THE FOURTH OF JULY ... 1

THE FOURTH OF JULY ... 1

Do you know why Swamiji died? He was battle-scarred and war-weary, and he bled to death but never gave up. He fought fearlessly till his end when he flew to the limpid spaces of the Spirit whence he had descended unto the earthly realm but not till his mission on earth was fulfilled and his mighty message unto man delivered.

His was a life, an epic drama in modern times of an individual battling against the gamut of terrestrial forces labouring in ignorance but preventing every step of spiritual evolution attempted by the higher light. Swamiji had to take on the might of the world that had gone delirious in delusive Maya's deceptive charms. His was the task of resettling humanity unto a semblance of sanity whereby they could hearken to the inner call and evolve unto a deeper organic order, a higher, a nobler state where depth-harmony could be perceived between the disparate forces of peripheral Nature. His was to straighten humanity's course at the subliminal level of mass consciousness such that the deeper forces, thus activated and given direction, could alter its evolutionary trajectory unto the blessed end of its innate divinity.

But Swamiji's sojourn in America and England was not a primrose path of prophetic preaching and was strewn with innumerable obstacles of a perverse kind. And he had to overcome all of them, the legacy of narrow religious indoctrination of Semitic exclusivity indigenised by Western political religiosity, all of it loaded with a terrible misapprehension of Indian culture and a consequent prejudice ruining discourse. And yet America listened and Swamiji spoke.

But the toil had been too much. The battles had been lost and won but the body would bear no more. And Swamiji took to flight.

End of Part 1

To be continued ...

Written by

Sugata Bose

15Sharmistha Chatterjee, Amrita Bhattacharjee and 13 others