ARISE! AWAKE! ... 11 (Night edition, 31 July, 2025)

ARISE! AWAKE! ... 11

(Night edition, 31 July, 2025)

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Editorial 

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Human beings are mentally lazy. And this is tāmas. Swamiji had urged men to be thinkers. But where are the thinkers among his devotees? They are the ones that resort to the typical victory chants in his name in a rather meek, vanquished manner, are passive in their piety and generally oppositely disposed to the valorous stance that Swamiji had adopted in life and had expected his followers to do as well. 

Alas! great men dream of one thing, exhort their following to fulfil their aspirations thus but fail to extract the like response. Such has been the history of humanity and such are the trends even today. Swamiji cries in the wilderness. His statement on the last day of his earthly sojourn that it would take another Vivekananda to realise the true import of what this Vivekananda had done has been used to glorify him rather than feel ashamed of the fact that the others including his brother disciples had failed him, not deliberately but owing to their understandable incapacity to apprehend the depth of his aspirations for his motherland and the world in all its superb sweep in space and time. The leonine protégé of the Master had struggled like a caged lion not to himself break free of the bars that held---for he was born free and had doubled up the act through his Master's grace by getting immersed in nirvikalpa samādhi (the non-dual superconscious state of trance)---but to free his countrymen in especial from the bondage of ignorance and superstition, poverty and colonial dependence. 'Freedom, freedom is the song of the soul'--- his clarion call, went in vain as men preferred to sleep in the icy chill of dawning death, ignoring his other call, 'Arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached.' 

But must we sleep? Ask yourself this question if you indeed are a devotee of Swamiji and his peerless preceptor, the Paramahamsa of Dakshineshwar, who would not pass a day in indolent dealing with the Divine but would rock up heaven and earth to open up the clogged channels of spiritual activity which has duly been called the awakening of the Brahmakundalini (the Kulakundalini Shakti of the entire world for now and for ages to come). 🕉 

Yours in Swamiji, 

Sugata Bose