Swami Vivekananda - Boyhood days Experience.

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Dear Devotees of Divinity in TBP,

 

Love and Love alone....

 

Here are a few lines about the boyhood days experience of Sw.

Vivekananda. Enjoy it. Love and Love alone....

 

P. Gopi Krishna

==

BOYHOOD DAYS

 

When I was a little boy at school, I had a fight with another

schoolfellow about some sweetmeats, and he being the stronger boy

snatched them from my hand. I remember the feeling I had; I thought

that boy was the most wicked boy ever born, and that as soon as I

grew strong enough I would punish him; there was no punishment

sufficient for his wickedness. We have both grown up now, and we are

fast friends. This world is full of babies to whom eating and

drinking, and all these little cakes are everything. They will dream

of these cakes, and their idea of future life is where these cakes

will be plentiful

 

What I saw and felt when going through the forest [on the way to

Raipur] (in the year 1877, when Vivekananda (then Naren) was about

fourteen years old, his father went to Raipur in the Central

Provinces (Madhya Pradesh). He arranged that his family should

follow him later on led by Naren. It was a journey partly by bullock

cart via Allahabad and Jabalpur through dense forests and over

unfrequented roads, for the railways were in those days constructed

only up to Nagpur.) has for ever remained firmly imprinted in my

memory, particularly a certain event of one day. We had to travel by

the foot of the Vindhya mountains that day. The peaks of the ranges

on both sides of the road rose very high in the sky; various kinds

of trees and creepers bending under the weight of fruits and flowers

produced wonderful beauty on the mountainsides. Birds of various

colours, flying from tree to tree, filled the quarters with sweet

notes. I saw all these and felt an extraordinary peace in my mind.

The slow-moving bullock-carts arrived at a place where two mountain

peaks, coming forward as though in love, locked themselves in an

embrace over the narrow forest path. Observing carefully below the

meeting-points I saw that there was a very big cleft from the crest

to the foot of the mountain on one side of the path; and filling

that cleft, there was hanging in it an enormous honeycomb, the

result of the bees' labour for ages. Filled with wonder, as I was

pondering over the beginning and the end of that kingdom of bees, my

mind became so much absorbed in the thought of the infinite power of

God, the controller of the three worlds, that I completely lost my

consciousness of the external world for some time. I do not remember

how long I was lying in the bullock-cart in that condition. When I

regained normal consciousness, I found that we had crossed that

place and come far away. As I was alone in the cart, no one could

know anything about it.

 

We cannot deny that there is much misery in the world; to go out and

help others is, therefore, the best thing we can do, although in the

long run, we shall find that helping others is only helping

ourselves. As a boy I had some white mice. They were kept in a

little box in which there were little wheels, and when the mice

tried to cross the wheels, the wheels turned and turned, and the

mice never got anywhere. So it is with the world and our helping it.

The only help is that we get moral exercise.

 

When my teacher came to our house, I brought my English and Bengali

books to him, and showing him the particular books and the portions

in them that were to be learnt as lessons for the day, I laid myself

down or sat quietly. The teacher repeated twice or thrice the

spelling, pronunciation, meaning etc., of the words of those

portions of those books, as if he was himself learning the lesson,

and went away. That was sufficient for me to learn them.

 

A little arithmetic, some Sanskrit grammar, a little of language and

accounts-these are taught in the primary school. A little book on

ethics, taught by an old man, we learnt by heart, and I remember one

of the lessons:

 

" For the good of a village, a man ought to give up his family; for

the good of a country, he ought to give up his village; for the good

of humanity, he may give up his country; for the good of the world,

everything. "

 

Such verses are there in the books. We get them by heart, and they

are explained by teacher and pupil.

 

This was the first verse that I was taught in my life, the first day

I went to school:

 

" He indeed is a learned man who looks upon all women as his mother,

who looks upon every man's property as so much dust, and looks upon

every being as his own soul. "

 

Even while I was a student at Calcutta, I was of a religious

temperament. I was critical even at that time of my life; mere words

would not satisfy me.

 

I used to see all my life a wonderful point of light between my

eyebrows, as soon as I shut my eyes in order to go to sleep, and I

used to observe attentively its various changes. So that it might be

convenient to see it, I used to lie on my bed in the way people bow

down touching the ground with their foreheads. The extraordinary

point kept changing its colours and increasing in size, became

gradually converted into the form of a ball, and bursting at last,

covered my body from head to foot with white liquid light. As soon

as that happened, I lost consciousness and fell asleep. I believed

that all people went to sleep that way. I was long under that

impression. When I grew up and began to practise meditation, that

point of light used to come before me as soon as I closed my eyes,

and then I concentrated my mind on it. In those days I daily

practised meditation with a few friends according to the instruction

of Maharshi Devendranath. We talked among ourselves about the nature

of visions and experiences that each of us had. At that time I came

to know from what they said that they never had the vision of such a

light and that none of them went to sleep in that way.

Gopi Krishna <gopi

 

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