Swami Vivekananda and Sudra Jagaran or the Awakening of the masses - His visions for a future world order - Part 10

Now with this as the foregone conclusion, what measures Swamiji tells us to adopt in order to ensure that a successful and largely peaceful transition happens. First of all, let us write off the elitists. They are, in the language of Swamiji, “fossils”. To the rest of us, who are more open to the transition, he asks us to collaborate, rather than oppose the transition. So it would be better to help in the transition through sincere help and service, through the worship of the living beings, the masses in various ways, by giving them proper education, by helping in their cause, by treating them with with the respect that they deserve as fellow human beings and co sharers of our lives. In short, the privileged few should sacrifice and willingly give way to the deserving many. This is very difficult, esp. when a society is driven by narrow selfish interests. Therefore the transition or handoff won’t be easy and there may be more trials and tribulations in days to come in every society and in the individual lives.

In the words of Swami Vivekananda, the goal of mankind is to manifest the inherent divinity. If that is the case, it is only natural justice that people at the bottom of the pyramid move up and replace those “fossils” who are occupying the top positions because of their birth related privileges which they think they are entitled to. Every individual, every society and every nation is moving towards that ultimate goal – freedom, from all forms of bondage, which culminates in the ultimate freedom of the soul, and therefore the progress of the society in which one class supercedes another and takes the reign is one of the most effective way of ensuring this progress and social evolution. Swami Vivekananda, unlike the communists, however did not believe that everbody should be equal and there would not be any class distinction. A true universal brotherhood, he said, can only be achieved through the sublime philosophy of Advaita Vedanta which ties the humanity, nay, the entire universe in one undivided consciousness and thereby promotes that illusive grand unity which our social scientists and egalitarian philosophers have tried to find for ages and have failed and which the divine sages had discovered more than 5000 years back and by that solved all the mysteries of the universe. Fanciful ideals of political egalitarianism have miserably failed and they are unlikely to succeed again. Only the deep, sonorous, highly elevating and lofty ideals of Vedanta can ensure a level playing field, a great human plane of consciousness where every human being achieves god-hood.