Swami Vivekananda: On Himself

Mystic, Prophet, Monk, guru, Evangelist, Paramahamsa, Disciple, Master, Lover of Humanity, Patriot, child, brother, friend innumerable facets of the great personality that is Swami Vivekananda stand here revealed through his won words. From his boyhood and discipleship under Sri Ramakrishna, to his founding of the Ramakrishna Missions; from his wandering throughout India as an unknown Sannyasin, to his world-shaking triumph at the Chicago Parliament of Religions; from his struggles to lift the suffering masses of India, to his soaring flights in the Spirit; and to his final release form the body through Yoga: we follow here the Swami’s life and experiences as he himself reveled them through his conversations, discourses, writings, and letters. Who was Swami Vivekananda? Here a thousand word-pictures, carefully gathered together by his students, give the answer.Swami Vivekananda was, at many times, a man of inconceivable attitude of thought, and often to all appearances a living paradox; but beneath the surface of appearance he was clearly the living explanation of the spiritual life. And the understanding of the man, seemingly almost impossible, becomes almost simple when one remembers that he was a man of manifold realization. Thus all the apparent paradoxes of his thought were reconciled by the greatness of his heart and by the consistencies of his emotional consciousness.He was intellectually like a great hammer mercilessly beating down the structures of complacent belief. Even with regard to his own mind he was an eternal iconoclast, always searching for and demanding a sounder, saner and a more comprehensive basis. He never allowed himself any intellectual ease. He peremptorily refused to be satisfied with a finality in thought and ideas which by their very nature connote limitation and imperfection. Therefore he was always on the watch-tower of thought, straining his personal vision to discern the contents of an eve widening horizon.. If he dreaded anything more than bondage, it was the idea of putting a limit to the infinite conceptions of God and the endless ways of realizing Him.