Articles

The line entitled above occurs in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and refers to the unitary experience—the supreme spiritual unity of everything. This unity is in our true Self; its nature is pure Consciousness. This unitary knowledge is the goal of our spiritual search.

It is extremely difficult to fathom the greatness of the direct monastic disciples of Sri Ramakrishna. All were men of the highest realization and purity of character. Swami Vivekananda was the bearer of Sri Ramakrishna’s message to the world and the inheritor of his spiritual power, and Swami Brahmananda was looked upon by Sri Ramakrishna as his very own spiritual son.

We begin encountering karma as soon as we are born. Our whole life is ceaseless action—tiresome, but unavoidable. When we retire from the waking state, we go to the dream state where we encounter dream activities. There, too, we cannot escape karma. Even when we sleep there is karma.

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.

What is time? It is something that plays a huge role in the way we experience our everyday lives. In fact, without time, life as we know it would be impossible. Time is something that is always with us, that appears to be close at hand—a palpable reality. Sometimes we stress out over not having enough of it. We say we are pressed for time or are racing against the clock to get something done.

One who has “discovered” one’s innermost Reality and identifies oneself with all that exists is called a “sthita-prajna” in Chapter Two of the Bhagavad Gita.