READ VIVEKANANDA

READ VIVEKANANDA

I exhort all to read Swami Vivekananda's 'Lectures from Colombo to Almora'. It will inspire you to feel intensely for the motherland and transform your life. 'The Sages of India' which features in it is such a flowing perceptive narrative of the spiritual history of India. It cannot but revolutionise your thinking about our spiritual heritage and its social impact. And, remember, these lectures were all delivered extempore by a monk barely thirty-four. Read and discover its glory. In so doing you will have discovered yourself.

It will be best to buy 'The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda' from the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission. There is a hardbound edition, a paperback edition and an economy edition of the Complete Works. The economy edition, though, contains only 8 volumes of the works as opposed to the 9 volumes available in the other two editions. One can get these volumes online as well. Here is the link to such : https://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/complete_works.htm

The books on the four yogas, namely, Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga Yoga and Jnana Yoga, are comprehensive condensed editions of massive philosophical and practical treatises on the various disciplines of spiritual practice that can unfailingly lead you unto truth and protect you from being misguided and duped by charlatans.

The 'Inspired Talks' delivered over a period of six weeks at Thousand Island Park in New York in 1895 to a select band of between ten and twelve disciples saw Swamiji rise to transcendental heights of contemplation and utterance thereof. It is there for us to savour even today through the labour of love of Miss S. E. Waldo who had taken short-hand notes of the talks and published them for posterity to profit by.

The Letters of Swami Vivekananda or his Epistles, written to his associates and comrades, his own disciples and his spiritual brothers, distinguished personalities and leading lights of the day are a treasure trove of knowledge and a seer's insights and responses to the problems of the day and the ensuing Age. There is one such letter where Swamiji says in unequivocal terms that whosoever should read it will imbibe his spirit. It was written from Los Angeles in 1894 to his brother disciples residing in Alambazar Math.

'Conversations and Dialogues' carry all his recorded conversations with intimate associates and bring you face to face with Swamiji as he expounds on issues intricate to matters mundane, but each from his philosophical flights of freedom. The dramatic element here captivates and the distance of a century and more is erased as we are brought into close contact with the sage.

And then, of course, are the Chicago Lectures which ushered in a new age that the world entered into without realising it so much. September 11, now infamous as the day of dastardly terror since 2001, opened the floodgates of the ancient wisdom of the Vedas exactly 108 years earlier in 1893 when a young man from India with his opening words of universal welcome became the personified junction of the past and the present, the East and the West, reason and faith, and, thus, held humanity by the hand to lead it into a new era of universal acknowledgement and understanding. These lectures were eleven in number of which the principal five have been preserved for posterity. These are all there in the Complete Works as well in its very first volume.

Written by Sugata Bose