Swami Vivekananda - a Psychologist for Our Times

Every great teacher speaks in the vernacular and language of his students. Speaking to a world living under the shadow of enlightened rationalism, Vivekananda insisted on the importance of “direct experience.” In Rāja Yoga, he writes:

“It is clear that all the religions of the world have been built upon that one universal and adamantine foundation of all our knowledge — direct experience. The teachers all saw God; they all saw their own souls, they saw their future, they saw their eternity, and what they saw they preached.”

Further, all the greatest minds of enlightened rationalism have brought us on the doorstep of complete and inescapable materialism. Our personality, loves, dreams, nightmares, and very nature stand reduced to material processes in the brain. But as Vivekananda points in Rāja Yoga, the first domino of materialism can only end in dystopia:

“If life is only a short play, if the universe is only a ‘fortuitous combination of atoms’ then why should I do good to another? Why should there be mercy, justice, or fellow-feeling? The best thing for this world would be to make hay while the sun shines, each man for himself. If there is no hope, why should I love my brother, and not cut his throat?”

This is our condition, then - we must have direct experience to believe in anything but direct experience shows us nothing but uncaring matter. The first option, then, is to become a nihilist - to work for nothing, to care for nothing, to think of nothing. But Vivekananda says: “I have never seen a man who could really become a nihilist for one minute.” It’s easy to “talk” - but to act out nihilism is almost a contradiction in terms. To live is to choose, to act, to value one thing over the other.

Vivekananda points out the “other position” — “to seek for an explanation, to seek for the real, to discover in the midst of this eternally changing and evanescent world whatever is real.” This is not simply one of many positions, but the only noble one for a person of integrity. When people tell us to ignore our religious hunt for the truth and focus instead on the “practical life,” that is nothing but settling for a “hypocritical, lying life, a life of continuous fraud, covering all sores in the best way you can.”

“Go on putting patch after patch, until everything is lost, and you are a mass of patchwork. This is what is called practical life. Those that are satisfied with this patchwork will never come to religion. Religion begins with a tremendous dissatisfaction with the present state of things, with our lives, and a hatred, an intense hatred, for this patching up of life, an unbounded disgust for fraud and lies.”

People across the mighty length of time, and the staggering breadth of cultures, have rejected the “fraud and lies” and bravely searched for the permanent truth of existence. Of these, Vivekananda says, the most successful have been the Advaita Vedāntists. In Jñāna Yoga, Vivekananda calls Advaitism the “fairest flower of philosophy and religion that any country in any age has produced.”

What, then, is Vedānta? How is it different from other forms of religious inquiry? What was Swami Vivekananda’s inner conflict on this subject?

Vivekananda the Vedāntist

In his second visit to the West, Vivekananda gave a fascinating speech: “IS VEDANTA THE FUTURE RELIGION?” But before we get to the future religion, let’s ask: What is religion? Some take religions to be specific, historical ideologies tied to specific, historical figures. But “Sanātana” Dharma implies religion has a durable and eternal nature. Vivekananda too separates between “kindergartens of religion” and more mature religions. Let’s understand the differences.

Religion, at its earlier stages, has three needs.

First: It needs a book.

Second: It needs the divine to be shown in a personalized form as “the Lord of the world or as the great Teacher.”

Third: “Religion, to be strong, must believe that it alone is the truth.

A book is the glue that binds a religious community. Vivekananda: “The book is the center round which human allegiance gathers.” The Jews were just a “handful of men” banished from country to country, yet they survived as they had a book with them. Religions very much need a cult of personality. Vivekananda : “Men must worship some embodied man! They must have the Incarnation or the prophet or the great leader. You find it in every religion today.” Hinduism has “incarnations” while Abrahamic religions have prophets.

Vivekananda said that the “third requisite” of religion is that it must be “sure of itself.” Otherwise it can’t “influence people.” This is also the curse of liberalism: “Liberalism dies because it is dry, because it cannot rouse fanaticism in the human mind.”

Where does Vedanta stand in relation to these three needs?

Firstly, it explicitly rejects the idea that “one book can contain all the truths about God, soul, the ultimate reality.” How do we realize the true nature of the self? Upaniṣads say: “Not by the reading of books.”

Secondly, Vedānta can’t elevate one form of life over another. Vivekananda: “Not one man has ever become the object of worship among the Vedāntins. A man is no more worthy of worship than any bird, any worm. We are all brothers. The difference is only in degree.” Thirdly, while Vedānta does not “compromise or give up the truths which it considers fundamental,” it is still not “antagonistic to anything.” Vedanta has no interest in drowning out the spiritual perspectives of others. It does not prefer to scream from a microphone.

This is the problem that Vivekananda is wrestling with. Since the beginning, the marketplace of ideas for religion has stayed the same. A core text, an influential founding personality, and an aggressive style combine to make “religions” successful. Vedānta rejects all three. But Vedānta may still triumph as it has the truth on its side. Vivekananda said that the divisions maintained by religion between one holy book and other texts, between God and men, are ultimately “dualistic superstitions.” The final argument against them: they are “weakening.” He summarized Vedānta’s great teaching beautifully:

“What is the God of Vedānta? He is a principle, not a person. You and I are all Personal Gods. The absolute God of the universe, the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the universe, is an impersonal principle.”

Vivekananda wonders: Do people need the “dualist method” until they are eased into the fuller truth? He said: “If a man wants you to show him the polar star, you first point out to him a bright star near it, then a less bright star, then a dim star, and then the polar star.” Then Vivekananda does what makes this speech worth our time, 122 years later - he quickly presents the counterargument:

“How long will the world have to wait to reach the truth if it follows this slow, gradual process? How long? Where is the surety that it will ever succeed?”

For Vivekananda, the highest form of religion is “the worship of the spirit by the spirit.” Let’s not teach people they are “helpless, miserable creatures” condemned to “abject degradation” without external cosmic intervention. All help and illumination comes from within.

Vivekananda the Psychologist

In Jñāna Yoga, Vivekananda writes:

“Fill the brain, therefore, with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work. Talk not about impurity, but say that we are pure. We have hypnotized ourselves into this thought that we are little.”

Here Vivekananda gives us an important lesson in the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. We started this essay with Vivekananda’s critique of rationalism and materialism. The big problem with these world-views is that they reduce human beings to logic-bound creatures who are all matter and no spirit. If one’s starting point is such a weakening worldview, then it’s no surprise that spiritual barrenness follows. Our identity and expectations have a profound influence on our perception of reality itself:

“There was a stump of a tree, and in the dark, a thief came that way and said, “That is a policeman.” A young man waiting for his beloved saw it and thought that it was his sweetheart. A child who had been told ghost stories took it for a ghost and began to shriek. But all the time it was the stump of a tree. Let positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into their brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralyzing ones.”

Further, Vivekananda’s penetrating psychological insight allows him to see religion for what it truly is: the ultimate double-edged sword. In Jñāna Yoga, he writes:

“Religion is the highest plane of human thought and life, and herein we find that the workings of these two forces have been most marked. The intensest love that humanity has ever known has come from religion, and the most diabolical hatred that humanity has known has also come from religion. The noblest words of peace that the world has ever heard have come from men on the religious plane, and the bitterest denunciation that the world has ever known has been uttered by religious men. Nothing makes us so cruel as religion, and nothing makes us so tender as religion. This has been so in the past, and will also, in all probability, be so in the future.”

As long as there is humanity, there will be religion. But what Advaita Vedānta gives us is a form of religion that is perhaps better suited to our times than any other. Vedānta is decentralized spirituality - no central holy book, no deification of individual humans - and therefore Vivekananda writes that a healthy religion will always have multiple sects. He writes: “I am glad that sects exist, and I only wish they may go on multiplying more and more. Why? Simply because of this: If you and I and all who are present here were to think exactly the same thoughts, there would be no thoughts for us to think. We know that two or more forces must come into collision in order to produce motion.”

If we all thought the same things, we would be like “Egyptian mummies in a museum looking vacantly at one another’s faces.”

A religious life with variety and differentiation might look vulnerable to dilution and erosion. But it is this variety that makes India’s religious traditions alive and long-lasting: “Variation is the sign of life, and it must be there. I pray that sects may multiply so that at last there will be as many sects as human beings, and each one will have his own method, his individual method of thought in religion.”

Conclusion: Five Takeaways

1. Materialism and rationalism finally end in nihilism, and humans cannot live like that.

2. Religion begins as a search for the permanent truth and a rejection of “fraud and lies” no matter how convenient.

3. Advaita Vedānta paints a truer picture of reality than any other system of thought. Your brain doesn’t just observe reality but actively reshapes it, and therefore your religious beliefs go a long way in determining the sort of reality you inhabit.

4. The variety of Indian religious traditions has given them the strength to persist for millennia.