Vivekananda on Americans-Part II

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Vivekananda thus 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.' 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 non-essentials; the essential part of them will remain and be built up into another edifice.'

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.' 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.'

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. 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 co-operation.'

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.'Vivekananda was a wandering monk, a sannyÀsin (which he described as a 'divine outlaw'). Indeed, he had ignored the threats 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.

Read about Vivekananda's experience in the US & His vision of oneness on the Next Page