Monthly Readings

It was in San Francisco that Swami Vivekananda declared that souls should defy nature, that they should live and die game. This is the story of one of his brother monks, Swami Trigunatita, who did just that in our city, San Francisco. He lived here, earnestly serving the people of this city, and he died game in that service.

Swami Brahmananda would keep his mind absorbed in ‘the Unchanging, nmoving, the Eternal’ even as he lived in the world for the good of humanity.

The self, as we ordinarily understand it, is fluctuating every moment. In spite of its changing nature, however, it is through the self alone we perceive and experience ourselves and the world. The self is the sense of ‘I-consciousness’ or individuality that we all have, though initially our identity is unclear. It is only after a long, sustained effort that we will be able to realize the true nature of this ‘I.’

Swami Vivekananda’s vision of Vedanta is his lasting legacy to contemporary spiritual thought. When his work in America needed an organizational structure, he chose to name it as Vedanta Society. We have an idea of what a “Society” is, but we need to ask ourselves what kind of “Vedanta” Swamiji had in mind when he used that word in connection with his Western work.

When people in the Ramakrishna Movement think of Carl Jung, they tend to think of his earlier, yet undeveloped ideas about the East and spirituality. In his Prabuddha Bharata article of 1936, for example, Jung argues that Westerners were not suited for the practice of yoga.