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This then is the ideal of the monastic in a nut shell for Swamiji had no time then to deliberate at length on the subject. It was the eve of his departure to the West for the second and last time and he did not then have the occasion to deliver an extensive oration to the assembled renunciates at Belur Math. He merely stressed upon the cardinal points of the monastic life which were service, obedience and a love of death, that is, a constant remembrance of the ephemeral nature of life and all of phenomena. He himself was the exemplar of all that he said, much like Krishna who was the very embodiment of his message that was the Bhagavad Geeta. And so are all spiritual luminaries who have impacted humanity in its long history, for it is the life of a lustrous one that infuses life into others and not so much his dry dissertation on aspect abstruse which is the province of philosophers. However, all those who have transformed society in the name of religion, for better or for worse, have not been spiritual personalities by even any stretch of imagination for they were driven by political objectives and never inspired by anything spiritually sublime despite their dogmatic assertions to the contrary. But a Vivekananda was not a man of such mettle. He was a supremely sane person who knew the madness an unholy alliance of religion and politics produced in otherwise decent men for humanity as a whole is not yet sufficiently evolved to separate the grain from the chaff when emotions are worked up clouding reason and judgement. Religion invariably awakens deeper fanatical chords within the devotee, especially those that are indoctrinated in exclusive monotheistic Abrahamic religious traditions, and it here that politics added becomes a violent component of the resulting mixture. Hence, the age-old fanatical wars centring religion in Europe and in West Asia whose worst consequence was the Partition of India along religious lines. Swamiji