My Sweet Lord, Swami Vivekananda
Think of this: Isn’t it more than a coincidence that by and large, life’s function is almost normal?
The metaphysical and physical duality forms a bell curve. When spirituality in our lives is less than what’s required, we feel dissatisfied. But when it’s too high, we feel disconnected from the reality. Needless to say, in today’s world, the corollary is truer than ever. While the best minds in the modern day management studies have been striving propound theories for business, leaders and individual promising a life that’s happily-ever-after, all the research work, white papers, leadership articles and open-house talks have one common footnote: chapter 3 of the Gita, Karma Yoga.
In the year 1863, on this day — few days before the dark subcontinent prepared for the bonfire representing realisation, transformation and purification — India witnessed the birth of the true Sun of soil: Swami Vivekananda. Born as Narendranath Datta, Vivekananda went to the best Guru of his times, Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar, worked diligently to imbibe the teachings, and then voyaged to the United States to deliver of the world’s best keynote address in the year 1893. I often wonder whether this was a prequel to the modern day keynotes by delivered by Indians who did not stop till they reached the goal: from Amar Bose to Indra Noyi, from Satya Nadella to Sundar Pichai.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, Swami Vivekananda, then in his early thirties, traveled to New York, where he spent a month holding a series of public lectures. Vivekananda attracted a number of famous followers, including path breaking inventor Nikola Tesla and brilliant psychologist and philosopher William James. “Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic prana and akasha and the kalpas [time],” Vivekananda wrote to a friend. “He thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go to see him next week to get this mathematical demonstration. In that case Vedantic cosmology will be placed on the surest of foundations.”
In the year 1896, one of many works of Vivekananda was transcribed and published as Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Action. Ever since then, Vivekananda and his teachings have influenced the most curious minds and restless souls: Annie Besant, Christopher Isherwood, Ellen Waldo, Paramahamsa Yogananda, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, John D. Rockefeller, Jamsetji Tata, J.D. Salinger, Sarah Bernhard and George Harrison to name a few. When he was asked about the origins of “My Sweet Lord,” George Harrison replied that “the song really came from Swami Vivekananda,” who said, ‘If there is a God, we must see him. And if there is a soul, we must perceive it.’
Later in Boston, Vivekananda noted that a great deal of our existential confusion about work has to do with our chronic judgment — and, most ironically self-judgment: the compulsive binary view of the world in terms of good versus evil. Karma Yoga is, in a certain sense, the abstract to papers on fuzzy logic, neural networks and artificial intelligence. Vivekananda wrote: good and bad are both bondages of the soul (a higher state of mind — if I may). If we do not attach ourselves to the work we do, it will not have any binding effect on our soul. Work incessantly, but be not attached to it. This is the one central idea that is common to almost all the best-selling self-management books.
It is, however, worth pausing and pondering. It must be challenging to an individualist and progressive global citizen to not mistake Vivekananda’s central point for advocacy of nonchalance and laziness. On the contrary, Vivekananda suggested that our best work comes when we stop being so preoccupied with the end result and instead surrender ourselves to the experience of life itself. And let the end and the means be joined into one.
O’ My Sweet Lord, Swami Vivekananda, fill my heart with joy unspeakable…
