If I am God, then my soul is a temple of the Highest, and my every work should be a worship--love for love's sake, duty for duty's sake, without hope of reward or fear of punishment. Thus my religion means expansion, and expansion means realization and perception in the highest sense--no mumbling words or genuflections. We have to become divine, realizing the divine more and more from day to day in an endless progress.
From a summary of a lecture given before the Brooklyn Ethical Society at the Pouch Mansion, Brooklyn, on December 30, 1894. Reproduced from the Brooklyn Standard Union. Complete Works, 1.332.
Vivekananda: You see, I love our Muslims.
Nivedita: Yes, but what I want to understand is this habit of seeing every people from their strongest aspect. Where did it come from? Do you recognize it in any historical character? Or is it in some way derived from Sri Ramakrishna?
Vivekananda: It must have been the training under Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. We all went by his path to some extent. Of course it was not so difficult for us as he made it for himself. He would eat and dress like the people he wanted to understand, take their initiation and use their language. "One must learn," he said, "to put oneself into another man's very soul." And this method was his own! No one ever before in India became a Christian and Muslim and Vaishnava, by turn!
Conversation on board a ship to England. Complete Works, 9.332.
The Light Divine within is obscured in most people. It is like a lamp in a cask of iron, no gleam of light can shine through. Gradually, by purity and unselfishness we can make the obscuring medium less and less dense, until at last it becomes as transparent as glass.
Sri Ramakrishna was like the iron cask transformed into a glass cask through which can be seen the inner light as it is. We are all on the way to become the cask of glass and even higher and higher reflections. As long as there is a "cask" at all, we must think through material means. No impatient person can never succeed.
Retreat given at the Thousand Island Park, USA. June 30, 1895. Complete Works, 7.21.
These are the three stages which every religion has taken. First we see God in the far beyond, then we come nearer to him and give him omnipresence so that we live in him; and at last we recognize that we are he.
From a summary of a lecture given before the Brooklyn Ethical Society at the Pouch Mansion, Brooklyn, on December 30, 1894. Reproduced from the Brooklyn Standard Union. Complete Works, 1.331.
The highest kind of teachers silently collect true and noble ideas, and others--the Buddhas and Christs--go from place to place preaching them and working for them. In the life of Gautama Buddha we notice him constantly saying that he is the twenty-fifth Buddha. The twenty-four before him are unknown to history, although the Buddha known to history must have built upon foundations laid by them.
Class on Karma Yoga. New York, January 10, 1896. Complete Works, 1.105-106.
You are good and noble. Instead of materializing the spirit, that is, dragging the spiritual to the material plane, convert the matter into spirit, catch a glimpse at least, every day, of that world of infinite beauty and peace and purity--the spiritual, and try to live in it day and night.
Letter to Mary and Harriet Hale. Written from Eliot, Maine, on July 31, 1894. Complete Works, 6.261-62.
If I am in a dark room, no amount of protestation will make it any brighter--I must light a match. Just so, no amount of grumbling and wailing will make our imperfect body more perfect. But Vedanta teaches us--call forth your soul, show your divinity. Teach your children that they are divine, that religion is a positive something and not a negative nonsense. Teach them that religion is not subjection to groans when under suppression, but expansion and manifestation.
From a summary of a lecture given before the Brooklyn Ethical Society at the Pouch Mansion, Brooklyn, on December 30, 1894. Reproduced from the Brooklyn Standard Union. Complete Works, 1.330.
The idea of an objective God is not untrue--in fact, every idea of God, and hence every religion, is true, as each is but a different stage in the journey, the aim of which is the perfect conception of the Vedas. Hence, too, Hindus not only tolerate but accept every religion, praying in the mosques of the Muslims, worshiping before the fire of the Zoroastrians, and kneeling before the cross of the Christians, knowing that all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of them marking a stage of progress. We gather all these flowers and bind them with the twine of love, making a wonderful bouquet of worship.
From a summary of a lecture given before the Brooklyn Ethical Society at the Pouch Mansion, Brooklyn, on December 30, 1894. Reproduced from the Brooklyn Standard Union. Complete Works, 1.331-32.
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