Swami Vivekananda in London - lectures part 1 - The Frontier between Science and Spirituality

Mahendranath Dutta, who was swami Vivekananda's own brother, has given a very vivid description of Swami Vivekananda's stay in London in 1896. During this time for sometime Mahendranath as well as Swami Saradananda stayed with Vivekananda in a rented house along with Goodwin, and the experience of living so closely with Vivekananda has been recorded succinctly. we therefore not only get the greatness of Vivekananda as a towering and blazing spirituality personified, but also his human side, his jokes, his childish pranks and above all his kindness and compassion towards all fellow beings.

The lectures or the parlour talks went unrecorded for some reason and probably was recorded by Goodwin but a lot of documents were lost after Goodwin's death. Hence many of these lectures, esp. the ones on science and spirituality, have not been found. So it is a treat to read them in the book by Mahendranath, where he has presented these lectures in summary form and also have provided a nice explanation or commentary on them. Mahendranath was in every way Swamiji's brother. He was himself a great scholar, had knowledge of almost every subject, was a great spiritual person and had various experiences around the world. He travelled by foot without any money almost half the world after he left London. His stay in London and the study was sponsored by Maharaja of Khetri Ajit Singh. Even though he went to study Law there, as Swamiji did not approve of it, he gave up that and instead concentrated on studying various subjects in British Museum Library. Because of his prolific memory we have a great account of Vivekananda's stay in London.

Swamiji during his lectures, according to Mahendranath, always remained in a very high spiritual state and also uplifted that of the listener to that state. Therefore there is a big difference between reading Vivekananda and actually listening to his lectures. The listener would be transcended to a different realm where there would be no difference among the one who is listening, one who is narrating and the object of narration. Everybody would instinctively feel the inherent truth and therefore the surreal atmosphere would make them forget later what they had heard.

In one of the lectures Swamiji illustrated how sun contributed to the formation of the earth and all its constituents, how we derive our energy from the sun and therefore the sun is regarded and worshiped from time immemorial as the storehouse and giver of energy. He provided a vivid description of the relationship of every being on earth with the sun, how different planets in solar system were formed from sun and the possibility of life in other planets. While discussing about the Nebula and galaxies he told the audience about the infinity, which is loved by both science and spirituality. Mahendranath says that it was evident from the lectures how knowledgeable Vivekananda was on astronomy and how far ahead he was in terms of knowledge of the science of that period. In narrating the limitless, boundless space and time he almost broke the barrier between space and time in front of the audience as infinity can only be one, there cannot be two infinities of space and time. Therefore space and time, according to him, were not separate. Thus it was a distance echo of the great theory which would be mathematically proved just 10 years down the line by another great man. In a separate lecture in America Swamiji had already claimed that matter and energy (akasha and prana as per samkhya terminology) were really the same as per samkhya philosophy, which impressed scientist Nicola Tesla so much that he wanted to formulate a mathematical model on the same. Tesla, though a genius, for some reason could not come up with the mathematical model of the interchangeability. This had to wait for another 10 years and Vivekananda probably would have been very happy to know how special theory of relativity upheld the ancient samkhya philosophy as explained by him.