Vedanta – Voice of Freedom
Of the many spiritual philosophy books I’ve read, this one still remains one the most influential for me. I encountered it in the 90s and have returned to it time and again for a refresher.
Once in a while one comes across a mind that seems to soar above the fray. That would be Swami Vivekananda’s. His passion for elevating humanity to the highest ideal is expressed in almost every sentence and his phrases have been compared to the style of Beethoven! His influence on my thinking can be seen in my post Your Highest Ideal.
His words are great music, phrases in the style of Beethoven, stirring rhythms like the march of Handel choruses. I cannot touch these sayings of his, scattered as they are through the pages of books at thirty years’ distance, without receiving a thrill through my body like an electric shock.- Romain Rolland
For me the most significant thing about Vedanta in general and Vivekananda in particular was that it offered a broader view of the word “God” in my thinking. The notion of God in Vedanta is that of the Absolute “One Without a Second”, or simply “The One”. The idea of God as all-in-all and Being itself was intoxicating and my thinking about it has never been quite the same since.
Vivekananda once said, “I have a message to the West, as Buddha had a message to the East.” And the message was Vedanta. Vedanta: Voice of Freedom is culled from Vivekananda’s collected works. This book presents in a clear and concise form the spiritual wisdom of India as it has evolved over five thousand years. Thus it evokes the living Vedanta put forth by an extraordinary mind.
I’m not heavily inclined toward spirituality. Perhaps it is for this reason that The Tao Te Ching so spoke to me. I realize that Taoism became more of a religion based on that book, but The Tao being “the way of things,” elusive and undefinable, made accessible the idea of spirituality, if not spirituality itself.
Spirituality is personal so my motto on it is to each his own. Taoism was the first eastern philosophy I encountered. It was in the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (see my review here) that I first came across the word “Tao”. I did not know at the time that Zen was actually a combination of Taoism and Buddhism but I learned this later as I continued to read and practice meditation.
As I mentioned in my post, Vedanta allowed me to reintegrate the word “God” into my thinking. In a way, all the eastern philosophies talk about the same thing, but with different descriptions and cultural references. The One or Absolute of Vedanta is very similar to the Tao. I still adhere to the Taoist notions of balanced opposites, following nature, non-interference with natural processes as much as possible, etc.
I have some posts coming about Taoist and other eastern ideas that may interest you.