By Abhijeet Kislay
The great gift that Swami Vivekananda brought with his angle of the Vedantic teachings was to practicalize Vedanta so that it can be held as an ideal even by a common man. One major step in this regard can be seen in his lecture titled “God in Everything” delivered in London in 1896.
Some excerpts clarify how he elucidated Vedanta for modern times:
“Here I can only lay before you what the Vedanta seeks to teach, and that is the deification of the world. The Vedanta does not in reality denounce the world. The ideal of renunciation nowhere attains such a height as in the teachings of the Vedanta. But, at the same time, dry suicidal advice is not intended; it really means deification of the world -- giving up the world as we think of it, as we know it, as it appears to us -- and to know what it really is. Deify it; it is God alone.”
Then he beautifully explains the above with a common everyday example for a householder:
“We have to cover everything with the Lord Himself, not by a false sort of optimism, not by blinding our eyes to the evil, but by really seeing God in everything. What is meant? You can have your wife; it does not mean that you are to abandon her, but that you are to see God in the wife. Give up your children; what does that mean? To turn them out of doors, as some human brutes do in every country? Certainly not. That is diabolism; it is not religion. But see God in your children. So, in everything. In life and in death, in happiness and in misery, the Lord is equally present.”
Some excerpts clarify how he elucidated Vedanta for modern times:
“Here I can only lay before you what the Vedanta seeks to teach, and that is the deification of the world. The Vedanta does not in reality denounce the world. The ideal of renunciation nowhere attains such a height as in the teachings of the Vedanta. But, at the same time, dry suicidal advice is not intended; it really means deification of the world -- giving up the world as we think of it, as we know it, as it appears to us -- and to know what it really is. Deify it; it is God alone.”
Then he beautifully explains the above with a common everyday example for a householder:
“We have to cover everything with the Lord Himself, not by a false sort of optimism, not by blinding our eyes to the evil, but by really seeing God in everything. What is meant? You can have your wife; it does not mean that you are to abandon her, but that you are to see God in the wife. Give up your children; what does that mean? To turn them out of doors, as some human brutes do in every country? Certainly not. That is diabolism; it is not religion. But see God in your children. So, in everything. In life and in death, in happiness and in misery, the Lord is equally present.”
