Swami Vivekanand

If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?

“Arise, awake, stop not till the goal is reached.”

“This world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong.”

“Talk to yourself once in a day, otherwise you may miss meeting an intelligent person in this world.”
                         -Swami Vivekananda

Swami Vivekanand was the chief disciple of the 19th-century mystic Ramakrishna and the founder of Ramakrishna Mission. Swami Vivekananda is also considered a key figure in the introduction of Vedanta and Yoga to the West and is credited with raising the profile of Hinduism to that of a world religion.

Swami Vivekananda become famous after representing India and Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (1893) at the Permanent Memorial Art Palace Chicago, now the Art Institute of Chicago, as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition. He emphasized the importance of religious tolerance, universal acceptance, and the idea that all religions lead to the same truth.

He advocated his followers to be divine, pious and unselfish. He emphasised that success was an outcome of focused thought and action, in his lectures on Raja Yoga he said, Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life- think of it, dream of it, live on that idea.

The divine, the absolute, exists within all human beings regardless of social status and that seeing the divine as the essence of others will promote love and social harmony. Vivekananda saw truth, purity, and unselfishness as qualities that bolstered the intellect and connected morality to mental power.