am here amongst the children of the Son of Mary, and the Lord Jesus

will help me,' he wrote to a friend. `They like much the broad views

of Hinduism and my love for the Prophet of Nazareth. I tell them that

I preach nothing against the Great One of Galilee. I only ask the

Christians to take the Great Ones of India along with the Lord Jesus,

and they appreciate it.'26

 

Thus he urged the United States forward on the path of universal

brotherhood, which begins first at the family level, then at the

community, state, national and international levels. `Step by step we

reach broad generalizations and the world of abstract ideas,'27 he

said. Thus, he again told the Times of London, a sense of oneness

could spread throughout the world in a kind of `spiritual

renaissance.' His statement sparked a delightful exchange with the

reporter:

 

Q: `Excuse me saying that there do not seem many signs of it [a

renaissance] just now.'

 

A: `Perhaps not,' said the Swami, gravely. `I dare say a good many

people saw no signs of the old Renaissance and did not know it was

there, even after it had come. But there is a great movement, which

can be discerned by those who know the signs of the times. Oriental

research has of recent years made great progress. At present it is in

the hands of scholars, and it seems dry and heavy in the work they

have achieved. But gradually the light of comprehension will break.'28

 

Does the sectarian violence that destroyed the World Trade Centre on

the 108th anniversary of Vivekananda's address at the World Parliament

of Religions mean that his faith in a spiritual renaissance was

misplaced? His answer would be a resounding, No! Like all great sages,

Vivekananda knew that lasting change begins in the depths of the

individual heart, and even though the effects may be too subtle to be

visible for some time, that is no reason to despair. In fact, violence

and massive unrest are often heralds of a transition to a new level of

understanding.

 

When a kettle of water is coming to the boil, first one bubble rises,

and then another, and so on, until at last they all join, and a

tremendous commotion takes place. `This world is very similar,' Swami

Vivekananda said. `Each individual is like a bubble, and the nations,

resemble many bubbles. Gradually these nations are joining.… A

tremendous stream is flowing towards the ocean carrying us all along

with it; and though, like straws and scraps of paper, we may at times

float aimlessly about, in the long run we are sure to join the Ocean

of Life and Bliss.'29

(From Vedanta Kesari)