SHALL WE HEED VIVEKANANDA? ... 1

SHALL WE HEED VIVEKANANDA? ... 1

The purity of the devotees in their pursuit of spirituality will bolster the movement of the sattva in overcome the prevailing tamas that is so besetting the progress of our nation and the world at large in consequence. India has the light and must hold it before the world if annihilation of humanity is not to be its destiny in the not too distant future.

Swami Vivekananda was the emissary from India to the West bearing the age-old message of the Upanishads and was the first Indian monk to have done so after the great days of the Buddha's sending missionaries abroad to preach the dharma. After his epic arrival on the world stage in Chicago, Vivekananda lay anchor in America to build up a Vedanta movement which is still flourishing there, although, its effect is to be understood in its silent transformation of American and European societies and not in any visible manifestation in terms of mass following as such. Swamiji had said that the seeds he had cast in the consciousness of the West would bear fruition if even after the lapse of several centuries, but it must. And his words, we know, are inviolable, for even Nature hastens to fulfil the words of these souls that are ever merged in the transcendental consciousness. So, the world will change at any rate. But when and at what cost? Swamiji himself had mused thus : ''The world will rise but, oh, at what a cost, at what a cost, at what a cost!''

Vivekananda was a rishi of the highest order and could foresee the future of the world. With prophetic vision he foretold many events such as the two great wars that shook the world, the independence of India, the Chinese aggression against India, the rise of China as a superpower in times to come, the acceptance of the Vedanta by thinking humanity across the world, the coming of the age of the proletariat which he termed the Shudra Yuga, the inundation of the world by the wave of Ramakrishna and his own reincarnation to accompany the Master after the lapse of two hundred years when people will fight to get a hair of Vivekananda, such will be the attraction for the hero.

Two of the three costs we have paid already in the two world wars that have been fought. The communist revolutions as predicted by him in Russia and China have come to pass. India became independent exactly after the predicted fifty years from 1897 when he had prophesied it. Soon after independence, Vivekananda had prophesied, India would be in danger of losing it to China which is exactly what happened in 1962 in the Sino-India War. China is now the second most powerful nation in the world just as Vivekananda had predicted. About China he had said that he could see an elephant giving birth to a lion cub and the cub would grow in time and become powerful. The elephantine memory of the Chinese in redressing past injustices meted out to them by foreign powers and the growth of leonine Communist China quite not in keeping with the traditional civilisation of ancient China is the proof of the Swamiji's phenomenal prophetic power.

But one more dangerous prophesy is yet to fulfil. Swamiji, during the course of a lecture in America, had suddenly veered off to prophesy a dark fate awaiting the world in which resurgent China would overrun Europe like the Huns of yore and ransack civilisation there. Men, women and children, he said, all would go and once more the Dark Ages would reign over Europe. He went on to say that the Chinese, millions of them, would throw the British into the North Sea and that the latter very much deserved such a fate for all their historical misdeeds against innocent peoples of the world. The prophet continued thus : ''You may not believe in the vengeance of God but you will have to believe in the vengeance of history. And it is coming...'' This, of course, if it happens ever, will mean the waging of the Third World War, the erasing of modern civilisation and a return to the Dark Ages for sure.

So, here we are on the edge of an evolutionary abyss where our extinction as a species is very much on the cards in much the same way as those of the species that are going extinct by human hand. Our fate hangs in the balance and upon our sanity depends our survival. Shall we listen to Swami Vivekananda's words who was God's emissary to planet earth to save it from annihilation or shall we not heed his message for man and go our way to extinction?

End of Part 1
To be continued...

Written by Sugata Bose