Talks Excerpt 515 & 516. Swamiji reading and commenting on ‘The Teachings of Swami Vivekananda’.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji

Readings from the Teachings of Swami Vivekananda on ‘Man’ Chapter 30.

[Curiously, it starts from point 6. We’ll try to find the missing points and update this post when we do.]

6. You may build a temple in which to worship God, and that may be good, but a better one, a much higher one, already exists; the human body.

7. The living God is within you and yet you are building churches and temples and believing all sorts of imaginary nonsense. The only God to worship is a human soul in the human body. Of course all animals are temples too, but man is the highest, the Taj Mahal of temples. If I cannot worship in that, no other temple will be of any advantage. The moment I have realised God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him – that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.

8. When a man has no more self [ego] in him, no possessions, nothing to call ‘me’ or ‘mine’, has given himself up entirely, destroyed himself as it were – in that man is God Himself; for in him self-will is gone, crushed out, annihilated. That is the ideal man.

9. The growth of a man can only be gauged by his power of living in the higher atmosphere where the senses are left behind, the amount of the pure ‘thought-oxygen’ his lungs can breathe in, and the amount of time he can spend on that height.

Swamiji comments: ‘On that height,’ he is talking about God or the [higher] Self.

10. First let us be Gods, and then help others to be Gods. ‘Be and make.’ Let this be our motto. Say not man is a sinner. Tell him that he is a God. Even if there were a devil, it would be our duty to remember God always and not the devil.

Swamiji comments: This means that although you know that the other man is bad you do not have to tell him so. Your duty is to remember God, to be subjective. He must have some good qualities in him, so praise those rather than picking on his negative qualities.

When Girish Babu went to Sri Ramakrishna everybody knew that he was a sinner. But what did Sri Ramakrishna say to him? ‘Nay, you are not a sinner. You are a god, you are a mahatma. And later he became one.

 Transcript of recording 516. Still reading from: Teachings of Swami Vivekananda Chapter 30.

11. When you think you are a body . . .

Swamiji comments: Remember these words. Some people are looking for joy, and some people are looking for the secretive path. They want Sri Ramakrishna to come and touch them so they will get in samadhi – like he did with Swami Vivekananda. That is what they want. But here it is clear-cut. Look at these words. Listen carefully.

11. When you think you are a body, you are apart from the universe; when you think you are a soul, you are a spark from the great Eternal Fire; when you think you are the Atman, you are All.

Swamiji comments: A sadhaka [spiritual aspirant/practitioner] must think: ‘I am Brahman.’ But when the thought comes, ‘I am the body,’ you must use the other [Advaitic] mantra: ‘neti neti’ [Not this, Not this]. When you look at others as the body, think: ‘Neti neti, Brahman has come and I must worship It.’ Think like this continuously. Think, think, the word is think.

When you do japa what are you doing? You are thinking about Lord Shiva, you are thinking about Lord Rama, you are thinking about Mother Kali. So, when you think about the Spirit you become the Spirit. There is no miracle about this, it is plain and simple. There is no secret initiation about it either.

When people went to Ramana Maharshi with problems he would say, ‘Don’t worry about the world. Enquire, Who am I?’ If you asked him, ‘Who must I pray to?’ he would say, ‘Who is asking?’ They would reply, ‘I.’ Then he would say, ‘Who is this ‘I’?’ He was direct.

Ramana Maharshi spoke a lot on bhakti. He wrote poems full of bhakti. But he always chose those things that pointed towards the Self – the real I (not I-conscious nor I-absent) which shines out, Self-effulgent.

Swami Purushottamananda [Swamiji’s param Guru and our ‘Guruji’] also drew people’s notice to this. He would say, ‘Who are you? Go and find out who the ‘I’ is, and the day you can find the ‘I’ out, you will disappear and God will appear.’

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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.