Vivekananda By Vivekananda | Full Movie | Life History | English | official

Be damned. I always think of Vivekananda as my own personal discovery.

I was twenty-three years and three months old.  Walking home from work (my first job--export documentations) along First Avenue in Seattle, I came across an inviting little bookstore.  I went in, feeling myself unaccountably at home, walked mid-way into the interior, put out my hand and laid it on Vivekananda's Four Yogas, which I picked up, paid for, and took home with me. I had never heard of Vivekananda and had no idea what I was buying, but the Raja Yoga, Aphorisms of Patanjali, became my meat and drink for the next year or so. And of course it still is, though I have long since lost my copy of it.

Apparently, Vivekananda was the personal discovery of a lot of people. There always will be remembered that smasheroo speech at the Parliament of Religions (1893) which, I confess, when I learned about it and the huge éclat it had made in then-contemporary Methodist and Presbyterian America, strangely gratified me: I congratulated myself on my religious good taste.

But, as you know if you are a reader of this  humble blog, I pride myself on both my voluntary, for-fun theism, and on my but-of-course atheism, in a fashion which I hope to be Lucretian. I gotta say, heterosexuals have a winner in the Goddess department with Dea Magna (Aphrodite, Hestia, Hera, Demeter); the thing about Zeus, however, is he's sexy, and, for a top god, clever.

The horror for me, still, is Vivekananda's (and Ramakrishna's before him) worship of Durga. And their acceptance of Shaivism (which, so far as I could ever tell. is grotesque bullshit).

Dunno about Vishnuism. Seems a little abstract.  But blessedly calm, rational, non-fanatic.

Truth to tell though, none of the Hindu deities seems to pass my Heian sniff-test (Be amusing, not vulgar, as authentic as you like, but [c'mon] not violent or disgusting. Please?). So, but were we talking about powers, metaphors and symbols? C'mon. ¿What powers? And here we are, over in Vajrayana-land, looking speculatively at "thunderbolts." Instant Enlightenment. Indeed.