Swami Vivekananda humanified and humanised

While speaking at Shakespeare's Club of Pasadena, California, on 27th Jan. 1900 Swami Vivekananda narrated his past woes of surviving on alms: " ... So things went on and on for ten years without any light , but with my health breaking all the time. It tells on the body in the long run: sometimes one meal at nine in the evening, another time a meal at eight in the morning, another after two days, another after three days — and always the poorest and roughest thing. Who is going to give to the beggar the good things he has? And then, they have not much in India. And most of the time walking, climbing snow peaks, sometimes ten miles of hard mountain climbing, just to get a meal. They eat unleavened bread in India, and sometimes they have it stored away for twenty or thirty days, until it is harder than bricks; and then they will give a square of that. I would have to go from house to house to collect sufficient for one meal. And then the bread was so hard, it made my mouth blee...

Though Swami Vivekananda studied B.A., he did not like the idea of working for his livelihood. This can be seen in his conversation with Priya Nath Sinha, his old friend. " ... In the case of a post of twenty or thirty rupees falling vacant, five hundred B.A.s and M.A.s will apply for it! And, dear me! how curiously worded these petitions are! "I have nothing to eat at home, sir, my wife and children are starving; I most humbly implore you, sir, to give me some means to provide for myself and my family, or we shall die of starvation! ... " We can see the scorn he uses in his language. This shows that Vivekananda might not have tried for a job at all. When compared to 2007, the job opportunities for B.A. studied persons in Kolkata (at that time it was the Capital of Undivided India) of 1890s were far more. The amount of Rs. 20 or 30 per month appears too paltry for Vivekananda. In the same conversation he deplored that Indians beg the British Government for relief fr...

Samadhi is a state of ecstasy of mind. During the ecstatic state, a person is believed to go into a trance of unconsciousness. Scriptures contain many definitions and interpretations. (At this blog itself, pl. see my earlier discussion on "samadhi". I am not adding this piece there as that post will become lengthy and difficult to read.) Priya Nath Sinha and Vivekananda were boyhood friends. Before Vivekananda took to monkhood, it seems they met many times and discussed (as per the reminiscences of Shri P.N. Sinha). During the discussions Shri Sinha questioned the possibility of a person attaining the ecstatic state in this Age of Darkness and Falsity (Kali Yuga). Vivekananda replied that he attained ecstatic state frequently could take Sinha to the state of ecstasy. At that time the conversation could not go ahead and Sinha could not presss for the ecstatic state from Vivekananda. After Vivekananda returned from his first sojourn in US, he got an elevated status of a ...