The workings of Nature physical and Nature psychological are more complex than are made out to be by shallow spiritual thinkers. Even hallowed spiritual organisations have made a mockery of these operational laws as their esteemed representatives go about dishing shallow theories in their bid to explain these difficult principles. Their explanations are puerile for their conceptions are way beneath the soaring heights of appreciation necessary to first apprehend them, leave aside then envisioning the right mechanisms in play that keep this universal drama going and thereafter articulating them in adequate terms.
Such sub-standard intellects dishing out dull deliberations on profound philosophy has become the bane of our decadent culture and unless the best brains, armed in the pure pursuit of truth, take to this philosophical discipline of the Vedanta, the message of the Rishis will not spread across the world.
Swami Vivekananda was one such, and Sri Aurobindo, despite his fantastic claims bordering on unreason, was another when in his saner moments of rational propriety that would draw the appreciative attention of savants like Romain Rolland and not their derision as when Rolland and J.C. Bose descended upon the Prisoner of Pondicherry in no uncertain terms for his absurdities and aberrations in philosophical thinking.
Nonetheless, Aurobindo had a clear head and sought deeper explanations of Nature's workings than Vivekananda's followers on the whole have explicitly managed. The latter's exhibited dissertations remain eminently hollow as is the wont of most published mediocrity. The more brilliant followers of Vivekananda have often not had the chance to publish their preeminently original works as organisation often does not afford such opportunities to individuals who dare cross the standard line adopted to maintain the social status quo, the imperatives being understandable in the complex political context. Of course, such individuals of brilliance also are rare and what passes off as brilliance is but second-rate stuff published by the cartload and endorsed by equally second-rate intellects going ecstatic over such material mediocrity erroneously dubbed 'spiritual literature'.
This is, after all, the fate eternally of the 'creativity' of eulogised gurus, godmen and senior renunciates in an order with their plethora of adoring adherents who have hardly the capacity to pick the grain from the chaff when it comes to critiquing dissertations of a dull order, for they are either duller than their pious 'perfected ones' or blinded in judgement by their pretentious piety. No wonder Swami Vivekananda had famously said that the in the entire history of humanity there have been but a handful of individuals with truly original ideas.
As creatively original was Swamiji with his deep understanding of the workings of Nature and his enunciations thereof by way of explanation of its operational principles, so unoriginal have his followers been with hardly any significant seminal work done after his passage from the world that has shed light on the operational modes of an ever-intricate evolving spiritual process, barring, of course, that titanic thinker's intellectual output whose name transformed in the process from Margaret Elizabeth Noble to the endearing Sister Nivedita. Yes, she is the lone exception to this manifested mediocrity, and my adoration of her for that.
In this 'desert-sand of dead habit', 'to pilfer from Tagore's arsenal of ideas' --- and, here again I pilfer from Hiren Mukerjee --- Nivedita of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda appears, not as a mirage offering an ever-receding respite from the routine rigmarole of philosophical pretension as the others do, but as a veritable oasis where we can slake our intellectual and spiritual thirst in depth understanding of the spiritual duo who were her life's polestars, her idols, her spiritual ideal manifested in flesh and blood. And in such understanding we envision greater revelations of the psychological processes that underlie individual life in the microcosm and the larger life manifest in the macrocosm.
Post Vivekananda we have in the trio of Aurobindo, Nivedita and Tagore our subtlest thinkers who have unravelled for us the deeper mysteries of Maya in their own inimitable creative ways. Add to it the French savant, Romain Rolland, who wrote those two priceless treatises on Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and we have our 'picture perfect' which no intruder dare mar with his puerile philosophical thinking.
Written by Sugata Bose
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