Pearls of Wise

SRI RAMAKRISHNA MISSION : BELUR MATH The ideology of Ramakrishna Math and Mission consists of the eternal principles of Vedanta as lived and experienced by Sri Ramakrishna and expounded by Swami Vivekananda.  This ideology has three characteristics: it is modern in the sense that the ancient principles of Vedanta have been expressed in the modern idiom; it is universal, that is, it is meant for the whole humanity; it is practical in the sense that its principles can be applied in day-to-day life to solve the problems of life.  The basic principles of this ideology are given below:   1. God realization is the ultimate goal of life: One of the important discoveries made in ancient India was that the universe arises from and is sustained by infinite consciousness called Brahman.  It has both impersonal and personal aspects.  The personal aspect is known by different names, such as God, Ishvar, Jehovah and so on.  Realization of this Ultimate Reality...

Man does not live by bread alone; he lives by the Spirit within. Spiritual hunger continues even if this physical body is cast off. Unless this innate hunger for knowledge and perfection is appeased, one cannot hope to have any rest. The saints, sages and Avataras purvey to man, now and then, the required spiritual food. Sankara is one such great feeder of mankind. It was Sankara who finally and satisfactorily answered the perplexing questions of life – questions concerning the inward, the outward, the above, and their mutual relations, questions which embrace the entire existence itself in their scope. There is the seer, the seen and also something which cannot be either the seer or the seen, as corroborated by a necessity felt for a reality which must be other than the individual who is the seer and the world which is the seen, both of which are known to be appearances due to their inherent character of changing, passing away, and giving rise to something else. Man ex...

Young Mother    When one takes up the practice of Yoga, one of the first issues to arise is how to deal with the force of desire. Desire for family, wealth, food, sex, power all are attractions with which the seeker must grapple. In order to truly solve this issue, the seeker needs to understand the actual relation between desire and his life in the physical body.                                                                                                   For most people, the arising of desires and the attempt to fulfill them does not lead to any self-reflection. It is just considered to be a natural process. This viewpoint actually has given impetus to the line of thought that believes the solution is to withdraw from acti...

(Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)  For Recap -Read Part-1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16. THE LECTURE :- Part-17.( Last ) In these modern days there is a greater impetus towards higher education on the European lines, and the trend of opinion is strong towards women getting this higher education. Of course, there are some people in India who do not want it, but those who do want it carried the day. It is a strange fact that Oxford and Cambridge are closed to women today, so are Harvard and Yale; but Calcutta University opened its doors to women more than twenty years ago. I remember that the year I graduated, several girls came out and graduated — the same standard, the same course, the same in everything as the boys; and they did very well indeed. And our religion does not prevent a woman being educated at all. In this way the girl should be educated; even thus she should be trained; and...

Meet Swami Udit Chaithanya, a Vedanta and Bhagavatam teacher who travels across the world promoting the eternal values of Indian spirituality Perhaps the greatest need of our times is to present and promote the eternal teachings of India’s rishis in a way that inspires and convinces the modern mind. That is the mission that drives Swami Udit Chaithanya (44), a teacher of Vedanta based in Kerala, relentlessly. Swamiji’s inspiring discourses on the Bhagavad Gita, Srimad Bhagavatam, the Upanishads and the Ramayana hold his audience spell-bound, leavened as they are with humour and practical wisdom. Swamiji, who has been teaching Vedanta since 2000, shot to fame when his discourse on the Bhagvatham for 108 consecutive days at Ernakulam, Kerala, was aired by a leading Malayalam TV channel. Demand for his lectures snowballed and he is presently a much sought-after speaker in India as well as in the Middle East, USA, Canada and some European countries. An alumnus of Sandeepani Sadh...

Young Swami Chidananda  before Sannyasam- The most important, holiest, and the greatest of all mantras in the Vedic religion is the Gayatri mantra, Brahma Gayatri mantra, into which a young boy is initiated at the time of being invested with the sacred thread. And the import of the mantra is a prayer for enlightening and illumining the intellect. The last line prays to the Most High exactly for this: "Graciously illumine our intellect." Man is body, mind and intellect. The outer physical part is the body. The inner part, the psychological part, is mind and intellect. If the intellect retains its independence—it is not caught, held and overcome by the mind—then the independent intellect is able to function as an observer, as a moderator, as a regulator, as a wise counsellor and as a guide. It becomes a very great helping factor. But if the intellect loses its independence and is overcome and controlled by the mind with its vagaries—various fancies and imaginations an...

Our forefathers would be considerably amused at many of the maladies that afflict humanity today, e.g., inflation, black-marketing, bootlegging, gun-running, et hoc genus omne. These Frankenstein monsters, threatening to destroy us before long, are our own creation as they are merely the inescapable effects of our lapse from a spiritual outlook upon life and the adoption of a purely materialistic philosophy of living. These and myriad of other similar problems have their origin in a love of luxurious living and are the products of a foolish mania on the part of every nation to raise its so-called standard of living over that of its neighbours. The economic-blockades, the armament-races and the atom-bomb imbroglios are all the resultants of human vanity, greed, jealousy, mutual suspicion and hatred; and as each nation wants to be on the safe side by multiplying its power of destruction, there is a regular scramble and competition for becoming the most ruthless and the most dest...

Unless the youth of a country is trained to live vitally the culture of the country, they will never be able to appreciate the cultures of the world. Especially, in these days when almost every educated man has become a world - trotter, it is necessary that everyone has a certain amount of his own cultural beauty within himself so that he may absorb the best from around him. A dry syphon cannot draw or convey; a heart that is dry of any of the higher values cannot get itself benefitted in the presence of, or in its contacts with the various civilisations of the world, and the cultural beauties in the different continents. The grown up and developed nations in the world have all cultivated consciously, and often unconsciously, under the moulding hands of History, a generation that knows and lives its own culture. When such people come in contact with others, they react healthily and absorb into them what is useful in polishing and strengthening their own cultural traits. In ...

1. Spirituality means a love filled life and at the same time a pure consciousness which means a spiritual love and not a physical one, which becomes a source of happiness and also brings about lightness. A pure and non-physical love also brings freedom from an unstable life in which sometimes there is a lot of joy, but the joy many times brings with it sorrow filled periods. Also, life stops being a roller coaster ride in which there is always insecurity about what will happen next. Also, the different relationships with God fills the self with different types of attainments, which cannot be explained. At the same time these different experiences with God give you a lot of fulfillment and you also love sharing these attainments with others and also bringing others on the spiritual joyride with you. 2. A good practice whenever you meet someone is to ensure that you have shared something with the other person e.g. If a person comes to you and he is lacking love, just look at him ...

1.The culture of a people must continuously serve them, nourishing their inspirations, guiding their actions and providing consolation and comfort, balance and equanimity in both their joys and sorrows. 2. A culture when sustained through its religious practices, if it has no elasticity, will come to choke the growth of the community and the people will then outgrow that culture. If an unyielding iron ring is put around a growing tree, in time, as the tree grows, the ring will be swallowed up into the very dimension and growth of the vigorous tree. 3. Our Bharatiya culture, as expressed through Hinduism, never died through all these millenniums, only because our culture had the required elasticity to embrace all the new dimensions into which our society grew during the march of time. The ideas enshrined in the Upanishads, couched as discussions held by the Rishis and their disciples in the forest vastnesses along the Ganges banks, the way of life and the eternal values that...

(Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)  For Recap -Read Part-1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 &  15. THE LECTURE :- Part-16. These are the different relations held by our Indian women. As I have told you, the mother is the greatest in position, the wife is next, and the daughter comes after them. It is a most intricate and complicated series of gradation. No foreigner can understand it, even if he lives there for years. For instance, we have three forms of the personal pronoun; they are a sort of verbs in our language. One is very respectful, one is middling, and the lowest is just like thou and thee. To children and servants the last is addressed. The middling one is used with equals. You see, these are to be applied in all the intricate relations of life. For example, to my elder sister I always throughout my life use the pronoun âpani, but she never does in speaking to me; she says tumi to me. She s...

The call to the spiritual life is a call from God to a better life. Whether our life has been a difficult one or whether it has been one with a minimum of difficulties, the spiritual call is a call to a higher life, a life of greater satisfaction. Ultimately, in Pujya Swamiji’s words, total satisfaction. In the beginning our spiritual life does seem to bring about some changes; but after some time, no matter how many changes we may see, there seems to be something that fundamentally hasn’t changed at all. We still seem to be a long ways from the total satisfaction that our hearts long for. We blame it on our behaviour. We see so many weaknesses in ourselves, so many virtues that we do not have. But if we will analyse it very carefully, we will find that the reason we don’t feel total satisfaction or even partial satisfaction is because at the core we haven’t changed. Our fundamental identity hasn’t shifted. Gurudev put his finger on it. He said, "You are not the body, ...

1. Sri Radhashtami is a joyous occasion observed throughout the country, especially in the North, bringing to one's hallowed memory the advent of Radha, a name familiar to every religious historian and devotee. But, there is nothing in religious history which is so little understood as the particular spiritual significance which is the theme of the observance of this sacred day, the eighth day in this bright half of the month of Bhadrapada (August-September), the birthday of Radha. The word 'Radhakrishna' is a reputed compound name, and devotees generally run into mystical contemplation and even fly into ecstasies in their moods in an attempt to understand the relationship between Sri Krishna and Radha. 2. But, as is the case with almost everything in the world, this relationship which is deeply spiritual and mystical, is hard for the human mind to understand, because God, and everything that is connected with God, cannot become an object of human understanding. The...

1. Today is a day of great auspiciousness and great significance in that it is that memorable day on which the Lord gave to us more than eighty years ago a glorious gift in the form of a blessed and glorious son of His, a son, who was the embodiment of all the great divine virtues which flow forth from the seat of Godhead, the virtue of wonderful compassion, the virtue of absolute purity, the virtue of absolute truthfulness and loyalty and Dharma, all of which go to make a man almost divine. For, this is that day upon which Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi saw the light of the day in fortunate and proud Rajkot in Saurashtra. 2. We call it a blessed and glorious day, because through his advent into this world, he created a wave of a renascent Dharma, of a new view of things, a new and sublime sense of values, and a new attitude towards human life and man’s activities upon this physical, eternal world. For, when this child grew up and became a man, the world saw in him a daun...