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Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
Ruth Harris
Top 10 Best Quotes
“With Landsberg, Vivekananda had resumed vegetarianism and was happy to eat simply after the dinner parties and receptions. But Landsberg could not appreciate how cooking could be in some sense sacred, not least because Vivekananda was also a messy cook and Landsberg hated having to clean up after him: 'I regarded it as unworthy of men of spiritual aspirations to waste the greatest part of their time with thinking and speaking of eating, preparing and cooking the food, and washing dishes, while the frugal meals required by a Yogi could be had quicker and cheaper in any restaurant .... I only wonder that this 'doing our own cooking' suggested by some evil demon, did not land me in the lunatic asylum.”
“When Vivekananda explained the dangers of personal love to Margaret Noble in October 1897, he suggested that 'the best leader ... is one who 'leads like the baby.'' The baby, he said, is 'the king of the household. At least to my thinking, that is the secret ....' The sentiment owed much to Ramakrishna; the baby's gift is to be the neediest, the most precious, the most fragile. A baby's unworldliness was its greatest spiritual offering. [...] Roxie Blodgeett, who tended Vivekanda in Southern California, noted how 'the child side of Swamiji's character ... was a constant appeal to the Mother quality in all good women.”
“Vivekananda's impressions had overwhelmed him, and he reacted by scolding his Madras disciples to emphasize the distance they still had to travel in comparison. He told them to hide their 'faces in shame' and called them a 'race of dotards, who spent hundred of years ... discussing the touchableness of this food or ... promenading the sea-shores with books in [their] hands - repeated undigested stray bits of European brainwork, and the whole soul bent upon getting a thirty-rupee clerkship ...' He implored them to come out of their 'narrow holes and have a look abroad ... to see how nations are on the march,' and called for sacrifice, especially for the poor and downtrodden, and acknowledged that the English 'had been the instrument' of breaking a 'crystallised civilisation' to force India, and especially her young men, to change. Both Hirai and Vivekananda regarded imperial assaults not as victimization alone, but also as opportunities for re-creation.”
“Struggle, Vivekanda believed, was a human creation, not inherent in natural law. When a fire strikes a theater, he explained, 'only a few escape' in the crush. But, '[i]f all had gone out slowly, not one would have been hurt. That is the case in life. The doors are open for us, and we can all get out without the competition and struggle; and yet we struggle. The struggle we create through our own ignorance, through impatience; we are in too great a hurry.”
“So we must not lower our ideal, neither are we to lose sight of practicality. We must avoid the two extremes. In our country, the old idea is to sit in a cave and meditate and die. One must learn sooner or later that one cannot get salvation if one does not try to seek the salvation of his brothers. You must try to combine in your life immense idealism with immense practicality. In this exhortation, he summed up what he meant by Karma yoga. He aimed to make rishis, sages who nourished their minds but recognized the limits of book-learning and even of meditation. 'You must stand on your own feet. You must have this new method - the method of man-making.”
“Many female devotees 'babied' Vivekananda. Sara Ellen Waldo traveled for hours in a jogging horsecar to care for him and was pleased when the cooked for her; he said he 'found genuine rest and relaxation in the freedom and quiet of Miss Waldo's simple home.' There he 'invented new dishes or tried experiments with Western provisions and ran back and forth from one room to the other like a child at play.' Josephine MacLeod loved the combination of holiness and childlike absorption when, after a talk on Jesus, he 'seemed to radiate a white light from head to foot.' On the way home, she did not want to interrupt his 'great thoughts,' but was delighted to learn that, despite the halo 'over his head,' he was in fact pondering 'the best way to complete a recipe for mulligatawny soup.' The admired his 'learning of a university president' or 'dignity of an archbishop,' but loved the 'child side' when the 'prophet and sage would disappear.' Maud Stumm, who gave Vivekananda drawing lessons, loved to watch him 'lying at full length on the green couch in the hall, sound asleep like a tired child.' Sometimes, he would get up after a meal to smoke or think, but he lured back to the table by ice cream: 'he would sink into his place with a smile of expectancy and pure delight seldom seen on the face of anybody over sixteen.”
“However, he still retained something of the fluid notions of male and female at the heart of the Ramakrishna's spiritual idealism: 'The true man is he who is strong as strength itself and yet possesses a woman's heart.' Central to this man-making was obedience: 'If your superiors order you to throw yourself into a river and catch a crocodile, you must first obey and then reason with him [sic].' This type of yogu put sacrifice before rationality: to give up one's life without a thought was to be the freest of all. He also emphasized an almost military loyalty to the order that squashed the temptation of sect and schism. And yet, there remained that impossible paradox: 'You must be free as the air, and as obedient as this plant and the dog.”
“He later remarked at the end of his Royal Institution lecture-demonstration in May 1901 that ''It was when I came on this mute witness of life and saw an all-pervading beauty that binds together all things - it was then that for the first time I understood the message proclaimed on the banks of the Ganges thirty years ago - 'they who behold the One, in all the changing manifoldness of the universe, unto them belongs eternal truth, unto none else, unto none else.' Such statements caused as much of a stir as did his painstaking results. Geddes described Bose's interaction with Sir Michael Foster, a veteran Cambridge physiologist, who asked why the Indian showed him a graph with the 'curve os muscle response' to electrical stimulation, something he already knew about. Delighted, Bose replied, 'Pardon me; it is the response of metallic tin.”
“He knew that vegetarianism was crucial for many, but wrote in 'Food and Cooking' that 'the nations who take the animal food are always, as a rule, notably brave, heroic, and thoughtful,' and he wanted to implant these traits in Indians. Food was thus intimately related to India's rebirth, and he urged carnivorousness so Indians could resist the British, despite the spiritual sacrifice. He was also suspicious of Western 'faddism.' Unlike Gandhi, whose first political involvement in London focused on vegetarian activism with like-minded Englishmen, Vivekananda rejected such ideas. In California, he asked Lucy Beckham and George Roorbach, vegetarians in the Bay Area, to provide him with 'proper food' ... I must have meat. I cannot live on potatoes and asparagus with the work I am doing!' They obliged him, despite their preferences.”
“Cooking was creative, but also a quotidian process of transformation, central to Vivekananda's maternal relationship to his disciples. He bragged to his Bengali friends about his culinary prowess: 'Last night I made a dish. It was such a delicious mixture of saffron, lavender, mace, nutmeg, cubebs [a java pepper with a tang of allspice], cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, cream, lime juice, onions, raisins, almonds, peppers, and rice ....' He adored spices, but also loved sweetness, as the ingredients to this recipe suggests. In California, he taught his disciples to make rock candy, which he boiled and boiled to ensure its purity. For him, it symbolized the sweetness vital to his spiritual lessons.”
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Book Keywords:
obedience, struggle, electrical-response, opportunities, spark, idealism, cooking, sweetnes, practicality, spices, vegetarianism, cleaning-up, life, mother, colonialism, paradox, biophysics, imperial-assaults, candy, baby, ice-cream-sage, freedom, meat