The MAN powered by his words...

Swami Vivekananda (Bengali: স্বামী বিবেকানন্দ,  Shami Bibekānondo (help·info);: Hindi: स्वामी विवेकानन्द) (12 January 1863 – 4 July 1902), born Narendranath Dutta (Bengali: নরেন্দ্রনাথ দত্ত, Hindi: नरेन्द्रनाथ दत्त ),  was the chief disciple of the 19th century saint Ramakrishna Paramahansa and the founder of the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission. He is considered a key figure in the introduction of Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the "Western" World, mainly in America and Europe and is also credited with raising interfaith awareness, bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion during the end of the 19th century C.E. Vivekananda is considered to be a major force in the revival of Hinduism in modern India. He is perhaps best known for his inspiring speech which began: "Sisters and Brothers of America," through which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions at Chicago in 1893 . He is perhaps best known for his inspiring speech which began: "Sisters and Brothers of America.

Its very easy to get influenced by his words, but the implementation requires lots of handwork and determination. how much ever said its the least said about this great soul- who's still alive in all our young hearts through his words. And the man who has his follower's count still counting ON..!!!

A respectful attempt in his remembrance, few quotes and teachings by swami Vivekananda.
              My ideal, indeed, can be put into a few words, and that is: to preach unto mankind their               divinity, and how to make it manifest in every movement of life.

 Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man.

 We want that education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can stand on one's own feet.

 So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them.

 Whatever you think, that you will be. If you think yourselves weak, weak you will be; if you think yourselves strong, strong you will be.

 If you have faith in all the three hundred and thirty millions of your mythological gods, … and still have no faith in yourselves, there is no salvation for you. Have faith in yourselves, and stand up on that faith and be strong; that is what we need.

 Strength, strength it is that we want so much in this life, for what we call sin and sorrow have all one cause, and that is our weakness. With weakness comes ignorance, and with ignorance comes misery.

 The older I grow, the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness. This is my new Gospel.

 Purity, patience, and perseverance are the three essentials to success, and above all, love.

 Religion is realization; not talk, not doctrine, nor theories, however beautiful they may be. It is being and becoming, not hearing or acknowledging; it is the whole soul becoming changed into what it believes.

 Religion is the manifestation of the Divinity already in man.

 Teach yourselves, teach everyone his real nature, call upon the sleeping soul and see how it awakes. Power will come, glory will come, goodness will come, purity will come, and everything that is excellent will come when this sleeping soul is roused to self-conscious activity. 

They alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.

 This is the gist of all worship – to be pure and to do good to others.

 It is love and love alone that I preach, and I base my teaching on the great Vedantic truth of the sameness and omnipresence of the Soul of the Universe.

It is not the sign of a candid and scientific mind to throw overboard anything without proper investigation. Surface scientists, unable to explain various extraordinary mental phenomena, strive to ignore their very existence.

What little I know I will tell you. So far as I can reason it out I will do so, but as to what I do not know I will simply tell you what the books say. It is wrong to believe blindly. You must exercise your own reason and judgment; you must practise, and see whether these things happen or not. Just as you would take up any other science, exactly in the same manner you should take up this science for study

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all other could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in discovering one energy of which all others are but manifestations..

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with further light from the latest conclusions of science.                                                         All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.                                                                                                                    All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark. 

As different streams having different sources all mingle their waters in the sea, so different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to God.

Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.

External nature is only internal nature writ large.

GOD is to be worshiped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and next life.

If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practiced, I am sure a very large portion of the evils and miseries that we have would have vanished.

If money help a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if not, it is simply a mass of evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the better.

In one word, this ideal is that you are divine.

Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin; to say that you are weak, or others are weak.

Our duty is to encourage every one in his struggle to live up to his own highest idea, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible to the Truth.

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.

That man has reached immortality who is disturbed by nothing material.

The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him - that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.

The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified, and God will be in them.

The Vedanta recognizes no sin it only recognizes error. And the greatest error, says the Vedanta is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner, a miserable creature, and that you have no power and you cannot do this and that.

The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.

The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong.

Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be true.

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

links : YOUTUBE: the speech in Chicago.

The generation I live in…!!!

Woke up in morning, as usual to the ring of my cell phone… It rang, rang & rang but realized it only after Amma woke me up with her TIME Alerts..!!! Thank God was on time for the college that day. Well usually on my way to college &  back home, I keep tweeting, listen to music, as well as side seeing, that’s the best thing one can do while stuck up with slow moving traffic..!  Traffic is sick in any SO called BIG cities.  I do consider reading books. I’m so observant, when it comes to look on both the sides of the road , some times to get to know the stores and stuffs in that road, and  sometimes to see the posters bills of movies- “Running Successfully” sort of stuck to the walls and compounds, quiet narrow streets though,  got to agree (Bangalore).

But that day was totally different…!!

Well these had nothing to do with the things that were running in my head..!! I mean I was totally on a thinking phase on a serious note. It started like this, I and my friends were on a leisure chat and all the gossips just popped up right from a PESIT student’s suicide to 5th grade girl suicidal attempt to a 10^th standard kid’s running away from home threats!!!  One random thought that came out was-“What the hell yar, a kid can think of things which we can’t even imagine of!!  And how the hell can they LOOSE INTEREST in life so soon..!! OMG if they had all seen life the way our ancestors saw they’d have end up there life right at the time they were born..!!”.

Yes that’s the thing that was running in my mind, if God’s creations were meant to self destruction one day, where does the adage “You’re here because; God’s planned something, to be done only by YOU”.  Well I’m a sincere follower of this adage, but its threatening to even dream of ‘The Generation I Live in...!’ like that.

 I quickly came up this explanation about all those criminal minds, I mean those weak heated, ever non energetic, vastly negatively thinkers and the end getter..!

                       

                   As this world changed, in the sense, developed, right from the stones to ‘chips’ the humane values decreased proportionately and as a result, competition, challenge, defeat, assault someone down, dig deep into rivalry, engage completely and insanely in the deeds which bore hatred as fruits & end products, became cons of those developments. Though not completely, VASTLY for sure. Speaking about that mind inside those weak hearts I feel these are the main reasons for those insane attempts of loosing life for nothing literally nothing in return.

                    Digging deep into this I found these things as relevant issues seconding the theme:

·         Firstly the present Generation that I belong to is in a haste to decide upon things and take up a decision so as to suppress the others in queue.

·         Secondly, this generation is ever jumping and wants things to be done at the wink of eyes at the cost of someone else’s hard work or at the cost highest available TECHNOLOGY!!

·         This generation is obsessed with assets in terms of brand new gizmo gadgets, accessories, branded products, style statements & no wonder those who are not able to afford such things end up with peer pressures resulting to insane humiliation, unnecessary distractions, and building up of inferiority complex.

·         Being in a race to climb up the ladder to top the race always, one may end up as a sadist sometime, needless to mention a major DISORDER..!

·         Socially adjoined in many ways, media playing terror videos at high rates, one of the major propelling anti force, imposing young lives to make a way out of this world..!!

So finally my brooding mind came up that poem- Is life getting better ?!

 

A disturbing truth…

It was like any other day and I was in terrace to water the plants. It was then that I heard a whisper. Who could it be? I was all alone in the terrace. The sound seemed to be coming from a small plant with two pink flowers. Yes, it definitely seemed so! Flowers talking! Am I dreaming? Didn’t seem so! So, I just started listening to them anyway.

The little flower seemed excited. “Hey, did you hear? The little boys, who came last evening, were discussing about 2012 and the end of earth. Is this true?” The other older flower replied brusquely,”Uh! Who doesn’t talk about it? And of course it’s true. It’s going to be the end of world, but only for the humans. And they truly deserve this.” The little flower was taken aback. “How can you be so rude? Poor humans!” The older flower laughed.   “Oh, no! Its something they have brought upon themselves. And you needn’t pity them. Fools! They are the most recent species to have evolved and look at the mess they have made out of planet. One species out of the millions of plant and animal species, wiped out from the face of earth, is not going to make a difference. Life existed before them, and will exist long after they are gone.”

It was a sharp blow that I received on hearing this seemingly little but obviously a very wise flower. This set me thinking. Is this what our fellow creatures with whom we share this planet think of us? Do we really deserve this end? The answer was of course, obvious.

We went astray long back. We have failed to abide by the rules of the nature and have destroyed the delicate balance between giving and taking, which every species other than us follow.

And the greatest truth of all- we have become so materialistic and comfort-O-maniacs, that we do not even realize that its time to stop, look back, go by these rules and respect our fellow denizens. Let’s take just a very small example. A bird, even after millions of years of its existence, has not looked out for an alternative for flying. We have so many alternatives to walking, that its impossible for us to walk even a small distance. Have we ever thought of the consequences of using our vehicles for a small distance, or the amount o destruction that has been caused to get this little amount of fuel?

We are only looking for comforts, which in turn is going to render the muscles of our body useless. We identify ourselves with the “Brands” that we use, do anything possible to gain them, forgetting all the way, that our attitude and self is more important than our brands. We build multi-storied houses, posh apartments and huge shopping malls, at the cost of destroying the ecosystem shared by so many other plants and animals. And now look at what we have done. Irreversible, irrevocable and Ir-repairable damage to the only place in the universe which is ‘our home’. And we have to pay a heavy toll for all this. And yes, life will continue without us, and we will not be missed!!

Conclusion is left to all your imaginations.