Experimentation Continues

His childhood experimentation with all dogmatic practices continued. He was very touched with the concept of untouchables. His father's drawing room had several hookahs. There were two queues - one for the upper classes and the other for the so called lower class people. He tasted all the hookahs one by one and went back to his father to tell him that nothing he realized had changed his caste. Later at the Dharmasabha (Parliament) he explains his position regarding caste in Hindu religion. He said these are prevalent practices in society and should not be associated with any religion. Like caste in India you have apartheid. This has brought the whole world today to think of reforming the society through religion.

A little background of his family would surprise many people. But I think the set-up was completely fabricated for him to experiment with his own life.

His father Mr. Biswanath Dutta was a man of virtue, discipline and humanity. Being magistrate in those days brought him sufficient financial stability. However, this also made him become a little profligate. But the thing that influenced Vivekananda the most was that he was an ardent follower of the “Brahmmo” society which sprouted in Kolkata as a substitute to idolatry system of Hinduism and non-spiritual aspect of Christianity.

On the other hand his mother Bhubaneswari Debi, though not very highly learned, knew all the scriptures of Puranas. So Vivekananda learnt whole of Mahabharata, Ramayana and Vedas from her. They say that his mother prayed for Vivekananda from lord Vireshwara of Kashi.

There is another important thing that people tend to miss out about him is that his grandfather Bhagabanchandra had abandoned his family at some early stage of his life in quest of God.

So father though virtuous an atheist, mother a perfect devotee, and grandfather a sannyas. This influenced his young mind very deeply. He could neither defy his mother's devotion, nor his father's conviction on atheism nor a hermit's effortless sacrifice.

His early age impression of Ramayana made him a worshipper of Rama and Sita. However, as he understood the pain of bondage more and more and the freedom of a hermit he replaced them with an idol of Sivji. At his early young age he used to regularly visit several institutions of Brahmmo society in search of spirituality. However soon he realized that something was missing in their whole discussion. Whosoever had any discourse on religion he asked them whether they had seen God! All of them had some roundabout answer which he could not understand.

The very thought that god does not exist at all puzzled him very much. Denial of anything entails that thing to exist at some point of time if not at present. A mere negation was not sufficient to quench a heart that was seeking out for an absolute truth. Later on he postulated this hypothesis in his own words.

“In the first place, all religions admit that, apart from the body which perishes, there is a certain part or something which does not change like the body, a part that is immutable, eternal, that never dies; but some of the later religions teach that although there is a part of us that never dies, it had a beginning. But anything that has a beginning must necessarily have an end. We — the essential part of us — never had a beginning, and will never have an end. And above us all, above this eternal nature, there is another eternal Being, without end — God. People talk about the beginning of the world, the beginning of man. The word beginning simply means the beginning of the cycle. It nowhere means the beginning of the whole Cosmos. It is impossible that creation could have a beginning. No one of you can imagine a time of beginning. That which has a beginning must have an end.”

The journey and the search went on. However, the plot was made a little different. All his answers were lying in some different corner of the world with a sage who was popularly known in those days as “Kshyapa Thakur” (insane sage).

Vivekananda had learnt about this man once in his F.A. class in General Assemblies Institution when Professor Hastie mentioned that as Wordsworth gets submerged with the nature seeing her beauty, Ramakrishna is the only other person who becomes inseparable when worshipping. Only a pure soul and an integrated concentration can help one achieve this state. This definitely was quite inspiring for him however he did not quite like this being compared to Wordsworth. But somewhere it marked an impression on him.

It was November 1881; Thakur Ramakrishna was coming to the house of one of his disciples Surendranath Dutta who used to be the neighbor of Vivekananda. Vivekananda got an invitation on this occasion to sing in the evening gathering. The first scene of the play was getting unfurled; the two great souls of our age were meeting each other. But ironically it’s only the master who knew about it, the servant was still ignorant and experimenting.