Talks Excerpt 470. Swamiji shares insights into the youthful and future Swami Vivekananda.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

The young Swami Vivekananda learned the Mahabharata and the Ramayana on his mother’s lap. Is it any wonder that he grew to love the poor and the miserable at that young age? Above all he grew to love the sannyasis.

His mother said that he was a very naughty child. She used to exclaim, ‘I prayed to Lord Shiva to give me a child but he sent me one of his demons.’ He proved her right, since, whenever he was naughty, she would pour water on his head and repeat [the mantra], ‘Om Namah Shivaaya, Om Namah Shivaaya, Om Namah Shivaaya’ – because that was her Deity. She found to her amazement that he stopped crying. The water was poured on his head, which was the linga personified and Om Namah Shivaaya completed it. That is how she learned the trick on how to keep him quiet – or rather, to pacify him.

It is a joke to us but every time she repeated Om Namah Shivaaya, Lord Shiva’s name penetrated him and awakened the good and divine samskaras in him. Lord Shiva’s name manifested itself inside this little child. Even if a mother playfully takes God’s name and whacks the child, the child is bound to be transformed, sooner or later. Some mothers say ungodly words when they hit their children; but this mother chanted Lord Shiva’s name.

As the young Swami Vivekananda grew, he would take all the best things in the house and give them to the poor people – especially to the sadhus and the sannyasis. Though his mother and father were very charitable, they eventually became tired of it. Whenever they saw a sadhu coming along the street, they would call the boy and say, ‘Come here Naren, come inside and see this.’ Then they would lock the door. It happened many times that when they opened the door they found that the father’s new shoes, his hat or his jersey were gone. When they asked him where a particular thing was, he would say, ‘I put it down there for the sadhus to take home.’ Such was his heart that they could not stop him from giving.

The free-to-read or download, 396-page Flipbook version of Swamiji’s biography is available by clicking HERE. If you’d prefer the PDF version, please click HERE.

These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.