It’s time the Sleeping Leviathan woke up again

From the depths of his being, Swami Vivekananda preached the message of divinity of man, the eternal message of Sanatan Dharma. From the core of his heart, he broadcast the message of universal religion, which he imbibed from his Master, Ramakrishna Paramahans, whose entire life itself was a consummation of this Universality.While Swamiji’s clarion call of brotherhood, love, universal acceptance, internal transformation aroused the Western mind, it energised the psyche of a nation steeped in inertia. He knew the futility of speaking the same language that stirred the Western audience, to his countrymen who, as per his own words, were a ‘ Leviathan’. That is why he said, “You will be nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the Gita.” He galvanised youthful minds with powerful, action-inducing clarion calls such as: “What we want is vigour in the blood, strength in the nerves, iron muscles and nerves of steel, not softening namby-pamby ideas.” He knew the weak, rudderless, minds of 19th-century India needed a strength-injecting new mantra.In the modern times, as we pursue our selfish interests, keep shrinking in our worldviews and getting trapped in the cycle of happiness and misery, Swami Vivekananda’s message is as relevant.He said, “Like the caterpillar that takes the thread from its own mouth and builds its cocoon and at last finds itself caught inside the cocoon, we have bound ourselves by our own actions. We have set the wheel in motion, and we are being crushed under it.”But there is a way out of this trap, and that is ‘spiritual knowledge’. “Spiritual knowledge is the only thing that can destroy our miseries forever; Let men have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world, not before,” he said.And spirituality in his manual is the progressive journey from selfishness to unselfishness. Unselfishness is more paying, only people have not the patience to practise it, he believed.Love, truth and unselfishness form our highest ideal, because in them lies such a manifestation of power.That is why he emphasised the right education that can help evolve humanistic impulses in a person. Education, to him, is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas.In the modern times, when society is moving headlong into the future without a higher ideal, Swami Vivekananda’s message of divinity of man can show us the way. He said: “Teach yourselves, teach everyone his real nature, call upon the sleeping soul and see how it awakens. Power will come, glory will come, goodness will come, purity will come and everything that is excellent will come when this sleeping soul is roused to self-conscious activity. Arise, awake! Awake from this hypnotism of weakness. Stand up, assert yourself, proclaim the God within you, do not deny Him! De-hypnotise yourselves.”Swamiji’s man-making ideas and his message connect us with the eternal value systems of our nation. A self-reliant nation with spiritually strong personalities capable of working for people beyond the conventional boundaries is the need of the hour.