Vivekananda On Americans-Part 2

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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 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. 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.'

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. 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.

'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.' Awareness of this truth, therefore, was the important element to understand for spiritual progress.

About the author

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).