After his enlightenment, many disciples gathered around ramakrishna paramahamsa. Vivekananda was the first yogi to go to the united states in 1893 for the parliament of the worlds religions in chicago, after which he caused a spiritual wave. When people were very resistant to anything new, he came and opened up the gates to some extent. Vivekananda came to ramakrishna and asked, you are talking god, god all the time. Where is the proof? show me the proof! ramakrishna had a very different kind of attachment towards vivekananda because he saw him as a means to take his message to the world. People around ramakrishna did not understand why he was so mad about vivekananda. If vivekananda did not come to see him even for a day, ramakrishna would go looking for him because he knew that this boy had the necessary perception to transmit.

He did not look for any employment, he did not do anything that people of his age are normally supposed to do. Now it suddenly struck vivekananda that there was no money in his hands and he was unable to provide her with the necessary medicine or food. It made him very angry that he was unable to take care of his mother when she was really sick.

He went to ramakrishna – there was nowhere else to go, even if he got angry, that was where he went. He told ramakrishna all this nonsense, this spirituality, where is it getting me? if i was employed and had done the things that i was supposed to do, today i could have taken care of my mother. I could have given her food, i could have given her medicine, i could have given her comfort. Where has this spirituality taken me? ramakrishna being a worshiper of kali, had a kali shrine in his house. He said does your mother need medicine and food? why don’t you go and ask the mother for what you want? it sounded like a good idea to vivekananda and he went into the shrine. After about an hour, he came out and ramakrishna asked, did you ask the mother for food, money and whatever else your mother needs? vivekananda replied, no, i forgot. Ramakrishna questioned him, did you ask the mother? vivekananda said no, i forgot.

Ramakrishna again asked him, did you ask the mother? vivekananda said no, i will not ask. If you had asked for anything in the shrine today, this would have been the last day between you and me. I would not have seen your face ever again, because an asking fool does not know what life is about. But if you are praying with an expectation that you will get something, then it is not going to work for you. When he was just 19 years of age, vivekananda was a very logical, intellectual boy, and was full of fire. He was expecting some great intellectual explanation – the proof of god is the seed sprouting and the planet spinning. Three days later, he came back and asked, okay, can you show me god? ramakrishna asked, do you have the courage to see? the brave boy said, yes because this was tormenting him.

So ramakrishna just placed his foot on vivekananda’s chest and vivekananda went into a certain period of samadhi where he was beyond the limitations of the mind. He did not come out of it for almost 12 hours and when he did, he was never the same boy again. Unless you are a devotee, life should not open for you, because if it opens for you, you will only cause damage to yourself and everyone else.

Ramakrishna paramahamsa had passed on and vivekananda gathered a band of young people, travelling throughout india, trying to build the nation and change the face of the country. Then someone told him that the parliament of religions was happening in chicago, united states. Nobody was! one young man running from place to place, trying to talk about big things which are not written in the scripture – who is willing to listen? they said, you go and shake them there. When he was about to leave for the west – the first time he was going to the united states to take the message of ramakrishna – he went to sharada, ramakrishna’s wife, to seek her blessings.

It was very common for indian women, particularly when they were cooking, to sing. Not anymore because many people play the ipad now, but earlier, one of the greatest things you could do was to cook well with utmost love and serve it to people. For a 20 30 minute meal, they would spend a minimum of three to four hours on it and they would always be singing. When he came and said, i want to go to the united states to take my master’s message to the whole world, she did not respond.

Then he asked, why did you wait so long and first of all, why did you ask for the knife? you have finished cutting the vegetables. Now, the way you gave me the knife showed you are fit to go, you are fit to carry the master’s message. You can always see that most masters are not capable of becoming famous by themselves. They need one good disciple to carry the message because the master himself may not be very good with the ways of the world. By himself, he would have been a lost, forgotten flower if vivekananda had not come. So many flowers bloom, but how many of them get recognized? swami vivekananda once said, kicking a football will take you closer to the divine than any amount of prayer.

What you can do and what you cannot do is already set and you have been trained for many years. Swami vivekananda once said, kicking a football will take you closer to the divine than any amount of prayer. With prayer, after sometime you might be doing the prayer while you do so many other things – you could be doing whatever you want. In india, they made the prayers very complex – not just verbal, so that you have to involve yourself because they have seen all this telling the prayer business for thousands of years. They know what people will do so they made the prayer so complex, a whole procedure that you have to remember and act out properly, otherwise it is sacrilege. When that level of complexity is there, you cannot be doing something else during the prayer.

So in that way a football game gets you into that level of involvement where you cannot be doing something else at all. Doing something else is totally absent and gone in you because you cannot do anything else, there is so much involvement in this. This is a game which particularly demands a certain level of involvement because the limbs with which you handle the ball and the limbs with which you transport yourself at full speed are the same, and you have to avoid the ten other people who are trying to do everything that they can do with you. You have to dodge people, you have to take the ball, you have to be running at full speed your feet must be as efficient as a surgeon’s scalpel because at that speed, at that activity, to direct the ball takes a phenomenal amount of skill. If you do something with total involvement, you will see, there is just action – the mind is somewhere else. So in a soccer game, the players reach that kind of a state very often because it is all in one thing. That is the reason why it grabs half the world when things are being played intensely.

There is a certain kind of transcendence – it is not really a spiritual transcendence, but there is a certain going beyond one’s limitations which sets fire to everybody else. Once, a certain social reformer went to vivekananda and asked, it is great that you also support women, what shall i do? i want to reform them. Sg 10 swamivivekananda nationalyouthday mdash sadhguru @sadhgurujv january 12, 2016 swamivivekananda has been a positive inspiration for youth of many generations. Sg mdash sadhguru @sadhgurujv january 12, 2015 when i was twelve or thirteen years of age, i happened to come across some literature in which swami vivekananda said, give me hundred truly dedicated people and i will change the face of this country.

At that time it seems there were two hundred and thirty million people in this country, but he could not find a hundred truly dedicated people. One person had tremendous vision and because of one persons vision, so many things have happened. All the others who lived at that time, where are they? but his vision is still working in some way. Much better things would have happened. one gautama buddha or one vivekananda having vision is not sufficient. Only when a large section of the population has vision, really beautiful things will happen in society.

Was a successful attorney with interests in a wide range of subjects, and his mother, bhuvaneshwari devi. By the time he graduated from calcutta university, he had acquired a vast knowledge of different subjects, especially western philosophy and history. Born with a yogic temperament, he used to practise meditation even from his boyhood, and was associated with brahmo movement for some time. At the threshold of youth narendra had to pass through a period of spiritual crisis when he was assailed by doubts about the existence of god. It was at that time he first heard about sri ramakrishna from one of his english professors at college. One day in november 1881, narendra went to meet sri ramakrishna who was staying at the kali temple in dakshineshwar.