One October Evening in 1965 in Seattle, Walking Home from my first Job as an Export Documentations Clerk,

Up along First Avenue, a couple of blocks down from the Pike Street Market, I halted in front of a beguiling, clean and warmly illuminated little bookstore, and walked in, penetrating perhaps a third  of the way into the establishment, where I saw displayed in a matching four-volume set the Four Yogas of Swami Vivekananda (of whom I had never heard and knew nothing), which I therewith purchased, and which (at least the fourth volume, Raja Yoga, the Aphorisms of Patanjali, with commentaries by Swami Vivekananda) became my meat and drink for the next year or so of my life.  So wise it seemed, and so profound, I virtually memorized it, learning of what the mind is made, how focused, how trained and how mastered.  I did not think till years later to discover who Swami Vivekananda had been, what his credentials as a disciple of Ramakrishna were, nor anything of his tragically short life or his enormously successful and influential career as a teacher and a scholar.  And in a sense, certainly I was right to consider anything and everything but the Raja Yoga as superfluous and inconsequential.

Nonetheless (and howsomever) what I eventually did come to know on a more personal level about Vivekananda--like his devotion to the Goddess Kali, which he apparently learned (albeit with some resistance) from Ramakrishna himself, and his counseling of a devotee of Shiva to "be pure and worthy" of his Lord, and his slavishly respectful attitude towards theism in general, frankly, make me want to vomit.  Kee-rist.  Esti de Tabernacle, as they say in Quebec, meaning approxinately fuck-oh-dear.