What Makes a Nation Survive

Direction of Love

Immortal India

This is the ancient land where wisdom made its home before it went into any other country, the same India whose influx of spirituality is represented, as it were, on the material plane, by rolling rivers like oceans, where the eternal Himalayas, rising tier above tier with their snowcaps, looks as it were into the very mysteries of heaven. 

Here is the same India whose soil has been trodden by the feet of the greatest sages that ever lived. Here first sprang up inquiries into the nature of man and into the internal world. Here first arose the doctrines of the immortality of the soul, the existence of a supervising God, an immanent God in nature and in man, and here the highest ideals of religion and philosophy have attained their culminating points. 

This is the land from whence, like tidal waves, spirituality and philosophy have again and again rushed out and deluged the world, and this is the land from whence once more such tides must proceed in order to bring life and vigour into the decaying races of mankind. 

It is the same India which has withstood the shocks of centuries, of hundreds of foreign invasions, of hundreds of upheavals of manners and customs. 

It is the same land which stands firmer than any rock in the world, with its undying vigour, indestructible life. 

Its life is of the same nature as the soul, without beginning and without end, immortal; and we are the children of such a country.

- Swami Vivekananda, 

Address at Madras,

Lectures From Colombo to Almora

Pain with Pleasure

Speaking and Not Doing - National Habit!

In spite of the greatness of the Upanishads, in spite of our boasted ancestry of sages, compared to many other races, 
I must tell you that we are weak, very weak. 
First of all is our physical weakness. That physical weakness is the cause of at least one-third of our miseries. 

We are lazy, we cannot work; we cannot combine, we do not love each other; we are intensely selfish, not three of us can come together without hating each other, without being jealous of each other. 
That is the state in which we are -- hopelessly disorganised mobs, immensely selfish, fighting each other for centuries as to whether a certain mark is to be put on our forehead this way or that way, writing volumes and volumes upon such momentous questions as to whether the look of a man spoils my food or not! 
This we have been doing for the past few centuries. 

We cannot expect anything high from a race whose whole brain energy has been occupied in such wonderfully beautiful problems and researches! 
And are we not ashamed of ourselves? 
Ay, sometimes we are; but though we think these things frivolous, we cannot give them up. We speak of many things parrot-like, but never do them; speaking and not doing has become a habit with us. 

            - Swami Vivekananda, 
              Address at Madras, 
              Lectures From Colombo to Almora

Spiritual Essentials of Religion

Mine of Strength

What we need is strength, but who will give us strength? 
There are thousands to weaken us, and of stories we have had enough. 
Every one of our Puranas, if you press it, gives out stories enough to fill three-fourths of the libraries of the world. 
Everything that can weaken us as a race we have had for the last thousand years. It seems as if during that period the national life had this one end in view, viz how to make us weaker and weaker till we have become real earthworms, crawling at the feet of every one who dares to put his foot on us. 
Therefore, my friends, as one of your blood, as one that lives and dies with you, let me tell you that we want strength, strength, and every time strength. And the Upanishads are the great mine of strength. Therein lies strength enough to invigorate the whole world; the whole world can be vivified, made strong, energised through them. 
They will call with trumpet voice upon the weak, the miserable, and the downtrodden of all races, all creeds, and all sects to stand on their feet and be free. 

Freedom, physical freedom, mental freedom, and spiritual freedom are the watchwords of the Upanishads. 

                - Swami Vivekananda, 
                   Address at Madras, 
                   Lectures From Colombo to Almora

Divine Bliss and Mundane Pleasures