Sri Ramakrishna Math : The Vedanta Kesari, Making Life out of a Life

Revered Swami Ranganathananda is the President of the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission. This is an extract from his talk delivered on 1 October 1981, at New Delhi and is being reproduced here from Eternal Values for A Changing Society, Vol.III, by his kind permission.

When you begin to live, and live for a great cause or a great purpose, everything will not be smooth. So many challenges will come. Modern India is passing from an age of easy living, living in the narrowest circle possible, to a life of expansion, a life of adventure, a life of heroic endeavour. That is the meaning of freedom with which we are today facing a tremendous future. And that future will be written by lives lived in a spirit of heroism in every department of life. It is this spirit that we lacked for centuries together.

The first of such heroism we saw in the last century and the first part of this century. Our great national struggle for freedom found many of our young people sacrificing their lives, their comfort, their everything, with a view to getting freedom for their country.

The way to greatness is not easy, it is not cosy, you cannot saunter into the great life; it needs alertness, for it is difficult to tread and hard to cross, like walking on the edge of a razor, as referred to in the Katha Upanishad. Under the inspiration of this heroic message, our nation worked hard, created a great culture, and contributed much to world civilization. Then came a decadent period. Weakness of mind and body set in; creative fires all but died out. People, big and small, preferred the line of least resistance in every department of life. From that darkness and despair, the nation was awakened and rescued by our great modern leaders, and the nation achieved political freedom, the necessary prelude to every other type of freedom. And for making this political freedom flower into every type of freedom, we need to continue the nurturing of the same heroic spirit. We need men and women endowed with clear thinking, courage, dedication, and intense practical efficiency.

The beautiful sentence that Vivekananda had uttered towards the end of the last century applies to our India of today: 'All expansion is life, all contraction is death.' What we call life in a contracted state is really death; the expanding state is really life. This truth has to be understood in a big way by our people. It is easy to live just a cozy life, life put in a glass case, as it were, to protect it from all harm, with all daring and risk taken away from life. That was the music of life, meant to lull us to sleep, that we were taught by our parents and teachers for centuries together. But, today, we are blessed to listen to another music--the music with the power to awaken and energize.

We heard this powerful music first from Vivekananda--the spirit of heroic endeavour, the spirit conveyed by him through a famous verse of the Katha Upanisad: 'Arise, Awake, and stop not till the goal is reached!' Don't contract yourself into sleep; we have slept for ages; we have wept for ages; no more weeping or sleeping now, but wake up and then march on, march on; life is a battle between life and death, between expansion and contraction. You have to face the terrible, face the brute, even embrace death.

Today we are experiencing the stirrings of a new way of life, expansion, struggle in all departments of life. Wherever you find initiative, wherever you find people striking out into new lines of development in the fields of industry, economics, politics, society, religion, and science, you are witnessing the dynamics of life, the spirit of expansion, replacing that old process of contraction. It was this spirit that Swami Vivekananda injected into our stagnant society, immediately after which came tremendous political awakening and the onset of the modern revolution.

When we speak of the greatness of any nation, we always find that it arose out of this daring to face death--sometimes physical but always death to the self-centred ego. How did England become great? By young English people daring to go round the world; to sail on the high seas, to scale the mountains, to wade through the forests and swamps, prepared to face privations and even death, just for self-actualization and for the glory of England. That is the spirit you find depicted in our own Mahabharata, as well as in Bhagavan Sri Krishna's teachings. We had a blaze of that heroic spirit and endeavour, that facing death constantly without fear, in a leader like Guru Gobind Singh. His life is a saga of great heroism, constantly facing death for the great cause of human freedom and dignity and unity, of defending man against oppression, and sacrificing wife, children, and himself in the struggle. In such examples, we can see life being made out of a life. This new understanding of making life out of a life must come to us today. Life has to face death to become richer because, from the ancient Vedic times up to our time, this truth has been given to us by our great teachers that the Supreme Reality has two aspects, one is life, the other is death. That is what the Rig-Veda said: Yasya chaya amritam, yasya mrtyuh.

When we understand this truth that life and death are two aspects of the same reality, we learn to welcome death, but not in a pathological mood, but heroically. That is a great lesson taught by Vivekananda to our nation.

In Guru Gobind Singh we see this fully expressed. Today, we find in hundreds of our young people fear of privation and death and a shallow attachment to life. What is in such a humdrum day-to-day life? What is talked of as adjustment to life is but a combination of shallow life and a shallow adjustment. Is it worthwhile, is it fit for a human being? Modern psychiatry also refers to the emptiness and unreality of such a life. Parents constantly exhort their children to adjust to life. What does it mean? It means: Adjust a false self to a false world! Real understanding of life is not there. The so-called 'normal' adjusted life is truly the abnormal and false life.

No heroic achievements can come to a nation if it hugs this perishable body all the time. It is born, it grows, it decays, it dies. But man's identity is something deeper and greater, and more profound, wherefrom come all fearlessness, all courage, all daring. If our soldiers posted in the high Himalayan ranges to defend our country are to face their challenges effectively, they need this philosophy.

I wish to mention that the concept of life as a battle-field, where you are constantly face to face with death, where you struggle and overcome the challenges, or are overpowered by the challenges and court death--that is the philosophy that makes a nation great. If I want to protect myself all the time, how can I become great? I must be able to dare to face the world of challenges.

The whole of our Bhagavad Gita is a great saga of such a robust philosophy. Life is truly life, not when measured in terms of years, but in terms of quality and richness. This lesson we need to learn today.

In the Mahabharata, we get a powerful verse. Whenever and wherever I have quoted that verse, it always had a tremendous impact on the mind of listeners. It is a short Sanskrit line containing a profound message of the beauty of an intense life. There was a king by name Sanjaya in the Northern Sindh region; his mother bore the name Vidula. She was a heroic queen-mother. How she inspired her son to be brave is what the story conveys. This young king went out for battle, got defeated, became weak-minded and depressed. The mother tried to rouse his royal spirit in several ways; it did not happen. Then, finally, she uttered a sentence conveying a tremendous power that helped to rouse the courage of the prince. That line conveys so much inspiration in so few words. That is the uniqueness of great literature--the capacity to convey great meaning to humanity in a few words. And what that great queen-mother conveyed to her princely son ages ago, our Mother India conveys to every child in this country today:

A short intense life, burnt out in a great struggle and achievement of the humanistic impulse, is preferable to a humdrum life of long duration. That is the message to us from our own past. In this modern period, we had a Vivekananda. During his brief 39 years, he made a tremendous impact on both East and West; even in that short span of life, his actual public work was only during the last nine years.

Live such a life that when you die, you will leave a permanent wholesome impact, small or big, on the world.

There is too much concentration on the very limited circle of life constituted of profit and pleasure; the wider horizons of life have receded; this makes life humdrum.

It is ecstasy and zest that enable one to say: Yes, I am fine. This is the answer expected of all of us in this most revolutionary and creative period of our long history. That can come only when we relate ourselves to the onward current of our history and participate in the shaping of it, instead of cutting ourselves away from it, to become stagnant pools of frustrations and complaints.

Every youth, imprinted with the heroic touch of soul, must say to himself or herself that this chaotic state of India is the best period for me to live. I can put my ideas into it. I can create something more beautiful and perfect out of it; I do not want to live a life of stagnant isolation in the resurgent context of contemporary India. The nation is marching and I, as a citizen in it, shall give it a gentle push and direction. That should be the positive attitude of all young minds towards the problems of their country.