It is really admirable the way Swami Vivekananda interpreted and exposed Hinduism, integrating it, widening its arms and turning it into a legitimate catalyst of positive transformations for the human being. His Raja Yoga is the externalization of a noble, courageous, and stimulating philosophy. Very few authors are capable of deeply understanding the human condition and offering a solution that does not imply forced repression or the fading of the will. Swami Vivekananda, instead of leading to an aggravation of tensions or an eclipse of consciousness, proposes an active mental conduct directed to the elevation of one’s own nature. It builds, magnifies, encourages overcoming. What a great man!
Category: Notes
For All the Times I Have Laughed…
For all the times I have laughed at Cioran’s explosive temperament, his wonderful rage in the grocery store line, and countless other situations that I always remember in laughter, it seems that I am now paying for them, and seem that laughter from heaven is directed to me. All the stupid banalities that make up my routine, the door that must open for me to leave my house, the scale that must work so that I weigh and buy food, the sun that must rise so that I know it is day… all these extremely banal things that always work because they have to work, or rather, all the human beings whose function somehow affects me, together and at the same time, fail to fulfill it, but with the whim of interrupting my routine and hindering me with problems that I have no means to solve! Cioran certainly laughs; that is the price: now it is my turn to make him laugh… But it is incredible to note the impossibility of peace in this world. Buddha is a folk character: in the real world, there would be someone to make him mad and ruin his spiritual progress.
Anger, Anger…
“Nothing clutters thought like an access of anger.” It is not only tranquility that is lost, but the construction of long efforts, of long improvement that materializes into a seemingly stable state, collapses entirely and abruptly. It is mental progress that returns to square one. From this, it is repeating the whole process. Buddhists assure us that a lifetime of meditation is lost in one of these impulses. If it is not so, it is certain to spoil before and after. Oh, sadness! Oh, the urge to cry!
Enough With the Psychoanalysis!
I am browsing through an interesting work on psychology, when the references to psychoanalysis begin. God! I think I have reached the point where I can no longer stand it; the respect, the appeasing condescension is gone. I no longer find it tiresome, but depressing to keep looking at this mediocre human model proposed by Freud. A model stuck to the past, castrated of potentialities, for whom the future is nothing but the continuity of the lamentable present, the dragging of a mental slavery. I think of Buddha, or rather the young Siddhartha, whose relevance begins exactly after he became aware of life and his first manifestation of personality, who deliberated an abrupt and final break with the past—something impossible according to Freud. The ex-prince followed and trod his famous path, which bore absolutely no resemblance to and suffered absolutely no decisive influence from Siddhartha’s previous experiences. He became Buddha, and before Buddha someone different, someone whose steps manifested a free and resolute will, whose actions affirmed an ultimate detachment not only from the past, but from all the chains that Freud asserted as necessary components of his human model. He purified himself by climbing levels, adding to his experience the trials that made him more and more authentic, and less and less what he had been. Enough with the psychoanalysis!