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In seeking for the immortal, the sages (Upanishadic Seers) conferred immortality on the literature which conveyed it and the culture which embodied it.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P20

Indian spiritual tradition refers to dharma, artha, and kama, as the trivarga, the inseparable group of three, treats them as the universal warp and woof of all ordered human society, theistic, atheistic, or agnostic, and presents moksha, absolute freedom of the spirit, as the fourth purushartha, which is an optional trans-social pursuit meant for those few who desire, and who dare, to dive deeper into the spiritual dimensions of reality and realize one's true nature in all its glory. For all the rest, this moksha experience comes within the limitations of the social context, as dharma. Dharma, thus, is the confluence of the secular and the spiritual, of the social and the trans-social, ...
- ibid P205

 Mysticism, studied seriously, challenges basic tenets of Western Cultures: a) the primacy of reason and intellect; b) the separate, individual nature of man; c) the linear organization of time. Great mystics, like our own great scientists, envision the world as being larger than those tenets, as transcending our traditional views.
- ibid P437 (from 'Consciousness: The Brain, States of Awareness,  and Alternate Realities' by G.A.P P192-94)

It is only when the spiritual forces of the great world religions in India become fused into a unified current of a Godward passion and a manward love that she will achieve full nationhood.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P12

Being is not identical with consciousness; consciousness is only one part of Being; conscious being is therefore only surface being, limited and circumscribed. The greatness and forcefulness of a personality derive from its capacity to appropriate more and more of its Being to consciousness, thus the expansion of consciousness is also the enrichment of personality; and the highest development of personality is when consciousness becomes coextensive and identical with Being.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P121

The human being cannot be made moral by an Act of Parliament. That is a great lesson we have to learn. There is such a thing as human spiritual growth. Education is meant to help us to start that spiritual growth and become decent citizens who can live at peace with other citizens in society. That doesn't come from an Act of Parliament. It comes from education. Education actually means, in the language of Vivekananda, 'manifestation of the perfection already in the human being'. We are to unfold those beautiful possibilities hidden within ourselves so that peacefulness, humanist concern, a spirit of dedication and service, all these can come from within ourselves, if only we know how to handle this wonderful thing called the human mind. All education is, therefore, the training of the mind and not stuffing of the brain.
- Universal Message of Bhagawad-Gita, Vol I, P324

Every human psychophysical system possesses a small quantum of explicit energy, and an infinite quantum of implicit energy. What is explicit is found in body, muscle, nerve, mind, buddhi; what is implicit is lying behind in the Atman. So every one of us is handling only a small packet of energy, though behind it there is an infinite packet of energy and we do not know it.
Vedanta wants to tell every human being that there is such a fund of energy of the  Atman within you. ... ... That is our true nature.
- ibid P347-48

If you want democracy to succeed, this element of ethical, moral and spiritual growth must come to the people. So, in Vedanta you will find, in the context of modern science, modern techniques, modern socio-political processes, this great spiritual orientation given to human life and human development.
- Universal Message of Bhagawad-Gita, Vol II, P15

To do honor to an infinite God in an infinite way is to practice active toleration and fellowship.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P25

In the Gita, ..., God is face to face with Man - Narayana with Nara - and this is what constitutes its solemn and sublime setting.
- ibid P64

The Gita places ethics under the guidance of a metaphysics which deals with life in its totality.
- ibid P83

Even many of our so-called educated people are feudal in their mental make-up; they have not captured the spirit of freedom and equality in their relations with their fellowmen: many of our educated men exhibit the feudal outlook even in their relations with their educated wives. Citizens with feudal outlooks and feudal attitudes are tremendous sources of weakness for a democratic state which India is, and a democratic society which India hopes to be. This weakness has to be eradicated by educating all sections of our people in the robust democratic temper. All citizens, irrespec­tive of their functions in society, are equal in their worth and dignity. Here the Vedantic and the modern democratic ideals of man mingle and converge. Swami Vivekananda's teachings on education and religion have this end in view.
  - Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III P56

Grace of Lakshmi to Flow from Grace of Sarasvati

Our country needs the light of knowledge, both secular and spiritual, which is what we mean when we speak about the grace of Sarasvati, the Goddess of learning. This grace is needed even to achieve wealth and economic and social welfare, which is the grace of Lakshmi, the Goddess of fortune. For all wealth is the product of the application of scientific knowledge to social purposes. Behind all applied science, or science as fructifera, lies the energy of pure science, or science as lucifera, as the light of knowledge. The former represent Lakshmi, and the latter Sarasvati. In the recent centuries, we in India had separated these two energy resources, these two divine sisters, and had upheld the wrong belief that these were two jealous sisters, and that the presence of one of them in an individual or a society spelt the running away of the other. This is perfectly true if we continue to hold on to our erroneous notion that Sarasvati means mere static knowledge of texts and formula and Lakshmi means static wealth hidden under the earth, buried under the pillows, or converted into gold ornaments or bullion. This static Sarasvati and this static Lakshmi are certainly incompatible. But these charming and adorable goddesses of our tradition are 'made of sterner stuff', to adapt a well-known expression of Shakespeare. They are dynamic divine energies--the first impelling man to seek truth in the world and in experience, to discipline the mind in detachment, concentration, and precision, and make it capable of penetrating into the mysteries of nature and human life, while the second impelling man to convert that knowledge into power and apply that power to enhance human life, growth, and fulfillment. The modern Western peoples have demonstrated that Sarasvati, as search for verified, verifiable, and communicable knowledge, and Lakshmi, as wealth and welfare arising out of applied knowledge, out of co-operative productive labour, as wealth in productive investment and circulation, are very friendly co-operative sisters. And Swami Vivekananda has told us that the significance of the modern period in our long history lies precisely in the effort in, and in the fruition of the bringing to our homes and to our society, through his philosophy of practical Vedanta, these two great sisters in friendly and energetic co-operation.
  - Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P84-85

The search for the Self must leave them [body, senses, mind, ego] behind and proceed deeper. If nothing is discovered beyond these changing not-self elements, man is right in resigning himself to nihilism in philosophy and pragmatism in life. Vedanta, however, finds in the facts of experience enough intimations of a changeless reality, which justify a more penetrating investigation of experience by reason. Reason is confronted by the puzzling fact that the diverse experiences of man form a unity; and there is also the fact of memory. These presuppose a changeless centre in man; without such a changeless centre, the perception of change, the experience of memory and their attributions to the one and the same knowing subject will become inexplicable. Such a scrutiny of experience revealed to Vedanta the presence of a changeless subject or knower at the centre of the knowing process, at the core of human personality. As affirmed by Shankaracharya in his Vivekachudamani (verses 125 and 126):
अस्ति कश्चित् स्वयम् नित्यम् अह्म्प्रत्ययलंबनः |
अवस्थात्रयसाक्षी सन् पञ्चकोशविलक्षणः ||
'There is some entity, eternal by nature, the basis of the experience of ego-sense, the witness of the three states (of waking, dream and deep-sleep), and distinct from the five sheaths.'
यो विजानाति सकलम् जाग्रत-स्वप्न-सुषुप्ति |
बुद्धि तदवृत्ति सद्भावं अभावं अहं इत्ययं ||
'Who knows everything that happens in the waking, dream, and deep-sleep states; who is aware of the presence or absence of the mind and its functions; and who is the basis of the ego-sense.'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P454-455

The real Self of man, says India's adhyatma-vidya, science of man as Atman, is inaccessible to the sense organs and to the sense-bound mind, but accessible to buddhi, or reason, when it becomes subtle and pure - buddhi-grahyam, atindriyam, as the Gita (VI.21) expresses it.
- ibid P193

The Shrimad Bhagavatam, in a majestic utterance conveying a synoptic vision, describes the ultimate Reality as advayam jnaanam, non-dual Pure Consciousness (1.2.11): 

Pure Consciousness is known as Brahman or Shiva, in Its impersonal quiescent aspect and as Maya or Shakti, in Its immanent dynamic aspect; and both are one, like the unity of physical energy in its two aspects of bottled up and released states. Shankaracharya presents 'the goal of all Vedanta as the realization of the unity and infinitude of the Atman as Pure Consciousness' - आत्मैकत्व विद्या प्रतिपत्तये सर्वे वेदान्त: आरभ्यते atmaikatva vidya pratipattaye sarve vedantah aarabhyate' in his Brahma-Sutra commentary (Sutra 4).  
- ibid P442-43

When science insists on studying things from the point of view of the objects themselves by eliminating the personal equation, it is in effect, emphasizing the sakshi-bhava or sakshi point of view (witness attitude); for, the limited and circumscribed vision of the ego gives place to the unlimited and universal vision of the sakshi, by the practice of scientific or intellectual detachment.
- ibid P106

The Gita is a profound philosophy, particularly because it is centred in action. It treats man at work as its central theme, unlike all our other books on religion, where man at leisure, man in meditation and at prayer, is the theme. Man at work, the labourer breaking stones on the roadside or working in a factory, the administrator working in an office, the housewife at home, is the theme of the Gita. of your work, your day-to-day life, if you can orient all this in terms of all-round human development—human development around you and spiritual development within you—you are my true friend and disciple. This is the meaning of the yoga expounded by Krishna from the second chapter onwards. Says verse 50 of the second chapter defining yoga: 'Yogah Karmasu Kaushalam' — 'Yoga is efficiency in action'. It is a double efficiency: By being a productive individual you develop the economic and social strength and raise the human situation around you; by enriching your inner life, you develop your own spiritual strength. Get in touch with the Atman, your true nature, little by little, in and through your life and actions, and you will achieve life fulfillment in a profound way in this very life. What a beautiful concept of efficiency!
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P549

Very few know this truth of Vedanta and the possibility of its practical application, even in our own country. What we call religion in India is mostly a few superstitions, a little magic and miracle, and some anti-human social practices. Even intellectuals in our country never knew the profound dimensions of their Vedanta, their adhyatma-vidya. I often used to wonder how even our intellectuals and pandits understood their religion in childish ways. They go to holy Hardwar, pay five rupees to a panda, or priest, catch hold of the tail of a cow, and they expect to go to heaven! This is considered religion! In this way, the whole nation was brought down to such flimsy ideas. No wonder our country is in such a sorry state. Flimsy philosophy or religion gives only flimsy life.
- ibid., P553

Theirs (avataras) is a standing example which validates the ethical truth that the height of a personality is directly proportional to the depth of its impersonality; to find life, we have to lose it first (Matthew, XVI.25).
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P117

Brahman as the Self of all, as the pratyagatman, is the only rational sanction for ethics and morality. It is an ever-present Reality, as the knower behind all acts of perception and knowledge, who can not be made an object of knowledge, but yet whose negation also is an impossibility; for, He or It is the very Self of him who does the negation: ya eva niraakartaa tasaiva aatmatvaat, says Shankaracharya.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society , Vol I P225

We failed to stress this whole gamut of social virtues and graces, and to impart the relevant secular education which is the source of them. Instead we stressed an other-worldly excellence with its passive virtues, with inaction as its watchword; we failed to understand that social welfare comes from an activist ethics in the context of interaction with other members in society. The result was that we failed to achieve the more attainable ideals of character, work-efficiency, public spirit, and general well-being, while equally failing to achieve the high ideal of mukti and the virtues and graces associated with so great an ideal. The high spiritual inaction of the mukti path and ideal became deformed into laziness, inertia, and human unconcern, along with a type of worldliness, or “a piety-fringed worldliness” as I prefer to call it, more harmful than the worldliness of the modern Western type, which has at least character-efficiency and human concern to enrich it.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society , Vol II, P97-98

How could Swamiji [Swami Vivekananda] speak with such 'irresistible appeal' on education? The answer lies in his own experience of education and its comprehensive nature. He had studied the modern sciences, history, and literature, with keen interest, while he was at school and college; earlier, he had imbibed at his mother's feet the spiritual and cultural traditions of his own ancient country. But by these alone his education was not complete. This educated Narendra had to go and sit at the feet of an 'uneducated' man—the great Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) for five years, to complete his education and emerge as Swami Vivekananda! What a strange spectacle is this anecdote in the modern age! Highly educated and intellectual, not only he, but also several other similar youths, has to approach the 'uneducated' Sri Ramakrishna living in Dakshineswar, north Calcutta, to continue and complete their education. Who was this Sri Ramakrishna? He had never gone to school beyond the first or second year to the primary level. He was just ordinary; and yet he was also something extraordinary; for he had given himself an education in what I had earlier referred to as the para-vidya of the Mundaka Upanishad; and they all found the fulfillment of their education in him.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society , Vol III, P572

Vedanta discovered the drk as chit, or Pure Consciousness, and as the unity of all drks and all dryshyam - behind the separate and diverse phenomenon of the material world outside, and all manifestations of consciousness centered in the ego of the individual drks within.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P276

The only condition for the realization of God is purity of heart; and not adopting a particular profession or mode of life. These latter are mere individual preferences; but the former is universal.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P343

If adhyatma vidya, the science of spirituality, is the strongest element in the Indian heritage, positive sciences and technology form her weakest points. She had made splendid contributions in these fields for centuries. But drawn by the lure of the divine within, and following the technique of meditation and inner withdrawal, she comparatively neglected the world without and the technique of action and struggle in that outer world; and this neglect of man's outer life became almost cruel in succeeding centuries. This is the one single cause behind almost all the maladies afflicting modem Indian society, not only its poverty and ignorance, but also its piety-fringed worldliness and social harshness. A policy that produced a few spiritual giants, produced also millions of arrested and stunted personalities and any number of selfish crooks in between.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P9-10

We should bear in mind ... ... the nature of God as Pure Chit or Consciousness, infinite, and non-dual, and Its being the very Self of our self, and not any external object or any extra-cosmic deity.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol I, P405

The first truth that our people in India have to realize is that our country has contributed substantially to the development of the physical sciences and technology during the five thousand years of our long history. No civilization can develop without the development of technology. And India had developed a high level of civilization, beginning with the highly sophisticated urban civilization of the Indus Valley, with its wonderful town-planning, public drainage, public baths, ship-building and ship-repair docks, and other features, down to about 1800 AD. Along with technology, these civilizations had also developed the theoretical aspects of several physical sciences like physics, chemistry, life sciences, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, surgery, metallurgy, linguistics, and grammar.
Our national scientific mind and scientific activity started experiencing a decline about 800 years ago, after a flourishing period of over 3,000 years, and became lulled into sleep after the establishment of the British Empire in India, which took every conceivable step to stifle and destroy, in the interest of the emerging modern scientific, technological, and industrial revolution in Britain, India's age-old scientific, technological, educational, and socio-economic structures and systems.
Since the seventeenth century, the modern West has taken to science and technology and, within these three hundred years, carried both to unprecedented heights of achievements. While doing so, the West had also to struggle against the dogmas of Christianity organized in a powerful and militant Church which tried, unsuccess fully, to suppress the scientific spirit and temper and research at every step. Such a phenomenon is a purely Western experience, and our people in India should know this second truth that, in India's long history, there has never been an effort to suppress the spirit of free and rational inquiry and investigation which is the life-blood of all science; and this was because Indian culture had given a high place to physical science and all rational inquiry, and had also carried over that scientific and rational approach and temper into the other great field of investigation, namely, religion. And India has accordingly developed and perfected the science of religion into a science of spiritual growth, development, and fulfillment of man, into a science of human possibilities, to use an expression coined by the late biologist and humanist, Sir Julian Huxley
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P610 (Lecture at IIT Madras, 1984)

External and internal are only formal expressions. Life or Reality knows no separation like this. What is external is also internal. 'Narayana, the indwelling divine', says the Narayan Upanishad, 'exists filling the inside and the outside of man and the universe.'
   'अन्त: बहिश्च तत् सर्वम् व्याप्य नारायण: स्थित: |
      antah bahishcha tat sarvam vyapya narayanah sthitah |'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P430

There are several words in Sanskrit as equivalents of the English word, consciousness: chit, prajnaa, jnapti, jnaana, bodha, samvit; according to contexts, they may mean Infinite Pure Consciousness, knowledge, wisdom etc.
- ibid P442

As the eternal subject or knower, it [Atman] is an ever-present datum of experience and not a mere logical construction; but it does not reveal itself as such to one and all. Not to speak of ordinary people, even great scholars fail to comprehend the Atman. The verse [Kathopanishad 3.12] gives the reason: gudah - 'it is subtle, hidden'. It is mysterious presence ... ... and therefore 'na prakashate' - 'it is not manifest': asamskrtabuddeh avijneyatvat - 'since (it is) unknown to him whose buddhi or reason is not refined or purified' comments Shankaracharya. It is not present on the surface of experience; it is hidden in its depth.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P456

We see the bitter fruits of the current crude materialism, ever increasing, not only in the psychic and somatic ailments, but also in the widespread corruption, bribery, and many other forms of social malpractices plaguing our own and other societies. The strength to resist an immoral or anti-social temptation is a spiritual strength. It does not come from mere physical or intellectual levels. The human intellect, even of highly intellectual persons, by itself, is helpless in the presence of temptations; but if that intellect is lit up by the divine light at the Atman behind, it develops the strength to stand up against all temptations, big or small. This redemption of the intellect is also the redemption of man and his civilization; it is thus that knowledge matures into wisdom.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P643

The Atman as the immutable and eternal Consciousness is presented by the Upanishads as the sakshi or witness of the changing subjects and objects of the states of waking and dream and of the total voidness of deep-sleep.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P461

In the passionate words of poet Tagore (Lectures and Addresses, pp. 27-28): 
'The object of education is to give man the unity of truth... I believe in a spiritual world, not as anything separate from this world, but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw, we must always feel this truth, that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance, drifting on the current of matter towards an eternal nowhere.'
For all students of the modern age, ancient India presents the glowing example of Narada of the Chandogya Upanisad as the prototype of this spiritual sensitivity in a student of learning and talent, who was dissatisfied with institutional education and mere book knowledge, and who used both as spurs to spiritual knowledge and wisdom.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P22

The increasing liberation of this deeper Self in the context of marriage is what is proposed by Indian thought. So far as woman is concerned, this is achieved by the wife growing into the mother, not merely or even necessarily biologically, but certainly spiritually. Motherhood is a spiritual transformation of wifehood. The wife may and does demand and take; but the mother feels it her privilege to give. Within the limited circle of her motherhood, she is the example of self-transcendence through self-effacement. If woman as wife is socially significant, woman as mother is spiritually glorious. If the spiritual is only coterminous with the biological, then woman as mother of a little biological group would have remained the highest moral and spiritual development possible for her sex. But the spiritual value transcends the biological and even the social, and finds expression in an ideal of motherhood where love and service break the, barriers of family, race, and creed, and assume a universal aspect. It is this spiritual elevation which is self-transcendence that enables women even as wife to function effectively as a citizen, embracing with her mother-heart the millions of its body-politic. If this is called finding life —larger and fuller life — then the path to it is self-development through self-effacement.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P70

We have to reduce them [vasanas, samskaras]; this is the meaning of renunciation in its purest sense - a joyous and spontaneous giving up of something less valuable, with a view to getting something more valuable.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P502

We may say that our education is secular, as we may say that our Indian state is secular. But we do not mean to banish ethical and spiritual values from our secularism, nor divorce secular values from our spirituality. Our national philosophy, the Vedanta, embraces in its sweeping synthesis the entire gamut of secular and spiritual values, As expressed by our Mundaka Upanisad: all knowledge is one, whether secular-- apara -- or spiritual--para. In India today, we need education that comprehends both, that enables our students to equip themselves with the knowledge that will help them to face the economic, political, and social challenges of their nation as much as to help them to give higher and higher spiritual expressions to their life-energy.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P76-77

The Vedanta therefore speaks of two levels of spirituality, namely, the spirituality of the secular ethical dimension, referred to as dharma, and the spirituality of the mystical dimension, referred as amrita, in the Upanishad and the Gita.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P499

The Indian tradition was fortunate to have a leader and innovator of the spiritual stature and credentials of Swami Vivekananda. Speaking about the impact of Vivekananda on Indian life and thought, Jawaharlal Nehru says (Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, p. 4):
'I do not know how many of the younger generation read the speeches and the writings of Swami Vivekananda. But I can tell you that many of my generation were very powerfully influenced by him and I think it would do a great deal of good to the present generation if they also went through Swami Vivekananda's writings and speeches, and they would learn much from them.'
Referring to the contemporary relevance of Vivekananda's ideas, he says (ibid, p. 5):
'If you read Swami Vivekananda's writings and speeches, the curious thing you will feel that they are not old. It was told 56 years ago, and they are fresh today, because what he wrote or spoke about dealt with certain fundamental matters and aspects of our problems or the world's problems.'
Speaking further about Vivekananda's influence on Indian politics, he says (ibid, pp. 6-7):
'He was no politician in the ordinary sense of the word and yet he was, I think, one of the great founders — if you like you may use any other word—of the national movement of India, and a great number of people who took more or less an active part in that movement in a later date drew their inspiration from Swami Vivekananda. Directly or indirectly, he has powerfully influenced the India of today. And I think that our younger generation will take advantage of this fountain of wisdom, of spirit, and fire that flows through Swami Vivekananda.'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P39

If the innermost Self I all peace, the outermost sheath, the annamaya, or the physical sheath is all noise and distraction. The farther we are from our centre in the Atman, the more become the noise and distraction in our lives. Peace is not in things outside, says Vedanta, but in man himself. This peace has to be realized by the development of the capacity for inner penetration through inner discipline. The structure of human life becomes steady when it is founded on the rock of the eternal Atman within, on the indwelling God in every being.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I,  P458-59

In the modern West, education stops at the development of individuality, of the ego centered in man's organic system. By strengthening that ego, that education turns out individuals, strong and self-confident, no doubt, but also with less and less capacity to communicate with other individuals. That capacity to communicate, to love and to be loved, which is so vital to human happiness and fulfillment, comes to man only through an education that initiates man's spiritual growth from individuality to personality. It is this situation, and the keen awareness of an inner spiritual poverty, that turn many thinking people in the modern West to the rational, universal, and practical philosophy of India - the Vedanta. Thus, religion as expounded in Vedanta, as expounded by Swami Vivekananda, which shows the way to human spiritual growth beyond his organic level and its limitations, is no primitive human superstition, but is part of a profound and rational philosophy of total and integral human development and fulfillment.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III,  P81

The stark fact of felt bondage and un-fulfillment, against the ever-present truth of inborn freedom and perfection, converts the human heart into a battlefield of forces, and makes the human being the only restive pilgrim in God's creation.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, ibid P489

... for thousands of years, our nation has been creative and dynamic, and had powerfully influenced the history of other nations, during the past few centuries, we had become static and stagnant and had ceased to be creative. We became creatures of history instead of being creators of history. Other nations created history and we became its victims. We were rescued from this darkness by our great thinkers and leaders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the powerful spiritual, cultural, and political movements initiated by them. They made India creative once again. The most dynamic of them all, both as to the sweep and depth of his thought and as to the infinite sympathies of his heart, was Swami Vivekananda. It was he who summoned our nation to develop fearlessness, character-efficiency, a capacity for team-work, and a sense of dedication. And he expounded a philosophy of education designed to develop these human resources in our people, a philosophy designed to achieve nation-building through man-making.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P223

Whatever you do, do not destroy another's self-regard, for by that we pave the way for his ruin. This maxim is a sure and wise guide in all social relationships.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P81

We have too long indulged in education as mere stuffing of the brain, as mere static communication of information. Vivekananda often highlighted the weakness of such an education by quoting a verse from our philosopher, king, and poet, Bhartrhari ... ...: 'Yatha kharah candana bharavahi bharasya vetta na tu candanasya ' 'Like an ass which carries a load of sandalwood on its back, but which knows only its weight but not its value'. This is what happens to a student when he stuffs his brain with ideas and information, with facts and formulae, but does not train his mind, assimilate the ideas, and develop character-efficiency. To study logic but to think illogically, to study grammar but to speak ungrammatically, to study law but to behave lawlessly, to study civics but to live and act without the civic sense, to study the sciences but to remain innocent of the scientific spirit and temper, of love of truth, intellectual detachment, passion and respect for facts, and precision in thought and speech, and to study Indian history, but to ignore its lessons and warnings in one's attitudes and behaviour-- that, for want of unity and national vision, and due to caste and other divisive loyalties, we, rich and poor alike, have lost our political freedom again and again and suffered untold humiliations-- is to remain like the ass with respect to the sandalwood on its back, aware of the weight of knowledge in one's head but not its value for one's life or the nation's destiny.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P224-25

You are already hypnotized into thinking that you are a limited finite being, that you are white, you are black, you are a man or a woman; but the ever-present truth is that you are infinite Atman, ever-free, ever-pure. This is the truth about you, and not an opinion, the truth expressed by that Upanishadic equation: 'Tat Tvam Asi', 'That Thou Art'.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P502

That is a wonderful term, mentally a child, though physically a man. The child in the house, when angry, breaks cups and saucers; he exercises his freedom thereby; but the responsibility to replace the broken ones is not mine, but of my parents, thinks the child. So also the child-minds in India today feel and act: We are free to break and destroy our hard-earned public property; but the responsibility to replace them is the business of the government or of the institution concerned, not mine; mine is only to destroy. Here you see the relevance of that arresting phrase used by Vivekananda— moustached babies, Now, education must help moustached babies to grow and mature into moustached men. It is only then that men become truly men; the idea, though not the phrase, applies equally to our women also.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III,  P187

The self-transcending ethics of unselfish love and compassion of Buddha and his movement, united to the philosophy of the transcendent Self of Shankara's Vedanta, is the new thought - the New Vedanta which is energizing and stimulating India's mind and heart today.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol II,  P58

... Vedanta speaks of one and the same reality as Brahman in its metaphysics, as Atman in its epistemology and mysticism and as Ishwara or Bhagavan in its religion.
- Prabuddha Bharata, September 1950, P357

The capacity to withstand the non-sense of life is an important capacity. Therefore Krishna said, tan titikshaswa Bharata, 'bear with them'.
- Universal Message of Bhagawad-Gita, Vol I, P116

A democratic state becomes weakened day by day by the increase of injustice in society. There may be poverty, there may be ignorance, that won't weaken it. But if there is injustice, and it increases, that will weaken the fabric of a democratic society. This injustice comes because those who hold power misuse it. There is no spiritual strength in the person to digest that power and to make it useful to the people. To help the democratic processes so as to strengthen our infant democratic state, and solve the problems of the millions, we need a philosophy. That philosophy is what Sri Krishna is giving here [i.e. in Bhagawad-Gita].
- Universal Message of Bhagawad-Gita, Vol I, P367

We have to build up our higher personality on the given personality. That is what true education means, which is not confined to school and college or an institution, but life itself is the center for that education. That is the real teaching of the Gita. You erect yourself above yourself. ... This human body-mind complex, when we are young, is a raw material. We have to transform it. But the whole transformation process is education, of which, religion understood as spiritual development, is only a higher part. But it is a continuous education. That is everybody's privilege and responsibility.
- Universal Message of Bhagawad-Gita, Vol II, P31

'प्राक् ब्रह्मविज्ञानादपि सर्वो जन्तु: ब्रह्मत्वात् सर्वभावापन्न: praak brahmavijnaanaadapi sarvo jantuh brahmatvaat sarvabhaavaapannah' 'Even before the realization of Brahman, everybody, being Brahman, is really always identical with all.'
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad P72

The brooding of the Spirit over the waters of Life produces social and political upheavals as much as scientific discoveries, moral achievements and spiritual realizations. This is the meaning of history in its comprehensive sense, the stirring of the universal in the particular, the vibrations of the infinite in the finite, the struggle of eternity in the meshes of time.
- Prabuddha Bharata, September 1950, P358

Lokottara means trans-sensory. The word 'transcendental' in English will be its nearest exact equivalent. The capacity to rise to the lokottara level comes from the fulfillment of ethical demands at the loka level [sensory level]. This is why we say, in the language of our world religions that ethical and moral basis is necessary to higher spiritual growth. Sila or morality is the basis for the higher spiritual development into Samadhi and prajna, in the words of Vedantic and Buddhist teachings.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I,  P476

To the sensory vision, we appear to ourselves and others as finite, limited, and subject to death; but when we transcend our sensory limitations, we realize our true nature as the immortal, infinite, non-dual, Pure Consciousness. This is an ever-present truth about man, proclaims Vedanta, that can be realized by every one by the steady raising of consciousness beyond all genetic and other limitations. This is not a matter of mere belief, but of realization, of experience, says Vedanta.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I,  P484

The teaching of Vedanta is that we are essentially divine; that God is present in the heart of all. But the evil samskaras entering the mind from outside hide this truth from us; and by achieving purity of the mind, this truth becomes a constant experience. 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,' assures Jesus.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P552

When our people (i.e. Indians) understand religion correctly, that it is a science and, as a science, it is based on both reason and faith, just like any physical science, we shall see the flowering, more and more, in our country, of true religion as dynamic spirituality, and the withering away, more and more, of the current noisy, showy static piety, or piety-fringed worldliness, mistaken as religion by many people.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol I, P297

Action and inaction, labour and leisure, appear antithetical to ordinary understanding. But scientific inquiry reveals their basic identity. In the words of L. P. Jacks (The Education of the Whole Man, p. 102):
'If you begin with labour, it begins to turn into leisure from the moment when art is applied to it. If you begin with leisure, it will turn into labour when science traces it to its roots.'
In the words of Ashtavakra Samhita (XVIII. 61):
   Nivrttirapi mudhasya pravrttirupa jayate;
   Pravrttirapi dhirasya nivrttiphalabhagini—
'For the foolish man, even leisure becomes labour; for the wise man, even labour yields the fruit of leisure.'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P289-90

The finite, separate individual is the focus of tension and strain; the world and the soul are in their essential nature the Sat-Chit-Ananda Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute; cut off from that ocean of being, the finite separate individual becomes a zero, and yet fears to become a zero, and fears still more to shed its finitude.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society , Vol II, ibid P44

Buddha took this finite individual for his theme - the human soul subject to ignorance, desire, delusion, grief and death. And his compassion went out to steady his feet, illumine his mind, and fill his heart with wisdom, peace and joy; hence his stress on psychology and ethics and not on metaphysics.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society , Vol II, P45

Man, as spiritual seeker, transcends the sphere of law and commandments of a religion. Whereas law and commandments relate him to parochial and temporal interests, spirituality relates him to the eternal and the infinite.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society , Vol II, P62

By and large, the object of human life presented to the Indian people during the last few centuries was so high, so transcendental, that it left millions of our people, all except a small minority, ill-nourished, and often wrongly nourished, because it had no message for them and was indigestible to them. Religion, understood as a means of mukti or moksha, spiritual liberation, is a subject that concerns only a small minority of the human population; but there is another concept of religion understood as character-efficiency, of social concern and social service, all that we call ethical excellence; this was not stressed. We stressed the other-worldly excellence, but not those positive virtues and graces that constitute an activist ethics and that make for a fuller realization of human possibilities, individual and collective, and a decent life for all. The result was that we failed to achieve not only the high ideal of mukti or spiritual liberation, but failed also to strive for the more attainable ideals of character, efficiency, and general well-being. To climb the Mount Everest of Mukti, one must first conquer the several foot-hills of lesser and more easily attainable ideals. Those who fail to do so, fail in their worldly as well as spiritual lives. The Gita had warned us: Na karmanam anarambhat naiskarmyam purusosnute— 'Without the prior discipline of work, man cannot profit from the discipline of meditation.'
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society , Vol III, P341

Sri Ramakrishna came to bridge that gulf [between life and religion] and to teach us that life is itself religion. He exhorts us to see life in its unity and wholeness. This is the vyavasayatmika buddhih (one pointed intellegence) spoken of in the Bhagawad Gita, where there is a unity of vision and unity of purpose and endeavor, external and internal.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society , Vol II, P129

... Quoted by nuclear scientist Erwin Schrodinger in his book: What is Life?, p. 115: 'Each lecturer in a technical university should possess the following abilities:
   (a) To see the limits of his subject-matter. In his teaching, to make the students aware of these limits and to show them that, beyond these limits, forces come into play which are no longer entirely rational, but arise out of life and human society itself,
   (b) To show in every subject the way that leads beyond its own narrow confines to broader horizons of its own.'
Thus, the conclusions of physics and chemistry become modified in biology, due to newer forces coming to evidence in biology; the conclusions of biology become, similarly, modified in anthropology and sociology, for the same reasons. And Vedanta suggests that a complete science of man in depth will similarly result in modification of the conclusions of cultural anthropology and sociology in view of unique new forces coming into view in human experience. A science of man may start with physical sciences of physics and chemistry and anatomy and physiology; but it cannot end with the conclusions of these sciences; if it does so, it will do scientific violence to many of the data revealed by the depth-study of the human personality.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P270-271

The moral and ethical demands of a spiritual religion are far more exacting than those of a socio-political faith.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P68

Vedanta presents God as the central thread of unity. He is the Antaryaamin, the Antaraatman of the theists and the atheists, of the Hindu, Muslim and Christian. He is the divine thread that unites all the pearls in a garland, as expressed by Sri Krishna in Gita: mayi sarvamidam protam sutre maniganiva ... ... we (i.e. Indians) failed to treat the millions of our common people as brothers and fellow humans, as demanded by this vision. And this is our special task in the modern age; and Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda and Holy Mother Sarada Devi provide us with the necessary inspiration to implement this vision in our political, social, cultural and educational fields. This is the message of what Swami Vivekananda calls Practical Vedanta.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society , Vol II, P137-38

Today, our education should aim to produce in our people these virtues and graces which go to make a citizen in the true sense of the word. This is a new concept of human excellence for us, or a new understanding of an ancient concept of human excellence as expounded in the Gita. The citizen is a person, and not a mere individual, as defined by the late biologist and humanist Sir Julian Huxley, who says that
'Persons and individuals who transcend their mere organic individuality in con­scious social participation.'
He lives in a society of other human beings, responds to them and seeks responses from them; and in this process, he develops a type of character and excellence which has, according to the Gita, a tremendous spiritual appeal in it. Our people have been more concerned with their relationship with god, or with an image of god in a temple or other religious places, than with man the nextdoor neighbour, with whom our people would more often collide, than cooperate for general human well-being. Our education today must help us to develop in our people a new type of excellence that would make for the grhastha, or the house-holder, spiritually growing into the citizen; a genetically limited individual growing beyond his or her genetic limitations of outlook and sympathy and response, and growing into a national and human awareness and responsibility.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III,  P98

To the earnest, seeking, storm-tossed souls of the modern world, a study of Swami Vivekananda's Vedanta has been, and is bound to be, like a bath in the Ganga for a weary pilgrim, a refreshing experience, a spiritual re-birth.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P237

One sidedness has been the most serious drawback of the Indian character, proceeding from the limitations of the prevailing religious outlook of her people.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P348

If Swami Vivekananda exerted so much influence on the contemporary world, and continues to exert that influence in ever increasing measure in the East and the West, it is because he realized the eternal imperishable truth in his own being.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P230

It is time that we take energetic steps to infuse ethical and spiritual values into our education, so that our nation may regain its spiritual health even while it is engaged in the struggle to become a progressive, materially advanced, modern society. This is the only way to make it a scientific and humanistic and truly modern society, and not just modernistic in the cheap sense. The former is the product of our assimilation of the root of Western greatness, namely, scientific spirit and technical efficiency, social concern and character-efficiency, while the latter is the product of our imitating and running after the fruits of Western greatness, namely, the gadgets of its technology and the comfort and pleasure it yields.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P250

While living in the world, man has to strive to achieve awareness of his true spiritual nature. If this is not done, his life becomes a false life and his living in the world becomes his living in worldliness. The so called 'normal', 'adjusted' life is truly the abnormal and false life.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II,  P413

An Interesting Interview
Tell me, Swami, I said, does religion have anything to do with politics outside of giving it a sense of moral uplift? Is the search for faith entirely personal? Is religion all mysticism and meditating alone and letting the rest of the world go hang?
Primarily, religion is a value which is deeply personal, Swami Ranganathananda said. It takes hold of an individual when he has finished with values which are sensual and relative and when he seeks for a value which is transcendental and absolute. Spirituality—Godliness—is an end-value in itself. Indian thought refers to it as the highest excellence. We call this side of religion nihshreyasa, the consummation of freedom through the realization, of truth. It is the supreme end to be sought after by man.
All the other ends and values are those which man achieves in the social context in response to his deeply felt craving for gross or refined joys and satisfaction. We call these ends abhyudaya. Now we cannot achieve this latter except in the context of a society or group; just as, to achieve ultimate spirituality, a man walks alone to the Alone. But though religion in its essential nature is trans-social and individual, it has a secondary yet significant role in the important sphere of social relations.
Yet we know from history, I said, that when religion has played its part in the sphere of social relations, it has frequently stood in the way of human progress and welfare, siding with the most backward elements of the society of its time, in fact lending them support and frequently, justification. What do you say to that?
History does indeed contain many such instances, Swami said. To deal with the subject of the role of religion in politics is therefore a delicate task, especially in present-day India where there has been an abuse and misuse of religion in recent years to the detriment of a correct assessment of the role of religion, on the one hand, and of the happiness and welfare of millions, on the other.
Yet it is worthwhile to face the task, for the stakes involved are high. There is a real need today to state the precise scope of religion both in relation to the individual and as a social force, and the contribution it can make to the health and stability of the social order. Both politics and religion stand to gain from an approach to each other, under the guidance of a philosophy such as the Vedanta, which dares to view life in its totality and wholeness, and which, remember, has for its declared objective the happiness and welfare of humanity as a whole.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P436-37 (An Interview with Swami Ranganathananda by David Chandler, American film writer and contributor to many national magazines.)

The successful synthesis of thought elements, each one of which is vital and powerful, flowering as they do from human experience at various levels ... ... ... calls for the guidance of a philosophy or world-view such as that of Vedanta, which is not afraid of any aspect of experience, but seeks truth in all of them with zestful detachment and devotion.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P82 (Christ We Adore)

He (Swami Vivekananda) traced the downfall of India to the forcing down the throats of one and all the mystical heights of religion with its neglect of social feeling and action and emphasis only on renunciation and contemplation.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II,  P351

Upanishads and Vedanta
The closing period of the Vedic age in ancient Indian history was marked by an intense activity, when some of the greatest of our thinkers and sages wrestled with the problems of life and experience. The record of these endeavors has been preserved for posterity in the Upanishads, which form the closing portions of a vast and varied Vedic literature. Containing as they do the quintessence of the Vedas, the Upanishads are also known as the Vedanta.
One of the most important features of the Upanishads is a fearless quest for truth. In them we come across students and teachers discussing and expounding basic problems of religion and philosophy, as Max Muller has put it, 'undisturbed by the thought of there being a public to please or critics to appease.' They considered no sacrifice too great in their search for truth. Not to speak of earthly pleasures and heavenly charms, they dared to achieve the still more difficult and rare sacrifice which the seeker after truth is called upon to make: the sacrifice of pet opinions and pleasing prejudices.
A second important feature is the atmosphere of freedom pervading the quest for truth in the Upanishads. Thought forges ahead from step to step under the stimulus of a passion for truth and in an atmosphere of perfect freedom. With no fear of authority or love for dogma as such, there emerges this edifice we know as the Vedanta, whose rationality and spirituality have made it a synthesis of philosophy and religion in one.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P448-49

Secular education continued to our deeper dimensions is spiritual education, says Vedanta. That is how Vivekananda defines the roles of the physical sciences, politics, and economics, on the one side, and of art, ethics, and religion on the other.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P481

... in contrast to the speculative and belief-based extra-cosmic god of all speculative philosophies and Semitic religions, he (Swami Vivekananda) presents the Vedantic vision of God as the Atman, as a truth given in experience itself: 'In worshipping God, we have been always worshipping our own hidden Self.'
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II,  P513-14

... 'unripe I' must be transformed into the 'ripe I'. How? By making it the 'daas aami', the 'devotee I', says Sri Ramakrishna ...
... It is on this basis that Swami Vivekananda presented the universality of Practical Vedanta, its being the basis of all religions and relevant to all peoples.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II,  P540

At birth, the human organism is very tender, weak, and flimsy; a little extra heat or cold can destroy a new-born baby. But slowly, its innate powers become unfolded. First, muscular strength comes to it, then nervous strength, followed by mental strength; it gains the power to crawl, to sit up, to walk, and finally, to run, and even to obtain Olympic championships, or to study, and to do research, and become a Nobel prize-winning scientist. At every stage it gains new experiences of happiness and fulfillment. As the powers of its mind unfold steadily along with the powers of its body, it experiences newer and greater happiness and fulfillment. We can mark its joy when it learns to utter the first letter of the alphabet. In this way, we watch the child unfolding steadily the enormous possibilities hidden within it, becoming statesmen, scientists, artists, servants of humanity, sages, saints, and even divine incarnations. All these possibilities were there in the baby and they became unfolded; and all this unfolding is education, with its secular and religious dimensions forming the earlier and later phases of one and the same process of human growth and development and fulfillment.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P489

Vivekananda saw the supreme necessity for man, in this highly technological age, to grow beyond the physical-intellectual dimension and to unfold, to manifest, the ever-present Divine within, so that modern man would be able to digest, and properly direct to human ends, the vast powers that modern science and technology have placed in his hands.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P539

Religion: Ethnical versus Spiritual
The capacity to attract people, the capacity to love and be loved—these are all spiritual qualities. What we normally understand as religion—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist—these re all ethnical concepts of religion. One is born into that religion, one has no choice. But the other idea of religion, spiritual, non-ethnical, and universal, is what you choose freely, what you build up in yourself as a rich and firm character, what you handle like climbing a mountain, daring all obstacles and difficulties and building up your destiny yourself—that is the heroic idea of religion, the science of religion. There you find the spiritual quality of human life; there you meet with high strength of character; there you come across the play of the heroic in human life. All these come when one starts climbing the Mount Everest of experience. That is why, as I said earlier, spiritual life is similar to mountain climbing.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P529

What we see as the beggar problem in modern India, and the general lack of public spirit in our people as a whole are largely the long-term legacy of indigestion of so lofty an ideal by our people.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P452

The endeavors and conclusions of the sense-bound intellect can not be the last word in man's search for truth. An intellectual approach to truth will end only in agnosticism; and often in cynicism. But the whole being of man seeks to experience truth, to realize it. ... This rising above rationalism to direct experience and realization, this growth of man from the sensate to the super-sensual dimension, is the special message of Indian spiritual tradition.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II,  P326

Spirituality, says Vivekananda, is the privilege, not only of sages and saints and ascetics in the monasteries and forests, but of one and all. It is the birth-right of every human being. The Upanishads or Vedanta also proclaims that nature has provided man with the organic capacity to realize this truth. Only we must have faith in ourselves, utilize this capacity, and so live our life that, year by year, we grow spiritually.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P536

The Marxist humanism goes far, but not far enough, to ensure human fulfillment. Vedanta helps Marxism to carry its study of man into the depth of the human spirit and to base its undoubtedly promising human experiment on the rock of the divine in man and not on the sands of his physical and organic system.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P485

A humanism that is strengthened and sustained by the religion of the divine spark in man is far different from the current humanism of the West, including its scientific humanism. There is a universality and dynamism in the former, and its energies are entirely positive and never negative.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II, P495

The humanism expounded by Vivekananda is intensely human and universal. But it is also something more than human; for it derives its strength and sanction ... from the ever-present and inalienable divine spark in all men and women. And that constitutes its uniqueness.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol II,  P495

Knowledge versus Wisdom
They come across new inspiring ideas in Vedanta and yoga; and they are trying to understand man from a deeper dimension than what they have done till now. They had viewed man till now only from the outside. That touched only his surface dimension. And in spite of all the current education in the West, based on that surface view of man--and even the Freudian depth view of man is only a surface view from the point of view of the Indian depth study of man--the more educated often means only the more complex and unintegrated in mind. Simple minds are better than unintegrated educated minds; so that, the educated person is full of unintegrated energies within, because he or she is merely strong intellectually. So even the late Bertrand Russell, a brilliant intellectual and not a man of religion but a thorough-going agnostic, said (Impact of Science on Society, p. 121) :
'Unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will be  increase of sorrow'.
What a beautiful idea! Now, the idea in this sentence is a modern echo of one of the great ideas in our ancient Upanishads.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III,  P560

That, ethical and social values are but the by-products of man's spiritual growth, is the teaching of the Upanishads. It is the manifestation of his inherent divine nature.
  - Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P12

The distinctiveness of a culture is revealed in the type of man in whom that culture finds its own highest excellence embodied. A culture is worldly, if worldly success is what its most admired hero represents; it is spiritual or unworldly, if renunciation and spirituality are what its most admired hero embodies. Such admiration acts as a silent leaven in the rest of the body-politic. If there is any truth in calling Indian culture spiritual, it is not because all or most of the Indians are more spiritual than other people; but it derives from the fact that the most admired hero of the Indian people has been, and is, the man of God; and that the deep-felt aspiration of the Indian people is to be spiritual themselves.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P9

A nation's educational policy, like its political policy, gets added dynamism and direction when to its domestic policy is added a foreign policy content as well.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III,  P43

Question: Swami, you spoke of growing spiritually. Does it mean that one thereby becomes good in himself or herself, and does it mean that by developing oneself spiritually, one helps to make the world also good?
Answer: Yes, that is true. When what is good in you unfolds, it affects the world in a good way. If it is merely hidden within oneself, one does not affect the outside. The truth of the divine is there within but, until it is unfolded, manifested, one does not benefit oneself or others. Suppose there is gold hidden below the earth. You do not become rich thereby. You have to dig that gold and bring it out through the science and technique of geology. Similarly, when you unfold the divine that is inherent in you, you achieve spiritual growth and inner enrichment and, through that inner enrichment, you enrich the world outside through your work and human interactions in society.
Question: But one can also grow in the wrong way?
Answer: Yes; if one is not properly guided, that is possible. But if one follows the science and technique of spiritual growth, there is no possibility of growing in the wrong way. The main question in the science of spirituality, as in the science of agriculture, is: have you grown? That is a beautiful idea. You have achieved some little spiritual growth, by the time you are 5 or 6 years old, when you show a little love and concern for others. But if you have not grown beyond it when you reach the age of 80, then we detect stagnation. That we should not allow to happen. Suppose when we plant a tree, it has two leaves; then it grows by putting forth more leaves, twigs, branches, finally flowers and fruits. That is the science of growth as applied to agriculture. Similarly, there is a science of growth as applied to man as a whole.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P602-03 (at a High School in Arnhem, Holland, 1982)

... This continued youthful vitality of India has its origin in her spiritual thought and social philosophy. The Upanishads are the source of her spiritual and philosophical thoughts, of which the fundamental ideas are : (1) the divinity of man; (2) the non-duality and spiritual character of the ultimate reality; (3) the basic solidarity of all existence; (4) realization, and net a mere belief or creed, as the criterion of religion; and (5) the harmony of religions.
  - Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P27

As a tool of cultural communication, Sanskrit holds a unique place among the languages of the world. Firstly, it is the only language which has come down to us from pre-historic times with an uninterrupted history. Secondly, it is the only language which has mothered and nourished a large family of languages both national and international. Thirdly, it is the only language which developed a scientifically phonetic alphabet and initiated the science of philology very early in its career. And fourthly, it specialized in being the nursery and communication medium of an immense field of experience and knowledge, namely, that of the inner world, the world of Reality that lies above the sensate level of experience, giving birth to the science of adhyatma-vidya, the science of man in depth, as developed by the Upanishads and re-verified by an unbroken tradi­tion of experimenters down to our own time.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P360

The capacity for practical application of knowledge is the product of a disciplined mind. The basis of all wealth, economic, mental, or spiritual, is the discipline of the mind; it is the product of intelligent, honest, hard work. Love of ease, physical or mental, is the greatest enemy of all forms of wealth and welfare.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III,  P62

There is vast energy coiled up in every one of us; in our mystical language, we speak of it as Kundalini, the coiled up. In all life growth, that energy gets uncoiled, released. In a state of tamas, that energy remains coiled up. Man then becomes stagnant, a nuisance to himself and a problem to society. When that energy begins to stir, it rises to the state of rajas; man then becomes alive and vital, but it scatters as much evil around, as good. Then finally, it is raised to the level of sattva, when all life energy becomes transformed into intense and dynamic goodness.
This is the direction of the uncoiling of the coiled-up energy in man. And the whole process of that uncoiling is what is meant by education, and also what is meant by religion, which is but continued education, according to Vedanta.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P507

Bertrand Russell, in one of his post-Second-World-War writings, pointed out the danger of knowledge remaining at the level of knowledge alone, along with power that knowledge brings, and stressed the need for knowledge to rise to the level of wisdom (The Impact of Science on Society, p. 121):
'Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends. Given sufficient folly as to ends, increase in the skill required to achieve them is to the bad. The human race has survived hitherto owing to ignorance and incompetence; but, given knowledge and competence, combined with folly, there can be no certainty of survival. Knowledge is power, but it is power for evil just as much as for good. It follows that, unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will be increase of sorrow!'
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P590

Swami Vivekananda had great faith in our women; he was also the most constant and consistent champion of the freedom of our women. He had once said that, with the help of ten thousand men, efficient, dedicated, and fearless, he could conquer India's problems, but added that, with only a tenth of that number of women with similar qualities, he could achieve the same much sooner.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P 83

When a man or woman grows intellectually without a corresponding spiritual growth, or without the growth of heart, he or she becomes a rascal. He or she is full of individual ambition, which he or she pursues with one's sharpened brain, but with no ideal of human excellence to strive for or to live for; education has come, but culture has tarried behind; and that education, put in the service of the organically conditioned ego, has transformed intelligence into cleverness, or chalaki, as we say in Hindi. Vivekananda said that no great work can be achieved by chalaki; he, therefore, did not want our country to be converted into a nation of chalaks. If the educated are only such ambitious chalaks, they will encompass the ruin of each other, and of the nation as well.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P183

Education is the process by which man, submerged in the collectivity, is raised to the dignity and status of, first, an individual, then, a person, with the capacity to integrate oneself freely with other persons.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P193

Man is meeting point of creatureliness and freedom Says India's great epic, The Mahabharata (Bhandarkar edition, XII. 169.28):
  Amrtam caiva mrtyusca dvayam dehe pratisthitam:
  Mrtyurapadyate mohat satyenapadyate' mrtam—
'Both immortality and mortality are established in the body (of everyone); by (pursuit of) delusion, one reaches death; by (pursuit of) truth, one attains the immortal.'
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P544

Any education which only quickens our intellect and sharpens our animal appetites, but does not help to develop a moral will, is harmful to man and society. Many civilizations have perished for this very reason. Our own history reveals to us many periods when man had decayed morally. Just before Buddha, conditions in the Indian society reveal a picture where the upper classes were steeped in luxury and self-aggrandisement and sterile philosophical speculations, and the lower classes were steeped in ignorance, superstition, and misery. It was then that India threw up a great teacher like Buddha. He saw that society had become stagnant, getting stuck up in the mire of worldliness; and he preached his message of spirituality, of renunciation and service, and it set the society on the road to progress and prosperity.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P306

Mere intellectual growth does not constitute your psycho-social evolution, since it does not, by itself, take one beyond the pressures and pulls of the organic system. You are seeing so many people around you with high intellectual growth; but you see them also committing anti-social acts like bribery, crime, violence, and exploitation of others. Therefore, mere intellectual growth is not enough; for in that growth you are still tied down to your genetic system and views everything and everybody else in terms of the profit and pleasure of your own genetic system. But psycho-social evolution as spiritual growth takes you beyond all such genetic limitations and makes you feel a spiritual oneness with millions of other psyches in society. This is the meaning of love and compassion; and this is the energy that the world must develop today through the science and technique of spirituality, through taking the first steps, and marching steadily, on the long road of psycho-social evolution, along with developing nuclear, solar, or other forms of physical energy resources through the help of the physical sciences.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P598

Q: How do you explain the tremendous awakening and interest in the spiritual life in the West in recent years? Is it a real or a passing interest?
Swamiji: It is genuine. And it can be explained, very easily. Three things should be understood: bhoga, yoga, and roga. Bhoga is all sense-pleasure, satisfaction on the organic level. Then we have yoga--spiritual aspiration. Yoga cannot come without bhoga. Bhoga comes first. After you have finished with bhoga you have a choice: either yoga (spiritual development) or roga (physical and mental ailments). Bhoga will lead to roga if yoga does not come in between. That is, sense-satisfactions will lead to mental and physical ailments, if spiritual growth doesn't intervene.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P467

Just as, in the spiritual message of our Vedanta, we are taught to realize that, behind the high and the mighty, and behind the menial and the low, there is the same infinite Atman present, ensuring the freedom, dignity, and equality of all, so also in the political message of our democracy, we are taught to realize that, behind the mighty and the high functions, or behind the menial and the low functions, that man performs in society, which are temporary and alienable, there is the one common democratic identity of citizenship, which is permanent and inalienable, and which ensures the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people in the polity. When this citizenship awareness becomes the primary focus of any people, and the functions performed by them become only the secondary focus deriving from that primary focus, the high and the mighty among the functionaries will not look down upon the low and the menial functionaries, nor will the latter stand in fear and trembling, or crawl before the former. ...
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol IV, P30-31 (Talk: 'Enlightened Citizenship and Our Democracy')

All true religion is education and all true education is growth. Education and religion, accordingly, form the earlier and later stages of man's growth in this trans-organic or trans-physical dimension.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III,  P263

The Indian spiritual tradition does not identify religion with mere profession of creeds and dogmas or performance of rituals and ceremonies; neither does it equate it with scholarship. Religious scholarship is only knowledge about religion; but religion itself is experience, it is spiritual growth, development and realization. Atma va are drastavyah - The Atman has to be realized', says Yajnavalkya to his wife, Maitreyi, in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad (iv. v. 6). The central theme of religion and its key words are, therefore, the same as in education, namely nourishment and growth, the spiritual growth of the human personality through spiritual nourishment. No formalism or creed or dogma can do this for man.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P240

Sanskrit will not die so long as man in India experiences the hunger of the spiritual heart. Sanskrit is the window to all that is fascinating, elevating, and enriching in human experience. It is the sacred body of vak-devi, goddess of speech, which ever points out to man the Truth that lies above all speech and thought, above all space and time.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P361

Question: Swami, can we do such meditation without outside help?
Answer:In the beginning, we may have to take outside help from books and from other people who have experience in that path. As in physical science, when we do research, we take help from another scientist guide in that field, here also, we need help and guidance, at least in the early stages, for research into the science of man in depth. India treats it as the pre-eminent science because it is directly concerned with human fulfillment, whereas the physical sciences contribute to it only indirectly. We have to approach it just like any other science. That is the view of Vedanta. Whereas in the Western experience, religion and science have been in permanent conflict and religion itself has also been in permanent conflict with its own different denominations, it was never so in India. They complement each other. India discovered and constantly emphasized the fundamental unity of religions and the fundamental unity of religion and science. Physical science and technology can build a house for you and equip it will all gadgets; but it cannot ensure that you live and work and sleep in it happily and peacefully. For that, you have to seek the help of another science, the science of spirituality. Happiness and peace come from the proper discipline of mind and not from mere possession of things. Thus, from the Indian point of view, physical sciences and the science of spirituality complement each other and both are needed to make human life fulfilled individually and collectively
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P604 (at a High School in Arnhem, Holland, 1982)

A rational theory of ethical values must be based on a total philosophy of man. Such an investigation will give different answers as to his nature at different levels; the answer from any one such level will be a true answer, but only of man at that level, and not man as a whole. Ethics of positivism, such as hedonism, social contract, enlightened self-interest, utilitarianism, etc., belong to this category. All ethics of transcendentalism emphasize, on the other hand, renunciation and self-effacement, which imply the distinction between a lower self and a higher self. Both types of ethics are ethics of self-realization depending upon which self is meant.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P108

Question: Swami, but physical science does good to everyone; can we say the same with regard to religion?>
Answer: Yes, but only if you approach religion as a science of man's spiritual growth, development, and fulfilment, and not as a static piety or exclusive creed and dogma.
Question: Yes, but is this not very personal?
Answer: Yes. The science of religion deals with the 'within' of nature as revealed in a human being, while the physical sciences deal with the 'without' of nature as revealed in inanimate matter. You are a person and you cannot deal with yourself the way physical science deals with inanimate matter. That will be disastrous to yourself; and that is what physical science has done to man today, making him or her into a machine and making him or her also believe that he or she is a machine. That is a tragedy. Even some of the modern agnostic thinkers, apart from existentialist philosophers, have rebelled against this treatment of man as a mere machine. Says Bertrand Russell (The Impact of Science on Society, pp. 80-82):
'You may view an individual, (a) as a common man, (b) as a hero, (c) as a cog in the machine. ...
'The cog theory, though mechanically feasible, is humanly the most devastating of the three. ...You can only justify the cog theory by the worship of the machine.
...In time, men will come to pray to the machine: "Almighty and most merciful Machine, we have put in those nuts which we ought not to have put in, and we have left out those nuts which we ought to have put in, and there is no cogginess in us"—and so on.
'This really won't do. The idolatry of the machine is an abomination. The Machine as an object of adoration is the modern form of Satan, and its worship is the modern diabolism. ... Whatever else may be mechanical, values are not, and this is something which no political philosopher must forget.'
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P604-05 (at a High School in Arnhem, Holland, 1982)

When you study the history of science, you will find that our country, as also China, have contributed substantially to the physical science, both pure and applied. We have the remarkable nine-volume edition of Science and Civilization in China by Joseph Needham published by the Cambridge University Press. We have, apart from several separate studies, a similar but more modest volume entitled A Concise History of Science in India by Bose, Sen, and Subbarayappa and published by the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi. We also have a recent book entitled Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts by Dharmapal. ... ...
Shri Dharmapal has also written another similar revealing book: The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century, also from contemporary European accounts. Through these books, he has opened up an important and relevant area of study, of national and international interest, by batches of interested research scholars. Such present and future studies into the truth of Indian history will help as to discover the immense richness and diversity of our long and uninterrupted history and culture in a new light, that our country in 1750 A.D. was more advanced in science and technology than European countries during the same period. It will dispel the current attitude of defeatism and cynicism, with respect to their motherland, afflicting many of our intellectuals, and create in all our people a robust faith in themselves and in their country's past, and the strength and confidence to work for a brighter national future.
Science in ancient India has received a glorious tribute from an Arab Muslim scientist of eleventh-century Moorish Spain, Abu'l-Qasim Said bin Abdur Rahman bin Muhammad bin Said al-Andalusi, in his book, written in 1068 A.D. and entitled: Tabaquat al-Umam (Categories of Nations: An Arabic History of Science and Culture). Discussing this work, Dr. M. Saber Khan says, in his article on India in Hispano-Arabic Literature: An Eleventh-century Hispano-Arabic Source for Ancient Indian Sciences and Culture, contributed to the Prof. H. K. Sherwani Felicitation Volume entitled Studies in the Foreign Relations of India--from the earliest times to 1947, published by the Andhra Pradesh State Archives (pp. 358-59):
'Qadi Said opens his work by enumerating the nations of antiquity and divides them into two categories—those that have specially occupied themselves with the cultivation of sciences, and made contributions to them, and those that have not done so. In the former, he mentions the following eight ancient and medieval nations who had contributed most to the study and development of sciences: the Indians, the Persians, the Chaldeans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Arabs, including those of Spain, and the Israelites. ...
'The first nation (that has cultivated the sciences) is (the people of) India, who form a nation vast in numbers, powerful, with great dominions. All former kings and past generations have acknowledged their wisdom and admitted their pre-eminence in the various branches 6f knowledge. ...
'Among all the nations, during the course of centuries and throughout the passage of time, India was known as the mine of wisdom and the fountainhead of justice and good government, and the Indians were credited with excellent intellects, exalted ideas, universal maxims, rare inventions, and wonderful talents.'
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P611-13 (Lecture at IIT Madras, 1984)

No man's actual life or work touches more than a fringe of the total area of life and work in a society. But his thought and vision are not so restricted. They can encompass an ever-widening vista of life and existence, if not the whole of it. This steady expansion of thought and vision imparts a sense of depth and quality and significance to his otherwise humdrum life and work. This is philosophy, not as understood in its prosaic academic sense, but as spiritual vision arising from an inward growth and development.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P275

... During the past few centuries, we, of course, never gave any thought to this subject [Enlightened Citizenship], since we were then under continuous foreign political domination. We were also very religious. But much of the religion bore the stamp of a very 'static piety'; it was essentially a 'piety-fringed worldliness'. All its various rituals, and its many do's and don'ts were meant to secure a seat somewhere in the many heavens, after the death of the body. The piety itself sought to relate man to gods, or rather to images of gods installed in our temples, except in the case of the small number of spiritual seekers and saints amongst us, who developed the upper and higher dimensions of true religion.
But in the midst of all this, we failed to consider how to relate ourselves to man, how to live in cooperation and amity with our neighbours, how to deal with the other individuals in society for mutual benefit. While cherishing a god-ward awareness, we neglected the understanding and cultivation of the many forms of that man-ward awareness, which forms the sturdy base of all genuine God-ward awareness and God-ward movement. That has been the cause of much of our political subjection, economic weaknesses, and general social immobilization. In this modern period, we have to take up that neglected theme in a big way, not only to strengthen our new democratic state and society, but also to purify and strengthen our precious age-old religious inheritance as well. It is not enough that we take up this subject of man's relation to man in the context of small groups, but in the context of our immense population of 650 million people, thrown together in a nation, gathered together in a free democratic political state.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol IV, P2-3

The greatest message of that heroic human excellence, of manliness, of strength, was given to this nation nearly 3,500 years ago and it has never been bettered since then even by Western ideas. That is the message of the Bhagavad-Gita. If there is one literature that speaks of man as the conqueror of obstacles, of the human spirit that can overcome every difficulty it is the Gita, where manliness and strength are the two cardinal values which are integrated with the other value of meditation and transcendental experience.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P345

Tattvam therefore denotes truth and matam denotes belief or opinion. There is plenty of scope for matam in human life; but it must be based on tattvam; then it is constructive and the source of harmony in human life; but when divorced from tattvam and held with passion and intensity, it becomes dogmatism, and leads to conflict and violence. Matam is also the Sanskrit word for religion; there are many matams or religions, like Vaisnava matam, Sakta matam, Saiva matam, Bauddha matam. Christian matam, and Islam matam; but tattvam or Truth behind all of them is one only.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P404

'All expansion is life, all contraction is death', he [Swami Vivekananda] said. Selfishness, self-centredness, human unconcern, is contraction—death; unselfishness, ethical awareness, human concern, is expansion—life. In a letter written from Chicago to the Maharaja of Mysore in 1894, Swamiji expressed this truth about man in a great sentence (Complete Works, Vol. 4, pp. 362-63, 1962 Edition):
'The one thing that is at the root of all evils in India is the condition of the poor. The poor in the West are devils; compared with them, ours are angels; and it is therefore so much the easier to raise our poor. The only service to be done for our lower classes is to give them education, to develop their lost individuality. ...Priest-power and foreign conquest have trodden them down for centuries, and, at last the poor of India have forgotten that they are human beings. They are to be given ideas; their eyes are to be opened to what is going on in the world around them, and then they will work out their own salvation. ...This is what is to be done in India. ...
'...This life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive!'
Study this passage in the light of another passage written in the course of a letter to his dedicated Madras disciple Alasinga Perumal, in 1894, from Chicago (ibid., Vol.5, pp. 57-58, 1958 Edition):
'What India wants is a new electric fire to stir up a fresh vigour in the national veins. ...I see what they call the poor of this country, and how many there are who feel for them! What an immense difference in India! Who feels there for the two hundred millions of men and women sunken for ever in poverty and ignorance?. ...
Let these people be your God—think of them, work for them, pray for them incessantly—the Lord will show you the way. Him I call a Mahatman (great soul) whose heart bleeds for the poor, otherwise he is a Duratman (wicked soul). ...My heart is too full to express my feeling; you know it, you can imagine it. So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them.'
Swamiji provides a social mirror for all our educated people to look into, in order to identify themselves, whether they are alive or dead, whether they are traitors or patriots. If our education has sharpened our intellects, it has failed to expand our hearts, it has failed to inspire us with the humanistic passion and impulse. What is knowledge worth if it is not yoked to love? When knowledge is yoked to human concern, it shines as character, for character is centered in a socially oriented will. That combination alone can achieve human development; it is there that we have failed; and it is there that we have to apply the remedy. If we can correct this imbalance and work hard during the remaining sixteen years of this century we shall be in a position to reap all the benefits of a tremendous synthesis — the synthesis of knowledge and wisdom, the synthesis of the tested elements of the modern Western cultural inheritance with the tested elements of our own national cultural inheritance. This will give us a national character combining spirituality with practical efficiency....
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P615-616 (Lecture at I.I.T. Madras, 1984)

Religion, as the science and art of man's spiritual growth and development, has done more to advance human culture and given sense of fulfilment than any other discipline. But when it has been dominated by non-religious motives, it has destroyed human happines and stunted the human personality. Functioning as closed systems, religions in the past have met each other mostly in collisions. This is for a radical change in the modern age. Thanks to the pervasive influence of modern science with its enlightenment and the broad humanism it has engendered, the great world religions are slowly releasing themsleves from their exclusive and intolerant attitudes and entering into fruitful dialogues with each other and with modern science
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P98

This [Vivekananda] literature will help to shock us out of our complacencies, lift us out of our self-centered attitudes, and cure us of our mental flabbiness; it brings to us an awareness of our pressing national problems and a keen desire to be instruments of their solution through a sense of national commitment and involvement. And most of our educated people suffer from these maladies and are in need of this remedy.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P432

Behind every work, there is the energy of the emotions. 'Can even a bird build its nest without (the stimulus of) emotion?' asks the great neurologist, Sir Charles Sherrington. The emotion of birds, and of all sub-human species, is triggered, not by knowledge as in the case of man in the higher levels of his life, but by in-built genetic mechanisms, towards three goals, namely, organic satisfactions, organic survival, and numerical increase. Human emotions also, in the ordinary levels of life, are triggered by these. But they need not be the only way in a human being; in him, they can be guided by another energy, namely, knowledge, and towards higher purposes, namely, working for the good of all, such work becoming infused with greater energy because of the knowledge factor. Nature has endowed the human being with the cerebral system precisely for carrying his evolution, by himself and not depending on nature like all animals, to higher levels. But this knowledge-energy factor can be a danger, not only to oneself but to others also, if it is made to function as a servant of self-centredness, as a servant of that in-built genetic mechanism. Nature evolved the higher brain in man to be the director and the guide of the entire organic system, so as to guide its energies towards the goal of freedom, which is a spiritual value, not found anywhere else in physical nature—non-living or living.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P617 (Lecture at I.I.T. Madras, 1984)

What is the use of having only plenty of money? We speak of Lakshmi, or beautiful goddess of fortune; it does not mean money only. It means money creatively used to enrich and beautify human life, to ensure human welfare. Money jealously hidden and protected under one's pillow is not Lakshmi. That is dead money, mere possession, something inauspicious, i.e., a-lakshmi; it does not produce joy or welfare. Money invested in human development is alone true Laksmi. The blessing of Lakshmi confers on humanity a capacity to create and appreciate and enjoy wealth and beauty and goodness.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P505

Religion, according to Vedanta, has two dimensions, namely, the ethnical, and the scientific or the spiritual. Ethnical religion is what is meant when we speak of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and so on. We are born in an ethnical religion; we had no say in the matter. But religion becomes a science, when we choose it, seek it. Vedanta classifies religion scientifically, when it speaks of Karma yoga, Bhakti yoga. Raja yoga and Jnana yoga. No one is born in a science; he or she becomes a scientist by seeking it. In the words of the mathematician-astronomer, Sir Arthur Eddington (Science and the Unseen World, P. 54):
'You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking is placed in the forefront.'
So Vedanta holds that ethnical religion, which is mostly tribal and socio-political in its sympathies and outlook, is not the whole of religion; at best, it is a base on which we have to erect the superstructure of the science of religion; at its worst, it can be, and has been and still is, the source of superstition, narrowness, intolerance, and violence, and thus become a bane on human society.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P627-628 (Lecture at I.I.T. Madras, 1984)

The aim of the science of spirituality is to lead man from wretchedness to blessedness, from creatureliness and helplessness to freedom and fearlessness. - Swami Ranganathananda

Western scientists like Thomas Huxley, collaborator of Darwin, presented science as the pursuit of truth and alleviation of human suffering. Primitive man was ignorant, full of fear and suffering; modern man has knowledge; and knowledge destroys fear, as I said earlier. To discover the limited scope and range of modern scientific knowledge, we have only to ask one question: Has all the fantastic knowledge acquired by modern science made modern man totally fearless? Yes and no, is the answer. It has certainly lifted him above those fears that troubled the ignorant primitive man; but it has, unfortunately, also landed him in new and more serious fears and uncertainties. The one prominent affliction of man in our modern scientific civilization is anxiety, and all anxiety is a form of fear. And this affliction comes, not from external nature over which modern man has near total control, but from that mysterious inner nature of man about which he and his physical sciences know nothing; in fact, physical sciences have no relevance there, for it lies above his sensory level, at the lokottara or transcendental level. This affliction is most prominent in those societies which are highly developed in science and technology. The tragedy of modern Western civilizationlies in the fact that the sciences of physical nature have advanced far, while the sciences of human nature have tarried far behind. And India is the one land where this latter science was pursued and developed with a single-minded devotion to truth and human welfare, which has no parallel elsewhere. And it is this contribution that made Bharat into an amar bharat, eternal India, and that is proving not only a source of peace and fearlessness, but also of fascination, to the Western world, nay, to the whole world, in the modern age.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P628-629 (Lecture at I.I.T. Madras, 1984)

Western science could not develop a science of values, even in its so-called depth psychology of Freud and others, who found only sex, violence, and hunger for power in the depth of the human psyche they had unveiled, only because of the drag of the dogma of materialism on its scientific pursuits. And the strong hold of this dogma on the Western scientific mind is mostly due to its hostile reaction to the dogmatic and intolerant Western religious tradition which is religion in its ethnical variety and not in its scientific or spiritual aspect—which sought to stifle science and its free quest of truth, and which did the same as much with respect to its own religious denominations as to the other world religions.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P634

The terms society, state, constitution, and government are sometimes used without discrimination, leading to much confused thinking and action in our country today. Government is the machinery through which the collective will of society finds executive expression. It is an instrument of the constitution. In its very nature, therefore, it is temporary and short-lived. Compared to government, the constitution is more stable. It represents the political, economic, and moral aspirations and objectives of the people. When these objectives and aspirations and aspirations change, the constitution also changes along with them. ... ...
The test of a healthy constitution lies in a proper blending of rigidity and elasticity, ensuring continuity along with a constant adjustment to social changes through new provisions, amendments, or conventions. Nothing can disturb the continuity and permanence of such a constitution except a foreign invasion. The state represents the collective will of the society, its will to be and to become. ... ...
The state thus is the entity of which the constitution is the expression in thought and intention, and of which the government is the expression in action. The state endures through all changes in governments and modifications of constitutions. Ordinary social upheavals and revolutions may not affect the integrity of the state while they affect the nature and form of the constitution and government. The state gets its mortal blow externally from a foreign invasion and internally from only one type of social upheaval known to modern experience, a communist revolution, whose declared objective is the total destruction of the old state and its structure and forms, whether democratic or even socialistic.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P 120 (Talk 'Role of Religion in Politics' delivered in Sylhet, East Pakistan, May 1949)

Limitations of the 'Grhashtha' Concept
... Many of our people [Indians] are, as I like to put it, 'good grhasthas' but bad 'citizens, indifferent citizens'.
And that is the main trouble afflicting our nation today. In what way are we bad or indifferent citizens? One of the evils arising from being a bad citizen and a good 'grhastha' is wide-spread injustice in society. One such evil is nepotism - the evil of showing special attention and consideration to one's own genetically related people, including caste-group genetics, in preference to others whose claims are more deserving and more just. If one cares only for one's own genetic group, and neglects the other groups, only helps to accumulate injustice in society. Citizen-awareness takes one beyond this tendency. People with a mere 'grhastha' awareness, conditioned as it is by genetic and caste-group relationships, and not purified by the elevating touch of citizen awareness, will certainly be afflicted with this evil of nepotism, which they themselves cannot recognize as evil; they will content themselves by saying that it is natural! But they forget that there is a higher nature in them waiting to manifest, but getting blocked by their genetically-conditioned stagnant attitude.
A 'grhastha' who has spiritually grown into the citizen, on the other hand, will never be afflicated with this evil, and, if afflicted, not to the same harmful extent. That means that, as a citizen, he or she has achieved an 'expanssion of consciousness', a growth in sympathy and interest, that takes the person concerned beyond the limitations of his or her genetic constitution. Twentieth-century biology describe this growth as man's 'cultural inheritance', which is soft and malleable, dominating his 'genetic inheritance', which is fixed and rigid, and which forms the basis so all racial and caste conservatism, pride, and arrogance in man. What a beautiful concept of human growth it is! ...
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P18-19 (Talk: 'Enlightened Citizenship and Our Democracy')

To the Upanishads we owe that impressive record of toleration characteristic of our whole cultural and religious history. To them we owe the periodical renewal of our springs of life when they seem all but choked and about to dry up. To them, also, we owe the absence of a heavy hand of an all-powerful church and an infallible dogma on the national life and mind. Thus, free spirits have emerged and functioned unhampered in succeeding eras — an impressive feature of India's long history. And so, also, they will arise the world over.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P452

Modern science has given man intellectual energy and the command of immense physical energy resources; both these energies are, unfortunately, digesting him and making him alienated, frustrated, bored, anxious, tense, and cynical; not knowing how to control the horse of his mind, his horse-ride has turned into the tragedy of the horse enjoying the ride and he becoming a helpless victim of that ride! On the other hand, if the cerebral cortex disciplines and guides man's organic system and its energies—it was for this, says modern neurology, that nature evolved the cerebral cortex in man through the homeostasis she achieved in the later mammals—man will find and take the road to, his spiritual freedom, through a second homeostasis he will have to achieve by himself within his psychic system, which Vedanta terms sama and dama, discipline of the mind and discipline of the sense organs.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P640

Nuclear scientist Werner Heisenberg considers materialism untenable in the light of nuclear physics. In a lecture in Washington, D.C, in April 1973, at a symposium sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. National Academy of Science to observe the 500th anniversary of the birth of Copernicus, Werner Heisenberg said. (American Review, Summer 1974, p. 55):
'What is really needed is a change in fundamental concepts. We will have to abandon the atomistic philosophy of Democritus and the concept of fundamental elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of fundamental symmetries, which is a concept out of the philosophy of Plato. Just as Copernicus and Galileo, in their method, abandoned the descriptive science of Aristotle, and turned to the structural science of Plato, so we are probably forced in our concepts to abandon the atomic materialism of Democritus and to turn to the ideas of symmetry in the philosophy of Plato.'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P637-38

There are three expressive words in Sanskrit which help us to understand and avoid the current pathology of the human situation: Bhoga, yoga and roga—organic satisfactions, spiritual growth and fulfilment, and physical and mental maladies, respectively. In the light of these terms and concepts, Sri Ramakrishna says that, from bhoga, man must rise to yoga to achieve life fulfilment; if he fails to do so, bhoga will land him in roga. As bhoga is a valid pursuit, yoga also is a valid pursuit. As nature has organically equipped man for bhoga, she has equipped him with the organic capacities for yoga also. If, however, he becomes stagnant at the bhoga level, and does not know, does not care, to continue his life's journey to unfold his higher possibilities at the moral, ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual levels, he will have to pay the price for that arrested development through roga, through various ailments, somatic as well as psychosomatic.
This is the tragic state of man in the otherwise amazing modern scientific civilization, A turning of human interests and seekings in the spiritual direction alone can save modern civilization; this alone will help modern man to handle and enjoy the world and its delights, as a free person, as a master, instead of remaining its helpless victim. This is the eternal message of the science of spirituality, which finds expression in very opening verse of the Isha Upanisad, the first of all the Upanisads: Tena tyaktena bhunjitha—'enjoy (life and the world) through tyaga, renunciation.'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P642-43

When we speak of 'enlightened citizenship', it will be rewarding to study the four human types in a society as expounded by Bhartrhari in his Niti-sataka. Bhartrhari hailed from the Malwa region of our state of Madhya Pradesh, and lived about the sixth century after Christ. He was king, poet, and mystic in one. Says he (verse 64):
Eke sat-purusā parātha ghatakā svārthān parityajya ye
Sāmānyästu parārtham udyama-bhrtā svarthā virodhens ye;
Te mi manava-rakṣasāpara-hitam svārthaya nighnanti ye
ye tu ghanti nirarthakam para-hitam te ke na jānimahe!
'There is one type of people called the 'sat-purushas', good people, who sacrifice their own self-interest and work for the welfare of other people; the next group consists of the 'samanyas', the generality, or the majority, who also work for the welfare of other people, but 'without sacrificing their own self-interest'; these other (the third group) are the 'manava-rakshasas', demons among men, who destroy other people's welfare in order to gain their own selfish interests; but they (the fourth group) on the contrary - alas, I do not know what to call them - destroy other people's welfare, 'even without gaining anything for themselves'
From this, we can see that the first and the second group constitute the health of any society, and the third and the fourth constitute the human problem of any society. ...
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P32-33 (Talk: 'Enlightened Citizenship and Our Democracy')

The aim of all the three - religion, science, and democracy- is the creation of a pattern of human excellence and general welfare. Their synthesis alone can ensure for man, everywhere that inner enrichment and poise in the context of external prosperity and progress, which makes for a sense of creative living and fulfilment.
- Swami Ranganathananda

Shankaracharya Jayanti
Introducing him [Sri Shankaracharya] in his Madras lecture on the The Sages of India, Vivekananda says (The Complete Works, Vol. III, p. 265):
'But India. has to live, and the spirit of the Lord descended again. He who declared: 'I will come whenever virtue subsides', came again, and this time the manifestation was in the South, and up rose that young Brahmin, of whom it has been declarcd that, at the age of 16, he had completed all his writings; the marvellous boy Shankaracharya arose. The writings of that boy of 16 are the wonders of the modern world, and so was the boy'.
Even agnostic Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru refers with deep appreciation to the greatness of Shankara's life and work (Glimpses of World History, letter 44):
'Shankaracharya's record is a remarkable one. ...The whole country is stirred up intellectually by Shankara's books and commentaries and arguments. Not only does he become the great leader of the Brahmin class, but he seems to catch the imagination of the masses. It is an unusual thing for a man to become a great leader chiefly because of his powerful intellect, and for such a person to impress himself on millions of people and on history. Great soldiers and conquerors seem to stand out in history. They become popular or are hated, and sometimes they mould history. Great religious leaders have moved millions and fired them with enthusiasm, but always this has been on the basis of faith. The emotions have been appealed to and have been touched.
'It is difficult for an appeal to the mind and to the intellect to go far. Most people unfortunately do not think; they feel and act according to their feelings. Shankara's appeal was to the mind and intellect and to reason. It was not just the repetition of a dogma contained in an old book. Whether his argument was right or wrong is immaterial for the moment. What is interesting in his intellectual approach to religious problems and even more so the success he gained in spite of this method of approach. ...
'And the great success which met his campaign all over the country in a very short time also shows how intellectual and cultural currents travelled rapidly from one end of the country to another.'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol III, P527

The Sanskrit word dharma stands for the integrating principle in human society and can be translated roughly as justice or righteousness sense. Next to the truth of the Atman, it is the most significant and pervasive truth and value in Indian culture. Dharma is that very truth of the Atman reflected in the social context of human interactions. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad gives the following exposition of dharma as righteousness, as the soul of justice (I.IV.14):
Sa naiva vyabhavat. Tat śreyo-rüpam asrjata dharmam.
Tat etat ksatrasya ksatram, yat dharmah;
Tasmat dharmat param nasti. Atho abaliyan baliyansamasamsate dharmea,
yatha rajna, evam. Yo vai sa dharma, satyam vai tat
'Yet He (the Cosmic Person) did not flourish (even after projecting all power into the universe-intellectual, politico-military, commercial, and labour). He especially projected that excellent form, dharma, or righteousness. This dharma is the controller of the ksatriya (the holder of power and authority). Therefore, there is nothing higher than that. (So) even a weak man hopes (to defeat) a stronger man through dharma, as (one contending) with the king. That dharma is verily truth."
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P54

I have been struck, while watching American football in the American TV, by the phenomenon that the two player groups more olen attack each other, and fall and roll, than they attack the ball Here in India, we find the similar phenomenon of our various political partics more often attacking each other than attacking the national problems, separately or together. The graceful conflict of our Mohan bagan football is a better model for our political parties; and that will raise the cultural level of our politics, the wholesome impact of which will be felt in all other fields of our national life as well.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P40

I hope you will have occasion to acquaint yourself with the inspiring and noble literature of Swami Vivekananda, who was in every sense of the term a nation-builder, the foremost architect of our national destiny. What wonderful ideas and visions he has bequeathed to us! What energy and power he has breathed into our age-old society! In his first lecture in India on his return from his four years glorious work in the West, he communicated his vision of an awakened India in language and style at once inspiring and convincing. The nation was largely asleep at the time when he spoke, in January 1897, at Ramnad, at the southern extremity of India. Says he in his "Reply to the Address at Ramnad' :
'The longest night seems to be passing away, the sorest trouble seems to be coming to an end at last, the seeming corpse appears to be awaking and a voice is coming to us - away back where history and even tradition fails to peep into the gloom of the past, coming down from there, reflected as it were from peak to peak of the infinite Himalaya of knowledge, and of love, and of work, India, this motherland of ours - a voice is coming unto us, gentle, firm, and yet unmistakable in its utterances, and is gaining volume as days pass by, and behold, the sleeper is awakening! Like a breeze from the Himalayas, it is bringing life into the almost dead bones and muscles, the lethargy is passing away, and only the blind cannot see, or the perverted will not see, that she is awakening, this motherland of ours, from her deep long sleep. None can desist her any more; never is she going to sleep any more; no outward powers can hold her back any more; for the infinite giant is rising to her feet.'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P172 (Address to staff and trainees of Secretariat Training School, New Delhi in 1961)

... it needs to be understood that a cheap and shallow cosmopolitanism is not true internationalism. Such cosmopolitans are happy wherever they get advantages, monetary or other; and they claim to be international in outlook, and rate low all national patriotisms. That is a very poor concept and attitude. Unless you are strongly rooted in your national consciousness, and discharge your citizenship responsibilities, you cannot develop a robust internationalism. Internationalism is made of sterner stuff than such cheap cosmopolitanism. The road of growth is through nationalism to internationalism-national humanism flowering into international humanism. That is India's concept of enlightened citizenship. ...
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P70

We are under the wrong impression that enlightenment, spiritual growth, spiritual experience all these are meant only for saints and ascetics who renounce the grhastha life and go to the forest and caves, but that the grhastha has to remain as a worldly individual, ignorant of his or her higher possibilities, but content with some static piety of ritual and ceremony as his religion in this life, and some heaven, after death. No, says the Gita; spiritual life is for all. The Divine Atman is the birthright of all. And its experience and realization is to be attained in this very life. So it is wrong to equate the grhastha life with the worldly life, and to treat the other extreme of the pendulum of the ascetic life as the true and only spiritual life. Life in the world is not the same as being worldly, says the Gita. Exhorts Sri Ramakrishna accordingly: Live in the world; live in samsara; there is no spiritual harm in it; but allow not samsára, i.e. the world, or worldliness, to live in you; that will make for life stagnation at the organic level; that alone will make you a samsarin and this stagnation alone is called sams?ra, or worldliness, in the bad sense of the term. A boat will be on the water, continues Sri Ramakrishna; that is the right place for the boat. But water should not be in the boat; for it will make the boat stagnant and unfit for the purpose for which it is meant.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P66-67

It is Swami Vivekananda's supreme glory that he re-enunciated the all-embracing spirituality of Vedanta and demonstrated the end and aim of all life's endeavours and struggles to consist in freedom-freedom from all bondages, actual and possible, physical, intellectual, and spiritual. This all-embracing touch comes out prominently in his definition of religion. (Complete Works, Vol.1. Eleventh Edition, p. 257):
'Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within, by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this.... and be free. This is the whole of religion...'
The conquest of external nature leading to liberation from the physical, social, and intellectual bondages of the soul is the contribution of science and politics to the growth of the soul. They thus become transformed into forms of spirituality; they become departments of his 'Practical Vedanta.' Says the Swami (Sister Nivedita's Introduction to the The Complete works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol. I, p. xiv):
'Art, science, and religion are but three different ways of expressing a single truth. But in order to understand this, we must have the theory of Advaita (philosophy of non-duality).'
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P87-88

The transformation of the world which science and politics seek is powerless to ensure human welfare without the transformation of human nature itself, which religion seeks through a discipline of the whole personality. It is only such spiritually disciplined individuals and groups that can ensure for humanity at large the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, of liberty, fraternity, and equality. The peace and happiness of man and stability and ordered progress of civilizations depend entirely upon the intensification of the spiritual awareness of humanity. With this, spiritual science and democracy becomes strong and steady; without it, it sways in periodic crises to topple down eventually. Without the Inspiration of religion, civilization shall ever remain an unstable structure.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P84

The present world has witnessed mighty advances in science and technology. But in spite of all these revolutions in the domain of scientific thought and technique, modern man has not been able to discand religion altogether. Religion has not been allowed by the rational man of today to enter his life by the font door. Yet it enters his life surreptitiously by the backdoor. That shows that religion is still a vital force. But the religion that enters thus is, in the absence of the purifying aid of rational thought, mostly passionate, communal and reactionary. Religion which regards all humanity as one and indivisible is a product of dispassionate thinking and, hence, progressive in outlook and action. The true purpose and function of religion is writ large in the history of human civilization. Its purpose is to make man truly civilized, cultured, and refined. Real civilization will come only when men and women become truly cultured, when they have learnt to refine their thoughts and chasten their feelings and sentiments. The function of religion is to actualize the spiritual oneness of humanity in ever-widening spheres, and develop human fellowship by reducing and obliterating the distance between man and man.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P 107(Talk on 'Role of Religion in Politics', 1949)

Primarily, religion is a value which is trans-social and inward. It takes hold of an individual when he or she has finished with values which are sensual and relative, and craves for a value which is transcendental and absolute. In this sense, it transcends even the sphere of dharma, the sphere of social ethics. Spirituality or godliness is an end in itself. Indian thought refers to it as the highest excellence (nihshreyasa), the consummation of freedom through the realization of Truth, and declares it to be the 'parama-purushartha', the supreme end to be sought after by man. All other ends and values-- dharma, artha, and kama are collectively known as adhyudaya; they are values which man achieves in the social context in response to his deeply-felt craving for gross or refined joys and satisfactions, 'Abhyudaya' and 'nihshreyasa' together constitute the sum total of human cravings, values, and ends. We cannot achieve abhyudaya expcept in the context of a society or group; and we cannot achieve nihśreyasa expcept outside the context of all social relations. At the 'abhyudaya' stage, we walk arm in arm to progress and welfare; but at the 'nihshreyasa' level, we march alone to the Alone. As well expressed by Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, we move in single file at the last stages of life's journey to the heights of Truth.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P105 (Talk on 'Role of Religion in Politics', 1949)

Law has various aspects. First, there is a law as embodied in the codes and regulations of civilized society, its civil and criminal law; next, there is natural law, the regularities, uniformities, and sequences observed in nature by science. Lastly, and belonging to a different category, there is the moral law within. The first gives civilization, the second gives science, and the third, culture. In world history, broadly speaking, the first is represented by Rome, the second by Greece, and the third by India. These races have been the representatives of these three aspects of law, due to a concentration of attention by each on one of them. Of these, Rome and Greece have ceased to be, after passing on the torch to others. But India survived, demonstrating the primacy of the moral law over the other two. But the India what has survived is moribund, demonstrating also the in efficiency of the moral law in the absence of the context provided by the other two. True progress of man can be ensured only by a synthesis and co-ordination of the three elements. ...
- Swami Ranganathananda, 'Eternal Values for a Changing Society', Vol IV, P135 ('Laws, Society, and the Citizen' - an article contributed to 'Karachi Law College Journal', Karachi, 1945)

Man's sense of honor and dignity and his sense of social responsibility, I saw these in abundance in Japan and the Western countries; that is their national morality. They may not claim to be religious or aspire to be saints; they may not be enthused in the name of God; but they have a sense of social responsibility, a respect for man as man and a respect for the dignity of man in their own persons. The greatest achievement of the Western people is their character efficiency and humanism, this respect for man in their own person as well as in others. They have grasped the spirit of manliness, which, according to India's own philosophy, the Vedanta, is the first step to true godliness. We in India have yet to grasp even the importance of this first step, in spite of our boasted religious culture. It is this man-making education and man-making religion that our nation can achieve through the guidance of Swami Vivekananda today.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society, Vol IV, P164

Guru Nanak represents the highest level of psycho-social evolution and spiritual growth, revealing a personality at once strong and gentle, fearless and compassionate, and yielding the character-fruits of universal love and service.
- Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol III, P265

We [Indians] have yet to realize that opinions and beliefs are sterile and that it is only when we develop some of them into lived convictions that we achieve the character-efficiency of manliness, with the power of impact on the social situation around us. This is dynamic goodness unlike the static ineffective goodness, what is called goody-goodyness, which again, is the result of our people's putting the cart before the horse, in the field of religion. We resorted to the higher ideals of religion, consisting of the struggle for saintliness, before we had built the base level of religion, through the struggle to achieve manliness. Our goody-goodyness is the product of our indigestion of these higher ideals of religion; the capacity for that digestion can come to us only through the struggle for, and achievement of, manliness, of which the spirit of mood of service is the nursery and the fruit.
- Eternal Values for a Changing Society Vol IV, P210