. HOLOVOLUTION

HOW SWAMI VIVEKANANDA LEARNED THE MESSAGE OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA Lesson IV of Ramakrishna’s Integral Vedanta Holovolution, the Cosmology Synthesizing Spiritual Evolution and Involution ABSTRACT Lesson IV in the transmission from Sri Ramakrishna to Vivekananda is concerned with how the “evolutionary” process from matter to spirit—what we look at as spiritual development moving “upwards”—is balanced by an equal and “involutionary” process from spirit to matter moving “downwards”. Traditionally, matter-based evolution is more emphasized in the West, especially since the eighteenth century, and involution by the mystics from time immemorial, and relating to the process of “creation” or “emanation” from the divine source. Speaking from his habitually humanistic perspective, Vivekananda termed these two processes realization and manifestation, which take place not “out there”, but within the person or culture itself. In the mind of both Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda these processes are totally interrelated within the same system. As this material brought to mind the coinage of holomovement by the quantum physicist David Bohm, I opted to term the whole process holovolution. As in the previous three lessons, this topic or theme is explored through the same five state changes in Vivekananda’s psyche, and in the same place and period of time—in short, following the progression of the chatushpad in parallel with the process of Lessons I through III. In holovolution the first three classes are a form of introduction to the topic, and Class IV the occurrence of the samadhi that opens up the full meaning of the topic, enabling Vivekananda, as after samadhi in the previous three lessons, to grasp the full meaning of the subject. Vivekananda opts to emphasize involution in India, not as divine creation but as how we manifest interior spiritual experience in action in the physical world. In the West, he gives evolution the meaning of how through spiritual development we arrive at the underlying reality of the whole process and thereby give materialist evolutionary theory a rationale in and of itself and logically linking it to involution. Both exegeses are clearly radically interrelated.  1. Introductory Summary The fourth lesson which Vivekananda learned from Ramakrishna was on holovolution, the combined processes of evolution and involution between the poles of spirit and matter as seen from the underlying ground of Reality. The words “evolution” and “involution” as most commonly used by Vivekananda in the Complete Works refer to the process of human spiritual development. In that contest, “evolution” refers to the movement from human to divine, and “involution” from the divine to the human. That usage is to be distinguished from the way the same words are employed in connection with Sankhyan philosophy. There, Prakriti’s production of diverse empirical forms is usually called “evolution”, while the return journey to the unmanifest is called “involution”. Vivekananda himself used such terminology in his discussion of Sankhyan philosophy in early 1896. We also find this usage in the translation of Vivekananda’s Bengali poem quoted on p.522. Apart from his discussion of Sankhyan philosophy, however, we find that Vivekananda used the words “evolution” and “involution” as they are presented in this thesis. As Vedanta removes the rigid Sankhyan distinction between Prakriti and Purusha in the world-process, one might suggest that Vivekananda’s predominant presentation of holovolution contains the idea that, as Prakriti “evolves”, spirit “involves”, and vice versa, the two movements being integrally and invariably related. The visual presentation of such a concept might well be the famous yin-yang symbol of Tao: In some such way, the process of production of the empirical universe is synthesized with the prime motion of spirit and the possibility of studying the two processes at different stages of their development suggested. For our immediate purposes, however, the primary idea is of two interrelated processes mutually sustaining and fulfilling each other, whatever be the terminology used. This comprehensive and organic synthesis was urgently needed in the modern world to counteract the disintegration of ideals and traditions, Indian and Western, which had followed the unveiling of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection only twenty-three years before Vivekananda’s first class from Ramakrishna. From the standpoint of the overall message of Ramakrishna the theme of holovolution is a logical next step after his treatment of maya. As and when the Self is accepted as the substratum of manifestation, previously “opposite” phenomena come together in harmony. Holovolution is merely the harmonious way of seeing how the phenomena of the universe are interrelated, from top to bottom, as two processes—evolution and involution—which work together in what we might call a spiritual cosmology. We find, in the development of this theme into a lesson of five classes, the same structure emerging as in the previous two lessons, i.e. a preparatory class or classes leading to a samadhi, and followed by “assimilative” teachings. In the case of this lesson there are three preparatory classes and one assimilative class, samadhi taking place at class 4. However, at this point it is rather apparent that, as we take up each succeeding theme, the onset of samadhi is later in the time frame of the lesson. A possible reason for this is—as we have just hinted—that the themes form a sequence of increasing subtlety and comprehensiveness and therefore take longer to be fully understood and digested. Theme I: spiritual humanism, dealing with the quite external, empirical human individual and his or her self-image, begins with samadhi, the experience necessary to launch the whole series, if it is to be based on authentic spiritual insight. Theme II—yoga—deals with self-transformation in the internal world of the individual and is not fully accessible in Class 1, where such a world has not yet come into its own. However, after the first samadhi and his systematic yoga practices with Ramakrishna, Vivekananda was able to experience, in Class 2, the unity behind his experiences. Theme III: maya moves to the realm of metaphysics and quantum leaps of understanding, a much less accessible realm for the ordinary mind than themes I and II. In our presentation, only in Class 3 does Vivekananda access in samadhi the meaning of maya, after engaging with the spiritual humanistic view in Class 1 and the dynamic self-transformation of Class 2. One might say that these steps prepared him for his leap beyond the paradox of matter/spirit inherent in Lessons I and II and Classes 1 and 2. Following the same line of thought, our present lesson, dealing with the harmonizing of phenomena on a cosmic scale, requires the foundation of the samadhis of the three previous classes before Vivekananda attains realization of what the theme really means. Building on this idea of preceding samadhis paving the way to the samadhi of any particular lesson, we can also point to the possibility that, after the samadhi of any lesson, what leads to the capacity to digest and assimilate the meaning of the relevant theme are the experiences of samadhi of the post-ceding classes. We have indirectly touched on this idea in our previous discussions, especially of Lesson III. Here, having accumulated almost all of our data, we present it more explicitly. Lesson I, with 4 assimilative classes after samadhi in Class 1, shows the influence of yogic understanding in Class 2, the grasp of maya in Class 3, and of holovolution (as expressed in the ideas about the divine incarnation) in Class 4. Finally, Class 5 of Lesson I on spiritualized humanism has all the hallmarks of holism reflecting the final stages of Vivekananda’s ongoing realization. A similar pattern is seen in Lessons II and III, as in this lesson. However, the samadhi related to any particular theme/lesson supervenes in this sequence only when the student’s mind is prepared by his experiences in other lessons. These ideas are presented here mainly as a suggested framework for thought. They will be gone into in greater detail in Parts II and III of this section, and tied together through verbal and visual analysis. In this chapter they will be expressed indirectly in the summaries of Vivekananda’s previous experiences and how they come together in a harmonious pattern in the present lesson. These summaries are intended to be little logical “ramps” from which the deeper, holistic analysis can be approached gradually and incrementally. In embarking into these deeper and more powerful waters, I return to the buoys I have been deploying as we go along, i.e. our paired relationship terms. These terms earmark each class, as it were, and acquire deeper and more inclusive meanings as we move from theme to theme, lesson to lesson. Here let us review them and tag them to the content which will be emerging in this chapter: Class 1, which engages humanistic, rationalistic consciousness with the theme of holovolution, and is tagged with the terms of coordination and reciprocity, introduces the idea that human perception creates a universe of variety organized in an empirical hierarchy upon the substratum of unity; and the idea of the God-man or divine incarnation as the acme of the whole evolutionary process. These ideas carry the relationship of coordination to cosmic proportions. Reciprocity becomes the open-ended vision of God and humanity as co-creators of the universe. Class 2, speaking from the yogic state and tagged with the terms compatibility and complementarity, deals with the demonstration by Ramakrishna of how the intense aspiration of the yogi enables him or her to accept the diverse scriptural forms (compatibility). Thereafter, the yogi can use them in an integrated and systematic way for spiritual evolution or development from the human to the divine (complementarity). He also spoke explicitly of the God-man as the voluntary descent or involution from the ultimate state of consciousness attained through yogic struggle. Here we see how the scriptures, the texts supporting holovolution, provide the hermeneutical tools to understand human development at both the ordinary human level and at the furthest reaches in which the divine incarnation lives. Primarily, human beings are concerned with evolution, while the divine incarnation is the prime exemplar of involution, providing the link that closes communication between spirit and humanity. Class 3, addressing the metaphysics of maya and tagged by mutuality and conjugation, emphasizes the capacity of the fully evolved human being to see all possible forms as spirit itself and therefore as fully valid. In such a context, the voluntary return or involution of God-men and women to the human plane is more readily understandable. Furthermore, Ramakrishna indicated that, at more evolved levels of perception, the distinct forms of God-men and women begin to dissolve into the primal power of Mother, the resolver of all paradox and separateness. Here we get a rationale that bridges the chasm between the God-man or woman and the ordinary human being permitting of a mutuality of vaster dimensions than in Lessons I through III, while, at the same time, conjugation moves to the dissolution of forms themselves in reality and thereby introduces depths of experience before which we might tremble if we did not have the assurances of Ramakrishna’s teaching and the experience of Vivekananda, who used it to develop into the most magnificent and effective of human beings. Class 4, engaging in full with holovolution itself and tagged with correlation/symbiosis, shows how Ramakrishna rounded out Vivekananda’s understanding of the meaning of the God-man or woman by emphasizing his own unobstructed vision of the universe as spirit itself and by his ever-recurring evolutions to samadhi, followed by re-involvement with the human plane of consciousness. Ramakrishna’s unfailing guide in the welter of ideas about the divine incarnation was his own, inner awareness of truth. He also carried forward the idea that the divine incarnation is not primarily a special human form but rather is an intense manifestation of reality which could easily become the human norm rather than the exception. He led Vivekananda to a complete understanding that the whole universe emerges from and returns to the fully evolved human soul, and that the principle presiding over such holovolution is Intelligence, the first involutionary form of reality as well as the last evolutionary one that we can describe in the language of human experience. The climax of this class as well as the whole subject of holovolution was Vivekananda’s nirvikalpa samadhi at the doorway of which he described divine intelligence taking the form of the primal “I” adjusting each part of the Whole to all other parts and thus removing discontinuity and conflict from the world process. Here correlation assumes the dimension of pegging our whole thinking process to the direct experience of truth which removes even the most fundamental of barriers between the divine incarnation and the ordinary human, permitting the possibility of human development to the level of the God-man or woman; symbiosis here is grounded in the experience of Intelligence, the power/form which masterminds the very process of symbiosis itself. Finally, Class 5 documents how Vivekananda merged with Ramakrishna in mutual samadhi and how his behavior manifested a complete integration and practical application of all that he had learned. He heartily embraced all forms of manifestation and promulgated the idea of Wholeness. We find these qualities in his fifth stage of teaching when he expressed poetically his final vision of Ramakrishna as the Reality experienced not only in maha-nirvana but in all concrete phenomena down to the tiniest flower, thus giving isomorphism a cosmic, and at the same time, an intensely human and deeply emotional meaning. All of these paradigms and suggestions are not anything radically new. They are growing organically from all that has preceded them, unfolding more and more explicitly perhaps and, hopefully, shedding new light on the dynamics underlying the whole transmission from Ramakrishna to Vivekananda. The next chapter will bring out the final forms of these structures, as far as they can be in a historical narrative such as this. Thereafter, we shall take them up in and of themselves and work on methods to make them more explicit, both as they are and as they interrelate in a total picture. 2. Introduction By the second week of March, 1885, Vivekananda had gone to the heart of three lessons with Ramakrishna and was ready to begin the fourth. In February of 1882 he had begun his study of the spiritual dimension of humanism (Chapter 20); in 1882-1883 he had entered fully into the realm of yoga, in which he experienced the nature of the relationship between the human individual and spirit (Chapters 21 and 22); in 1885 he had discovered how all sense of dichotomy in such a study can be removed by accepting the dynamic power of spirit as represented by Mother Kali (Chapter 23). Taking the content of these three lessons together, there seems to be a progressive blending of human and spiritual, from the concept of spiritual humanism in the first lesson to the removal of all intellectual barriers between spirit and the dynamic world which he experienced at the third. Such a progression was by no means purely cognitive. On the contrary, Vivekananda had undergone convulsive transformations of his whole being, nothing short of an evolutionary unfolding or an expansion of the empirical human consciousness that he had presented to Ramakrishna at their first meeting in early 1882. By March of 1885 Vivekananda had apparently shed all obstacles to true objectivity, for we find that Ramakrishna began to engage him in an in-depth study of the very evolutionary process he had just come through, finally plunging him into the very core of its meaning in a tremendous samadhi in May of 1886. However, Vivekananda did not enter such an experience without thorough preparation. As we have seen in the three previous lessons, Ramakrishna gently built up a systematic cognitive “scaffolding” of themes or levels to support the tremendous experiential “construction” going on within Vivekananda. Nor was such scaffolding thrown away when the work was completed. I have tried to show in the three previous chapters how the stepwise building of an intellectual rationale for inner transformation was preserved by Vivekananda in his own teaching, faithfully reproducing the insights and angles of vision of Ramakrishna which he had assimilated during his own spiritual education. The subject of evolution was timely, not only in Vivekananda’s development, but because the world was still reeling from the unveiling in 1859—only 23 years prior—of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection based on the idea of survival of the fittest. In the West the theory had challenged the comfortable assumption that human beings are quite other than the rest of creation and therefore ordained to dominate it. In India, it had been pressed into service by interested parties to bolster the terrible caste distinctions which were undermining the social fabric, and had introduced for the first time the idea of competition as an acceptable modus operandi (Vivekananda, 1970a, pp.191-192). CW, Vol. 3: The Mission of the Vedanta, pp.191-192. Prior to meeting Ramakrishna Vivekananda had identified himself with the efforts of thinkers like Herbert Spencer who sought to introduce a more dignified and moral interpretation of Darwin’s data. In India, too, he had been active in the Brahmo Samaj which was working to remove the abuses of the rigidly hierarchical notion of social structure and class which were stifling individual freedom and development. However, the havoc wrought by modern evolutionism had afflicted a much deeper level of the human soul than could be righted by such superficial, through well-meaning activities. What was required was a radical approach that could ground the Western tradition in a much more profound understanding of what is meant by the very word evolution. Viewed as a phenomenon occurring entirely within the materialistic/rationalistic level of consciousness, the idea of evolution was thrashing about like a tiger trapped in a tiny cage. Only if it could be conceived of as connecting up several levels of progressively expanded consciousness could it be “tamed” and become a useful tool to explain the human journey through the cosmos. From the Indian side, the poison of competition introduced from the West could be neutralized only by a return to the basic Vedantic truth that Reality has not only become all this but pervades it and manifests through it, thus removing all justification for invidious social distinctions. As for practical prescriptions, Western humanity would find its peace only in discovering and exploring the process of evolution of consciousness to higher states of awareness from which the inter-connectedness of all phenomena can clearly be seen. The prescription for India was to involve the truths of Vedanta into full, waking consciousness of the oneness of all forms of life and to respect and serve each and every one as a direct manifestation of spirit itself. The combined and profoundly interwoven processes of evolution and involution I propose to call holovolution; and also to suggest that that was precisely what Ramakrishna taught Vivekananda in order to fulfill his fourth intention to “mold him in such a way that he might become a fit instrument to fulfill [the] great purpose of his life” (Saradananda, 1952, p.752). Great Master, Part V.6. (1).2, pp.751-752. That purpose, of course, was to become a teacher to all the cultures and religions of the world, a harmonizer and synthesizer of them all within the framework of humanity and spirit. And that hung on his ability to see them as organically related to one another without artificial barriers and in a clearly defined, though flexible way even as they moved in their holovolutionary trajectories. 3. Class 1: Ramakrishna Lays the Groundwork for a Rational and Humanistic Synthesis of Evolutionary Theories Although the primary emphasis of Ramakrishna’s teaching to Vivekananda at the beginning of their relationship (in February-March of 1882) was the spiritualization of humanism, we have seen that he also touched on other subjects that were to take center stage consecutively later on in the “curriculum”—yoga and maya. The same was true of the subject of holovolution which, like yoga and maya at this preliminary stage, was couched in the language of empiricism and humanism on account of Vivekananda’s imperious rejection of any other mode of thought. In a conversation with Vivekananda in March of 1882, we find this remark of Ramakrishna: In this creation of God there is a variety of things: men, animals, trees, plants. Among the animals, some are good, some bad. There are ferocious animals like the tiger. Some trees bear fruit sweet as nectar, and others bear fruit that is poisonous. Likewise, among human beings, there are the good and the wicked, the holy and the unholy. There are some who are devoted to God and others who are attached to the world (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.86). Gospel, February, 1882, p.86. Here was a bird’s-eye view of the endless variation of types within the unifying ground which Ramakrishna called God. This was the concept substrate of holovolution to which Ramakrishna went on to add the correlated idea of the ever-free God-men or divine incarnations; such as Narada, who “live in this world for the good of others, to teach men spiritual truth” (Ibid.). In bringing up the subject of divine incarnation before Vivekananda, Ramakrishna was addressing a fiercely humanistic mind which repudiated, not only the Western notion of a never-to-be-repeated incarnation of God but also the heavy emphasis in medieval Vedanta on the personalities of the (recurring) divine incarnations and on their grace as the primary means to salvation. Both ideas placed too much limitation on the innate divinity of every human soul and its power to manifest that divinity according to its own frame of reference. Again, the notion of divine incarnation was not in agreement with contemporary Western theories of evolution which completely put to one side the human soul and the possibility of its conscious evolution to full manifestation of the divine. Rather, implicitly subscribing to the modern myth, “God is dead” (Nietzsche, 1961, Prologue, Chapter 2), the theory of evolution rolled onwards on the assumption that human beings had no option but to submit to the forces of physical evolution. Here Vivekananda could not be at home completely, either. His innate sense of divinity could never accept that humanity was less than the physical laws running the cosmos, nor could he accede to the brutal implications of the “survival of the fittest” theory—the proposed mechanism of natural selection—for it suggested that parts of the whole are greater or more privileged than any others. Vivekananda was faced with two theories—one of divine incarnation, forgetting the human “tail” and the other of Darwinism, omitting the divine “head”. How was he to remove the one-sidedness of these two theories and reach a view that was spiritually true and intellectually satisfying, as well as transforming and rational? In the remarks of Ramakrishna which we are studying here he must have found much food for thought. There was definitely an implication of the Darwinian progression from plants to man, and within each kingdom the plant, animal, and human, the possibility of manifestation from the negative to the positive pole. Moreover, according to Ramakrishna, the human progression had been made primarily in the context of the divine, culminating in the divine incarnation conceived of as a promoter of human evolution itself. Perhaps this was a synthesis which could help Vivekananda resolve the ambiguities in his own position. In it the relationship of coordination acquired a more profound meaning than in the previous three themes of humanism, yoga and maya, for here the alignment from simplest to the most complex kingdoms was all-inclusive and highly flexible and dynamic with no difficult breaks in comprehension. Similarly, reciprocity, or equality in communication, had become not just a fact, but an explained fact, fully accessible to the intelligent mind. At the beginning of his own teaching in Notes Taken down in Madras, 1892-93, Vivekananda, like Ramakrishna, took a bird’s-eye view of both Western and traditional Indian teaching and from that standpoint emphasized the evolution of human consciousness as the core event around which traditions and concepts of divine incarnations are formed and to which they must always be adjusted. In India he advocated: The Vedas should be studied through the eyeglass of evolution. They contain the whole history of the progress of religious consciousness, until religion has reached perfection in unity (Vivekananda, 1968, p.103). CW, Vol. 6: Notes Taken Down in Madras, 1892-1893, p.103. The time had come for Indians to reassess their traditions in a scientific spirit, adjusting to the times through intellectual power (Ibid., p.113) in order to neutralize and ultimately assimilate the foreign ideas—including the “tremendous engine of competition”—so seriously eroding the Vedantic ideal of unity. Perhaps as an example of such thinking, Vivekananda gave a vivid image of how the struggle with competition might proceed: Generally the organism is weaker than the environment; it is struggling to adjust itself. Sometimes it over-adjusts itself; then the whole body changes into another species. Nandi was a man whose holiness was so great that the human body could not contain it. So those molecules changed into a god-body (Ibid.). Nandi here may refer to a human incarnation of Shiva’s bull who meditated so intensely that he was metamorphosed into a god by Shiva himself. Does this not raise an echo of Ramakrishna’s opening class on holovolution, creating a synthesis of empirical fact and Vedantic ideal? Moreover, it completely avoids any sense of invidious hierarchy with regard to the divine incarnation by putting the whole burden of evolution to divinity upon the effort of the human individual, the characteristic emphasis which Vivekananda invariably made in India. In the West at the same period he addressed the problem of excessive systematism and dogmatism in her tradition: Every other religion [other than the Hindu] lays down certain fixed dogmas and tries to force society to adopt them (Vivekananda, 1965, p.17). CW, Vol. 1: Paper on Hinduism, p.17. To Vivekananda, on the contrary, the whole world of religions is only a: traveling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. . . . The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures (Ibid., p.18). Here the emphasis was on the unity behind the infinitude of different forms which the West had thus far not been able to unify within her existing traditions; and also upon the potential of every human being to attain to spiritual perfection even in a human body. Thus did he take the first of many steps to relativize religious forms and to bring the West to focus on the need for acceptance of all stages in the progression of human reason in its formulation of the truth. As he had called on India to harmonize its complex philosophies and practices rationally and thus lay a firm basis for her cultural development, so did he begin the process of concentrating the West’s energies upon the inner thrust behind evolution, of which forms are but the outer manifestation. In so doing, he expected to bring about a harmony of religions and bring to an end a millennium of competing theologies and bloodshed. 4. Class 2: Vivekananda Begins to Understand the Principles of Progressive Stages in Human Experience and Knowledge From some time in 1882 to early 1884, Vivekananda discovered and explored the realm of yoga, leaving behind the rationalistic world as he sought to commune with the unifying principle or God which was becoming more and more real to him in and through the very world he had previously seen as discrete and external. Within that frame of reference Ramakrishna said to him on October 16, 1882: After I had experienced samadhi, my mind craved intensely to hear only about God. I would always search for places where they were reciting or explaining the sacred books such as the Bhagavata, the Mahabharata, and the Adhyatma Ramayana (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.117). Gospel, October 16, 1882, p.117. This glimpse of his own yogic experience indicates directly that as mind evolves spiritually, God becomes the only point of reference. To the rationalistic mind, God may perhaps be conceded to be a principle, the substratum of the evolutionary process, or the unity behind variety—but to the yogi, moving in the imaginative universe, the primary concern is the actual experience of the God creating the forms he or she blissfully moves through in that universe. Moreover, potent helps to attaining such experience were to be found in the sacred texts of Hinduism, indicating the great transformative power within their intellectual constructs. However, Ramakrishna’s choice of texts was highly eclectic, ranging over the entire gamut of yoga and combining texts of jnana (the Adhyatmaramayana) and bhakti (the Bhagavatam), traditionally considered to be antithetical to each other. Moreover, he threw in the Mahabharata, a text on dharma and work especially, which could have been considered by an analytical mind a rather “low” path for a paramahamsa (great soul) such as he. How did he hold all of this together, validating and extracting the nectar from so many different sources? Was there a “filing system” within that made it possible for him to bring up so many different responses, each of which answered so perfectly to the external situation evoking them? Certainly the power of God was running through that “computer”, but what was the principle with which it organized the mass of data in its bank? A little less than a year later—on August 19, 1883—Vivekananda perhaps picked up a hint dropped by Ramakrishna. As Vivekananda tuned the drums before singing for Ramakrishna, the latter remarked, “The drums don’t sound well as before.” At this, Vivekananda’s companion, Captain Upadhyaya, a scholarly devotee, likened them to a holy man “who remains silent when his heart is full of God-consciousness.” To this pious thought Ramakrishna counterpoised the ideal of Narada who, like Shukadeva and others, “came down a few steps, as it were, to the plane of normal consciousness and broke their silence out of compassion for the sufferings of others and to help them” (Ibid., p.276). Ibid., August 19, 1883, p.276. Did Vivekananda pick up on this new hint about the divine incarnations to whom Ramakrishna had introduced him only seven months before? (Ibid., pp.526-527). At that time they had been presented as the end of the evolutionary spectrum of humanity—a proposition couched in humanistic terms for Vivekananda’s rationalist mind to digest; now they were being introduced as “coming down” from samadhi to help humanity. This new idea draws attention to a hierarchical system within which the actions of perfect human beings can be interpreted. Apparently the movement of such being was not only “up”; there is also a correlated “down”—and the divine incarnation has the ability to move in whichever direction he or she finds to be necessary. The fundamental implication, however, was that the divine incarnations do indeed move within a system that is hierarchical, accepting on the human plane the idea of both evolution from matter to spirit and also involution which, in the same context, means the voluntary engagement of an illumined soul in the world-process. Could this cryptic remark of Ramakrishna have helped Vivekananda to see that “ranking” each manifestation in an overall series was one possible answer to the mystery of Ramakrishna’s capacity to hold in harmony and access at will all the yogic and intellectual traditions of Vedanta was an attitude of? Certainly Vivekananda had by that time become established in the idea that various phenomena are unified in a central principle of God (Lesson II-1, pp.27-30) and could grasp, at least in imagination, the possibility of degrees of manifestation of that principle. That suggested a hierarchy as a means of overall organization of all possible phenomena. Such yogic insight would also have enabled him to understand that any such organizational hierarchy could never be cast in concrete, (as the rational mind conceives of it), but rather is fully flexible, blending each member of the series effortlessly to the other as one went “up” or “down” a continuum. Here compatibility between levels of consciousness is fundamental to any such way of thinking, implying a unifying common factor; while complementarity is self-evident in the fully articulated working relationship which holds the whole structure together. Perhaps as a parallel to this development of concept at the second stage of his own education, we find Vivekananda bringing forward similar ideas during the second stage of his own teaching from September 1894 to the early spring of 1896. In India he spoke, not simply of evolution of the Vedas (p.8), but dealt with the various texts of the Vedantic tradition in an evolutionary series. In undertaking to point out to his countrymen—confused by Western modes of thought—a guide through their traditional scriptures, Vivekananda began with the Vaisheshika and Nyaya, whose dualistic philosophy focuses on the qualities and characteristics of matter and mind; and then moved on to the Sankhyas, “the fathers of theories of evolution”—which is, as we have been suggesting, the rationalization of the conflict of various phenomena and theories into a unity; and concludes with the Brahma Sutras, “the ripe fruit, the result of all these researches” (Vivekananda, 1972, p.334). CW, Vol. 4: Reply to the Madras Address, p.334. Abstracting this progression of ideas to its philosophical roots, he gave out to his disciples at that time that “All of religion is contained . . . in the three stages of the Vedanta philosophy—the Dwaita (dualism), Vishishtadwaita (qualified non-dualism), and Adwaita (non-dualism); one comes after the other. These are the three stages of spiritual growth in man” (Vivekananda, 1970b, p.81). CW, Vol. 5: Letter to Alasinga Perumal from the U.S.A., May 6, 1895, p.81. His sweeping overview of all phenomena was, “every man or woman—nay, from the highest devas [gods] to the lowest worm that crawls under our feet—is such a spirit evoluted or involuted. The difference is not in kind, but in degree” (Vivekananda, 1972, p.351). CW, Vol. 4: Reply to the Madras Address, p.351. This whole system culminated in the Man-God, the last word in the system of human evolution (and the first in divine involution) who, in the context of the Vedantic tradition, “shows what the Hindu religion is” (Ibid., p.348). These great human beings had taken different forms as human culture developed; but he made it clear in India that in the present period their form was to be that of selfless service of humanity (Ibid., pp.338-339), a voluntary involution to the human condition. In view of this overall stepwise scheme of human development which he perceived as underlying the welter of Indian schools, texts and traditions, their explanation could only be “by [Ramakrishna’s] theory of avastha or stages” (Vivekananda, 1970b, p.53). CW, Vol. 5: Letter to Alasinga Perumal from the USA, November 30, 1894, p.53. For India, the implication was of an organizing principle of religion; within which “we must . . . positively embrace [others at different stages] and [know] that the truth is the basis of all religions” (Ibid.). The corresponding ideas for the West included his harmonizing of the warring Western traditions on the common criterion of the development of each and every individual: The steps which the human race has taken to reach to the highest pinnacles of religious thought, every individual will have to take (Vivekananda, 1965, p.404). CW, Vol. 1: Steps of Hindu Philosophic Thought, p.404. As a practical application of these ideas, he began to dwell in detail in his public addresses on the evolution of the Western religious tradition from the pre-rational Jewish and Babylonian tribal gods to the monotheistic God and finally to the immanent God of Christianity (Vivekananda, 1965, pp.322-323), CW, Vol. 1: Soul, God, and Religion, pp.322-323. thus linking all of these traditions into an organic series of development. Finally, he added the integral stage of religion in which “I and my Father are one” (Ibid., p.323), adding the crucial thought, “The different stages of growth are absolutely necessary to the attainment of purity and perfection” (Ibid.). In this way Vivekananda began to connect up his Western students with the practical implications of the process of “traveling through various conditions and circumstances to the same goal” which he had outline a year and a half previously. (p.528). The whole focus of his presentation in the West was the spirit and the oneness that is its hallmark in human affairs. In that context he defined the theory of divine incarnation as: “The first link in the chain of ideas leading to the recognition of the oneness of God and Man” (Vivekananda, 1969, p.100). CW, Vol. 7: Inspired Talks, August 5th, p.100. At the conclusion of this stage of his teaching he spoke for the first time in public about Ramakrishna whom he depicted as the perfected yogi, the God-man involved in the human condition, exemplifying the Vedantic ideal of humanity and completely “beyond the possibility of seeing [or] thinking evil” (Vivekananda, 1972, p.183). CW, Vol. 4: My Master, p.183. In this way spirit itself had directly entered the process and was laying a foundation for an understanding of the potential of all religious forms to promote and foster the evolutionary thrust of human activity. This was, one might say, the counterpart to the involutionary process in India where he synthesized the different Vedantic philosophies in order to prevent fragmentation of the intellectual underpinnings of the traditional methods of spiritual transformation through yoga. 5. Class 3: The Synthesis of Evolution and Involution The primary thrust of the third stage of Vivekananda’s education was his struggle to transcend the pairs of opposites and merge them in reality from where they could be seen as conjugate to each other, i.e. wedded to each other while retaining many of their opposing qualities. Alongside that drama went the third class on holovolution which brought together the concepts of evolution and involution in a synthesis comparable to that going on in parallel throughout Vivekananda’s entire worldview. Ramakrishna’s instructions in this mode began on March 2, 1884, just after the death of Vivekananda’s father and the beginning of his hand-to-hand combat with Mother Kali. In keeping with the central concept of his teaching on maya—that our capacity to perceive determines what we see (Lesson III, 10), he introduced, in his inimitable, down-to-earth way, the ideal of spiritual evolution: There are three classes of devotees. The lowest one says, “God is up there.” That is, he points to heaven. The mediocre devotee says that God dwells in the heart as the “Inner Controller.” But the highest devotee says: “God alone has become everything. All that we perceive is so many forms of God” (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.396). Gospel, Sunday, March 2, 1884, p.396. This illustration serves, not only to demonstrate the development of perception—the actual process upon which evolution turns—but also to indicate that it is only at the highest or most evolved state that one can grasp the truth that everything is ruled and ordered by God or reality and ultimately, actually is Reality itself. When one realizes that fact, the circuit is closed and one can re-enter the arena, no longer to fight one’s way out (evolution), but to play in and express one’s divinity (involution). Because of this integrated viewpoint Ramakrishna, unlike the mainstream Adwaita Vedantins, did not deny importance and value to the external manifestation of God. He said: A devotee of God accepts everything. He accepts the universe and its created beings as well as the indivisible Sat-chit-ananda (Ibid., p.395). This was, of course, the attitude that logically should follow from the Upanishadic mantra “All this is verily Brahman” (Cha. Up.1.3.14); but the exigencies of refuting the Buddhist emphasis on change and decay in the universe had led, in medieval times, to a marked swing towards the Absolute and a neglect of empirical phenomena. As part of his teaching on maya, Ramakrishna was now moving to the middle ground between these two extremes, reinstating God’s universe without letting go of God him-or-herself. This was the fleshing out of his basic realization that the immutable, absolute Brahman and the dynamic, ever-changing Kali are one and the same. Some six months later (September 25, 1884), Ramakrishna carried this idea of spiritual involvement in the manifest universe right in Vivekananda’s own life. At that time Vivekananda was very close to his experience of the veils of maya being removed from his mind. Who knows what he experienced as Ramakrishna, on seeing him, placed one foot on his knee and went into a deep, prolonged samadhi! What was transmitted to him by this touch of Ramakrishna only they knew; but, true to his “involution” Ramakrishna returned to normal consciousness at last and proceeded to give a coherent verbal discussion of all that such involution meant, in general and especially in Vivekananda’s own life. He said: There are different planes of consciousness: the gross, the subtle, the causal, and the Great Cause. Entering the mahakarana, the Great Cause, one becomes silent; one cannot utter a word (Ibid., p.562). Ibid., Sunday, September 28, 1884, p.562. Then, as the complement to this of evolution in terms of human consciousness, he went on: An ishwarakoti (incarnations of God and others like them), after attaining the Great Cause, can come down again to the lower planes. . . . They climb up, and they can also come down. . . . The ordinary jiva [embodied soul] . . . after much effort may go into samadhi; but he cannot climb down from that state or tell others what he has seen there (Ibid., pp.562-563). As we know, Ramakrishna had previously referred to such ishwarakotis in Vivekananda’s presence. In addition, he had many times (Nikhilananda, 2000, pp.331, 364, 535) indicated to the devotees that, along with a few others of his disciples, Vivekananda himself was such an ever-perfect soul, born to teach mankind. The present occasion is, however, the first and only time in the Gospel record that we see him speaking before Vivekananda in this way. In view of the circumstances—by now familiar—of the “magic touch” in a high stage of consciousness, can we doubt that Sir Ramakrishna was calling up from within Vivekananda a mode of function—involution—of which he was not yet fully aware? Within his very precise definition of the status of the incarnation and his or her close companions—one that made sense from the phenomenological point of view—there was, however, an apparent dichotomy between the jiva and the incarnation. This was inevitable, of course, when thinking of the subject from the level of human reason and intellect, for it is precisely there that such dichotomies are created. The common thread of thought running through these remarks of Ramakrishna was, of course, the stepwise evolution of the human soul and the possibility of “return” or involution, at least for certain members of the human race. We do not know how Vivekananda felt about this distinction, this apparent roadblock on the evolutionary path of humanity; but perhaps Ramakrishna’s mood three days later was in response to some unspoken objection to this apparent obstacle to human aspiration. As Ramakrishna came down from samadhi brought on by Vivekananda’s arrival in his room, he sang a song to the Divine Mother touching on the issue. Addressing her at first as [Divine Mother] Durga, he went on to think of her as Rama, as Krishna, (two of India’s best-loved divine incarnations) then on to the ten mahavidyas or divine powers, as well as to the ten incarnations traditionally accepted in Hinduism. This inflooding of Mother’s power was thus beginning to blur the sharp edges of the incarnation etched by the intellect, for all ten of them were being dissolved into the primal power and losing their distinctive forms (Ibid., p.569). Ibid., Monday, September 26, 1884, p.569. In this third “class”, then, Vivekananda had begun to see the topic of evolution through the perspective of his lesson on maya, the subject he was most directly involved in at the time. As his creative intellect was coming to understand in general the power of the Mother to conjugate or pair together the poles of intellectual paradox, he was beginning to grasp first, that in Indian metaphysics evolution did not stand as an isolated phenomenon, but was accompanied and complemented by a parallel process of involution. And, as always, spirit was the guiding principle of the whole process, whether as the abstract Brahman, the more concretized and accessible Mother (God) or as the living breathing, divine incarnation. Moreover, both spirit and matter met and acquired their ultimate meaning in the project of human development into and manifestation of the divine. At this stage, the shared identity fundamental to the relationship term mutuality takes on a cosmic character, applying to the phenomena of the entire universe. Similarly, conjugation or irrevocable joining together applies to all phenomena, thus investing the term with hermeneutical or explanatory power of tremendous magnitude. In his own third phase of teaching (in the summer and fall of 1896 in the West and from January to summer of 1897 in India) Vivekananda, like Ramakrishna at the same stage of Vivekananda’s education, developed the concept of involution and began to correlate it with that of evolution. In India, rather than merely emphasizing the philosophy of transcendence, he pointed to the organic interrelatedness of the three basic attitudes underlying the three philosophical schools. In his view, that was the key to removing misunderstanding or quarrel between the schools—Dwaita (dualism), Vishishtadwaita (qualified non-dualism), and Adwaita (non-dualism)—for each is playing its part in a process and therefore is to be treated as an integral part of Vedanta (Vivekananda, 1970a, p.230). CW, Vol. 3: Vedanta in Its Application to Indian Life, p.230. In order to remove the obstacles to understanding this organic sequence of their philosophies, Indians were to remove the veils from the perfect Soul within and to permit their spiritual power to manifest (Vivekananda, 1970a, pp.334-335), CW, Vol. 3: The Vedanta in All Its Phases, pp.334-335. not merely within, but also in the great involutionary project of “raising up the lower to the higher” (Vivekananda, 1970a, pp.295-296). CW, Vol. 3: The Future of India, pp.295-296. That upraising was to be done by removing all the cultural barriers created over time to the dissemination of education and ideas of human potential for development. Instead of bringing down the spiritual aristocracy of India, the masses were to be raised to a higher understanding of themselves, empowering them to resolve for themselves their empirical problems. What a contrast to the modern Western destruction of its aristocracy, from the French to the Russian revolutions—inevitable when the infilling by spirit, its involution into a prepared space, is not understood! Behind this vision of voluntary involution promoting the evolution of the Indian masses lay Vivekananda’s own experience with Ramakrishna and his abiding faith in the great teachers of India—the incarnations—who condemned none and encouraged people to grow from where they were, following their own nature. By immersing themselves in the teachings and example of the greats (Vivekananda, 1970a, p.220), CW, Vol. 3: My Plan of Campaign, p.220. Indians would find the way to resolve their problems of intellectual and social rigidity and schism, the ultimate fact being a return to the dynamic principle of oneness, of which divine incarnations are human embodiments. In this way Vivekananda echoed the themes he had imbibed at the third stage of his own education: the voluntary involvement of the divine which meets humanity upon its upward evolutionary path and the universal attitude of the divine incarnation, who cleaves to no rigid hierarchy, but embraces all forms as divine. In the West at the same time, the new aspect of Vivekananda’s work was to introduce explicitly the idea of involution, thus far not explored conceptually in the modern West. In London he asked, “How can you have evolution without involution?” (Vivekananda, 1971a, p.174). CW, Vol. 2: Realisation, p.174. In order to spiritualize the concept of evolution the West must understand that what we ordinarily perceive as external phenomena are in fact, “embodiments of infinite principle” (Vivekananda, 1969, p.496), CW, Vol. 7: Letter to Mary Hale from London, May, 1896, p.496. a divine involution awaiting, as it were, to be evolved to full manifestation. From such a viewpoint, the significance of evolution is that: This universe is simply a gymnasium to exercise the soul and its only value is “how far [anything] is a manifestation of God” (Vivekananda, 1970b, p.308). CW, Vol. 5: A Discussion, p.308. In the same vein, “As we reveal ourselves as we evolve, so the gods reveal themselves” (Vivekananda, 1971a, p.107) CW, Vol.2: Maya and the Conception of God, p.107.—and so do the metaphysics expressing and explaining these subtle realms of experience. As the practical side of his teachings in India at that time emphasized involution, his teachings in the West emphasized evolution. As long as we are occupied with lower things “we must have our own experiences, we must have our full run. It is only when we have finished this run that the other world opens” (Vivekananda, 1971a, p.171). CW, Vol. 2: Realisation, p.171. Vivekananda intended that Westerners would consciously and deliberately pass through these stages, not only articulating them in the language of phenomenology but also investing them with metaphysical interpretation. As each stage was experienced consciously, there would grow an understanding of how empirical evolution is balanced by divine manifestation, thus creating the possibility of a more refined and philosophical interpretation of the whole process. Again, the sanction of spirit behind the entire spectrum of phenomena would ultimately lead to : a universal religion which can apply to everyone . . . [it] must be composed not only of the parts, but it must always be their sum-total, and include all degrees of religious development (Vivekananda, 1971a, p.141). CW, Vol. 2: The Absolute and Manifestation, p.141. In the light of such a vision, at Harvard University he defended sects, ceremonies, and scriptures, pointing to the need for those who are more advanced to help others on (Vivekananda, 1970b, p.309). CW, Vol. 5: A Discussion, p.309. This was the basis of religious acceptance—appreciating the needs of others to evolve and helping them in the way best suited to their stage of development. At this stage of his teaching, then, Vivekananda had discussed in India the need to harmonize the philosophical schools in practice, realizing that they reflect the process of growth of human experience and perception and are therefore organically interrelated. In the West, his understanding of organic, integrated process had underlain his call to develop a more favorable and supportive environment for the whole evolutionary process of human development. Both views may be seen as an application of his understanding of Ramakrishna’s demonstration and explanation of the gamut of evolutionary and involutionary states and their conjugation into what I have proposed to call holovolution. 6. Class 4: Ramakrishna Paves the Way to Vivekananda’s Samadhi and His Experience of Cosmic Intelligence a) The Emergence of the Subject of Divine Incarnation as Central to the Topic of Holovolution By March 11, l885, shortly after his surrender to Mother Kali, Vivekananda had “graduated” from his first three classes on holovolution. He had first grasped the idea of human evolution to spirit; secondly, he had accepted an open and flexible hierarchy supporting it; and thirdly, had understood that there is a “downward” involutionary process which feeds and harmoniously balances the “upward” movement we normal call evolution. At each of those steps in the analysis—and perhaps to concretize it—Ramakrishna had brought in the related subject of the divine incarnation, modifying it at each stage to suit Vivekananda’s capacity to accept and assimilate it. There had been a steady expansion of the concept, no doubt, but its full meaning had not yet been revealed. Now Vivekananda had risen above maya and was poised to rush headlong over the next year or so into direct experience of the reality he had just discovered and become merged in it directly. Ramakrishna had already indicated to him that as a God-man-in-the-making, he could not but return thereafter from pure principle to the human level in order to teach humanity the principles and practices on its own holovolutionary path (Lesson III, p.17). Clearly, a mastery of the inner meaning of the God-man before him was going to be necessary in order to expedite his own immediate development as well as to inform his own, later involution to a world-teacher. In short, Vivekananda was about to begin his “major” in evolutionary theory with his understanding of the God-man as his primary thesis. On March 11, 1885, Ramakrishna had been eager all day to have Vivekananda argue about the divine incarnation with Girish Ghosh, who had burning faith in the saving grace which is traditionally attributed to them. That evening, Vivekananda and Girish were both present in Ramakrishna’s room, and he lost no time in initiating a discussion between them. Over the objections of the other devotees, Ramakrishna permitted the two protagonists to tussle over the issue, saying, “There is a meaning in all this” (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.733). Gospel, March 11, 1885, p.733. Vivekananda and Girish discussed the questions of the superiority of the divine incarnation, whether God can or cannot assume a body; and the necessity of God incarnating to teach mankind (Ibid., pp.732-733). In all three instances, Vivekananda took the stand that God is Infinity, unknown and unknowable; if at all it is known, it is directly in the human heart and not in any special manifestation—in substance, the humanistic stance. It was from such a humanistic stance that he had been first introduced by Ramakrishna to the idea that the divine incarnation is primarily a teacher of humanity (p.6-7) and had himself arrived at the idea that the divine incarnation is the evolutionary “missing link” in the progression from the human to the God-world (Lesson I, p.6). As the argument between Vivekananda and Girish went on, it heated up considerably. Finally, Ramakrishna himself tired of it and took over the analysis. Asserting his realization, “I clearly see that God is everything . . . and again . . . beyond everything”, he went on to point to his own spontaneous merging in the Indivisible on seeing other humans, especially highly evolved ones such as Vivekananda himself (Ibid., p.733). He then went on to mention his voluntary return from such samadhi in order to speak to and teach others—what we have previously studied as the claim of the divine incarnation in the realm of yoga (Lesson II, p.12). Thereafter, he explained to Vivekananda the metaphysical basis for this yogic capacity to involve as well as evolve spiritually, invoking Ramanuja’s qualified non-dualism for the former and Sri Shankaracharya’s non-dualism (Adwaita) for the latter. He concluded this part of the discussion (which we have previously presented in the maya lesson (Lesson III, pp.15-16) with the remark: I do see God directly. What shall I reason about? I clearly see that he himself has become everything, that he himself has become the universe and all living beings (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.734). Here we find an amplification of the merging of external forms into divine power which Ramakrishna had unveiled before Vivekananda only six months previously (p.13). If such thinking at that time may have helped Vivekananda to surmount his lingering sense of élitism in the concept of the divine incarnation, his own researches in maya seemed also to have enabled him to grasp a unique and vitally important characteristic of Ramakrishna. He had observed that Ramakrishna could perceive simultaneously undivided Brahman-consciousness and the realm of ideas and facts. Such perception, in turn, led to a validation of both worlds and the ability to integrate them harmoniously in moment-to-moment behavior and action (Lesson III, pp. 15-16 et seq.)—in short, a holovolution balanced between evolution and involution as Vivekananda had understood them. Having thus touched on the essence of his arguments for the divine incarnations in the first three realms of evolving consciousness, Ramakrishna then went on to a key idea for the approach most immediately relevant to the subject. He said: The nearer you approach to God, the less you reason and argue . . . Then you go into samadhi . . . into communion with God in silence (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.735). Saying this, Ramakrishna himself slowly passed into deep samadhi, as if to illustrate the point he had just made. Although the conversation had touched on four different levels of perception, what was common to all was the Infinity which becomes progressively more and more available to the conscious mind—first as the capacity to see God as part of an evolutionary series; second as the actual experience of evolution and involution as separate, but related processes; followed by an intellectual understanding of the whole process and culminating in total immersion in the underlying Reality, principle or God. These concepts were presented to clarify the nature of divine incarnations, but it is also evident that Ramakrishna’s intent was to lead Vivekananda to a clearer understanding of what was now expected of him—to merge once and for all in the reality he had just succeeded in grasping intellectually. b) The Deeper Analysis: the Non-Local Nature of the Divine Incarnation The centrality of Reality in Ramakrishna’s thinking about these issues was vividly brought out in an exchange with Vivekananda on May 9, 1885, when Vivekananda cried, most likely in exasperation with the blind faith of his brother-disciples, “How can I believe, without proof, that God incarnates himself as a man?” (Ibid., p.771). Ibid., Saturday, May 9, 1885, p.771. Into the inevitable exchange which ensued with Girish, Ramakrishna interjected several pertinent remarks. As Vivekananda ranted, not only against the theory of divine incarnation, but also the apparent impossibility of reconciling the various interpretations of the different scriptures, a devotee piously remarked, and was seconded enthusiastically by Ramakrishna: “The Gita contains the words of Krishna.” To this the intrepid Vivekananda burst out, “Yes Krishna, or any fellow for that matter!” (Ibid., p.772). These words—highly disrespectful to a canonical text of Vedanta and to the divine incarnation Krishna, and shocking to pious Hindus—at first amazed Ramakrishna; but, in a sense he supported Vivekananda by remarking, “One should accept the real meaning [of the scriptures] alone—what agrees with the words of God . . . I do not accept anything unless it agrees with the direct words of the Divine Mother” which seems to have meant for him what his own intuition was telling him (Ibid., pp.772-773). By this he appears to have meant that scripture acquires meaning, not because of the external authority of its author, but because of its consonance with the inner heart of every human being—to which Reality divulges truth when it is sought in all sincerity and purity of heart. This was more to Vivekananda’s taste, and the taste also of Dr. Sarkar, Ramakrishna’s physician, for both upheld the Western emphasis on humanity in all its phases of self-manifestation. There was, of course, a deeper aspect to this remark. Yes, it embraced all of humanity as potential God-men and women, but it also pointed to the underlying awareness that was so striking in Ramakrishna. On October 18, 1885, he undertook to humor Dr. Sarkar, who was expressing his deep-seated doubts about his teaching by “reasoning” with him. Vivekananda was also present and no doubt benefited from the conversation. Ramakrishna first granted that, to the jnani (whose perception is the most comprehensive and evolved) there is no incarnation of God. Then he told the story of how Sri Krishna demonstrated to Arjuna a tree with so many dark-skinned Krishnas on it that they looked to Arjuna like bunches of black berries (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.853). Gospel, October 18, 1885, p.853. The focus here seems to be on the eternally and flowing power that can create such infinite numbers of divine incarnations, and to such an extent that they lose specialty. Can we conclude that it is entirely possible that the inflow of Reality could create so many human beings with the development of consciousness we presently ascribe to divine incarnations that the concept of such an incarnation as a special and irrevocably unique human form will be completely changed? Vivekananda himself seems to have been moving towards an understanding of the tremendous potential behind Ramakrishna and its capacity to transcend all usual norms of time, space and causation. Shortly after the foregoing conversation, Vijoy Goswami, a great devotee, arrived from Dacca to visit Ramakrishna and divulged to the other devotees that he had seen Ramakrishna in Dacca in a body which was not only visible but actually could be touched. To this, Vivekananda laconically rejoined, “I too have seen him many a time. How can I say I do not believe your words?” (Ibid., p.885). Ibid., Sunday, October 25, 1885, p.885. Was this proof of Ramakrishna’s power as a divine incarnation or of the capacity of his disciples to transcend their empirical selves and commune with him beyond the norms of location, time as defined by the speed of light, and causation as we understand it at present? Or, more generally, was it simply a manifestation of power inherent in the human Self? Vivekananda was entering a new dimension of experience from which it would be possible to acquire a more comprehensive and inclusive view of holovolution and the place of the human soul within it. c) The Divine Incarnation as the Locus of Holovolution Consciously Poised in Cosmic Intelligence By the end of 1885 Vivekananda was yearning almost uncontrollably to merge in Reality itself, begging to remain continually absorbed in it for three to four days, “only once in a while coming to the sense-plane to eat a little food” (Ibid., p.935). Ibid., Monday, January 4, 1886, p.935. Clearly, he had not yet fully realized that he himself was of the order of a divine incarnation, whose fulfillment was not to lie merely in his personal realization. Ramakrishna had scolded him, saying “You are a very small-minded person. There is a state higher even than that. ‘All that exists art thou’—it is you who sings that song . . . you will have a state higher than [nirvikalpa] samadhi” (Ibid., pp.935-936). Though Vivekananda had still not understood his role as a savior of souls, Ramakrishna had never forgotten it, and had things in store for him which were to amount to a working out—to the last detail—of his own message in a concrete form that could benefit all of humanity. Despite this fate in store for Vivekananda, Ramakrishna demonstrated the intrinsic freedom which lay beyond all of these comings and goings of the divine incarnation, and which would still be Vivekananda’s after his own return from samadhi. Despite his sufferings from throat cancer, Ramakrishna placed his hand on his heart and full of divine emotion said: I see that all things—everything that exists—have come from this (Ibid., p.945). Ibid., Monday, March 15, 1886, p.945. This was the state of the divine incarnation in which he was then abiding; and to ensure that Vivekananda had followed what he was saying, he signed to him, “What did you understand?” Vivekananda’s reply—“All created objects have come from you”—filled Ramakrishna with joy, for he knew that Vivekananda had finally understood the locus in Reality from which evolution and involution emerge and later disappear. This remark represents a quantum leap in Vivekananda’s understanding from his attitude of only eleven months before when he cried, “How can I believe, without proof, that God incarnates himself as a man?” (Ibid., p.771). On April 9, 1886, nearly a month later and only one month before Vivekananda’s own nirvikalpa samadhi, Ramakrishna, in discussing the nature of Buddha, the divine incarnation which most appealed to Vivekananda at the time said: Buddha means . . . to become one with bodha, pure Intelligence, by meditating on That which is of the nature of pure Intelligence; it is to become pure Intelligence itself (Ibid., p.947). Ibid., Friday, April 9, 1886, p.947. This Intelligence with which Buddha was completely merged is the “resonance” from which the divine takes forms, and into which forms melt, as Vivekananda was to say years later in commenting on the mahavakya prajnanam brahma: Brahman is Intelligence. See: CW, Vol. 5: The Cosmos and the Self, pp.255-256 and CW, Vol. 2: Immortality, p.228 and CW, Vol.2: The Cosmos: The Macrocosm, pp.208-210. It is, as it were, the “still point of the turning world” (T. S. Eliot: Coriolan I: Triumphal March). Vivekananda was at last understanding how involution and evolution, creation and its transcendence could both emanate from Reality without there being any loss of energy or equilibrium. On the contrary, both processes were perfectly balanced in Reality and formed the two parts of an overall process which I am calling holovolution. Ultimately the explanation of it all was Reality itself, in which the dynamic forms merrily played, like yin and yang, throughout eternity. In the context we are now seeing, within the freedom of life lived beyond time, space and causation, a correlation or complete interdependence of the two great streams of cosmic activity, i.e. the movement towards and away from Reality, like the inward and outward movement of the heart. Here symbiosis is self-evident, for the organism can live only when its basic processes co-exist inseparably, supporting, expressing and feeding each other. As we ponder all of these remarks which Ramakrishna made in Vivekananda’s presence we ourselves begin to feel the primal state that he was expressing in so many ways, the divine intelligence of which, he, like Buddha and all other souls like him, was a direct embodiment. If we can feel it, we can perhaps get some inkling of how Vivekananda was affected by it. His inner eye was now open to see revealed truth beyond the pairs of opposites, and needed only to adjust itself to perceive the rhythmic flow of manifestation and transcendence going on eternally, like some great heart beating throughout the universe. d) Vivekananda Enters Reality and Leaves for Posterity His Experience of Cosmic Intelligence In less than a month Vivekananda was to transcend all categories of discursive reason, including the distinction between evolution and involution, even as seen from the subtle plane of Intelligence. But before his “departure” his intellect had one last fling with Ramakrishna. On April 21, 1886, he had firmly told him: “Let a thousand people call you God, but I shall certainly not call you God as long as I do not know it to be true” (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.962). Gospel, Wednesday, April 21, 1886, p.962. This feisty independence and insistence upon personal experience was, of course, what Ramakrishna especially loved in Vivekananda. It was his own characteristic quality, though he was not so vociferous about it. Vivekananda’s verbalizations were necessary, however, for he was destined to express all these truths to audiences who would not understand or be convinced by mere traditional explanations or mystic trances. When Vivekananda finally attained samadhi at the beginning of May, 1886, he lost consciousness of the body and felt that it was absolutely non-existent . . . and [he] had nearly merged in the Supreme. . . . In this state of samadhi all the difference between “I” and the “Brahman” goes away; everything is reduced into unity, like the waters of the Infinite Ocean—water everywhere, nothing else exists—language and thought all fail there. Then only is the state “beyond mind and speech” realized in its actuality (Vivekananda, 1969, p.139). CW, Vol. 7: Conversation 6 with Sharat Chandra Chakravarty at Belur, 1898, p.139. As Ramakrishna had so often repeated, most humans who attain that state become permanently absorbed into the Infinite and leave behind their mortal bodies. But Vivekananda was Ramakrishna’s eternal counterpart, born to teach the truth of the super-conscious state and so, even in the midst of this tremendous experience, he still “had just a trace of the feeling of ego, so I could again return to the world of relativity from samadhi” (Ibid.). Ramakrishna was, once again, the stage-manager of Vivekananda’s drama. When Vivekananda returned to his guru after his experience, Ramakrishna told him, “Now you have known. But I am going to keep the key with me.” Then, turning to the devotees he added, “Vivekananda will not keep his body if he knows who he is. But I have put a veil over his eyes” (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.981). Gospel, Monday, March 25, 1887, p.981. The veils that Ramakrishna had placed over Vivekananda’s eyes were the work that he had yet to accomplish in the world: articulating Ramakrishna’s message and spreading it far and wide. Vivekananda was always to protest this role, and saw the whole things as the work of Mother Kali, who ever goaded him onwards, the élan vital carrying him onwards, often to many places and situations he did not at all relish. For the moment, however let us note how Vivekananda expressed the truth he had experienced in this, his fourth samadhi from Ramakrishna. In his poem The Hymn of Samadhi which may have been composed around this time, Vivekananda describes how the world slowly disappears into the experience that cannot truly be expressed: Lo! the sun is not, not the comely moon; All light extinct: in the great void of space Floats shadow-like the image-universe. In the void of mind involute, This is the use of the word “involution” in the Sankhyan mode, possibly due to the fact that it is an English translation from Vivekananda’s original Bengali. there floats The fleeting universe, rises and floats, Sinks again, ceaseless, in the current “I”. Slowly, slowly, the shadow-multitude Entered the primal womb and ceaseless flowed The only current—“I am”, “I am”. Lo! “Tis stopped; ev’n that current flows no more; Void merged into void—beyond speech and mind! Whose heart understands, he verily does (Vivekananda, 1972, p.498). CW, Vol. 4: The Hymn of Samadhi, p.498. If we look at another poem of the same period, The Hymn of Creation, we find the reverse process: from the incompressible Totality there flows out, first the river of causation creating a sense of ego which in its turn, whips up a universe of millions of forms—great galaxies of suns, moon and stars, with myriads of universes within them (Vivekananda, 1972, p.497). CW, Vol. 4: The Hymn of Creation, p.497. From these two poems we can conclude that Vivekananda directly experienced the gradual process, first of evolution from the gross to the subtle and on his “return” the involution of the Absolute to the relative. This was the fundamental experience of what he had been seeking in his battles over the issue of divine incarnation—that there is a continuous gradient of matter to spirit, and spirit to matter, with no abrupt separations or steep gradation. This perception is at the core of the interconnectedness of all existence. After Vivekananda’s samadhi, Ramakrishna concluded his instruction to Vivekananda on this part of his message by telling him, “This realization will become so natural to you, by the grace of the Mother, that even in your normal state you will realize the one divinity in all beings” (Shivananda, 1930, pp.109-110). Vivekananda was now established in a position to see everything from a position of complete objectivity including—and primarily—the literal divinity of the universe. e) Cosmic Intelligence as Vivekananda Later Explicated It From the poems written in connection with Vivekananda’s fourth samadhi we find that “I am” is the last impression on the evolutionary journey, and the first on the involutionary one. “I am” is described as a “current entering the primal womb” and also as “a causal river flowing down.” One feels that this nexus from which all emerges and through which all returns, is perhaps how we experience empirically the pure Intelligence which Ramakrishna described as the Buddha nature. In the unfolding of Vivekananda’s message to his own students we find what seem to be many references to this prime force in the whole range of human consciousness. Let us take a quick glance, before proceeding, at how he presented this idea during the fourth stage of his own teaching. In India the viewpoint was that of conservation of energy: We admit that the ameba goes higher and higher until it becomes a Buddha; but we are at the same time as much certain that you cannot get an amount of work out of a machine unless you have put it in some shape or another. The sum total of energy remains the same, whatever forms it may take. . . . Therefore, if a Buddha is one end of the change, the very ameba must have been the Buddha also. If the Buddha is the evolved ameba, the ameba was the involved Buddha also (Vivekananda, 1970a, p.407). CW, Vol. 3: The Vedanta, p.407. This electrifying vision of the unity of manifestation of Intelligence gives an impression of divine intelligence at the very core of all aspects of the universe, identical with Brahman and, if we but knew it, with us ourselves. The implication is that the human soul is capable of world-moving activity, working equally through the imperatives of Vedanta and of modern science, both of which look to the ground of the universe, though in opposite, but complementary ways. In the West at this stage we find Vivekananda propounding holovolution in the same intensely inward and synthesized way. He told his students: The gigantic intellect, we know, is coiled up in the protoplasmic cell, and why should not the infinite energy? . . . Each one of us has come out of one protoplasmic cell, and the powers were coiled up there. . . . Potentially, no doubt, but still there. So infinite power is in the soul of man, whether he knows it or not. Its manifestation is only a question of being conscious of it (Vivekananda, 1971a, pp.339-340). CW, Vol. 2: Practical Vedanta III, pp.339-340. This statement contains Vivekananda’s great call to humanity to consciously find and tap its innate power and thus become, like the divine incarnations, unrestricted manifestations of Intelligence. How could he thus utter such a summons and carry all before him? Was it not that he himself, after more than four years of conscious struggle had evolved from a mere (though formidable!) rationalist to a seer of undifferentiated reality and its finely-balanced cosmic processes? Directly encountering Intelligence as the door-keeper of Reality, he had passed beyond it to Reality itself, and back through it from reality to the world-process. In so doing, he had become supremely intelligent and completely attuned to its rhythmic ebb and flow in the universe. This was the nub of Ramakrishna’s lesson on holovolution—the acquisition of cosmic intelligence in which the evolutionary and involutionary strands of the power emanating from Reality were not only grasped conceptually (as in the maya phase of the lesson (p.10) but actually seen and made part and parcel of oneself. In bringing Vivekananda to this tremendous synthesis within himself, we may say that Ramakrishna was thereby mold[ing] him in such a way that he might become a fit instrument to fulfill his great purpose in life, as suggested in Saradananda’s list of content of Ramakrishna’s work with Vivekananda (p.6). He knew that Vivekananda was going to teach, not simply humanistic principles, self-transformative methods or even deep metaphysical truths leading to self-transcendence; he was going to go to the very root of human consciousness and effect a worldwide redirection of understanding and experience. Such a redirection would take place through Vivekananda’s thorough familiarity with the massive Intelligence of the cosmos, which he could demonstrate, explicate and modulate to the greater development of humanity. Vivekananda now saw fully how Intelligence evolved and involved and the relationship between the two processes. Moreover, having tapped the undifferentiated reality of which Intelligence is the very first visible manifestation, it lay in his power to direct and modify it according to his purpose in life—the weaving of the human and divine into a seamless unity. f) Vivekananda Teaches the Idea of Holovolution as Embedded in the Experience of Cosmic Intelligence The fourth phase of Vivekananda’s public teaching (from the fall of 1896 in London to the fall of 1897 in India) took up the theme of holovolution and embedded it in the Reality from which it is manifested, as Ramakrishna had done on March 11, 1895. For Indians, the project of involving from their metaphysical preoccupations to the hard facts of everyday life, (including the problems of the masses) required a solid guarantee that in doing so, they would not lose the spiritual capital they had amassed over millennia. The West, on the other hand, was now faced with a puzzling and complex theory that suddenly made its own newly-discovered theory of evolution but a mere part of the whole story. What possible explanation could Vivekananda give to underwrite the combined processes of evolution and involution? It obviously had to be something very comprehensive to account for what corresponded in a sense to the modern idea of matter and anti-matter, a seen process and an unseen one which complements it. The specific context in India was, as we have seen, the harmonious synthesis of her traditional philosophies into an integrated whole. As Ramakrishna had drawn Vivekananda’s attention at the beginning of the fourth lesson to the unifying experience that God is all this (p.12), harmonizing all the parts within itself, so did Vivekananda synthesize all three systems of Indian philosophy based on the Upanishads within the unitary human mind. He maintained, contrary to Western interpretations, that the three traditional systems were not primarily a historical progression, but rather progressions which can take place within each human mind. They were not “invented” in the medieval period, but rather “have been current in India almost from time immemorial” (Vivekananda, 1970a, p.396). CW, Vol. 3: The Vedanta, p.396. Going back to the Upanishads themselves—the mother-lode of all Vedantic thought and traditions—he asserted that in each of them a definite evolutionary or inductive process could be ascertained. Each begins with the gross preoccupations of dualism and gradually works up to the integral assertion “Thou art That” (Ibid., p.398). This is the scriptural reflection of the “gradual working up of the human mind toward higher and higher ideals till everything is merged in that wonderful unity which is reached in the Adwaita system. Therefore these three are not contradictory” (Ibid., p.397). Such an assertion—apart from the need for its verification by textual research—calls for a statement of where the locus of such unity lies within the human mind. As Ramakrishna had uncompromisingly faced Vivekananda’s rantings about the incompatibility of the various scriptures with Ramakrishna’s own inner knowledge from the “Divine Mother” (p.9), so Vivekananda pointed to the Atman or supreme Soul as the “metaphysical necessity” of this whole scheme of thought. In invoking the Self, however, Vivekananda was not going through a mere metaphysical escape-hatch. To him the Self is the synthesizing power of the human soul—“the unity in the human organs, falling upon which, as it were, the various ideas come to a unity and become one complete whole” (Ibid., p.405). For India at that time, what was especially needed was to concretize these deep ideas and so it is probably not surprising that he talked to his countrymen in the language of modern science. He invoked the idea of “unit force” which unifies all other forces, such as heat, magnetism, electricity, etc.—and linked it directly to Vedanta, pointing to how such a search for the principle of unity underlying variety had been basic to Vedanta since time immemorial (Ibid., p.399). In involving Adwaita for India he even went so far as to say that because the concepts of classical non-dual Vedanta are compatible with modern science (unlike the dualistic schools) he regarded it as the only basis for a scientific religion (Ibid., pp.423-424). Along with the interiorization of the idea of holovolution at this stage went a corresponding abstraction of the concept of divine incarnation. His thought in this line in India naturally turned to Ramakrishna himself, the very embodiment of Intelligence involved for the good of mankind. At this stage of his exegesis, Ramakrishna was nothing other than religion itself, pure philosophy divested of any form and embodying in himself “the reality of all religions” (Vivekananda, 1968, p.513). CW, Vol. 6: Conversation with Sharat Chandra Chakravarty at Howrah, February 6, 1898, p.513. On attaining to such a concept of Ramakrishna we leave behind the mechanism of evolution and enter the very matrix from which both evolution and its counterpart, involution, proceed. In Ramakrishna Indians had been vouchsafed such a comprehensive, inexhaustible and all-embracing manifestation of their spiritual and metaphysical ideals that there was now an integrated and sure -way to navigate the bottomless ocean of Vedanta, with its perception, not only of several stages of evolution, but also of involutionary stages and their intimate interplay with the processes of evolution. In this cosmic synthesis, the opportunity had now come to lay to rest the misunderstandings and increasing competitiveness of the schools of Indian thought and to synthesize them into a harmonious whole reverberating with divine intelligence which invests it with a new practicality and a spirit of service to humanity. In answering the unspoken need of the West for an explanation of the new and complex notion of holovolution, Vivekananda seems to have drawn, as he did in India, on the various facets of his fourth class from Ramakrishna, with the major emphasis on increasing internalization and abstraction, ultimately converging on the Reality behind the cosmic intelligence which animates the universe. Vivekananda described evolution at the fourth phase of his own teaching as “a continuous expansion towards Infinity” (Vivekananda, 1971a, p.346). CW, Vol. 2: Practical Vedanta IV, p.346. The ideas of competition and survival of the fittest necessarily associated with Darwinism—which deals only with the external—are replaced, in the internalized, spiritual version, by love, “the motive power of the whole universe” (Ibid., p.354). As in India the Soul was the mandate for the whole framework for scientific application of philosophical principles, so in the West he was intent on applying to religion the feature of modern science which explains things from their own nature (Vivekananda, 1965, p.371). CW, Vol. 1: Reason and Religion, p.371. This was, perhaps, an echo of Ramakrishna’s firm stand in May of 1885 on his own inner knowledge as the touchstone of the truth of divine incarnation. Again, behind any such effort could lie only the deepest and most comprehensive reality which he himself had experienced directly in May of 1886. Now he spoke of that Reality as Brahman, “the last generalization to which we can come” (Ibid., p.372), the unity from which “all have come, and that must be essentially one” (Ibid., p.373), thus laying a rationale for universal love and ethics. As India was to concretize such realization in humanistic and social activity, the West was to grasp the principle that, as one evolves spiritually, duality of body and soul disappears and they are ultimately seen as “one and the same thing appearing in various forms” (Vivekananda, 1971a, p.345). CW, Vol. 2: Practical Vedanta IV, p.345. From that realization would come the capacity to see that “the essence of matter and thought is their potentiality of spirit” (Vivekananda, 1965, p.373), CW, Vol. 1: Reason and Religion, p.373. that which is to be “evolved” from the rationalistic outlook, and also that which is involved even in the smallest aspects of life. In expanding towards such an all-embracing vision, the West must and would understand the message of Ramakrishna, the embodied Intelligence of our era: One infinite religion existed all through eternity and will ever exist, and this religion is expressing itself in various countries and in various ways (Vivekananda, 1972, p.180). CW, Vol. 4: My Master, p.180. What is central is the Religion, the principle which is involved in all the forms of organized religion. The goal for the West was to grasp this idea, not merely intellectually, but through realization, direct vision—as the great teachers of humankind had done (Ibid., p.165). In such an evolved state of consciousness, there could no longer be room for exclusivism and fundamentalism. On the contrary, his deepest hope was that all of Western humanity, like the divine incarnation themselves, would come to such a state that even in the vilest of human beings we could see the real Self within, and instead of condemning them, say: “Rise, thou effulgent one, rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless, rise almighty, and manifest thy true nature” (Vivekananda, 1971a, p.357). CW, Vol. 2: Practical Vedanta IV, p.357. This was the purely logical outcome of the whole process of holovolution: to become fully evolved and then to involve, in order to bring up all of striving humanity. As Ramakrishna had centered the whole holovolutionary process within himself, Vivekananda had, at the fourth stage of his teaching, pointed in India to the human soul as the locus of synthesis of all philosophy. The harmonizing of her great philosophical traditions was to be the solid basis for India’s great project of involving herself spiritually with the concrete problems at home and throughout the world. In the West the purifying power of love was the magnet for the whole human venture, drawing the West towards a more and more thoroughgoing metaphysics of unity and a realization of the universality of Religion behind all of its diverse external forms. 7. Class 5: The Vision of the Whole Process in Each and Every Event In the three months that remained after Vivekananda’s return from nirvikalpa samadhi and Ramakrishna’s passing away on August 16, 1886, Ramakrishna prepared his disciple for the final step of removing any sense of difference between matter and spirit. That seems to have occurred in the climatic samadhi shared by both of them only three days before Ramakrishna death. That experience, I have suggested (Lesson I, pp.413-415), established him as Vivekananda in a vision nowadays referred to as holistic, which, for our present purposes I would like to define as seeing, not only the part in the whole, but also the whole in the part. Such a progression is by no means a mere change in verbal order; it is a different dimension of consciousness. When one sees the part as the whole, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to create any sort of “system” (such as holovolution) for every possible step in such processes is as good as any other, each having the whole potential of the whole process within it. It is as if the entire system of holovolution melts down into the Reality that supports and informs it. What seems to happen in the progress from the dynamic holovolutionary outlook to the fully holistic is that there is a complete telescoping of the whole process into each and every event perceived, imbuing the perception with the tremendous power we associate with fully illumined seers. It is, therefore, a rather difficult matter to decipher what holovolution means in this context. However, as holism by definition concerns the whole, we may embark on a creative attempt to decipher the holovolutionary implications of Vivekananda’s inspired utterances at that time. Now, as I have tried to suggest in the discussion thus far that the vehicle for holovolution in Vivekananda’s teaching is the interrelationships of schools of thought and of the different religious traditions, perhaps the single most telling piece of evidence at our disposal at this time is that Vivekananda and his brother-disciples often spent their evenings on the roof of the dilapidated building in which they lived after Ramakrishna’s death discussing, not only the teachings of Hindu philosophy—Including the Vedas, Puranas, Tantras as well as the three systems of Vedanta philosophy—but also European philosophy and the teachings of Jesus Christ (Nikhilananda, 2000, p.991). Gospel, Saturday, May 7, 1887, p.991. Their interest in Western thought might of course be expected in young Bengalis of that period, as they received Westernized education at the British-run universities; but their freewheeling acceptance of the entire gamut of Indian philosophy, cutting across the creedal barriers so dominant in their day, indicates a unique openness of mind which no doubt was the reason they embraced Western thought along with that of the Indian traditions. We may also be sure that they brought to bear the attitude of harmony so characteristic of Ramakrishna and now so deeply assimilated by Vivekananda. Nothing was rejected, because all systems of thought were necessary to the whole, and we may well surmise their complete absorption in whatsoever topic was under discussion, accepting it as containing the whole, no matter what the limitations of its outer forms. In the realm of holovolution where some distinctions still remain, we have now reached the stage of integration, where the separation still lingering in the integration of maya (Lesson III, p.18) is finally removed and “opposite” forms come together in a seamless whole. The meaning of isomorphism here is that the thought of India and the West becomes interchangeable, both accepted as forms in which reality is equally embedded. As for Vivekananda, he could now, like Ramakrishna himself, see not only both part and whole simultaneously, but also their precise relationships at any stage of their mutual yin-yang type of progression and retrogression. This invested him with such tremendous perspicacity that his pronouncements could clarify the meaning of holovolution even to those who had not heard of it before. Such eye-opening in turn, was like the final removal of the “obstacles” to noetic and other development described in Patanjali’s evolutionary system; after such removal, nothing could happen but that the dammed up flood of Intelligence’s activity would pour in and fall into its natural, synchronized activity in the bodies, emotions, intellects of Vivekananda’s hearers. In Vivekananda’s public teachings at the end of his life we find the characteristics of all-inclusiveness and all-embracingness stemming from his last merging in Ramakrishna in which their two personalities had coincided completely even while both remained within their empirical personal domain. What he had to convey most urgently to a world in which the very idea of the Whole had been terribly mutilated or even lost (and thus the possibility of holistic vision had been brought near to zero), was his enthusiastic embrace of all possible philosophies and religions within Religion and his identity with Intelligence which dynamically informs and coheres the entire universe. He embedded his vision for India in a sweeping panorama of her history, through which there had been a gradual involution of power from the brahminical aristocracy to the masses as each in turn had proved itself “the fittest to survive” (Vivekananda, 1972, p.456). CW, Vol. 4: Modern India, p.456. But, in and through that world-process, the constituent ideals of Indian culture—the religion eternal—had remained, though “lying scattered here and there for want of competent men to realize them” (Vivekananda, 1968, p.185). CW, Vol. 6: Hinduism and Shri Ramakrishna, p.185. To Vivekananda such a person was Ramakrishna, he who is not only present in the state of maha-nirvana and at the time of cosmic destruction (Vivekananda, 1972, p.516), CW, Vol. 4: A Song I Sing to Thee, p.516. but also: plays with [his] own maya, [his] power divine. The One, [he] becomes the many to behold [His] own form (Ibid.), even down to the “flower abloom, lift[ing] her happy face, washed with drops of dew, towards the sun” (Ibid.). The very embodiment of the principle of holovolution, Ramakrishna had discovered “the reconciliation of all aspects and ideas of religious thought and worship; ... this boundless, all-embracing idea had been lying inherent, but so long concealed, in the Religion Eternal and its scripture” (Vivekananda, 1968, p.185). CW, Vol. 6: Hinduism and Shri Ramakrishna, p.185. By looking at Vedanta as a whole, Ramakrishna had made it possible to adjust to the inevitable involution of external forms that was going on empirically in India. From the standpoint of the whole such involution from aristocracy to the masses was by no means a disastrous regression. Rather, it was yet another and fully valid way of manifesting the truth enshrined in the Religion Eternal. The corresponding analysis in the West dealt with the problems of ethnic religion which had so bedeviled Western history despite its guiding principles of political liberty, equality and fraternity. The ideas of “the family brother, the caste-brother, the national brother. . . . All these are barriers to the realization of Vedanta” (Vivekananda, 1971b, p.139). CW, Vol. 8: Is Vedanta the Future Religion?, p.139. The West needed to know “Vedanta is everywhere only you must become conscious of it” (Ibid.). As India required to reapply her principles to the whole panorama of her cultural and national life, the West required to throw off “these masses of foolish beliefs and superstitions that hinder us in our progress . . . and understand that God is spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in truth” (Ibid.). See also: Gospel According to St. John, 4.24. And such a development would depend entirely upon a radical transformation of human understanding: Only through the principles of true philosophy [can] religion in its deepest form be found. Until men [can] accord to others the right of free belief on all subjects and be willing to believe truth under whatever form it might appear, no universal religion [will] be manifest to the world. . . . It [will] never be promulgated by any society, but [will] grow instinctively as the intellect of man develops (Burke, 1987a, p.316). Swami Vivekananda in the West, Vol. 5, Chapter 7: Northern California: A New Gospel-I, p.316. Along with the growth of such universal understanding, Vivekananda envisioned such widespread human evolution that previous religious and spiritual norms would be superseded. He spoke of the arundhati principle by which the whole idea of evolution is expressed in India. Through the image of finding the smallest star by means of locating larger ones first and slowly working towards the smallest, it suggests the step-by-step evolution of perception that is the crux of the Indian idea of evolution. In teaching his own students he himself had worked all through on this principle, which he saw as a compassionate method of explanation, calling for no violent rejection or cruel destruction of “lower forms”. However, at this point in his teaching on holovolution Vivekananda admitted that, despite its smooth, compassionate nature of explaining the evolutionary process, arundhati is slow (Vivekananda, 1971b, pp.140-141). CW, Vol. 8: Is Vedanta the Future Religion? pp.140-141. Moreover, it has succeeded only in promoting the evolution of a few individuals during the last few millennia in India (Ibid., p.141). What Vivekananda envisioned in this age was universal evolution of humanity. His diagnosis of the deficit in the dualistic concept of evolution was that it was based on a wrong idea of humanity (Ibid.). What is needed—and what he set up as the method of education at Mayavati (the meeting point of Eastern and Western thought in the Himalayas in the strictly Adwaita mode) is to bypass all superstitions such as the personalities of the divine incarnations, and rather to call on men, women and children to stand in the strength of the essence of their teachings: “worship of the spirit by the spirit” (Ibid.). As to India Ramakrishna was spirit or Reality itself, involving itself in the entire cosmos and thereby divinizing it to the last molecule, to the West he was the all-embracing paradigm of spirit, the understanding, assimilation and worship of which would lay the foundation for an evolution of humanity to divinity on a global scale—something previously unheard-of. References Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. (1961): Thus Spake Zarathustra. London: Penguin Nikhilananda, Swami. (2000). The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Trans.): Originally Recorded in Bengali by M., A Disciple of the Master. Mylapore, Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna Math. Shivananda, Swami. (1930, March). Ramakrishna. Prabuddha Bharata, Vol. 35. Vivekananda, Swami. Complete Works, Mayavati Memorial Edition. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. (1965). Volume 1, Twelfth Edition. (1971a). Volume 2, Twelfth Edition. (1970a). Volume 3, Tenth Edition. (1972). Volume 4, Tenth Edition. (1970b). Volume 5, Ninth Edition. (1968). Volume 6, Eighth Edition. (1969). Volume 7, Seventh Edition. (1971b). Volume 8, Fifth Edition. (1997). Volume 9, First Edition.  24