Every day, sometimes after breakfast, Swamiji and Miss MacLeod, accompanied very likely by Mrs. Blodgett’s dog Trix, would walk to the home of a magnetic healer named Mrs. Melton, whom, as Swamiji wrote, "Joe had unearthed" and who lived about a mile and a half away. There they would take turns undergoing what Swamiji described as "skin-paring." Mrs. Melton, who could neither read nor write and who spoke, it was said, "in a negro dialect," had upon her a gift. She felt herself to be an instrument in the hands of a Higher Power, as Betty Leggett was to write to her husband, and she did nothing without its command. Her treatments were, to be sure, unusual, consisting in a sort of massage charged with excruciating "magnetism." Her patients winced with pain as she ran fingers like "streams of fire" over their bodies. It was sheer agony, particularly, perhaps, for Betty Leggett, who was in pain to begin with, having been suffering for months from an injury to her leg that refused to heal. (It had been because of the healer’s abilities that Mrs. Leggett was to come to Los Angeles, _x000d_ arriving on January 5. From across the continent, Mrs. Melton had diagnosed the difficulty. Holding a handker¬chief of Betty Leggett’s in her hands, she had divined that an imbedded needle or pin was causing the trouble. And sure enough, she was later to draw out a needle or pin by her magnetic touch.)

Although Swamiji did not object to Mrs. Melton’s "skin¬parings," he did not share Joe’s unqualified faith in them. "Joe thinks she [Mrs. Melton] is pulling me up splendidly," he wrote to Mrs. Bull on December 27. "On her has been worked a miracle, she claims. Whether it is magnetic healing, California ozone, or the end of the present spell of bad Karma, I am improving. It is a great thing to be able to walk three miles, even after a heavy dinner. But in March he was to write to Mrs. Bull from San Francisco, "With all Joe’s enthusiasm, I have not yet found any real benefit from the magnetic healer, except a few red patches on my chest from scratching! And in April, after Mrs. Melton had gone to New York, he wrote again to Mrs. Bull, "I am so happy to learn that all the New York friends are being cured by Mrs. Melton. She has been very unsuccessful, it seems, in Los Angeles, as all the people we introduced tell me. Some are in a worse state than before the skin paring. . . . I, of course, would not write this to Joe; she is happy in her dreams of having done so much good to poor sufferers." (Joe was indeed happy in these dreams. "I bless Mrs. Melton, the magnetic healer, daily," she wrote to Mary Hale in February of 1900; "& only hope those I love-& hate?-may have the benefit of her power. "But oh," Swamiji continued to Mrs. Bull, "if she could hear the Los Angeles folks . . . She would change her mind at once and learn wisdom from an old adage not to recommend medicine to anyone. In this same letter, however, Swamiji conceded that Mrs. Melton’s "rubbings" had done him good "at the time at least." And certainly something was doing him good. "Oh the peace and blessing of this life!" Miss MacLeod exclaimed in a letter of December I5 to Sister Nivedita. "And with each day comes the feeling that the reestablishment of Swami to health is more & more permanent.

But before continuing with our narrative let me tell how Mrs. Hansbrough’s "Reminiscences" came into existence. In the spring of 1941 she was living in San Francisco with her daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Cohn, and at¬tending the lectures at the Vedanta Society of Northern California. Knowing of her close association with Swamiji in 1900, Swami Ashokananda, who was in charge of the Society, one day asked her if she would tell him her memories of those early days fully and in detail. Mrs. Hansbrough readily agreed, and a meeting was arranged at which a third person, equipped with pen and paper, was to be present. The first reminiscing interview took place at Mrs. Hansbrough’s home on a March evening in 1941, at which time it soon became clear that one session could not do justice to her richly stored memory. Thus four or five subsequent interviews took place, not at Mrs. Hansbrough’s home, but during long Sunday drives through Golden Gate Park and along San Francisco’s ocean front. At all of these sessions Alfred T. Clifton (now Swami Chidrupananda) was present, taking down everything that was said. Transcribed, his notes run to some seventy-seven typed pages and constitute the "Reminiscences."

Although Mrs. Hansbrough was not young at the time of these meetings, her memory was extraordinarily accurate. Many of the dates, names, and events which she recalled after more than forty years coincide in almost every instance with those given in the Los Angeles newspapers and in other contemporary records. There was no confusion in her mind as to what happened when. Nor was she vague and self-contra¬dictory as to the way in which events occurred. Often, as a means of checking, Swami Ashokananda would ask questions pertaining to an event Mrs. Hansbrough had already related. Her answers would confirm in every case the story previously told: the same colorful details would be given, the same clear picture disclosed; thus we can, I think, feel assured of the reliability of her memory. These "Reminiscences" have been made available to me by the Vedanta Society of Northern California, and I shall draw upon them freely throughout this account of Swamiji’s life in California.

Swamiji delivered his second lecture in Los Angeles on the evening of Tuesday, December I2, at the regular monthly meeting of the Southern California Academy of Sciences. The Academy had wisely chosen a larger than usual meeting place for the occasion and, fittingly, had chosen a church - ¬Unity Church, situated about a block west of Blanchard Hall.

Mrs. Bull had evidently received from Swami Saradananda a letter that had been too much for her mother heart. We can be fairly sure that she had kept faith with Swami Saradananda, never disclosing his confidences, whatever they may have been; but she could no longer forbear to remonstrate with Swamiji, protesting, it would seem, his "harsh" treatment of his brothers and counseling a more tender approach. In reply she received, as she might have expected, a blast.

Returning from Mrs. Melton’s or, as the case might have been, from a morning class, Swamiji would generally cook the noon dinner, which, as Miss MacLeod wrote in one of her letters, "we all enjoy hugely." According to a passage in Mrs. Blodgett’s letter from which a long excerpt has been quoted above, "He would come home from a lecture where he was compelled to break away from his audience, so eagerly would they gather around him, and rush into the kitchen like a boy released from school with `Now we will cook!’ Presently Joe would appear and discover the culprit among the pots and pans in his fine dress who was by thriftily watch¬ful Joe admonished to change to his home garments.

After lunch, if nothing interfered, Swamiji would lie in the garden hammock, sometimes "lost," Miss MacLeod wrote to Mrs. Bull, "in reading Elisee Reclus [the French geographer and social philosopher] on The Earth and Its Inhabitants,a work of many large, illustrated volumes dealing with his favorite subject-Man. Sometimes Miss MacLeod would talk to him or read her correspondence to him, particularly her letters from Sister Nivedita. But "he talks very little," she wrote to Mrs. Bull on December 21 "scarcely at all." And to Nivedita the day before, she wrote that Swamiji was so much quieter than she had ever seen him that she watched for the least new mood that might be brewing in that silence-a mood that would bring about some sudden and swift change of plan.

The lecture, which Mrs. Hansbrough recalled as having been as "enchanting as the first," was a great success. From one of Miss MacLeod’s unpublished letters, one learns that the audience at Unity Church numbered over a thousand and that at the close of the lecture a Mr. Lloyd came upon the platform to pay his tribute to the Swami’s valuable contribution to psychology and modern thought.

Of Swamiji’s "Mind and Its Powers" series at the Home of Truth only two class titles have been known to us: "Christ’s Message to the World" and "Hints on Practical Spirituality." Recently, however, we have been fortunate enough to have discovered in the Time’s "City Briefs" three additional titles of this series. As we have seen, Swamiji spoke on Christ on Christmas Day; the title of his class of December 26 was not announced, but those held from December 27 to 30 were, respectively: "Theory of Concentration," "Practice of Con¬centration," "Spiritual Breathing," and "Reincarnation." In this list we find no such title as "Hints on Practical Spirituality," but to judge from the text of that class, as published in the Complete works, its original title may well have been "Spiritual Breathing." (Clearly, "Hints" was held toward the end of the series, and as clearly, spiritual breathing was its subject. "This morning," Swamiji said at the start, "I shall try to present to you some ideas about breathing and other exercises. We have been discussing theories so long that now it will be well to have a little of the practical.

In the Los Angeles papers one can discover no further notice of these Home of Truth class lectures, nor any reports of them. In Unity magazine for February of 1900, however, one finds a short but relevant article written by Mr. J. Ransome Bransby. One wishes that Mr. Bransby, who surely attended more than one of Swamiji’s lectures, had told more about them.

At the turn of the century, Los Angeles bore almost no resemblance to the huge, sprawling metropolis of today. In 1900 the city’s population, which had doubled during the previous ten years, stood, momentarily, at 102,500; its area was a mere fraction of its present vastness; the Los Angeles River supplied enough water for all its needs; many of its streets were still unpaved tree-lined roads that became mudholes when it rained; its downtown buildings were small and unprepossessing, and while a few grandiose mansions adorned the city here and there, its late-Victorian residences were, on the whole, undistinguished. Despite its romantic Spanish and Mexican past, Los Angeles resembled in many respects a typical mid¬western town, thriving incongruously amidst pepper trees, eucalyptus, orange groves, and palms. Since the 1880s, and even earlier, midwesterners had poured by the trainload into this well-advertised paradise, where flowers bloomed in abundance throughout the year and blizzards were unknown. For the most part, the newcomers were prosperous and hardy farmers who, though tired of battling the elements in their native states, were by no means tired of life or of themselves. They were not people to be absorbed into a sleepy Mexican pueblo; on the contrary, they had put their own stamp on the little town and in short order had converted it into a prosperous, fully American, predominantly Republican and Protestant city. They had introduced electric car lines, electric lights, water mains, and sewers. They thought of ways and means to grow and to improve; they were, in fact, already urging their adopted town, which at the close of the nineteenth century ranked twenty-sixth among American cities, to catch up in economic and cultural status to the urbane, self assured San Francisco, which ranked ninth.

But though seething internally with ambition, Los Angeles was to all outward appearances still a quiet, peaceful, and compact town. In one residential section, it is true, oil wells were fast ruining the lawns and gardens; but this was a limited disturbance. One could still bask in the city’s sunshine, fill one’s lungs with its clean and fragrant air, and walk into outlying farmlands. The start of the motion-picture industry was some ten years in the future; Hollywood was an uneventful village of five hundred devout and temperate Methodists; paved highways did not exist, and the automobile, a rarity, was still looked upon askance as "an expensive luxury . . . Well named the `devil-wagon.’ "

Miss MacLeod did not say just who Miss Spencer was, just where she lived, or why she and Swamiji visited her during his first week in Los Angeles, and none of our other currently available sources of information answer these questions. But that Swamiji did stay with Miss Spencer and her mother at some time during his Los Angeles visit has long been known. "At Los Angeles he was for a time the guest of Miss Spencer, who became one of his fervent disciples," a passage in the Life of Swami Vivekananda reads. "While there, he was wont to sit on the floor beside her aged mother who was blind and nearing the end. At Miss Spencer’s question, why he seemed so interested in her mother, he told her that death like birth was a mystery, and so the mother was an interesting study to him.

This somewhat dreary picture of Swamiji sitting beside the chair of an aged lady, observing with absorption the slow receding of life, constitutes our only glimpse of him during his first four or five days in southern California, but all in all this seems to have been a gloomy time.

Mr. Baumgardt, who was to become one of Swamiji’s ardent admirers, was in the printing business and was himself a master printer. But printing was merely the breadwinning part of his life. In addition, he was an expert seaman, a mathematician, an astronomer, a connoisseur in music, art, literature, a linguist of rare attainments, fluently speaking nine languages, and a lecturer of marked ability. Born in England in 1862 and educated in Sweden where he graduated from Strengnas College, he had come to America in the 1880s. In I892 he had been secretary of the Oregon Academy of Sciences and at the time of our story was secretary of the Southern California Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Academy’s Astronomy and Mathematics Section. This excellent young man helped to arrange not only Swamiji’s first lecture in Los Angeles, but, as we shall see, his second lecture as well, which was held before the Academy. Nor was Mr. Baumgardt the only member of his family drawn to Swamiji: his wife, as I have learned from her daughter-in-law, became deeply interested in his teachings -even more so than Banmgardt himself.

But during these days the Swami surely did other things besides sit with the aged Mrs. Spencer. Miss MacLeod, for instance, must have introduced him to her newly made friends, who had been eagerly looking forward to his arrival in their city. Indeed, the Swami soon found himself surrounded by many people to whom his religious writings were already well known, and who were anxious to see him and to hear him lecture. Among them was a Mr. Bernhard R. Baumgardt, Secretary of the Southern California Academy of Sciences, and a versatile man of many talents and accomplishments. He took deep interest in the Swami and his work. and arranged for his first lecture in Los Angeles, engaging for the purpose Blanchard Hall, the best in the city, on the evening of Friday, December 8.

"Various gentlemen are interested," Miss MacLeod had written to Sister Nivedita in regard to the plans being made for Swamiji, "so I do nothing. In fact, I shall always try to be in the background-though necessarily I must vouch for the Prophet, as I am the one who knows him. But while Miss MacLeod may have been the only person in Los Angeles who knew Swamiji personally, the name of Swami Vivekananda was by no means unknown in that city. News of his appearance at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 had inevitably reached southern California, either through Californians who had themselves attended the Parliament or through letters from the Midwest telling in alarm or in jubilation of the extraordinary young Hindu who had burst upon the religious scene with galvanizing effect. "All the ideas the Californians have of me emanated from Chicago, Miss MacLeod was later to quote Swamiji as having said. His subsequent lecture tour had also surely come to the notice of the people on the Pacific Coast; nor were his later teachings unknown to them. His books, first published in I896, had reached California and, as he was to find, "did indeed great service on this coast. Thus many were those who had looked forward to his arrival with informed interest and no little excitement-attitudes that were reflected in the following article, which appeared December 2 in the Capital, a Los Angeles weekly, accompanied by a photograph captioned "Swami Vivekananda Who Will Lecture at Blanchard Hall Next Friday Evening."

Lecture by Swami Vivekananda of Bombay, India, representative of the Hindu Religion at the World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicato, 1893. Subject: Vedanta Philosophy, or Hinduism as a Religion. Blanchard Hall, 233 South Broadway, Friday Evening, December 8, at 8 o’clock.  _x000d_ Admission, 50c. Tickets for sale at Fitzgeralds, 113 S. Spring Street.

"Swami spoke very quietly last night," Miss MacLeod recounted in another unpublished letter, written on December 13 to her sister, in fact it seems to be his new way, but he was most scholarly &, clear in his lecture on the Kosmos, and one member of the Academy of Sciences, a Mr. Lloyd (graduate of Harvard, after which he took a degree in Germany)said he wanted to pay his personal tribute to the Swami Vivekananda, who had done so much for modern psychology, that he was a light among thinkers etc etc & then he asked him a pertinent question as to the Vedanta idea of Kosmos that Swami answered so brilliantly that applause came from everyone. Several questions were asked & answered and coming home Mr. Baumgardt was radiant. For it was he who had vouched for Swami. Someone in the audience asked: "What is the difference between Vedanta & Theosophy?” & Swami answered. "I do not know. I have never made a study of Theosophic litera-ture." Which was a proof to everyone that he did not stand for Theosophy._x000d_ Another listener had asked that evening if he would not hold classes, and Swamiji was indeed ready to do so. His health had by now noticeably improved; even the exertion of speaking before a large audience for the first time in well over a year had not been too great a strain. "Though he lectured last night before 1ooo people," Miss MacLeod related in the same letter to her sister, "he drank a glass of hot milk [on returning home] and slept like a child all night."

By the time Swamiji delivered his second lecture, he had no doubt moved from Miss Spencer’s home to Mrs. Blodgett’a at 921 West Twenty-first Street. Mrs. "Roxie" Blodgett, whom he described to Mary Hale as "fat, old, extremely witty . . . and very motherly," was, it so happened, one of those Californians to whom the name of Swami Vivekananda was well known. She had attended the Parliament of Religions in Chicago six years earlier and had there heard him give his first talk to the American people. "When that young man got up and said, `Sisters and Brothers of America,’ "she told Miss MacLeod, "seven thousand [actually, Four thousand] people rose to their feet as a tribute to something they knew not what; and when it was over and I saw scores of women walking over the benches to get near him, I said to myself, ‘Well, my lad, if you can resist that onslaught, you are indeed a god. "‘ Swamiji was indeed a god. In Chicago Mrs. Blodgett acquired a large colored poster of him, which she hung in her home in Los Angeles, never dreaming that he would one day be her guest. This poster, hanging incredibly over her dying brother’s bed, had greeted Miss MacLeod when she had arrived from Ridgely Manor. Astounded, she had asked Mrs. Blodgett, "What do you know about him?" and Mrs. Blodgett had told her story. "I know him," Miss MacLeod had said, and then, "Why don’t you ask him here?" "To my cottage?" "He will come." And in her memoirs she relates: "In three weeks my brother was dead and in six weeks Swamiji was there:’17 (Later on, Miss MacLeod brought this poster, which showed Swamiji standing in his robe and turban, to Ridgely Manor, where she mounted it in a toweringly high-backed Gothic chair. For years it remained thus in her bedroom. "One would hardly dare go into her room," Mrs. Frances Leggett told me, "-this enormous thing appearing there!")

The neighborhood in which Mrs. Blodgett lived is today deep in the city and caught in a triangle between two intersecting overhead freeways. The nine hundred block of West Twenty-first Street, where her cottage stood, is a run-down stretch of small, worn-out houses and two-story apartment buildings. Foliage is not absent; but trees and flowers notwithstanding, there remains scarcely a hint of the peaceful rural scene that existed when Swamiji was there. In those early days the neighborhood was on the outskirts of the city; the streets were quiet, unpaved roads, and the houses, few and far between,were amply surrounded with trees-deep-skirted palms, peppers, and blue-flowering jacarandas-gardens, and open lots. To the west and south stretched citrus groves and grain fields, and one need not have walked far to be among the farms. "It is exactly like Northern Indian winter here ,only some days a little warmer," Swamiji wrote in late December to Mary Hale; "the roses are here and the beautiful palms. Barley is in the fields, roses and many other flowers round about the cottage where I live. In her published reminiscences, Miss MacLeod describes Mrs. Blodgett’s house as "a small white cottage covered with roses" and as having "three bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and a sitting room. And in a letter to her sister, dated October 25, I899, she drew a sketch of the cottage, which is here reproduced.

The Swami delivered his second lecture in Los Angeles on the evening of Tuesday, December 12, at Unity Church, under the auspices of the Southern California Academy of Sciences. Over a thousand people attended, and the lecture, entitled "The Cosmos, or the Vedic Conception of the Universe", was a great success, creating a demand for more. The Swami himself, his health now improved, was eager to work and to teach. By this time he had no doubt moved from Miss Spencer's home to Mrs. Blodgett's small house at 921 West Twenty-first Street. Mrs. Blodgett, a widow, whom the Swami described to Mary Hale as "fat, old, extremely witty. . . and very motherly", had attended the Parliament of Religions in Chicago six years earlier, and had there heard him give his first talk to the American people. In Chicago she had acquired a large coloured poster of him, which she had hung in her Los Angeles home, never dreaming that the great Swami himself would one day be her guest.

Swamiji’s life at Mrs. Blodgett’s was simple, relaxed, and filled with the peace that he himself brought to it. "What a breath of the Infinite he always brings with him! Miss MacLeod was to write to Mary Hale a month or two later. And indeed to the homeliest of everyday events he lent an indefinable brightness. No moment in his presence was an ordinary one, and this not because he covered whatever illness, sorrow, or worry he may have felt at the time with a veneer of cheerfulness, but because he transcended every distress of mind or body and entered freely into the state of divine joy that was natural to him. Again and again one finds Swamiji responding to adverse circumstances of his life and mission with a cry of anguish or despair, for his heart was intensely human; yet again and again one finds him at the same time filled with a transcendent bliss and imparting that bliss to others. "No harm in the world in my being happy, in being miserable, but others must not catch it," he had written in his letter of December 6, 1899, to Sister Nivedita, and the passage clearly sounds the basic theme of his life: "If you are really ready to take the world’s burden, take it by all means. But do not let us hear your groans and curses. Do not frighten us with your sufferings, so that we come to feel we were better off with our own burdens. The man who really takes the burden, blesses the world and goes his own way. He has not a word of condemnation, a word of criticism, not because there was no evil but that he has taken it on his own shoulders, willingly, voluntarily, It is the Saviour who should `go his way rejoicing,’ and not the saved. . . . Come ye that are heavily laden and lay all your burden on me and then do whatever you like and be happy and forget that I ever existed.

This letter, which serves as a memoir, was first published in Vedanta and the West of November/December 1953, and will bear requiting here in part:_x000d_ I am ever recalling those swift, bright days in that never to be forgotten winter, lived in simple freedom and kind¬liness, We could not choose but to be happy and good. . . . I knew him personally but a short time, yet in that time I could but see in a hundred ways the child side of Swamiji’s character which was a constant appeal to the Mother quality in all good women. He depended on those near him in a way which brought him very near one’s heart. Possessing as he did an almost inexhaustible knowl¬edge of things old as the world, a sage and philosopher, he yet appeared to me utterly to lack the commercial knowledge which so distinguish men of the Western world! You were constantly rendering him some ap¬parently trifling service in the everyday homely happenings of life, he in some small way requiring to be set right. . One day busy with my work and Swamiji absorbed with his curries and chapatties, I spoke to him of you when he said: "Ah yes! Joe is the sweetest spirit of us all." . . . Ah, those pleasant "tea party" days, as you used to call them. How we used to laugh! Do you remember the time he was showing me how he wound his turban about his head and you were begging him to hasten as he was already due at a lecture. I said, "Swamiji, don’t hurry. Like the man on his way to be hung and the crowd jostling each other to reach the place of execution who called out, `Don’t hurry, there will be nothing interesting till I get there!’-I assure you, Swami, there will be nothing interesting till you get there!" This so pleased him that often afterwards he would say: "There will be nothing interesting till I get there"-and laugh like a boy.

Just now I recall a morning when quite an audience had gathered at our house to listen to the learned Hindu who was sitting with downcast eyes and impenetrable face while his audience waited. His meditation over, he raised his eyes to Mrs. Leggett’s and asked like a simple child: "What shall I say?" This gifted man possessing the subtle power of delighting an intellectual audience of cultured men and women asking for a theme! And there appeared to me in the question an exquisite touch of confidence in her judgment. An interesting portion of the day you lost in the early mornings when you and your sister were sleeping. He would come in for his morning plunge in the bath and soon his deep voice would be heard in solemn chant. Though Sanskrit is an unknown tongue to me I caught the spirit of it all, and these morning devotions are among my sweetest recollections of the great Hindu. In the homely old-fashioned kitchen you and I have seen Swamiji at his best.

I heard very few of Swamiji’s public lectures; my age and household duties gave me no choice but like Martha to sit in the house. Were you present at a lecture when one of those ladies who love to make themselves conspicuous by some ill-timed remark asked: "Swami, who is it that supports the monks in your country? There are so many of them, you know." Like a flash Swami replied: "The same who support the clergy in your country, Madam -the women!" The audience laughed and Swamiji proceeded with his lecture.

There was a difference of opinion as to whether or not Josephine MacLeod and her sister, who was to come from New Work at the beginning of 1900, heard Swamiji chanting in his morning bath. Joe, who should have known, believed they did. "Every morning," she wrote in her reminiscences, "we would hear Swami chanting his Sanskrit from the bath, which was just off the kitchen. He would come out with tousled hair and get ready for breakfast," she continued. "Mrs. Blodgett made delicious pancakes, and these we would eat at the kitchen table, Swami sitting with us; and such discourses he would have with Mrs. Blodgett, such repartee and wit, she talking of the villainy of men and he talking of oven the greater wickedness of women!

And there was one early morning, special for its date¬December 21, the solar New Year-which Miss MacLeod does not mention in her memoirs, but of which she wrote to Mrs. Bull: "Swamiji and I greeted each other, dear S. S., this morning with `a happy New Year’ after which we greeted the Sun, while he recited the Gayatri!

Yet quiet as Swamiji was, one can well imagine that guests were often invited in the evenings to meet him. He must also have been entertained in other homes, and on one occasion that we know of he went to the theater. "On Saturday [December 23] we are going to see `My friend from India,’ the farce on Swamiji!" Miss MacLeod wrote to Sister Nivedita, and added, "It will be screaming fun! & good relaxation after all his lectures.

To be sure, this three-act play was not an intellectual experience. Nor, strictly speaking, was it "farce on Swamiji " Rather, it was a satire of sorts on New York Society’s lionizing of him and had been written, as Mrs. Hansbrough later recounted, "as a result of his first visit to the United States." The impression that New York’s Four Hundred had "taken up" Swamiji was so prevalent in America that shortly after his death an Iowan newspaper referred to him as "the Hindoo monk and philosopher, who preached himself into New York’s exclusive Society . . . [which] took him up as a `fad’ and lionized him. Because "My Friend from India" was based on this "lionization" and because Swamiji was highly amused by the play, the reader may like to know what it was about.

The action, all of which takes place in a richly furnished library in a Madison Avenue residence, concerns a rough-and¬tumble nouveau-riche widower from Kansas City, his twice¬widowed sister, his son, and his two daughters. For years the father has tried, for the sake of his family, to break into New York High Society, without the slightest success. One morning, for reasons we need not go into, the son dresses a new acquaintance of his, who happens to be a barber, in a yellow silk bedspread and introduces him to the family as "my friend from India"-a Bostonian who "has. been studying the mysticism of the East and has learned all there is to know of Theosophy and attained that most exalted state, Nirvana." The father at once hits upon a plan. "It’s one of those things," he exclaims, "a freak that society is craving for! It’s a brand new one, and it’s dropped right into my hand. I’ll nail him and work it for all it’s worth." The women of the family are enchanted to find a mystic in the house, and in no time the father gives the story to the newspapers, which blaze forth with headlines. "Aha!" cries the father. "We’ve got ‘em now, girls." "Who, papa?" "Who? Society, of course." And, to the son’s horror, invitations to a reception for the disguised barber are sent out to the cream of the Four Hundred. All the women in the family buy costly, and, as it happens, identical, yellow gowns. The barber is similarly outfitted; and a large part of the play’s hilarity depends upon the numerous mistakes in identity that ensue. A few Christian ministers, both genuine and spurious, are mixed into the muddle for good measure, and confusion piles upon confusion. But in the end, all is straightened out. By a happy fluke, the invitations to the reception had not been mailed; the young people, as well as the aunt, are betrothed to the choice of their hearts; social aspirations are forgotten, and the father goes back to Kansas City, where of course he has wanted to be all along. Clearly, none of these carryings-on had anything to do with Swamiji, except-and this is the point to be noted-there was no question in anyone’s mind that if the invitations had gone out, New York’s Four Hundred would have accepted them with alacrity, drawn irresistibly by the lure of the yellow robe.

"The play was really very funny," Mrs. Hansbrough assures us, "and Swamiji enjoyed it hugely. Professor Baumgardt [who had been the party’s host] said he had never seen anyone laugh so hard or so much."

One might mention in passing that Swamiji went also to a vaudeville in Los Angeles. (For the benefit of youthful readers, I should perhaps say that at the turn of the century, and on through the twenties, vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States-and often the best. The term vaudeville applied in America to a variety of short, unrelated’ performances by singers, dancers, acrobats, fancy bicyclists, trained dogs, jugglers, dramatic artists of all sorts, and, inevitably, magicians. The standard was generally high. Indeed, it was not considered at all demeaning or unusual for top-notch theatrical talent to tour the vaudeville circuit.)

Yesterday a lady and daughter of sixteen called, both seemingly very cultivated Eastern women, one judged at once by the accent and by the voice, and told him they had attended his lectures in London three years before. The child was so impressed by his religion that she adopted his precepts and directed her life as nearly as possible by them and concluded to use her talents for dancing, make her living and express to the world the sublimity of art, religion etc. It seemed an original point of view. This young girl had never spoken to Swami before, but wanted him to go and see her dance. We all went last evening to a vaudeville where her grace was wonderful, but I was painfully impressed by the contortions part of her work. Her body seemed a bit of chiffon, she could do with it as if there were no bone, hold her foot at the back of her head, standing on the other toe. It made me ache with sympathy instead of giving enjoyment of grace and harmony. I think Vedanta seems to have affected many others with a sort of necessity for contortioning instead of giving them an easy balance of character.

But the young contortionist had probably put her whole soul into that performance for Swamiji-a performance he had gone out of his way to see simply because she had asked him.

The action, all of which takes place in a richly furnished library in a Madison Avenue residence, concerns a rough-and¬tumble nouveau-riche widower from Kansas City, his twice¬widowed sister, his son, and his two daughters. For years the father has tried, for the sake of his family, to break into New York High Society, without the slightest success. One morning, for reasons we need not go into, the son dresses a new acquaintance of his, who happens to be a barber, in a yellow silk bedspread and introduces him to the family as "my friend from India"-a Bostonian who "has. been studying the mysticism of the East and has learned all there is to know of Theosophy and attained that most exalted state, Nirvana." The father at once hits upon a plan. "It’s one of those things," he exclaims, "a freak that society is craving for! It’s a brand new one, and it’s dropped right into my hand. I’ll nail him and work it for all it’s worth." The women of the family are enchanted to find a mystic in the house, and in no time the father gives the story to the newspapers, which blaze forth with headlines. "Aha!" cries the father. "We’ve got ‘em now, girls." "Who, papa?" "Who? Society, of course." And, to the son’s horror, invitations to a reception for the disguised barber are sent out to the cream of the Four Hundred. All the women in the family buy costly, and, as it happens, identical, yellow gowns. The barber is similarly outfitted; and a large part of the play’s hilarity depends upon the numerous mistakes in identity that ensue. A few Christian ministers, both genuine and spurious, are mixed into the muddle for good measure, and confusion piles upon confusion. But in the end, all is straightened out. By a happy fluke, the invitations to the reception had not been mailed; the young people, as well as the aunt, are betrothed to the choice of their hearts; social aspirations are forgotten, and the father goes back to Kansas City, where of course he has wanted to be all along. Clearly, none of these carryings-on had anything to do with Swamiji, except-and this is the point to be noted-there was no question in anyone’s mind that if the invitations had gone out, New York’s Four Hundred would have accepted them with alacrity, drawn irresistibly by the lure of the yellow robe.

"The play was really very funny," Mrs. Hansbrough assures us, "and Swamiji enjoyed it hugely. Professor Baumgardt [who had been the party’s host] said he had never seen anyone laugh so hard or so much."

Unhappily, the transcripts of Swamiji’s three classes on "Applied Psychology" are not available; yet transcripts there once were, for as Mrs. Hansbrough tells us, these classes were all taken down in shorthand. "At first," she said, "we had the nephew of Mrs. Bagley, with whom Swamiji had stayed in Detroit [in 1894], to take notes. I remember that he said Swamiji was `very hard to follow." Later the Mead sister engaged a Miss McClary, who went everywhere that Swamiji lectured or held classes, her pencil busy. In addition, we read in the valuable article "Swami Vivekananda in Southern California" by Brahmacharini Usha (Vedanta and the West, No. I58) that Helen Mead recorded a number of his talks. Thus almost from the beginning to the end of Swamiji’s work in southern California there was no dearth of transcripts, all of which-at least all that are available today-are particularly excellent and certainly of much value. According to Mrs. Hansbrough, Sister Nivedita sent for them all, and subsequently some were published in the Brahmavadin and Prabuddha Bharata and later in the complete Works. What became of the rest is a question one might well ponder.

It is possible that Swamiji now’ moved his living quarters to the Home of Truth, which could accommodate, with board, "students and patients" and surely teachers and healers as well. It is not certain, however, that he did so. In the Life one reads: "At the special request of an association known as the `Home of Truth’ he spent nearly a month at its headquarters in Loss Angeles, and held many classes there, and gave several public lectures at which, every time, more than a thousand people attended. But as has been pointed out in Vedanta and the West (No. I58), our available sources of information provide no other reference to Swamiji’s having lived at the Los Angeles Home of Truth. There are, in fact, indications to the contrary. For instance, in a letter written on December 27 he still refers to Mrs. Blodgett as his hostess. Further, in Mr. Bransby’s letter to Mr. Allan there is no mention that Swamiji had lived at the Home of Truth. Again, there is no apparent reason why he would have lived there. The Home was within easy walking distance of 921 West Twenty-first Street; it was only a little over half a mile away, and by this time half a mile to Swamiji was a mere nothing. He could have walked to his morning class, and after it was over he could have walked back to rush into Mrs. Blodgett’s kitchen with a happy "Now we will cook!" However, the matter of whether Swamiji stayed or did not stay at the Home of Truth in Los Angeles cannot be settled with finality on the basis of our present knowledge. Only one thing is certain: he did not spend-he could not have spent "nearly a month at its headquarters."

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA AT THE_x000d_ LOS ANGELES HOME_x000d_ Of all the Vedantist missionaries who have visited this country probably Vivekananda is the most widely known, because he has done the most public works here and was such a notable figure at the World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago. The . Other Swamis who are working in America were sent here by Vivekananda, but all of them are either directly or indirectly the disciples of one great teacher, Ramakrishna, who was an extreme Ascetic and at the same time an illumined soul, one might almost be tempted to say in spite of his Asceticism, for the Swami Vivekananda after twenty years’ experience as an Ascetic has come to the conclusion that it is a mistake and not the road that leads to freedom. The Swami himself looks anything but an Ascetic. He reminds one rather of the good hearty monks one reads about as having flourished at the time of the Crusades.

The Hindoo missionaries are not among us to convert us to a better religion than Christ gave us, but rather in the name of religion itself to show us that there is in reality but one religion, and that we can do no better than to put in practice what we profess to believe. We had eight lectures at the Home by the Swami and all were intensely interesting, though a few malcontents complained because he did not give some short cuts into the Kingdom [of Heaven] and show an easy way to the attainment of mental powers; instead he would say, "Go home and promise yourself that you will not worry for a whole month even though the maid breaks all your best china."

Getting on the platform without a moment’s preparation he would soon be in the midst of his subject, sometimes becoming almost tragic as his mind would wander from deep metaphysics to the prevailing condition in Christian countries today who go and seek to reform Filipinos with the swords in one hand and the Bible in the other, or in South Africa allow children of the same father to cut each other to pieces. To contrast this condition of things he described what took place during the last famine in India where men would die of starvation beside their cattle rather than stretch forth a hand to kill. (Will Unity readers remember the fifty million Hindoos who are starving today and send them a blessing?)

Instead of trying to give much of what we heard from the Swami direct, I will append a few of the sayings of his master, Ramakrishna, that will better indicate the nature of his teaching. His chief aim seems to be to encourage people in living simple, quiet wholesome lives -that the life shall be the religion, not something separate and apart.

To the true mother he gives the highest place, counting her as more to be esteemed than those who simply run around teaching. "Anyone can talk," he said, "but if I had to look after a baby, I could not endure existence for more than three days." Frequently he would speak of the "mother" as we speak of the "father," and would say "the mother will take care of us," or "the mother will look after things."

We had a lecture on Christmas day from the Swami entitled, "Christ’s Mission to the World," and a better one on this subject I never heard. No Christian minister could have presented Jesus as a character worthy (of) the greatest reverence more eloquently or more powerfully than did this learned Hindoo, who told us that in this country on account of his dark skin he has been refused admission to hotels, and even barbers have sometimes objected to shave him. Is it any wonder that our "heathen" brethren never fail to make mention of this fact that even "our" Master was an Oriental?_x000d_ [Here was appended a section entitled, "A Few of the Sayings of Ramakrishna." Eleven sayings were given.]

It could well have been Swamiji’s Christmas Day lecture, "Christ’s Message to the World"-rather than "Christ, the Messenger," delivered nearly two weeks later at Payne’s Hall-to which Miss MacLeod, impressed as much by his childlike simplicity as by his radiant and awesome power, refers in her reminiscences. "Swami lectured a great number of times at the Home of Truth and in various halls," she wrote, "but perhaps the most outstanding lecture I ever heard was his talk on `Jesus of Nazareth,’ when he seemed to radiate a white light from head to foot, so lost was he in the wonder and the power of Christ. I was so impressed with this obvious halo that I did not speak to him on the way back for fear of interrupting, as I thought, the great thoughts that were still in his mind. Suddenly he said to me, `I know how it is done.’ I said, `How what is done?’ `How they make mulligatawny soup! They put a bay leaf in it,’ he told me. That utter lack of self consciousness, of self importance, was perhaps one of his outstanding characteristics. Indeed, Swamiji, as he himself had once said of his Master, was not "holy"; he had become identified with holiness.

Once relating this story to a monk of the Ramakrishna Order-Swami Ashokananda-Miss MacLeod told more of Swamiji’s sudden insight into the mysteries of mulligatawny soup, a dish, incidentally, of Tamil origin, whose name means "black-pepper water." "They put the bay leaf into it afterward, not before," Swamiji had exclaimed. "That is how they get, the special flavour!"_x000d_ (Swami Ashokananda later spoke of how a person of Swamiji’s spiritual stature saw everything so permeated with the being and presence of divinity that the thought of such matters as mulligatawny soup could never interrupt or obstruct his thought of God. "Swamiji might go down deep in the thought of God and yet still think about the seasoning for this black-pepper water; and, conversely, from the thought of black-pepper water he could again plunge deep into the thought of God.")

Miss MacLeod also related the same story to Mme Paul Verdier, a fellow Vedantin, who very kindly gave me access to her notes. In this version, Miss MacLeod included the information that she and Swamiji had been walking back from the lecture on Christ to Mrs. Blodgett’s, a detail that lends support to the view that the lecture had been given at the nearby Home of Truth rather than at the far more distant Payne’s Hall. (She would have been walking, one thinks, a little behind Swamiji, for, as she told Swami Ashokananda, this was her custom. Jovial and easy though he was, one instinctively, naturally, treated him with deep respect. One felt always the essential majesty and profundity of his being.)

Another incident, which Miss MacLeod did not relate in her published reminiscences, but which she told to Mme Verdier, may also have reference to this same lecture on,Christ. It took place, in any case, after a lecture or class during which Swamiji had risen to "a very high spiritual state." At the close a young man rushed forward and prostrated at Swamiji’s feet, touching him. As though stung, Swamiji jumped back. "Don’t ever do that!" he admonished him with vehemence; "Don’t ever do that again!"69 Miss MacLeod gave no explanation. But as is well known, in India at least, there is a state of spiritual exalta¬tion, familiar to Avataras and saints, in which the touch of a hand even slightly soiled by the world can be painful in the extreme. Another explanation might be that the touch could communicate to the boy far more spiritual power than he would be able safely to contain.

At the beginning of the year Swamiji moved his classes to Payne’s Hall, a secular and uncommitted auditorium situated a block south of Blanchard Hall, above the Women’s Exchange. In Mrs. Hansbrough’s words, "We . . . moved from the chapel in the Home of Truth because Swamiji did not feel free to speak critically of metaphysical ideas from their platform.

By pondering over various confused and contradictory announcements in the Los Angeles papers, one is able to make out with a fair degree of certainty that Swamiji’s classes at Payne’s Hall were held on the mornings of January 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 at ten o’clock and that fifty cents admission was charged for each class. The titles of his talks of January 2, 3, and 6 were unannounced and are today unknown; but those of January 4 and 5 were, respectively, "What Brings Success" and "We Ourselves: ‘The former of these two is, very probably, pub¬lished in the Complete Works under the title "Work and Its Secret." The latter, a magnificent call to Self -realization, was the only class in the Payne’s Hall series reported in the newspapers. The report, a curiously truncated one in the Timer of January 6, corresponds in its entirety with the first two paragraphs of "The Open Secret," as published in the Com¬plete Works. Thus, as has been pointed out in Vedanta and the West (No. 158), "The Open Secret" can be established as being a transcript of "We Ourselves." A further comparison of an early typescript of "We Ourselves" (which is in the archives of the Vedanta Society of Northern California) with "The Open Secret" removes any possibility of doubt on this point: from beginning to end the two transcriptions are, with one or two exceptions, word for word the same. (The exceptions are small but not insignificant. For instance, where Swamiji is quoted in "The Open Secret" as saying "But let us repeat: `I am It; I am It,’ " he is quoted in the typescript of "We Ourselves" as saying more ringingly and rousingly "Stand up and say, `I am He. I am He.’ " This is perhaps too small a difference to mention; yet in those words "stand up" there resounds a vital note of Swamiji’s message, a note that rings, indeed peals, throughout his entire mission-and perhaps nowhere so emphatically as in the lectures he was later to give in San Francisco.)

At the beginning of the year 1900, Swamiji moved his classes from the Home of Truth, from whose platform he did not feet free to speak critically of metaphysical teachings, to Payne's Hall, a secular auditorium situated in the heart of town. His classes there were held on the mornings of January 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 at ten o'clock, but only the titles of the classes of January 4 and 5 are known; they were respectively: "What Brings Success" and "We Ourselves". This first week of the year was a full one for the Swami. In addition to these morning classes, he gave two evening lectures in the auditorium of the Blanchard Building. The first, delivered on Tuesday, January 2, was entitled "India and Its People" (or "The People of India"), and the second, delivered on Saturday, January 6, "The History of India".

By December 23 (after the "Applied’Psychology" classes) he could write to Sister Nivedita, "The wheel is turning up, Mother is working it up. She cannot let me go before Her work is done-and that is the secret. And four days later, with a sudden air of relief, much as though a cloud had moved away, he wrote to Mrs. Bull, "I am much better in health¬able enough to work once more. I have started work already, and have sent some money-Rs. 1,300 [about $420] already -as expenses for the law suit. I shall send more, if they need it. On this same day, December 27, he wrote with exuberance to Christine. "I am making money fast---25$ a day now. Soon I will work more and get 50$ a day. In San Francisco I hope to do better, where I go in two or three weeks. And after many more lectures and classes, he wrote on January 17 to Mrs. Bull, "I have been able to remit Rs.2,000 [about $645] to Saradananda, with the help of Miss MacLeod and Mrs. Leggett. OF course they contributed the best part. The rest was got by lectures. . . . Well, I came here principally for health. I have got it-in addition I got Rs. 2,000 to defray the law expenses. Good. (According to her own memory, Miss MacLeod had been able to contribute a good deal. Years later she told Swami Ashokananda that one day in Los Angeles Swamiji had received a letter from India and seemed very depressed. She asked him what was wrong, and he answered that the Math had no money, his brothers not enough to eat. At once she told him that she had saved $800 and would give it to him. This sum, coincidentally, was the same as that which she had earlier been able to give him in India for the Udbodhan.)

Two of Swamiji’s original purposes in coming to Los Angeles-the restoration of his health and the collection of funds-had been accomplished. Now again he wanted to return to India. This time not to raise money or to expand his work, but to retire for good. In his letter of January 17 to Mrs. Bull, in whose counsel he had an almost childlike faith, he wrote: "It is becoming clearer to me-that I lay down all the concerns of the Math and for a time go back to my mother."_x000d_ She has suffered much through me [he continued]. I must try to smooth her last days. . . . I have become practical at least compared to the visionary dreams of Joe and Margot [both of whom had prophesied a "change in destiny" for Swamiji and India]. Let them work their dreams out for me-they are not more than dreams. I want to make out a trust-deed of the Math in the names of Saradananda, Brahmananda and yourself. I will do it as soon as I get the papers from Saradananda. Then I am quits. I want rest, a meal, a few books, and I want to do some scholarly work. Mother shows this light vividly now. . . . Joe and Margot are great souls, but to you Mother is now sending the light for my guidance. Do you see light? What do you advise? At least do not go out of this country without sending me home.

(There seems a strangeness in Swamiji’s wish at this time to include Mrs. Bull, an American woman, as a trustee of the Belur Math. Perhaps one of the reasons for his choice was her combination of deep devotion and business acumen. In his letter of December 27, 1899, he had written to her: "I want only some clear business head to take care of the details as I push onwards and work on. I am afraid it will be a long time to find such in India, and if there are any, they ought to be educated by somebody from the West Among Swamiji’s friends in the West who possessed both a clear business head and devotion to Sri Ramakrishna seems to have been only Mrs. Bull. "You . Have been one friend with whom Shri Ramakrishna has become the goal of life;" he wrote to her in a letter of March 7, "that is the secret of my trust in you. However, as it turned out, by the time the terms of Swamiji’s trust deed had been given more or less final form, Mrs. Bull’s name had been dropped, perhaps at her own wish, from the list of trustees.)

As for his lecturing work in the West, Swamiji felt that, too, was done. "Now it occurs to me that my mission from the platform is finished, and I need not break my health again by that sort of work. . . . I cannot any more tell from the platform. . . . I am glad. I want rest; not that I am tired, but the next _x000d_ phase will be the miraculous touch and not the tangue-like Ramakrishna’s. . . . I am resigned. Only get me out to India, won’t you? Mother will make you do it, I am sure.

But the Divine Mother did no such thing. Her work in California was not yet done. As for Mrs. Bull’s part, she, too, may have felt that from the standpoint of Swamiji’s health the time had not come for him to return to India. It is indeed most likely that she consulted Swami Saradananda on this point. On February 22 the Swami wrote to her from India in reply to a letter of hers dated January 23 (by which time she could have received Swamiji’s plea): "I cannot feel that this [is] the moment for the Swamiji to come back here. He will be dragged down again by all these family discussions [the legal trouble with Swamiji’s aunt and her people], unless he is prefectly self adjusted.

In his letter of December 27 to Sister Christine he had drawn, partly perhaps to please her, an idyllic picture of his retirement "a little place in the Himalayas . . . a grand view of the eternal snows . . . springs and a tiny lake . . . the Himalayan cedar forests-and flowers flowers everywhere. I will have my litte cottage in the middle, my vegetable gardens, which I will work myself-and-and-and-my books-and see the face of man only once in a great while. And the world may go to ruin round about my ears-I would not care. I will have done with all my work-secular or spiritual-and retire. But in another sentence this vision was wiped away by his knowledge, inescapable even in fantasy, of his meaning on earth. "Curious-all my dreams about my own happiness are as it were bound to come to nothing-but about others’ well being-they as a rule prove true."

There can be little doubt that if so great and free a soul as Swami Vivekananda had strongly wanted to leave California, nothing could have prevented him. His mission held him; and his mission, his inmost will, and the divine will were one. Despite his longing for total peace, which was beginning to grow more and more insistent as he approached the end of his life, he resigned himself to this threefold power-the same that had brought him to earth. "I am afraid that the rest and peace I seek for will never come," he wrote to Sister Christine on January 24.* "But Mother does good to others through me, at least some to my native land, and it is easier to be reconciled to one’s fate as a sacrifice. . . . The great worship is going on-no one can see its meaning except that it is a great sacrifice. . . . I am determined now to be a willing one._x000d_ _x000d_ * This passage taken from Swamiji’s letter of January 24, 1900, to Sister Christine is given verbatim in the Complete Works as a letter of the same date to Nivedita. Did Swamiji write exactly the same passage to Nivedita on January 24 as he did to Christine? One is more inclined to think that there has been some mix-up of letters. In any event, Swamiji’s original letter to Sister Christine is available and indisputably addressed to her.

... Hindu missionaries are not among us to convert us to a better religion than what Christ gave us, but rather in the name of religion itself, to show us that there is in reality but one Religion, and that we can do no better than to put into practice what we profess to believe. We had eight lectures at the Home by the Swami Vivekananda, and all were intensely interesting.... There is combined in the Swami Vivekananda the learning of a university-president, the dignity of an archbishop, with the grace and winsomeness of a free and natural child. Getting upon the platform without a moment's preparation, he would soon be in the midst of his subject, sometimes becoming almost tragic as his mind would wander from deep metaphysics to the prevailing conditions in Christian countries of today, whose people go and seek to reform the Filipinos with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, or in South Africa allow children of the same Father to cut each other to pieces In contrast to this condition of things, he described what took place during the last great famine in India where men would die of starvation beside their. Cattle (cows) rather than stretch forth a hand to kill….

... I knew him personally but a short time, yet in that short time I could but see in a hundred ways the child side of Swamiji's character, which was a constant appeal to the Mother quality in all good women. He depended upon those near him in a way which brought him very near to one's heart.... He would come horse from a lecture where he was compelled to break away from his audience, so eagerly would they gather around him — come rushing into the kitchen like a boy released from school, with, "Now we will cook". The prophet and sage would disappear to reveal the child side or simplicity of character.

Wherever the Swami went in the West, he was sought after not only as a great religious teacher, but as an extraordinary person-ality, one who could bring life to any gathering and brightness to any household. Although, in 1900, Los Angeles was not a large and cultured city compared with the cities of the East Coast, the Swami was no doubt lavishly entertained from time to time. We know, for instance, that in December of 1899 he spent a week or so with the Stimsons, a wealthy family, to whom Mrs. Blodgett had introduced him and who lived in a mansion on the fashionable Figueroa Street. We know also that on December 23, a morning reception was held for him by a Mrs. Caroline M. Severance, to which she invited ‘a number of 'advanced' women to meet him". Mrs. Severance was not a stranger to the Swami; she had, indeed, attended one of his first lectures in America — his talk delivered in Salem, Massachusetts, in the days before the Parliament of Religions.

To Mrs. G. W. Hale_x000d_ THE CALIFORNIA LIMITED_x000d_ Snta Fe Route_x000d_ 1 December 1899_x000d_ My dear Mother,_x000d_ Excuse this scrawl as the train is dancing._x000d_ I passed a good night and hope to have a good time all through. With all love for the sisters and Mr. [Clarence] Wool¬ley and Bud and Father Pope. _x000d_ With love,_x000d_ Vivekananda

To Sister Nivedita_x000d_ THE CALIFORNIA LIMITED_x000d_ Santa Fe Route_x000d_ December 2nd, 1899_x000d_ My dear Margot,_x000d_ Two nights are passed__today the third will come. If it proves as pleasant and somnolent as the last two, I [shall] re¬joice._x000d_ The scenery today I am passing through is much like the neighborhood of Delhi, the beginning of a big desert, bleak hills, scanty, thorny shrubs, very little water. The little streams are frozen, but during the middle of the day it is hot. Must be [illegible] I presume, in summer._x000d_ I send this to the care of Mrs. Adams, as I don't know your address. The Chicago work will not give you much, I am sure, except in education in the methods here, which I am sure will work out soon._x000d_ With all love and blessings,_x000d_ Vivekananda

A PRINCE FROM INDIA_x000d_ LOS ANGELES is to be royally favored, in a very shorttime, in the visit of Swami Vivekananda to this city. He is in very truth, an Indian Prince-Prince in intellect, in knowledge and in that strange realm we vaguely call spiritual. There will be lectures presumably, and other mediums through which the men and women of the extreme Western city may drink from the fountain of the Eastern Seer’s rare mind. Swami Vivekananda has awakened the interest of a number of the most prominent society people-men and women of culture in Los Angeles. If he does not provide a new sensation under the sun then there is nothing in indications._x000d_ Swami Vivekananda is the red-coated Indian monk who spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Unlike other wise men from the East he comes not to salute the rising of an Occidental luminary, but to scatter amongst younger peoples the long-garnered lore of his own race._x000d_ A great scholar pointed out the other day the curious effect that the discovery of Sanscrit had had on the imagination of Indo-European nations. From the day that Sir William Jones found that it was easier to translate a Sanscrit play (sakoontalaly kalidas) [Sakuntala by Kalidasa] into Latin first and then into English, till now, there has been a steady growth of the feeling that Hindu, Persian, Greek, Roman and Teuton are one in blood. We are all Aryan. Roman law, British power, Greek literature, Persian arts, and Indian wisdom are all branches that have been acquired by various members of the family for the common good. None of them ever die. They may seem to be dead. They only bide their time, like the statues in the museum, till the hour strikes in their hearing, and they may step down from their pedestals warm with life._x000d_ For the most part, it is the scholar that bids a latent culture speak. It is the great savants that translate Plato, and are critical of Persian poets, and treat of the relation of Roman law to modern life._x000d_ But India appears to be an exception. Such are the social customs of that curious country, and such is the tenacity of the national character, that no science or scheme of things once formulated there seems ever to be lost. Now this is very strange indeed, when we think of it. Who of us cares to acquaint himself with mediaeval alchemy? Yet in Benares-the Rome of Asia, as it has been called--exist learned men whose pride it is today that they are competent to restore all the intricate instruments of an old-time observatory. And so it may well seem absurd to the grave Eastern mind that we should be training students and paying professors to drink deep into the Sanscrit lore of life as if it were a branch of antiquity, when it is actually a living philosophy of conduct, an active discipline, a stern ideal of daily living at this moment in India, the country of its birth._x000d_ For it is too late in the day to doubt that the Indian wisdom has really existed, or that it was indeed, wisdom. Schopenhauer, Emerson, Burnouf, Deussen and Max Muller would all have lived in vain if we could question this fact. But after all the scholar can give little but dry bones! Emerson-of this list-comes nearest to being a living voice. Edwin Arnold, in his Light of Asia, unlike the grave persons of the libraries, touches the emotional note, and we know how we respond!_x000d_ These are the interpreters that we desire. And such, it is said, is Mr. Swami Vivekananda. Those who saw him at the World’s Fair in 1893, speak of him as a young man, thirty or thereabouts, a born orator, who seemed charged with the Philosophy of the Vedanta. Apparently he was deeply versed in Sanscrit itself; then he had sat long, as it seemed, at the feet of great sages, and finally he had wandered on foot over thousands of miles of his own country watching every manifestation of religious feeling and observance and acquiring that deep insight into human experience which is all-important to the religious teacher._x000d_ Six years have come and gone, however, since the World’s Fair and it is reasonable to assume that the Swami’s strange personality has undergone some changes in those years. For one thing, he has in the interval seen many new countries and completed the circuit of the globe._x000d_ Is he as Oriental as ever in his ideas? Or has he become somewhat cosmopolitan? It will be interesting to hear what this vigorous mind has carried away from our Western World. Above all, we shall be glad to have an opportunity of comparing the importance of the grand Occidental motive-the Perfecting of Life-as it stands related in his mind to the Eastern motive-Freedom and Renunciation. It is a strange element to come into our modern world-a man who has lived the life of wisdom in forests and mountains, and who, nevertheless, is able to cope with our manners and customs, with our senti¬ments and interests, like one of the rest of us._x000d_ He was the first monk to brave [leave?] India’s shores on a mission of evangelization to the rest of the world¬ and his country received him back with acclaim. Religion rules everything there, and the papers of the day told how one of the richest of Indian Princes-the Maharajah of Ramnad-knelt at the monk’s feet as he landed once more on his soil; how six or eight ruling sovereigns were proud to draw the carriage that contained him; and how the people of Madras gave him an ovation not equalled even on the occasion of the visit of the Prince of Wales._x000d_ His journey through his own country in the year 1897 judging from a little book published by the Christian Literature Society of Madras-was a triumphal progress from beginning to end. It is evident that the religious preacher of the palm-land is an uncrowned king.

In the early afternoon of December 3 Swamiji arrived in this Eden of America. It was a sunny day with only a few clouds scattered in the sky. The temperature was in the sixties and the breeze was gentle. There can be little doubt that Josephine MacLeod met him at the railway depot and that she took him, not to Mrs. Blodgett’s, as has heretofore been supposed, but to the home of a Miss Spencer. "Swami & I are to spend the first week with Miss Spencer, who has spent the last 10 years in nursing a dying mother," Miss MacLeod had written to Mrs. Bull on November 26 and had added, "After that we will come to stay with Mrs. Blodgett.

The Swami arrived in Los Angeles in the early afternoon of December 3. Here he was to be the guest of Mrs. S. K. Blodgett, at whose house Miss MacLeod had come from Ridgely in the early part of October 1899, in order to nurse her brother, who lay there fatally ill. Although Taylor MacLeod had died early in November, Miss MacLeod had stayed on and, at Mrs. Blodgett's request, had urged the Swami to come. He had concurred, thinking, perhaps, more of his work than of his health. In fact, as Miss MacLeod had left Ridgely, the Swami blessed her in Sanskrit and then called out as she drove off: "Get up some classes and I will come." This was the first intimation that after months of rest he once again felt impelled to carry his message to wider fields. And, indeed, his going to California was to open one of the momentous chapters of his life. Though he came unobtrusively, without announcing a _x000d_ new programme, and though he seemed physically incapable of doing hard work any longer, one marvels to witness him again rising to the awe-inspiring heights of his ministry with his wonted power, ever devoted to doing "Mother's work" as commissioned by his Master.

Before coming to stay with Mrs. Blodgett, the Swami, together with Miss MacLeod, first spent a week at the home of a Miss Spencer, who became one of his fervent disciples. Not much is known as to who this Miss Spencer was, except that she had spent the foregoing ten years nursing her blind and dying mother — which may reveal a character of self-sacrifice and devotion. While in her home, the Swami was wont to sit on the floor beside the aged and dying lady, and at Miss Spencer's question why he seemed so interested in her mother, he told her that death, like birth, was a mystery; when the body approaches dissolution, the sense activities are stilled as the soul gradually passes to the life beyond. This state, so sad and repulsive to a mind limited to external appearances, was to the Swami's spiritual insight pregnant with interest and significance.

During his first four or five days in Los Angeles, Swamiji clearly did other things besides sitting with the aged Mrs. Spencer. Miss MacLeod, for instance, must have introduced him to her newly made friends, who had been eagerly looking forward to his arrival in their city. "I was invited to meet a dozen people at Judge Cheney’s [judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court from 1885 to 1891] to tell them about India!" she had written on November 26 to Mrs. Bull. "But they were all so keen on Swamiji’s coming-that he became the pivot " Indeed, so keen on Swamiji’s coming were Judge Cheney’s guests that one of them, Mr. Bernhard R. Baumgardt, set himself to making arrangements for his first lecture in the city, engaging for the purpose Blanchard Hall- `the best in town."

To Mrs. G. W. Hale_x000d_ Los Angeles_x000d_ 6 December 1899_x000d_ My dear Mother,_x000d_ A few lines to say my safe arrival and am going to resume my usual work of lecturing here._x000d_ I am much better than I was in Chicago and hope soon to become well again._x000d_ I cannot tell you how I enjoyed once more the little visit with my American Mother and Sisters._x000d_ Harriet has scored a triumph really. I am charmed with Mr. Woolley__only hope Mary will be equally fortunate. It gives me a new lease of life to see people happy. May they all be happy._x000d_ Ever with love, your son,_x000d_ Vivekananda

Los Angeles_x000d_ 6th Dec., 1899_x000d_ Dear Margot {Nivedita},_x000d_ Your sixth has arrived, but with it yet no change in my fortune. Would change be any good, do you think? Some people are made that way, to love being miserable. If I did not break my heart over people I was born amongst, I would do it for somebody else. I am sure of that. This is the way of some, I am coming to see it. We are all after happiness, true, but that some are only happy in being unhappy--queer, is it not? There is no harm in it either, except that happiness and unhappiness are both infectious. Ingersoll said once that if he were God, he would make health catching, instead of disease, little dreaming that health is quite as catching as disease, if not more! That is the only danger. No harm in the world in my being happy, in being miserable, but others must not catch it. This is the great fact. No sooner a prophet feels miserable for the state of man than he sours his face, beats his breast, and calls upon everyone to drink tartaric acid, munch charcoal, sit upon a dung-heap covered with ashes, and speak only in groans and tears!--I find they all have been wanting. Yes, they have. If you are really ready to take the world's burden, take it by all means. But do not let us hear your groans and curses. Do not frighten us with your sufferings, so that we came to feel we were better off with our own burdens. The man who really takes the burden blesses the world and goes his own way. He has not a word of condemnation, a word of criticism, not because there was no evil but that he has taken it on his own shoulders willingly, voluntarily. It is the Saviour who should "go his way rejoicing, and not the saved"._x000d_ This is the only light I have caught this morning. This is enough if it has come to live with me and permeate my life._x000d_ Come ye that are heavy laden and lay all your burden on me, and then do whatever you like and be happy and forget that I ever existed._x000d_ Ever with love,_x000d_ Your father,_x000d_ Vivekananda

A Hindu Lecturer_x000d_ Swami Vivekananda, a member of the most ancient order of Hindu monks, will lecture this evening at Blanchard hall on "The Vedanta Philosophy or Hinduism as a Religion." Swami Vivekananda represented the Hindus at the World’s Fair in 1893, since which time he has lectured on various phases of religion in this country and in Europe, drawing many most interested listeners to his expositions of the Hindu philosophy. He is [was to have been] one of the lecturers this winter on the program of the Cambridge conference, and has also lectured before the Graduate Philosophical society of Harvard university. The lecture this evening will present a general survey of the fundamental principles underlying eastern religions and philosophical thought.

The Blanchard Building was situated in the heart of town, opposite the City Hall, and like the Carnegie Building in New York, though on a considerably smaller scale, was "devoted to Music and Art." The auditorium held eight hundred people-a sizable hall for a philosophical lecture, considering the fifty-cent admission. Yet from the account of one who was present we learn that the lecture was attended by more than six hundred people, all of whom were "enchanted: ‘ And when Swamiji spoke, another who was present tells us, one could hear a pin drop, so spellbound was the audience.

Happily, both the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald published fairly good reports of Swami Vivekananda’s first public lecture in California, and since they are, as far as we know, the only existing accounts of this talk and since neither has been heretofore reprinted in whole or in part, both are given below in their entirety. The Times article, the better of the two, read as follows:_x000d_ _x000d_ SWAMI VIVEKANANDA _x000d_ Lectures on Hindoo religion and philosophy_x000d_ ________________._x000d_ Toleration, brotherhood, and Nirvana his themes¬difference between Eastern and Western civilization. The latter desires the continuation of individuality._x000d_ ___________________x000d_ _x000d_ Hindoo philosophy is a difficult subject, and that fact doubtless accounts for the moderate size of the audience that came together, last evening, to listen to Swami Vivekananda. R. B. [B. R.] Baumgardt introduced the speaker as the apostle of toleration and a representative of the oldest religion in the world. The well-known expositor of the Hindoo philosophy, dressed in the yellow robe of the Brahmin caste, spoke in part as follows:_x000d_ "I come before you, ladies and gentlemen, to bring no new religion. I desire simply to tell you a few points that bind together all religions. I shall touch upon some things in the thought of eastern civilization that will appear strange to you and on others that I hope will appeal to you. All the religions of the world have a backbone of unity. This is the principle of philosophy and of toleration._x000d_ "Very few people in this country understand what India is. It is a country half as large as the United States and containing 300,000,000 people, speaking a number of different tongues, but all bound together by the ideas of a common religion. By these ideas the Hindoos have made their influence felt through the ages, working gently, silently, patiently, while western civilization has been conquering by force of arms. The future will show which is the more powerful-physical force or the power of ideas. The arts and sciences of the Hindoos have found their way over all the earth-their numerals, their mathe¬matical thought, their ethics. Was it not in India, there and there alone, that the doctrine of love was first preached, and not alone the doctrine of love of one’s fellow-men, but of love of every living thing, yea, even of the meanest worm that crawls under our feet. When you begin to study the arts and institutions of India, you become magnetized, fascinated. You cannot get away._x000d_ "In India, as elsewhere, we find the earliest condition one of division into little tribes. These different tribes had each its different god, its different ceremonial. But in coming in contact with one another, the tribes did not follow the course that western civilization has taken -they did not persecute each other because of these differences, but endeavored to find the germs of common ideas in all the religions. And from this endeavor arose the habit of toleration which is the keynote of the Indian religion. Truth is one, can be but one, though it may be expressed in different language._x000d_ "Another great difference between eastern and western religion lies in the reception of a philosophical and scientific view of the universe. In the West, agnosticism has been growing in late years, and with the loss of a hope in individual immortality, which the westerner is always desiring and seeking, a note of despair has crept into western thought. Ages ago, the Hindoo realized that the universe was one of law, and that, under law, all change. Therefore, an imperishable individuality is an impossibility. But this thought is not one of despair to the Hindoo. On the contrary-and this is what the westerner can least understand of eastern thought-he longs for freedom, for release from the thralldom [sic]of the senses, from the thralldom of pain and the thralldom of pleasure._x000d_ "Western civilization has sought a personal God and despaired at the loss of belief in such. The Hindoo, too, has sought. But God cannot be known to the external senses. The Infinite, the Absolute, cannot be grasped. Yet although it eludes us, we may not infer its non-existence. It exists. What is it that cannot be seen by the outward eye? The eye itself. It may behold all other things, but itself it cannot mirror. This; then, is the solution. If God may not be found by the outer senses, turn your eye inward and find, in yourself, the soul of all souls. Man himself is the All. I cannot know the fundamental reality, because I am that fundamental reality. There is no duality. This is the solution of all questions of metaphysics and ethics. Western civilization has in vain endeavored to find a reason for altruism. Here it is. I am my brother, and his pain is mine. I cannot injure him without injuring myself, or do ill to other beings without bringing that ill upon my own soul. When I have realized that I myself am the Absolute, for me there is no more death nor life nor pain nor pleasure, nor caste nor sex. How can that which is absolute die or be born? The pages of nature are turned before us like the pages of a book, and we think that we ourselves are turning, while in reality we remain ever the same."

The report of this lecture in the Los Angeles Herald was considerably more sketchy than the above; it contains, however, some additional impressions that one is glad to have, such as the comparison between Swamiji’s Sanskrit and the rippling Latin of Horace:_x000d_ THE SWAMI ON THE VEDAS_x000d_ A Brahmin Philosopher Delivers an _x000d_ Interesting Lecture_x000d_ _x000d_ Swami Vivekananda, a member of the most ancient order of Hindoos, lectured last night in Blanchard_x000d_ hall. Before a most appreciative audience. The lecturer was introduced by B. R. Baumgardt, who said his introduction was in a double sense a pleasure in that first the Swami came to enlighten us on the Vedas, and second as an apostle of toleration and respect for other people’s religions and philosophic views, in which respect the West has much to learn from the East._x000d_ Swami Vivekananda wore the yellow robe of the highest cult of the Brahmins and presented a most picturesque figure._x000d_ In commencing his lecture he gave a brief description of the past and present conditions of his people, the polit¬ical divisions of the country and their common tie in the Brahmin religion. He gave a graphic description of the wonderful civilization which has existed in that peninsula for more than 7000 years._x000d_ India, the Swami said, is the mother of all civilization and Hinduism the mother of all religion. In this country the lowest castes are perfectly familiar with metaphysical concepts which are only taken up by the cultured class in the West._x000d_ In the Hindu religion man is not only a part of God but he is God, and the reason that God cannot be seen or understood is because man cannot see himself. The eye can see objectively, but cannot see itself. The lecturer said in Sanscrit numerous passages from the Vedas which he subsequently translated into English. The rhythm and beauty of the language as it fell from his lips could only be compared to the ripple in the poetry of Horace. It was a revelation to many to hear [that] the transcendental ideas which have only recently become known in the western world have been taught in the Vedas for thousands of years._x000d_ The Hindu religion, as presented by the Swami is a religion of love for man, love for all men, love for all animals, love for everything that has life. This doctrine has had a wonderful effect upon the inhabitants of India. It has taught them that they cannot injure anything living without injuring themselves, without injuring the whole world. Perhaps the grandest conception which the speaker presented from the Vedas, may be summed up as follows: That change, constant change, is the rule of the universe, transformation following transformation without beginning, without end. If one could attain to a glimpse of the whole of nature, could gain a philosophical prospect of the whole cosmos as a whole, then he would know no change, for all change would be comprised within the whole.

The Swami will lecture before the academy of sciences Tuesday evening, the 12th instant, upon the subject of "Cosmos."

Sitting enthralled in the audience at Blanchard Hall were three women who were to play an important part in Swamiji’s life in California. They were the Mead sisters of South Pasadena: Mrs. Carrie Mead Wyckoff, Mrs. Alice Mead Hansbrough, and Miss Helen Mead. The closeness of the friendship that was to grow between these sisters and Swamiji is well known to everyone familiar with the history of his life; but the exact date of their first meeting has heretofore been obscure.

The Swami's lecture that evening was entitled "The Vedanta Philosophy or Hinduism as a Religion" and was attended by more than six hundred people, all of whom, as we learn from one who was present, were "enchanted". Sitting enthralled among them were three women who were to play important roles in the service of the Swami's ministry on the West Coast, both during his visit there and subsequently. These were the Mead sisters of South Pasadena: Mrs. Carrie Mead Wyckoff, Mrs. Alice Mead Hansbrough, and Miss Helen Mead.

On the day of Swamiji’s first lecture, Helen Mead, the youngest of the sisters, had come upon its announcement in the Los Angeles papers. Returning home from work late that afternoon, she had excitedly relayed the news to Mrs. Hansbrough, well knowing that her sister would be electrified by it. And electrified she was; for the teachings of Swami Vivekananda had already captured Mrs. Hansbrough’s mind. For more than two years-during an ocean voyage and a long sojourn in Alaska-she had pored over two of his books, Raja yoga and Karma yoga, which, at her request, had been given to her in San Francisco as going-away presents. Reading them again and again, she had pondered over the greatness of their message and the evident greatness of their author. "I used to read for a while," she related many years later, "and the thought would come to me, `What marvelous thoughts these are!’ I would hold the place with my finger, close the book and shut my eyes and think, `What a wonderful man he must be who wrote these words!’ And I would try to form a picture in my mind of what he looked like. . . . I had never expected to see him. Yet less than two weeks after Mrs. Hansbrough’s return from her travels Swami Vivekananda arrived in southern California.

On the memorable evening of December 8, when he was to speak at Blanchard Hall, the Mead sisters (she related) "rushed through dinner, made up a party and went in to Los Angeles." Needless to say, Mrs. Hansbrough was by no means disappointed in Swamiji. "I got the same impression I had previously had of him," she later said; "that is, he was a most impressive personality . . . . He wore a light orange robe and turban; his complexion [for a Hindu] was light. His hair was black-very black-with not a trace of gray. His voice was the moat musical I have ever heard. I should say he was a baritone -certainly nearer to bass than tenor. At the end of his lecture he closed with the chant: `I am Existence Absolute, Knowl¬edge Absolute, Bliss Absolute.’ . . . Whenever he quoted from Sanskrit he would chant, and then he would translate. Once later on, he apologized for quoting first in Sanskrit and ex¬plained that he still thought in that language.

The Swami's lecture that evening was entitled "The Vedanta Philosophy or Hinduism as a Religion" and was attended by more than six hundred people, all of whom, as we learn from one who was present, were "enchanted". Sitting enthralled among them were three women who were to play important roles in the service of the Swami's ministry on the West Coast, both during his visit there and subsequently. These were the Mead sisters of South Pasadena: Mrs. Carrie Mead Wyckoff, Mrs. Alice Mead Hansbrough, and Miss Helen Mead.

Almost from her first sight of Swamiji, Mrs. Hansbrough had what might be called a hunch. "Even before we had called on him," she related, "I one day said to my sisters, `Do you know, I think Swami Vivekananda wants to come to visit us.’ My sisters thought I was crazy. However, I defended my thought by pointing out that the Swami was not well and that he might find our home restful. We were then living in a rented house in Lincoln Park, which is now a part of South Pasadena. Mrs. Hansbrough was not to be dissuaded by her sisters; on her first meeting with Swamiji she invited him to live with them. She was politely refused. "He was very gracious," she recalled. "I had told him that our home was very un¬pretentious, but that we would be very happy to have him with us. He smiled and said, `I do not need luxury,’ and explained that he was comfortably situated at Mrs. Blodgett’s. Later on ", Mrs. Hansbrough continued, "I asked him to come for Sunday dinner. He readily accepted and asked me to invite Miss MacLeod also.

After the lecture was over a number of people gathered on the platform, among them the Mead sisters. It was not then, however, that Mrs. Hansbrough met Swamiji. Rather, she sought out her friend Mr. Baumgardt to ask him when and where the Swami was to speak again. He introduced her to Miss MacLeod, who, on learning of her interest in Swamiji’s teachings, asked her to call on him at the home of Mrs. Blod-gett. A date for the meeting was set: December 13.

To Sister Christine_x000d_ 921 West 21st Street,_x000d_ Los Angeles,_x000d_ 9th December 1899._x000d_ My dear Christina,_x000d_ After all, it is good for me, and good for those I love, that I should come here. Here at last in California! One of our poets says: "Where is Benares, where is Kashmir, where Khorasan, where Gujarat! O Tulsi! thus, man's past Karma drags him on". And I am here. After all it is best, isn't it? Are you going to Boston? I am afraid you are not. I have not unsettled any of your plans, have I?__unnecessary expenses? Well, if any, I will make it up. Only the trouble is yours. I am ashamed of my eccentricities. Well, how are you? What are you doing? How are things going with you? Sleep if you can; it is better to sleep than get awakened. I pray that all good may come to thee__all peace, all strength to do and suffer. I have a great deal of strength to do, but very little to suffer._x000d_ I am so selfish again, always thinking of my own sufferings and paying no heed to others. Pray for me; send strong thoughts that I may have strength to suffer. I know you will. Now, I mean to remain a few weeks in this city. After that, "Mother" knows. I am physically much better now than I have been for months. The weakness of the heart is nearly gone. The dys¬pepsia is also much better, and [there is] very little. I can walk miles now without feeling it in the heart. If this continues, I expect to have a new lease on life. I am so, so sorry of asking you to come to Boston and flying away. If you are there, I hope you will enjoy the place and the meetings. If you have given it up__well, did you take leave and not go to Boston? My! what a bungle! Well, I ask a thousand pardons, if such is the case. Things must look brighter anyway, sooner or later. What of these little, few days of life!_x000d_ How is Mrs. Funke? Loads of love for her. How long a leave [do] you get at Christmas? When does it begin? If you feel inclined and willing, write me a long note, will you? But don't tell my friends my whereabouts. I want to be off from the world for a time, if I can. Will you kindly send Mr. Freer's address to Mrs. Bull? She needs it. I had a lecture here last night. The hall was not crowded, as there was very little ad[vertisement], but a fairly good sized audience though. I hope they were pleased. If I feel better, I am going to have classes in this city soon. I am on the business path this time, you know. Want a few dollars quick, if I can._x000d_ Ever yours in the Lord,_x000d_ Vivekananda.

His health had by now improved. "I am physically much better now than I have been for months," he had written to Christine as early as December 9. "The weakness of the heart is nearly gone. The dyspepsia is also much better and Very little. I can walk miles now without feeling it in the heart. If this continues, I expect to have a new lease on life."

Another lecture by the Swami._x000d_ The next regular monthly meeting of the Southern California Academy of Sciences will take place next Tuesday evening when a lecture will be delivered on "The Kosmos; or the Veda Conception of the Universe, by Swami Vivekananda, the representative of the Hindu religion at the world’s parliament of religions, Chicago, 1893. The usual meeting place of the academy being too small to accommodate the audience on this occasion it has been decided to hold the meeting at Unity church, corner of Third and Hill streets._x000d_ Members are advised to be present at 8 o’clock. All the lectures of the academy are open to the public and are free.

12th Dec., 1899_x000d_ My dear Mrs. Bull, _x000d_ You are perfectly right; I am brutal, very indeed. But about the tenderness etc., that is my fault. I wish I had less, much less of that--that is my weakness--and alas! all my sufferings have come from that. Well, the municipality is trying to tax us out--good; that is my fault as I did not make the Math public property by a deed of trust. I am very sorry I use harsh language to my boys; but they also know I love them more than anybody else on earth. I may have had Divine help--true; but oh, the pound of blood every bit of Divine help has been to me!! I would be gladder and a better man without that. The present looks very gloomy indeed; but I am a fighter and must die fighting, not give way--that is why I get crazy at the boys. I don't ask them to fight, but not to hinder my fight._x000d_ I don't grudge my fate. But oh! Now I want a man, one of my boys, to stand by me and fight against all odds! Don't you vex yourself; if anything is to be done in India, my presence is necessary; and I am much better in health; possibly the sea will make me better. Anyway I did not do anything this time in America except bother my friends. Possibly Joe will help me out with the passage, and I have some money with Mr. Leggett. I have hopes of collecting some money in India yet. I did not see any of my friends in different parts of India. I have hope of collecting the fifteen thousand that will make up the fifty thousand, and a deed of trust will bring down the municipal taxes. If I cannot collect that--it is better to struggle and die for it than vegetate here in America. My mistakes have been great; but everyone of them was from too much love. How I hate love ! Would I never had any Bhakti! Indeed, I wish I could be an Advaitist, calm and heartless. Well, this life is done. I will try in the next. I am sorry, especially now, that I have done more injury to my friends than there have been blessings on them. The peace, the quiet I am seeking, I never found._x000d_ I went years ago to the Himalayas, never to come back; and my sister committed suicide, the news reached me there, and that weak heart flung me off from that prospect of peace! It is the weak heart that has driven me out of India to seek some help for those I love, and here I am! Peace have I sought, but the heart, that seat of Bhakti, would not allow me to find it. Struggle and torture, torture and struggle. Well, be it then, since it is my fate, and the quicker it is over, the better. They say I am impulsive, but look at the circumstances!!! I am sorry I have been the cause of pain to you, to you above all, who love me so much, who have been so, so kind. But it is done--was a fact. I am now going to cut the knot or die in the attempt._x000d_ Ever your son,_x000d_ Vivekananda_x000d_ PS. As Mother wants it, so let it be. I am going to beg of Joe a passage via San Francisco to India. If she gives it, I start immediately via Japan. It would take a month. In India, I think, I can raise some money to keep things straight or on a better footing--at least to leave things where I get them all muddled. The end is getting very dark and very much muddled; well, I expected it so. Don't think I give in in a moment. Lord bless you; if the Lord has made me His hack to work and die on the streets, let Him have it. I am more cheerful just now after your letter than I was for years--Wah Guru ki Fateh! Victory unto the Guru!! Yes, let the world come, the hells come, the gods come, let Mother come, I fight and do not give in. Ravana got his release in three births by fighting the Lord Himself! It is glorious to fight Mother._x000d_ All blessings on you and yours. You have done for me more, much more, than I deserved ever._x000d_ Love to Christine and Turiyananda._x000d_ Vivekananda

The learned Hindoo, Swami Vivekananda, will deliver a lecture at Unity church this evening under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences. Subject: "The Kosmos from the standpoint of the Ancient Vedas." The distinguished lecturer has appeared before large audiences in eastern cities and has addressed the faculty of Harvard college on three occasions. Vivekananda represented the religions of 300,000,000 people in India at the world’s Congress of religions in 1893. The lecture at Unity church will be free.

(Mrs. Bull must have given way to a long sigh-not the first since she had met Swamiji and tried to counsel him. But her motherly plea for his brothers, late though it was-for his scoldings were over-did not go unheeded. The day after writing the above, Swamiji, like an anxious father, sent a cablegram to Swami Brahmananda and wrote a long letter to Swami Saradananda, telling them of his restored health and good spirits. And around December 21, Miss MacLeod told Sister Nivedita, he wrote "another long letter in Bengali to Saradananda. Nor did many days pass before he became concerned over the silence from the Math. On December 27, he wrote to Mrs. Bull, who, in accordance with his wish, had evidently forwarded him no letters from India: "I had a very bad dream this morning and had not any news of Saradananda for three weeks. Poor boys! How hard I am on them at times. Well, they know in spite of all that, I am their best friend. And in another letter to Mrs. Bull, which has been dated December 22 but which was almost certainly written after the above, he wrote, "Kindly send Saradananda’s letters that have come to your care.)

CONCEPTION OF THE UNIVERSE_x000d_ Swami Vivekananda’s lecture before_x000d_ the Academy of Sciences_x000d_ _x000d_ Unity church was filled last evening with a large audience to hear tbe Swami Vivekananda, a native of India, lecture on the kosmos, or the Veda conception of the universe under the auspices of the Southern California Academy of Sciences. Abbot Kinney [president of the Academy] presided and introduced the speaker. The Swami wore the yellow robe and turban of the Hindu monk, in which he appeared at a previous lecture, and, with his well-rounded physique, clear dark skin and finely chiseled features, was a perfect facsimile of a brown bisque figure._x000d_ In introducing his subject the speaker reviewed the mythology of the flood, which among the Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians and other races is similar to the story of the Hebrew scriptures, showing that all held a similar belief concerning the creation of the universe._x000d_ "In the worship of the sun and the forces of nature," he said, "we see the attempts of ancient peoples to explain the mysteries surrounding them. Man’s first idea of force was himself: When a stone fell he saw no force in it but the will behind it, and he conceived the idea that the whole universe was moved by force of wills. Gradually these wills became one, and science begins to rise, Gods begin to vanish, and in their place comes oneness, and now God is in danger of being dethroned by modern science. Science wants to explain things by their own nature and make the universe self sufficient._x000d_ "Wills gradually began to disappear, and in their place comes will. This was the process of development in all the nations of the world, and so it was in India. Their ideas and gods were pretty much the same as those of other lands, only in India they did not stop there, They learned that life alone can produce life, and that death can never produce life. In our speculations about God we have got to monotheism. Everywhere else speculation stops there; we make it the be all and end all of everything, but in India it does not stop there. A gigantic will can not explain all this phenomena we see around us. Even in man there is something back of the will. In so common sense a thing as the circulation of the blood, we find will is not the motive power._x000d_ "We have conceived God as a person like ourselves, only infinitely greater, and because there is goodness and mercy and happiness in the world there must be a being possessing these attributes, but there is also evil. The Hindu mind is too philosophical to admit the existence of two gods, one good and one bad. India remained true to the idea of unity. What is evil to me may be good to someone else; what is good to me may be evil to others. We are all links in a chain. Hence comes the speculation of the Upanishads, the religion of 300,000,000of the human race. Nature is a unit; unity is in all existence, and God is the same as nature. This is one of the Indian speculations known to all the world outside of India._x000d_ "There is not a system of religion or philosophy in the world that does not show the influence of India’s speculation, even to the Catholic church. The conservation of energy, considered a new discovery, has been known there by the name of father [was not Swamiji’s word prana, "cosmic energy," rather than father?]. Whatever is comes from the father. Brahma [Prana?] must energize on something, and that they say is an invisible ether. Brahma vibrating on ether, the solid, the liquid, the luminous, it is all the same ether. The potentiality of everything is there. In the beginning of the next period Brahma will begin to vibrate more and more._x000d_ "Thus this speculation of India’s scriptures is very similar to modern science. The same idea is taken up by modern evolution. Even our bodies, different only in dignity, are links in the same chain. In one individual the possibilities of every other individual are there. The living entity contains the possibility of all life, but can only express that which environment demands. The most wonderful speculations are formed in modern science. The one that interests me as a preacher of religion is the oneness of all religions [life?]. When Herbert Spencer’s voice says that the same life welling up in the plant is the life welling up in the individual, the Indian religion has found a voice in the nineteenth century."

As we have seen, Swamiji delivered two public lectures shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles, both of which were in a sense introductions to India and to Vedantic thought. It was on the day following the second of these lectures that the way opened to holding classes. "Some ladies are desirous of getting up classes," Miss MacLeod wrote on December 14 to Mrs. Leggett. ‘These ladies were undoubtedly the Mead sisters, who had had their first meeting with Swamiji on Wednesday, December 13. In her memoirs, Miss MacLeod tells us that all three sisters came to call upon Swamiji. Mrs. Hansbrough’s "Reminiscences," however, differ a little in this regard, and since the day was an unforgettable one in her life, her memory of it is perhaps more accurate. "My sister Helen and I went to call on Swamiji," she said in telling of the occasion. "He was dressed to receive us in a knee-length coat. He wore a kind of minister’s collar with what must have been a clerical vest, and his hair was covered by a black turban which rolled back. As she was later to learn, this was the costume Swamiji generally wore when he was not lecturing, and sometimes, except for his black turban, when he was.

It was on the day following the second of the Swami's lectures that two of the Mead sisters — Mrs. Hansbrough and Helen Mead — came to pay him a friendly call.

Almost from her first sight of Swamiji, Mrs. Hansbrough had what might be called a hunch. "Even before we had called on him," she related, "I one day said to my sisters, `Do you know, I think Swami Vivekananda wants to come to visit us.’ My sisters thought I was crazy. However, I defended my thought by pointing out that the Swami was not well and that he might find our home restful. We were then living in a rented house in Lincoln Park, which is now a part of South Pasadena. Mrs. Hansbrough was not to be dissuaded by her sisters; on her first meeting with Swamiji she invited him to live with them. She was politely refused. "He was very gracious," she recalled. "I had told him that our home was very un¬pretentious, but that we would be very happy to have him with us. He smiled and said, `I do not need luxury,’ and explained that he was comfortably situated at Mrs. Blodgett’s. Later on ", Mrs. Hansbrough continued, "I asked him to come for Sunday dinner. She invited him for dinner He readily accepted and asked me to invite Miss MacLeod also.

To Swami Brahmananda_x000d_ [Swami Vivekananda sent the following cablegram to his brother monk.]_x000d_ _x000d_ [Postmarked: December 13, 1899]_x000d_ PERFECTLY CURED. BLESS ALL. VIVEKANANDA.

"On December 13th Swami wrote a long beautiful letter in Bengali to Saradananda telling him of his recovery-& full of courage! & the same day sent a cablegram to Brahmananda _'Perfectly cured. Bless all. Vivekananda.’

The Los Angeles Times was more brief:_x000d_ _x000d_ HINDU PHILOSOPHY_x000d_ CONCEPTION OF THE UNIVERSE_x000d_ IN DISTANT INDIA._x000d_ Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu philosopher, addressed the regular monthly meeting of the Southern California Academy of Sciences at Unity Church last evening. The audience was large and appreciative, and at the end of the lecture a number of questions were asked by members of the audience and answered by the lecturer._x000d_ B. R. Baumgardt introduced the speaker, whose subject was "The Kosmos; or the Veda Conception of the Universe."_x000d_ The speaker began with a reference to the mythological tales of the Hindus in which they attempted to explain the origin of the universe, and he told also of the endeavors of the ancients to explain the mysteries which surrounded them._x000d_ According to their belief, he said, man’s first idea is of himself. His will moves all his members. A child’s idea of power is in its will. All movement of the universe has a will behind it. The Hindus believe, said the speaker, that there is but one God, and he a person like the rest of them, but infinitely greater. Their mind is philosoph¬ical enough not to admit the existence of two gods, one bad and one good. With them nature is a unit, unity in all existence is the universe, and God is the same as nature._x000d_ "There is not a system of philosophy," said the speaker, "from that of the ancient Egyptians down to that of the Roman Catholic Church, which does not show traces of the same thought. All forces that exist in the mental and physical world have been resolved, in India, into the one word `Father’ [`prana’?]. Whatever is, has been projected by Him."_x000d_ In closing, the philosopher said that the ancient voice of India had found an echo in the 19th century in the writings of Herbert Spencer._x000d_ (Although the above reports are valuable inasmuch as they give a general idea of the nature of Swamiji’s lecture and of the points he emphasized, it is clear that they contain many gaps and much muddled reportage, and the reader who cares to know more of what he may have said would do well to turn to his lectures on "The Cosmos," delivered in New York in 1896 and published in Jnana Yoga. There, Swamiji gave a clear exposition of Vedantic cosmology, just as he no doubt did, though more briefly, before the Southern California Academy of Sciences.)

Miss MacLeod, who was present with Swamiji to greet the two sisters, disappeared after a few minutes, as was her custom when visitors paid him their first call. The sisters’ talk with Swamiji, however, does not seem to have been particularly confidential: "The conversation," Mrs. Hansbrough recalled, "was only general. He said he was very glad we were interested in his lectures. We asked how long he expected to stay in Los Angeles, and he replied that he did not know, but that if we cared to arrange a class, he would be glad to address the group. She remembered him as having been "rather shy and reserved" but "enchanting"-a word she often used when speaking of him. Swamiji’s offer to hold a class was jumped at as the opportunity it was, and no doubt preliminary arrangements were made then and there. Everyone was delighted.

During the course of the conversation the Swami offered to hold a class if the sisters cared to make the arrangements. Delighted at this proposal the Mead sisters wasted no time in arranging for a series of three classes to be held in the Blanchard Building on the evenings of December 19, 21 and 22. Thus the way opened for the Swami to set forth on a season of steady teaching on the Pacific Coast.

Swamiji’s glee seems to have been caused not only by the turn of events, but by an independent upsurge of his spirits. "On December 13th Swami wrote a long beautiful letter in Bengali to Saradananda telling him of his recovery-& full of courage! & the same day sent a cablegram to Brahmananda _'Perfectly cured. Bless all. Vivekananda.’ " Thus Miss MacLeod informed Sister Nivedita on December I5, and added, "He really seems to feel, & act as if a new era were open to Him!" "[He] is talking and lecturing so quietly that it does not seem to fatigue him in the least," she wrote in the same letter, "& he says that he [would] just as lief lecture every day or have classes. As though in response to Swamiji’s readiness the way just then opened. The Mead sisters "eagerly went about getting a class together," Mrs. Hansbrough related, and indeed she and Helen seem to have wasted no time at all. A series of three classes was arranged for the following week, to be held in the Blanchard Building. A Mr. Thaddeus S. Fritz, a religious teacher and healer who regularly gave two Sunday lectures at Blanchard Hall and whom Miss MacLeod wrote of as "a fine young man, the head of `the Forward Movement,’ a splendid broad thinker and worker," announced the series to his Sunday audiences.

Swami Vivekananda will deliver 3 class lectures on "Applied Psychology" at .Blanchard Hall, Tuesday, _x000d_ Thursday and Friday [December 19, 2I, and 22] at 7:30. Everybody welcome.

The words, "Everybody welcome," in the above announcement would indicate that the classes were free of charge; but according to Mrs. Hansbrough, "each person paid a dollar for every meeting, a memory that seems in keeping with Swamiji’s need at this time to earn money. His first class on "Applied Psychology" was held not in the main auditorium of the Blanchard Building but in three studio rooms that opened one into the other. "The arrangement was not very satisfactory," Mrs. Hansbrough recalled, "especially since the attendance was somewhere between one hundred and fifty and two hundred. So when a Mr. Bransby suggested moving to a nice chapel which he could arrange for at the Home of Truth, it was decided to follow his suggestion.

The first class of the series, which was entitled as a whole "Applied Psychology", was held not in the main auditorium of the building, but in the three studio rooms that opened one into the other. This arrangement could not accommodate the audience which numbered between one hundred and fifty _x000d_ and two hundred. The second and third classes, therefore, were moved to the chapel of the Los Angeles Home of Truth — a religious society of "New Thought" persuasion — at the suggestion of its director, Mr. J. Ransome Bransby.

Mr. J. Ransome Bransby, who, together with his wife, was then directing the Los Angeles Home of Truth-a religious society of "New Thought" persuasion-had called on Swamiji twice, asking him to lecture at the Home. Many years later he recalled these meetings in a letter to Mr. Thomas J. Allan (of whom we shall hear more in a later chapter) in reply to the latter’s inquiry regarding Swamiji’s life in southern California. Mr. Bransby’s letter was dated January 17, 1936, and read:

Swami Vivekananda gave two lectures at the Home of Truth in Los Angeles over thirty five years ago. They were attended by large appreciative audiences. The Swami spoke with great charm and spirit. He spoke as one having authority; as one who had an inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge to draw from. Speaking in a language not native to him he manifested a fluency seldom, if ever, attained by those whose natural speech is English.

I called on the Swami twice to make arrangements for his meetings. The first time at the Stimson mansion of Figueroa Street. I was introduced to a man who was the embodiment of poise and dignity. Handsomely dressed in black relieved by spotless linen the Swami overwhelmed me by his presence and personality. The next time I called on the Swami the conditions were different. Instead of the home of luxury the setting was a small cottage in a poor part of town. The Swami seemed like another man. Gone was the broadcloth-gone the starched collar and cuffs replaced by an orange colored robe that looked jolly comfortable. And what do you suppose the great man was doing-he was engaged in the humble pastime of eating roasted peanuts. He avowed with a merry laugh that they would give him indigestion.

Mr. Bransby’s memory seems to have failed him after so many years in regard to the number of lectures Swamiji at the Home of Truth; actually, he gave eight in all. But however that may be, he lost no time in moving his classes to the Home, holding there his second and third talks in the series on "Applied Psychology.

Lectures by Swami Vivekananda on applied psychology will be held at 1327 Georgia street, December 21 and 22: This cancels former notice._x000d_ The above seems to have been the only announcement made to the Los Angeles public that Swamiji had moved location of his classes. However, "City Briefs," a daily column containing many items of local interest, was no doubt widely and regularly read, and word surely got around. His first class had been a success.

The above seems to have been the only announcement made to the Los Angeles public that Swamiji had moved location of his classes. However, "City Briefs," a daily column containing many items of local interest, was no doubt widely and regularly read, and word surely got around. His first class had been a success. "A line to tell you that Swami most successful last night in `applied psychology,’ " Miss MacLeod wrote on December 20 to Nivedita, "there being much enthusiasm, and the best is," she continued, "that he slept soundly afterwards! to his astonishment (Appreciation of Swamiji’s teaching was heard even in New York. "It is to be regretted that we were not brought up on this philosophy instead of having a foundation which is useless when we are of reasonable age," one of his Los Angeles listeners, whose words come down to us anonymously, wrote in December to the New York Vedanta Society.)

22nd December, 1899_x000d_ My Dear Dhira Mata {Mrs. Bull},_x000d_ I have a letter from Calcutta today, from which I learn your cheques have arrived; a great many thanks and grateful words also came._x000d_ Miss Souter of London sends me a printed New Year's greetings. I think she must have got the accounts you sent her by this time._x000d_ Kindly send Saradananda's letters that have come to your care._x000d_ As for me, I had a slight relapse of late, for which the healer has rubbed several inches of my skin off._x000d_ Just now I am feeling it, the smart. I had a very hopeful note from Margo. I am grinding on in Pasadena; hope some result will come out of my work here. Some people here are very enthusiastic; the Raja-Yoga book did indeed great services on this coast. I am mentally very well; indeed I never really was so calm as of late. The lectures for one thing do not disturb my sleep, that is some gain. I am doing some writing too. The lectures here were taken down by a stenographer, the people here want to print them._x000d_ I learn they are well and doing good work at the Math--from Swami Saradananda's letter to Joe. Slowly as usual plans are working; but Mother knows, as I say. May She give me release and find other workers for Her plans. By the by, I have made a discovery as to the mental method of really practising what the Gita teaches, of working without an eye to results. I have seen much light on concentration and attention and control of concentration, which if practised will take us out of all anxiety and worry. It is really the science of bottling up our minds whenever we like. Now what about yourself, poor Dhira Mata! This is the result of motherhood and its penalties; we all think of ourselves, and never of the Mother. How are you? How are things going on with you? What about your daughter? About Mrs. Briggs?_x000d_ I hope Turiyananda is completely recovered now and working. Poor man, suffering is the lot! Never mind; there is a pleasure in suffering even, when it is for others, is there not? Mrs. Leggett is doing well; so is Joe; I--they say--I too am. May be they are right. I work anyway and want to die in harness; if that be what Mother wants, I am quite content._x000d_ Ever your son,_x000d_ Vivekananda

921, 21st Street, Los Angeles_x000d_ 23rd December, 1899_x000d_ My dear Margot {Nivedita},_x000d_ Yes, I am really getting well under the manipulations of magnetic healing! At any rate I am all right. There was never anything serious with my organs--it was nerves and dyspepsia._x000d_ Now I walk miles every day, at any time--before or after meals. I am perfectly well--and am going to remain so, I am sure._x000d_ The wheel is turning up, Mother is working it up. She cannot let me go before Her work is done--and that is the secret._x000d_ See, how England is working up. After this blood-letting, people will then have time of thinking better and higher things than "war", "war", "war". That is our opportunity. We run in quick, get hold of them by the dozens and then set the Indian work in full swing._x000d_ I pray that England will lose Cape Colony, so that she will be able to concentrate her energy on India. These capes and promontories never are of any use to England except in puffing up a false pride and costing her hordes of money and blood._x000d_ Things are looking up. So get ready. With all love to the four sisters and to you,_x000d_ Vivekananda

And the following day a series of six classes to be held at the Home of Truth was announced in large type on the theater page of the Sunday Times:

The play, which was making a three-day stand at the Los Angeles Theater, had opened in New York in October of I896, had subsequently run in England and throughout America, and was billed in the local papers as the "Greatest Farce-Comedy Success of the Century." Not everyone agreed with this verdict. "Such farces as these," the Los Angeles Times critic wrote sourly, "play down to the lowest type of intelligence, and for that reason they come near to being an affront

On the day following Swamiji’s third and last class of the "Applied Psychology" series a morning reception was held for him by a Mrs. Caroline M. Severance, to which she invited, as Miss MacLeod informed Mrs. Bull, "a number of `advanced’ women to meet him. (This reception, incidentally, was to have been held originally on Saturday, December 16, but because of rain-a rare occurrence that winter it had been postponed.) Mrs. Severance was not a stranger to Swamiji. One finds that this remarkable woman, who was known as "the Mother of Women’s Clubs," had attended one of his first lectures in America-his talk delivered in Salem, Massachusetts, before the Thought and Work Club during the days when he was not yet sure he would speak at the Parliament of Religions. One finds, also, that Swamiji and Mrs. Severance had several other associations in common. The famous New England Woman’s Club, before which he had spoken in May of 1894, when it was headed by Julia Ward Howe, had been organized in I868 as a result of Mrs. Severance’s efforts. Further, she had served in I867 as vicepresident of Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Free Religious Association, before which Swamiji had spoken in August of 1894 and of which his good friend Dr. Lewis G. Janes had recently become president. Also, from Miss MacLeod’s letter it is clear that Mrs. Severance was acquainted with Mrs. Bull; and from other sources one learns that the author Kate Douglas Wiggin, who had attended Swamiji’s New York lectures, had in earlier years been her protegee.

Mrs. Severance, or Madam Severance, as she was sometimes called, was nearing her eightieth birthday when Swamiji met her again in Los Angeles. Behind her was a life devoted to various good causes, some of which must have been startling to her Victorian contemporaries. In addition to founding numerous women’s clubs both on the East Coast and in California, she was "active in the Unitarian Church . . . A pronounced woman suffragist [and] a zealous peace advocate"; she was, moreover "a believer in a single standard ,of morals and [far in advance of her time] in birth control and . . . Numbered among her friends women `who wore bloomers and rode astride.

Mrs. Severance’s reception was held in her home, which she called "EI Nido" and which stood in one of the most attractive, large-gardened residential districts in Los Angeles, not far from Mrs. Blodgett’s cottage.

But his mission had, as it were, a will of its own, and this, combined with his love of teaching, of giving without limit to others, was like an incoming tide that cannot be stopped until it reaches its fullness. "[Mother] cannot let me go before Her work is done-and that is the secret, he wrote to Sister Nivedita on December23.

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA_x000d_ Lectures on Mind and Its Powers at the Home of Truth.1327 Georgia st., 10 a.m. each day-December 25th to 30th inclusive. Subject Monday [Christmas Day], Christ’s Message to the World. Course of six lectures $3, single lecture 50c. Tickets on sale at Bartlett Music Store.285S.Broadway.

This led almost inevitably to further classes at the Home of Truth, many of whose members were completely won over by the Swami's simple manner, his great intellectuality, and, above all, his towering spirituality. During the last week of December he held a series of six classes at the "Home", entitled as a series "The Mind and Its Powers". The individual titles of five of these classes are now known to us: On Christmas Day he spoke on "Christ's Message to the World"; the title of his class of December 26 was not announced, but those held from December 27 to 30 were, respectively: "Theory of Concentration", "Practice of Concentration", "Spiritual Breathing", and "Reincarnation".1_x000d_ _x000d_ 1. Since it has been said in earlier editions that the Swami spent nearly a month at the Home of Truth in Los Angeles and gave several public lectures there with audiences of more than a thousand, it should be noted here that newly ascertained facts pertaining to the Swami's visit in Los Angeles make it highly improbable that he stayed at the Home of Truth for more than a few days, if at all. As for the talks he gave there, to the best of our knowledge, they have all been mentioned in the present accounted. – Ed.

An informal reception was given the Swami Vivekananda yesterday morning by Mrs. C. M. Severance at her home on West Adams street. The Swami answered many questions asked by the guests concerning the condition of women in India and the educational needs of his people. His object in visiting this country at present is to make preparations for the education of his people, who, while they have fine memories and are versed in occult philosophy, have few or no opportunities for an education. The Swami is preparing to inaugurate a system of itinerant teaching whereby the people may be reached in the fields and at their work wherever it may be. His talk was highly interesting to the guests.

It should perhaps be mentioned that among these guests was very probably Swamiji’s old friend Mrs. Kate Tannatt Woods, president of the Thought and Work Club, at whose Salem home he had spent a week in August of 1893 From various records one learns that Mrs. Woods was in Los Angeles in 1899and 1900. and although no details of this Los Angeles sojourn are available, it is unlikely that a friend of both Mrs. Severance and Swamiji would have stayed away from the reception. In any case, one likes to think that Swamiji and Mrs. Woods met once again. She would have found him changed in many respects, yet striving still and with as full a heart as ever, if with less hope, to raise money for the education of his countrymen.

To Sister Christine_x000d_ 921 West 21st Street,_x000d_ Los Angeles,_x000d_ 27th December 1899._x000d_ Dear Christina,_x000d_ So you are awake and can't go to sleep any more. Good! Keep awake, wide awake. It was good I came here. For, in the first place, I am cured. What do you think of this__able to walk, and every day walk three miles after a heavy dinner! Good! Isn't it?_x000d_ I am making money fast__twenty five dollars a day now. Soon I will work more and get fifty dollars a day. In San Francisco I hope to do still better__where I go in two or three weeks. Good again__better, say I__as I am going to keep the money all to myself and not squander it any more. And then I will buy a little place in the Himalayas__a whole hill__about say, six thousand feet high with a grand view of the eternal snows. There must be springs and a tiny lake. Cedars__the Himalayan cedar forests__and flowers, flowers everywhere. I will have a little cottage; in the middle, my vegetable gardens, which I will work myself__and__and__and__my books__and see the face of man only once in a great while. And the world may go to ruin round about my ears, I would not care. I will have done with all my work__secular or spiritual__and retire. My! How restless I have been all my life! Born nomad. I don't know; this is the present vision. The future is to come yet. Curious__all my dreams about my own happiness are, as it were, bound to come to nothing; but about others' well being___x000d_ they as a rule prove true._x000d_ I am so glad you are happy and peaceful under Mrs. Bull's hospitable roof. She is a great, great woman__one whom to see is a pilgrimage._x000d_ No snow here__exactly like northern India in winter. Some days, even warmer__cool in the morning and evening, in the middle of the day, warm, in the sun, hot. The roses are about us, gardens everywhere, and the beautiful palms. But I like the snow: crisp, crackling under the feet, white, white, white__all round white!_x000d_ I don't think I have anything with the kidneys or the heart. The whole thing was about indigestion and it is now nearly cured. A month more, and I will be strong like a lion and hardy like a mule. The poor English are getting it hot from the Boers. Mourning in every home in England and still the war goes on. Such is human folly. How long will it take for man to become civilized! Will wars ever cease? Mother knows! The New Year is sure to bring about a great change. Pray some good may come to India. I send you all joy, all love, all success for the New Year and many, many more to come._x000d_ So you did well, you think, by coming to Mrs. Bull. I am glad. I wanted you to know Mrs. Bull thoroughly. Remain there as long as you can. It will do you good, I am sure. Take heart and be of cheer, for next year is sure to bring many joys and a hundred blessings._x000d_ Yours truly,_x000d_ Vivekananda.

And about three weeks later, on December 27: "I don't think I have anything with the kidneys or the heart. The whole thing was about indigestion, and it is now nearly cured. A month more and I will be strong like a lion and hardy like a mine."

921 W. 21st Street_x000d_ Los Angeles_x000d_ 27th December, 1899_x000d_ Beloved Dhira Mata {Mrs. Bull},_x000d_ An eventful and happy New Year to you and many such returns!_x000d_ I am much better in health--able enough to work once more. I have started work already and have sent to Saradananda some money--Rs. 1,300 already--as expenses for the law suit. I shall send more, if they need it. I had a very bad dream this morning and had not any news of Saradananda for three weeks. Poor boys! How hard I am on them at times. Well, they know, in spite of all that, I am their best friend._x000d_ Mr. Leggett has got a little over £500 I had with Sturdy on account of Raja-Yoga and the Maharaja of Khetri. I have now about a thousand dollars with Mr. Leggett. If I die, kindly send that money to my mother. I wired to the boys three weeks ago that I was perfectly cured. If I don't get any worse, this much health as I have now will do well enough. Do not worry at all on my account; I am up and working with a will._x000d_ I am sorry I could not write any more of the stories. I have written some other things and mean to write something almost every day._x000d_ I am very much more peaceful and find that the only way to keep my peace is to teach others. Work is my only safety valve._x000d_ I only want some clear business head to take care of the details as I push onwards and work on. I am afraid it will be a long time to find such in India, and if there are any, they ought to be educated by somebody from the West._x000d_ Again, I can only work when thrown completely on my own feet. I am at my best when I am alone. Mother seems to arrange so. Joe believes great things are brewing--in Mother's cup; hope it is so._x000d_ Joe and Margot have developed into actual prophets, it seems. I can only say, every blow I had in this life, every pang, will only become joyful sacrifice if Mother becomes propitious to India once more. _x000d_ Miss Greenstidel writes a beautiful letter to me, about you most of it. She thinks a lot about Turiyananda too. Give Turiyananda my love. I am sure he will work well. He has the pluck and stamina._x000d_ I am going soon to work in California; when I leave I shall send for Turiyananda and make him work on the Pacific coast. I am sure here is a great field. The Raja-Yoga book seems to be very well known here. Miss Greenstidel had found great peace under your roof and is very happy. I am so glad it is so. May things go a little better with her every day. She has a good business head and practical sense._x000d_ Joe has unearthed a magnetic healing woman. We are both under her treatment. Joe thinks she is pulling me up splendidly. On her has been worked a miracle, she claims. Whether it is magnetic healing, California ozone, or the end of the present spell of bad Karma, I am improving. It is a great thing to be able to walk three miles, even after a heavy dinner._x000d_ All love and blessings to Olea. My love to Dr. Janes and other Boston friends._x000d_ Ever your son,_x000d_ Vivekananda

C/o Mrs. Blodgett_x000d_ 921, West 21st St._x000d_ Los Angeles_x000d_ 27th December, 1899_x000d_ My Dear Mary {Hale},_x000d_ Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and many, many glorious returns of such for your birthday. All these wishes, prayers, greetings in one breath. I am cured, you will be glad to know. It was only indigestion and no heart or kidney affection, quoth the healers; nothing more. And I am walking three miles a day--after a heavy dinner._x000d_ Say--the person healing me insisted on my smoking! So I am having my pipe nicely and am all the better for it. In plain English the nervousness etc. was all due to dyspepsia and nothing more._x000d_ . . . I am at work too; working, working, not hard; but I don't care, and I want to make money this time. Tell this to Margot, especially the pipe business. You know who is healing me? No physician, no Christian Science healer, but a magnetic healing woman who skins me every time she treats me. Wonders--she performs operations by rubbing--internal operations too, her patients tell me._x000d_ It is getting late in the night. I have to give up writing separate letters to Margot, Harriet, Isabelle, and Mother Church. Wish is half the work. They all know how I love them dearly, passionately ; so you become the medium for my spirit for the time, and carry them my New Year's messages._x000d_ It is exactly like Northern Indian winter here, only some days a little warmer; the roses are here and the beautiful palms. Barley is in the fields, roses and many other flowers round about the cottage where I live. Mrs. Blodgett, my host, is a Chicago lady--fat, old, and extremely witty. She heard me in Chicago and is very motherly._x000d_ I am so sorry, the English have caught a Tartar in South Africa. A soldier on duty outside a camp bawled out that he had caught a Tartar. "Bring him in", was the order from inside the tent. "He will not come", replied the sentry. "Then you come yourself", rang the order again. "He will not let me come either". Hence the phrase "to catch a Tartar". Don't you catch any._x000d_ I am happy just now and hope to remain so for all the rest of my life. Just now I am Christian Science--no evil, and "love is a drawing card"._x000d_ I shall be very happy if I can make a lot of money. I am making some. Tell Margot, I am going to make a lot of money and go home by way of Japan, Honolulu, China, and Java. This is a nice place to make money quick in; and San Francisco is better, I hear. Has she made any?_x000d_ You could not get the millionaire. Why don't you start for half or one-fourth million? Something is better than nothing. We want money; he may go into Lake Michigan, we have not the least objection. We had a bit of an earthquake here the other day. I hope it has gone to Chicago and raised Isabelle's mud-puddle up. It is getting late. I am yawning, so here I quit._x000d_ Good-bye; all blessings, all love,_x000d_ Vivekananda

"I am cured, you will be glad to know," Swamiji wrote to Mary Hale on December 27. "It was only indigestion and no heart or kidney affection, quoth the healers; nothing more. And I am walking three miles a day-after a heavy dinner. Say-the person healing me insisted on my smoking! So I am having my pipe nicely and am all the better for it. [Smoking had been denied him by Dr. Helmer.] In plain English the nervousness etc. was all due to dyspepsia and nothing more."_x000d_ "He actually ran to catch the electric car today!" Miss MacLeod exclaimed in a letter to Mrs. Bull; and in a passage that appears in an unedited copy of Swamiji’s letter to Mary Hale, he wrote with the exuberance of regained health, "Well, six feet-I am strong enough to take you in my arms like a feather and pitch you a few hundred yards. That is what I feel."41 And to Sister Christine on this same day, December 27-a day of much letter writing for Swamiji "A month more and I will be strong like a lion and hardy like a mule.

There is no doubt that life in Los Angeles benefited Swamiji’s health and thereby fulfilled at least one purpose of his visit; nor is there any doubt that he thoroughly enjoyed his weeks at Mrs. Blodgett’s. ("I remember, perfectly, the delight of Swamiji during his stay with [good old Mrs. Blodgett]," Mrs. Charlotte Sevier wrote years afterward to Miss MacLeod; "he often spoke of it.")43 But cooking for his friends, joking and laughing ho fill, walking three miles a day, submitting to Mrs. Melton’s magnetic treatments, and attending a farce did not by any means fulfill the primary purpose of his stay in California; nor had these relaxing pursuits been enough in themselves to bring him health. It was not until he had started holding classes in Los Angeles that he felt a sense of well-being and that the true meaning of his stay in California began to reveal itself. "I am very much more peaceful," he assured Mrs. Bull on December 27, "and find that the only way to keep my peace is to teach others. Work is my only safety valve.

The fact is that from first to last Swamiji was a Teacher. Thus while he had not come to California with the express purpose of teaching, it was not long before he plunged into work. So totally identified was he with his destiny that there was no need for him to make plans in advance or to consciously plot _x000d_ his course. "Religion was never preached by planners!" he had once exclaimed. His way opened of itself; his mission unfolded as he went. "Swami just waits," Sister Nivedita remarked of him in January of 1900, "and drifts in on the wave. . . . I am just beginning to understand his bigness.

Of Swamiji’s eight class lectures at the Home of Truth (including his two classes of December 21. and 22 on "Applied Psychology") the only transcript that has come down to us is "Hints on Practical Spirituality"-which, as we have seen, may have been originally titled "Spiritual Breathing." Essentially, this class constituted a brief, succinct exposition of some aspects of raja yoga, as did, no doubt, others of the "Mind and Its Powers" series, such as "Theory of Concentration" and Practice of Concentration." Swamiji seems to have laid a good deal of emphasis in Los Angeles on the theory and practice of raja yoga, and Mr. Bransby was, in a sense, mistaken in saying that he did not give "short cuts into the Kingdom." The science of yoga was, precisely, a shortcut to perfection, a hastening by the individual of humanity’s long-drawn-out evolution. But, to be sure, it was not an easy shortcut. "The Yogi becomes conscious of what he really is, God Himself," Swamiji said in "Hints on Practical Spirituality," " , , . But it is a terrible task. If a person wants to attain to this truth, he will have to do something more than to listen to lectures and take a few breathing exercises. . . . Breathing, posturing, etc. are no doubt helps in Yoga; but they are merely physical. The great preparations are mental. . . . He who desires a comfortable and nice life and at the same time wants to realise the Self is like the fool who, wanting to cross the river, caught hold of a crocodile, mistaking it for a log of wood. `Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and everything shall be added unto you.’ This is the one great duty, this is renunciation.

As usual, Swamiji gave his message straight. He never temporized. Reverencing man as he did, he taught him the highest of truths; he catered to no weakness, never lowered the ideal to please or comfort his listeners. He never belittled them, never deceived them, and when he saw fit he reproved them. Throughout "Hints on Practical Spirituality," he interspersed admonitions against smugness-a trait he had found prevalent in the Western world and evidently not absent in Los Angeles. "We are always making this mistake in judging others," he said; "we are always inclined to think that our little mental universe is all that is; our ethics, our morality, our sense of duty, our sense of utility, are the only things that are worth having. . . . Now, in judging others you must always define your terms of courage or greatness. The man whom I am criticising as not good may be wonderfully so in some points in which I am not."71 Toward the end of the class this interwoven secondary theme reached a climax in a concept that he had touched on at Ridgely Manor but that one does not . Find stated so explicitly elsewhere in his published talks or writings: "We should look upon man in the most charitable light," he said, and continued with a passage as unexpected and as grand as a flash of lightning. "It is not so easy to be good. What are you but mere machines until you are free? Should you be proud because you are good? Certainly not. You are good because you cannot help it. Another is bad because he cannot help it. If you were in his position, who knows what you would have been? The woman in the street, or the thief in the jail, is the Christ that is being sacrificed that you may be a good man. Such is the law of balance. All the thieves and the murderers, all the unjust, the weakest, the wickedest, the devils, they all are my Christ! I owe a worship to the God Christ and to the demon Christ! That is my doctrine, I cannot help it. My salutation goes to the feet of the good, the saintly, and to the feet of the wicked and the devilish! They are all my teachers, all are my spiritual fathers, all are my Saviours. I may curse one and yet benefit by his failings; I may bless another and benefit by his good deeds. This is as true as that I stand here. I have to sneer at the woman walking in the street, because society wants it! She, my Saviour, she, whose street-walking is the cause of the chastity of other women! Think of that. Think, men and women, of this question in your mind. It is a truth-a bare, bold truth! As I see more of the world, see more of men and women, this conviction grows stronger. Whom shall I blame? Whom shall I praise? Both sides of the shield must be seen.

The Swami, as always, gave his message straight. He neither sugar-coated it nor watered it down. Nor did he have the "closed fist of the preacher" in which was reserved the choicest teachings for the elect few. Swami Vivekananda wholeheartedly believed in the saving power of the highest truth. And he believed that man, any man, should always be taught that truth. Therefore he admonished: Never forget the glory of man! To give man only the highest and the best to remember his glory, never to patronize him, never to temporize or compromise — that was perhaps his way of carrying out what he had learnt early in life from his Master:' "Jiva is Shiva". To his listeners, who were not committed to doctrinal teachings of the Church, his message brought abiding light and refreshing inspiration. Those whose very thought process was conditioned by doctrinal teachings were stunned by his amazing message of simple truths. Who could withstand the impact of such teachings without being affected one way or the other, when, in his lecture "Hints on Practical Spirituality", he uttered the following words?:

... We should look upon man in the most charitable light. It is not so easy to be good. What are you but mere machines until you are free? Should you be proud because you are good? Certainly not. You are good because you cannot help it. Another is bad because he cannot help it. If you were in his position, who knows what you would have been? The woman in the street, or the thief in the jail, is the Christ that is being sacrificed that you may be a good man. Such is the law of balance. All the thieves and the murderers, all the unjust, the weakest, the wickedest, the devils, they are all my Christ! I owe a worship to the God Christ and to the demon Christ l That is my doctrine, I cannot help it. My salutation goes to the feet of the good, the saintly, and to the feet of the wicked and the devilish! They are all my teachers, all are my spiritual fathers, all are my Saviours. I may curse one and yet benefit by his failings; I may bless another and benefit by his good deeds. This is as true as that I stand here. I have to sneer at the woman walking in the street, because society wants it. She, my Saviour, she, whose street-walking is the cause of the chastity of other women! Think of that. Think, men and women, of this question in your mind. It is a truth — a bare, bold truth! As I see more of the world, see more of men and women, this conviction grows stronger. Whom shall I blame? Whom shall I praise? Both sides of the shield must be seen.

Although there is no question that there were many seekers of spiritual truth among the followers of the various metaphysical schools that were proliferating in southern California at the close of the nineteenth century, there were also many unabashed seekers of worldly ends, who sought the kingdom of God so that everything else-health, wealth, and worldly success would be added unto them. It was an attitude Swamiji repudiated with his every breath. "Live for an ideal," he exhorted, "and leave no place in the mind for anything else. Let us put forth all our energies to acquire that which never fails-our spiritual perfection. . . . The less thought of the body, the better. For it is the body that drags us down.

There was many a "metaphysician" who would have been none too pleased with this kind of advice, and indeed one finds a certain rancor growing in Mr. Bransby. It was perhaps after the class of "Hints on Practical Spirituality" that he asked (as we learn from Mrs. Hanabrough), "Swami, if all things are one, what is the difference between a cabbage and a man?" Swamiji’s answer was as sharp as the question had been taunt¬ing. "Stick a knife into your leg," he replied, "and you will see the line of demarcation.

"The missionaries were not the only ones who opposed Swamiji," Mrs. Hansbrough recalled. "There were many teachers of metaphysics and many pseudoteachers who resented him or maliciously condemned him either because he was so far superior to them or because he exposed their shallowness and `spoiled their business’ by teaching true metaphysics. Mr. Bransby was one of these, more or less. He was constantly finding fault with Swamiji. One of his criticisms was that Swamiji was breaking the rules of his Order by taking money. I later told this to Swamiji. He was chanting something at the time, and he stopped, smiled, and said, `Yes, it is true; but when the rules don’t suit me, I change them.’

Although many members of the Home of Truth were won over to the Swami, there were metaphysicians, both within the "Home" and outside it, who were thoroughly disturbed by his ultra radical teachings that stopped nowhere between God and man. Even Mr. Bransby, who was close to the Swami in the beginning of his ministry on the West Coast, could finally stand it no longer. "Swami," he one day asked tauntingly, "if. all things are one, what is the difference between a cabbage and a man?" Sharp came the Swami's reply, "Stick a knife into your leg, and you will see the line of demarcation."

"The missionaries were not the only ones who opposed Swamiji," Mrs. Hansbrough recalled, "There were many teachers of met-aphysics and many pseudo-teachers who resented him or maliciously condemned him, either because he was so far superior to them or because he exposed their shallowness and 'spoiled their business' by teaching true metaphysics." _x000d_ Nor did the Swami merely lecture on "true metaphysics" or religious verities; lie gave spiritual light as though showering his audience with it. To those with eyes to see, he himself seemed a veritable embodiment of that light. It was probably of his Christ-mas Day lecture at the Home of Truth, "Christ's Message to the World", that Miss MacLeod wrote: "Swami lectured a great number of times at the Home of Truth and in various halls, but perhaps the most outstanding lecture I ever heard was his talk on "Jesus of Nazareth", when he seemed to radiate a white light from head to foot, so lost was he in the wonder and the power of Christ. I was so impressed With this obvious halo that I did not speak to him on the way back for fear of interrupting, as I thought, the great thoughts that were still in his mind. Suddenly he said to me, 'I know how it is done.' I said, 'How what is done?' 'How they make mulligatawny soup! They put a bay leaf in it,' he told me. That utter lack of self-consciousness, of self-importance, was perhaps one of his outstanding characteristics."

This morning I shall try to present to you some ideas about breathing and other exercises. We have been discussing theories so long that now it will be well to have a little of the practical. A great many books have been written in India upon this subject. Just as your people are practical in many things, so it seems our people are practical in this line. Five persons in this country will join their heads together and say, "We will have a joint-stock company", and in five hours it is done; in India they could not do it in fifty years; they are so unpractical in matters like this. But, mark you, if a man starts a system of philosophy, however wild its theory may be, it will have followers. For instance, a sect is started to teach that if a man stands on one leg for twelve years, day and night, he will get salvation--there will be hundreds ready to stand on one leg. All the suffering will be quietly borne. There are people who keep their arms upraised for years to gain religious merit. I have seen hundreds of them. And, mind you, they are not always ignorant fools, but are men who will astonish you with the depth and breadth of their intellect. So, you see, the word practical is also relative._x000d_ We are always making this mistake in judging others; we are always inclined to think that our little mental universe is all that is; our ethics, our morality, our sense of duty, our sense of utility, are the only things that are worth having. The other day when I was going to Europe, I was passing through Marseilles, where a bull-fight was being held. All the Englishmen in the steamer were mad with excitement, abusing and criticising the whole thing as cruel. When I reached England, I heard of a party of prize-fighters who had been to Paris, and were kicked out unceremoniously by the French, who thought prize-fighting very brutal. When I hear these things in various countries, I begin to understand the marvellous saying of Christ: "Judge not that ye be not judged." The more we learn, the more we find out how ignorant we are, how multiform and multi-sided is this mind of man. When I was a boy, I used to criticise the ascetic practices of my countrymen; great preachers in our own land have criticised them; the greatest man that was ever born, Buddha himself, criticised them. But all the same, as I am growing older, I feel that I have no right to judge. Sometimes I wish that, in spite of all their incongruities, I had one fragment of their power to do and to suffer. Often I think that my judgment and my criticism do not proceed from any dislike of torture, but from sheer cowardice--because I cannot do it--I dare not do it._x000d_ Then, you see that strength, power, and courage are things which are very peculiar. We generally say, "A courageous man, a brave man, a daring man", but we must bear in mind that courage or bravery or any other trait does not always characterise the man. The same man who would rush to the mouth of a cannon shrinks from the knife of the surgeon; and another man who never dares to face a gun will calmly bear a severe surgical operation, if need be. Now, in judging others you must always define your terms of courage or greatness. The man whom I am criticising as not good may be wonderfully so in some points in which I am not._x000d_ Take another example. You often note, when people are discussing as to what man and woman can do, always the same mistake is made. They think they show man at his best because he can fight, for instance, and undergo tremendous physical exertion; and this is pitted against the physical weakness and the non-combating quality of woman. This is unjust. Woman is as courageous as man. Each is equally good in his or her way. What man can bring up a child with such patience, endurance, and love as the woman can? The one has developed the power of doing; the other, the power of suffering. If woman cannot act, neither can man suffer. The whole universe is one of perfect balance. I do not know, but some day we may wake up and find that the mere worm has something which balances our manhood. The most wicked person may have some good qualities that I entirely lack. I see that every day of my life. Look at the savage! I wish I had such a splendid physique! He eats, he drinks, to his heart's content, without knowing perhaps what sickness is, while I am suffering every minute. How many times would I have been glad to have changed my brain for his body! The whole universe is only a wave and a hollow; there can be no wave without a hollow. Balance everywhere. You have one thing great, your neighbour has another thing great. When you are judging man and woman, judge them by the standard of their respective greatness. One cannot be in other's shoes. The one has no right to say that the other is wicked. It is the same old superstition that says, "If this is done, the world will go to ruin." But in spite of this the world has not yet come to ruin. It was said in this country that if the Negroes were freed, the country would go to ruin--but did it? It was also said that if the masses were educated, the world would come to ruin--but it was only made better. Several years ago a book came out depicting the worst thing that could happen to England. The writer showed that as workmen's wages were rising, English commerce was declining. A cry was raised that the workmen in England were exorbitant in their demands, and that the Germans worked for less wages. A commission was sent over to Germany to investigate this and it was reported that the German labourers received higher wages. Why was it so? _x000d_ Because of the education of the masses. Then how about the world going to ruin if the masses are educated? In India, especially, we meet with old fogies all over the land. They want to keep everything secret from the masses. These people come to the very satisfying conclusion that they are the crème de la crème of this universe. They believed they cannot be hurt by these dangerous experiments. It is only the masses that can be hurt by them!_x000d_ Now, coming back to the practical. The subject of the practical application of psychology has been taken up in India from very early times. About fourteen hundred years before Christ, there flourished in India a great philosopher, Patanjali by name. He collected all the facts, evidences, and researches in psychology and took advantage of all the experiences accumulated in the past. Remember, this world is very old; it was not created two or three thousand years ago. It is taught here in the West that society began eighteen hundred years ago, with the New Testament. Before that there was no society. That may be true with regard to the West, but it is not true as regards the whole world. Often, while I was lecturing in London, a very intellectual and intelligent friend of mine would argue with me, and one day after using all his weapons against me, he suddenly exclaimed, "But why did not your Rishis come to England to teach us?" I replied, "Because there was no England to come to. Would they preach to the forests?"_x000d_ "Fifty years ago," said Ingersoll to me, "you would have been hanged in this country if you had come to preach. You would have been burnt alive or you would have been stoned out of the villages."_x000d_ So there is nothing unreasonable in the supposition that civilisation existed fourteen hundred years before Christ. It is not yet settled whether civilisation has always come from the lower to the higher. The same arguments and proofs that have been brought forward to prove this proposition can also be used to demonstrate that the savage is only a degraded civilised man. The people of China, for instance, can never believe that civilisation sprang from a savage state, because the contrary is within their experience. But when you talk of the civilisation of America, what you mean is the perpetuity and the growth of your own race._x000d_ It is very easy to believe that the Hindus, who have been declining for seven hundred years, were highly civilised in the past. We cannot prove that it is not so._x000d_ There is not one single instance of any civilisation being spontaneous. There was not a race in the world which became civilised unless another civilised race came and mingled with that race. The origin of civilisation must have belonged, so to say, to one or two races who went abroad, spread their ideas, and intermingled with other races and thus civilisation spread._x000d_ For practical purposes, let us talk in the language of modern science. But I must ask you to bear in mind that, as there is religious superstition, so also there is a superstition in the matter of science. There are priests who take up religious work as their specialty; so also there are priests of the physical laws, scientists. As soon as a great scientist's name, like Darwin or Huxley, is cited, we follow blindly. It is the fashion of the day. Ninety-nine per cent of what we call scientific knowledge is mere theories. And many of them are no better than the old superstitions of ghosts with many heads and hands, but with this difference that the latter differentiated man a little from stocks and stones. True science asks us to be cautious. Just as we should be careful with the priests, so we should be with the scientists. Begin with disbelief. Analyse, test, prove everything, and then take it. Some of the most current beliefs of modern science have not been proved. Even in such a science as mathematics, the vast majority of its theories are only working hypotheses. With the advent of greater knowledge they will be thrown away._x000d_ In 1400 B.C. a great sage made an attempt to arrange, analyse, and generalise upon certain psychological facts. He was followed by many others who took up parts of what he had discovered and made a special study of them. The Hindus alone of all ancient races took up the study of this branch of knowledge in right earnest. I am teaching you now about it, but how many of you will practise it? How many days, how many months will it be before you give it up? You are impractical on this subject. In India, they will persevere for ages and ages. You will be astonished to hear that they have no churches, no Common Prayers, or anything of the kind; but they, every day, still practise the breathings and try to concentrate the mind; and that is the chief part of their devotion. These are the main points. Every Hindu must do these. It is the religion of the country. Only, each one may have a special method--a special form of breathing, a special form of concentration, and what is one's special method, even one's wife need not know; the father need not know the son's. But they all have to do these. And there is nothing occult about these things. The word "occult" has no bearing on them. Near the Ganga thousands and thousands of people may be seen daily sitting on its banks breathing and concentrating with closed eyes. There may be two reasons that make certain practices impracticable for the generality of mankind. One is, the teachers hold that the ordinary people are not fit for them. There may be some truth in this, but it is due more to pride. The second is the fear of persecution. A man, for instance, would not like to practise breathing publicly in this country, because he would be thought so queer; it is not the fashion here. On the other hand, in India, if a man prayed, "Give us this day our daily bread", people would laugh at him. Nothing could be more foolish to the Hindu mind than to say, "Our Father which art in Heaven." The Hindu, when he worships, thinks that God is within himself._x000d_ According to the Yogis, there are three principal nerve currents; one they call the Idâ, the other the Pingalâ, and the middle one the Sushumnâ, and all these are inside the spinal column. The Ida and the Pingala, the left and the right, are clusters of nerves, while the middle one, the Sushumna, is hollow and is not a cluster of nerves. This Sushumna is closed, and for the ordinary man is of no use, for he works through the Ida and the Pingala only. Currents are continually going down and coming up through these nerves, carrying orders all over the body through other nerves running to the different organs of the body._x000d_ It is the regulation and the bringing into rhythm of the Ida and Pingala that is the great object of breathing. But that itself is nothing--it is only so much air taken into the lungs; except for purifying the blood, it is of no more use. There is nothing occult in the air that we take in with our breath and assimilate to purify the blood; the action is merely a motion. This motion can be reduced to the unit movement we call Prâna; and everywhere, all movements are the various manifestations of this Prana. This Prana is electricity, it is magnetism; it is thrown out by the brain as thought. Everything is Prana; it is moving the sun, the moon, and the stars._x000d_ We say, whatever is in this universe has been projected by the vibration of the Prana. The highest result of vibration is thought. If there be any higher, we cannot conceive of it. The nerves, Ida and Pingala, work through the Prana. It is the Prana that is moving every part of the body, becoming the different forces. Give up that old idea that God is something that produces the effect and sits on a throne dispensing justice. In working we become exhausted because we use up so much Prana. The breathing exercises, called Prânâyâma, bring about regulation of the breathing, rhythmic action of the Prana. When the Prana is working rhythmically, everything works properly. When the Yogis get control over their own bodies, if there is any disease in any part, they know that the Prana is not rhythmic there and they direct the Prana to the affected part until the rhythm is re-established._x000d_ Just as you can control the Prana in your own body, so, if you are powerful enough, you can control, even from here another man's Prana in India. It is all one. There is no break; unity is the law. Physically, psychically, mentally, morally, metaphysically, it is all one. Life is only a vibration. That which vibrates this ocean of ether, vibrates you. Just as in a lake, various strata of ice of various degrees of solidity are formed, or as in an ocean of vapour there are various degrees of density, so is this universe an ocean of matter. This is an ocean of ether in which we find the sun, moon, stars, and ourselves--in different states of solidity; but the continuity is not broken; it is the same throughout._x000d_ Now, when we study metaphysics, we come to know the world is one, not that the spiritual, the material, the mental, and the world of energies are separate. It is all one, but seen from different planes of vision. When you think of yourself as a body, you forget that you are a mind, and when you think of yourself as a mind, you will forget the body. There is only one thing, that you are; you can see it either as matter or body--or you can see it as mind or spirit. Birth, life, and death are but old superstitions. None was ever born, none will ever die; one changes one's position--that is all. I am sorry to see in the West how much they make of death; always trying to catch a little life. "Give us life after death! Give us life!" They are so happy if anybody tells them that they are going to live afterwards! How can I ever doubt such a thing! How can I imagine that I am dead! Try to think of yourself as dead, and you will see that you are present to see your own dead body. Life is such a wonderful reality that you cannot for a moment forget it. You may as well doubt that you exist. This is the first fact of consciousness--I am. Who can imagine a state of things which never existed? It is the most self-evident of all truths. So, the idea of immortality is inherent in man. How can one discuss a subject that is unimaginable? Why should we want to discuss the pros and cons of a subject that is self-evident?_x000d_ The whole universe, therefore, is a unit, from whatever standpoint you view it. Just now, to us, this universe is a unit of Prana and Akasha, force and matter. And mind you, like all other basic principles, this is also self-contradictory. For what is force?--that which moves matter. And what is matter?--that which is moved by force. It is a seesaw! Some of the fundamentals of our reasoning are most curious, in spite of our boast of science and knowledge. 'It is a headache without a head", as the Sanskrit proverb says. This state of things has been called Maya. It has neither existence nor non-existence. You cannot call it existence, because that only exists which is beyond time and space, which is self-existence. Yet this world satisfies to a certain degree our idea of existence. Therefore it has an apparent existence._x000d_ But there is the real existence in and through everything; and that reality, as it were, is caught in the meshes of time, space, and causation. There is the real man, the infinite, the beginningless, the endless, the ever-blessed, the ever-free. He has been caught in the meshes of time, space, and causation. So has everything in this world. The reality of everything is the same infinite. This is not idealism; it is not that the world does not exist. It has a relative existence, and fulfils all its requirements. But it has no independent existence. It exists because of the Absolute Reality beyond time, space, and causation._x000d_ I have made long digressions. Now, let us return to our main subject._x000d_ All the automatic movements and all the conscious movements are the working of Prana through the nerves. Now, you see, it will be a very good thing to have control over the unconscious actions._x000d_ On some other occasions, I told you the definition of God and man. Man is an infinite circle whose circumference is nowhere, but the centre is located in one spot; and God is an infinite circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is everywhere. He works through all hands, sees through all eyes, walks on all feet, breathes through all bodies, lives in all life, speaks through every mouth, and thinks through every brain. Man can become like God and acquire control over the whole universe if he multiplies infinitely his centre of self-consciousness. Consciousness, therefore, is the chief thing to understand. Let us say that here is an infinite line amid darkness. We do not see the line, but on it there is one luminous point which moves on. As it moves along the line, it lights up its different parts in succession, and all that is left behind becomes dark again. Our consciousness may well be likened to this luminous point. Its past experiences have been replaced by the present, or have become subconscious. We are not aware of their presence in us; but there they are, unconsciously influencing our body and mind. Every movement that is now being made without the help of consciousness was previously conscious. Sufficient impetus has been given to it to work of itself._x000d_ The great error in all ethical systems, without exception, has been the failure of teaching the means by which man could refrain from doing evil. All the systems of ethics teach, "Do not steal!" Very good; but why does a man steal? Because all stealing, robbing, and other evil actions, as a rule, have become automatic. The systematic robber, thief, liar, unjust man and woman, are all these in spite of themselves! It is really a tremendous psychological problem. We should look upon man in the most charitable light. It is not so easy to be good. What are you but mere machines until you are free? Should you be proud because you are good? Certainly not. You are good because you cannot help it. Another is bad because he cannot help it. If you were in his position, who knows what you would have been. The woman in the street, or the thief in the jail, is the Christ that is being sacrificed that you may be a good man. Such is the law of balance. All the thieves and the murderers, all the unjust, the weakest, the wickedest, the devils, they are all my Christ! I owe a worship to the God Christ and to the demon Christ! That is my doctrine, I cannot help it. My salutation goes to the feet of the good, the saintly, and to the feet of the wicked and the devilish! They are all my teachers, all are my spiritual fathers, all are my Saviours. I may bless one and yet benefit by his failings; I may bless another and benefit by his good deeds. This is as true as that I stand here. I have to sneer at the woman walking in the street, because society wants it! She, my Saviour, she, whose street-walking is the cause of the chastity of other women! Think of that. Think, men and women, of this question in your mind. It is a truth--a bare, bold truth! As I see more of the world, see more of the men and women, this conviction grows stronger. Whom shall I blame? Whom shall I praise? Both sides of the shield must be seen._x000d_ The task before us is vast; and first and foremost, we must seek to control the vast mass of sunken thoughts which have become automatic with us. The evil deed is, no doubt, on the conscious plane; but the cause which produced the evil deed was far beyond in the realms of the unconscious, unseen, and therefore more potent. Practical psychology directs first of all its energies in controlling the unconscious, and we know that we can do it. Why? Because we know the cause of the unconscious is the conscious; the unconscious thoughts are the submerged millions of our old conscious thoughts, old conscious actions become petrified--we do not look at them, do not know them, have forgotten them. But mind you, if the power of evil is in the unconscious, so also is the power of good. We have many things stored in us as in a pocket. We have forgotten them, do not even think of them, and there are many of them, rotting, becoming positively dangerous; they come forth, the unconscious causes which kill humanity. True psychology would, therefore, try to bring them under the control of the conscious. The great task is to revive the whole man, as it were, in order to make him the complete master of himself. Even what we call the automatic action of the organs within our bodies, such as the liver etc., can be made to obey our commands._x000d_ This is the first part of the study, the control of the unconscious. The next is to go beyond the conscious. Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness. When this superconscious state is reached, man becomes free and divine; death becomes immortality, weakness becomes infinite power, and iron bondage becomes liberty. That is the goal, the infinite realm of the superconscious._x000d_ So, therefore, we see now that there must be a twofold work. First, by the proper working of the Ida and the Pingala, which are the two existing ordinary currents, to control the subconscious action; and secondly, to go beyond even consciousness._x000d_ The books say that he alone is the Yogi who, after long practice in self-concentration, has attained to this truth. The Sushumna now opens and a current which never before entered into this new passage will find its way into it, and gradually ascend to (what we call in figurative language) the different lotus centres, till at last it reaches the brain. Then the Yogi becomes conscious of what he really is, God Himself._x000d_ Everyone without exception, everyone of us, can attain to this culmination of Yoga. But it is a terrible task. If a person wants to attain to this truth, he will have to do something more than to listen to lectures and take a few breathing exercises. Everything lies in the preparation. How long does it take to strike a light? Only a second; but how long it takes to make the candle! How long does it take to eat a dinner? Perhaps half an hour. But hours to prepare the food! We want to strike the light in a second, but we forget that the making of the candle is the chief thing._x000d_ But though it is so hard to reach the goal, yet even our smallest attempts are not in vain. We know that nothing is lost. In the Gita, Arjuna asks Krishna, "Those who fail in attaining perfection in Yoga in this life, are they destroyed like the clouds of summer?" Krishna replies, "Nothing, my friend, is lost in this world. Whatever one does, that remains as one's own, and if the fruition of Yoga does not come in this life, one takes it up again in the next birth." Otherwise, how do you explain the marvellous childhood of Jesus, Buddha, Shankara?_x000d_ Breathing, posturing, etc. are no doubt helps in Yoga; but they are merely physical. The great preparations are mental. The first thing necessary is a quiet and peaceable life._x000d_ If you want to be a Yogi, you must be free, and place yourself in circumstances where you are alone and free from all anxiety. He who desires a comfortable and nice life and at the same time wants to realise the Self is like the fool who, wanting to cross the river, caught hold of a crocodile, mistaking it for a log of wood. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and everything shall be added unto you." This is the one great duty, this is renunciation. Live for an ideal, and leave no place in the mind for anything else. Let us put forth all our energies to acquire that which never fails--our spiritual perfection. If we have true yearning for realisation, we must struggle, and through struggle growth will come. We shall make mistakes, but they may be angels unawares._x000d_ The greatest help to spiritual life is meditation (Dhyana). In meditation we divest ourselves of all material conditions and feel our divine nature. We do not depend upon any external help in meditation. The touch of the soul can paint the brightest colour even in the dingiest places; it can cast a fragrance over the vilest thing; it can make the wicked divine--and all enmity, all selfishness is effaced. The less the thought of the body, the better. For it is the body that drags us down. It is attachment, identification, which makes us miserable. That is the secret: To think that I am the spirit and not the body, and that the whole of this universe with all its relations, with all its good and all its evil, is but as a series of paintings--scenes on a canvas--of which I am the witness.

From Mrs. Alice Hansbrough's reminiscences of a question answer exchange following the class entitled "Hints on Practical Spirituality":_x000d_ _x000d_ Q: Swami, if all things are one, what is the difference be¬tween a cabbage and a man?_x000d_ A: Stick a knife into your leg, and you will see the line of demarcation.

It contained the essence of what he had taught on this subject during his first visit to the West-and more besides. Indeed, "Work and Its Secret" could be included in the book Karma Yoga without being redundant, for in this class Swamiji stressed a point that he had not dwelt on so explicitly in 1896. He spoke not so much of "nonattachment," a term liable to mis¬construction in the West, as of "the power of detachment." "If only we had power to detach ourselves at will," he said, "there would not be any misery. That man alone will be able to get the best of nature who, having the power of attaching himself to a thing with all his energy, has also the power to detach himself when he should do so. The difficulty is that there must be as much power of attachment as that of detach¬ment. . . . The wall never feels misery, the wall never loves, is never hurt; but it is the wall, after all. Surely it is better to be attached and caught, than to be a wall. Therefore the man who never loves, who is hard and stony, escaping most of the miseries of life, escapes also its joys. We do not want that. That is weakness, that is death.

According to Mrs. Hansbrough, the house was not only packed to capacity that Sunday afternoon, but over a hundred people were turned away. Swamiji could draw large crowds¬-and he drew as well the inevitable money-minded impres¬sario. In this latter connection, Mrs. Hansbrough tells of a crisis that took place on the platform of Payne’s Hall. "The Mr. Blanchard for whom Blanchard Hall was named," she related, "was present at this lecture, and the size of the audience was not lost on him. When the lecture was over, he came up to me on the platform, where Swamiji was talking to some people. `I would like to make some money out of this man-for him as well as for myself,’ he said. `Could I announce to the audience now that he will speak next Sunday at Blanchard Hall?’ I told him I could not give him such permission. He then went to Miss MacLeod, who did give him permission. So while Swamiji was still there, Mr. Blanchard announced from the platform that Swami Vivekananda would speak the following Sunday at Blanchard Hall and that the admission would be ten cents.

"When Swamiji heard this announcement, he turned and asked who gave the man permission to make it. Somehow Miss MacLeod crawled out of it, and Swamiji turned on me. He was thoroughly annoyed and looked quite angry. He said the man should not have been allowed to make such an announcement. He pointed out that he had had no end of trouble trying to get rid of people who wanted to make money out of him. And he could not be persuaded to give the lecture at Blanchard Hall. What Mr. Blanchard did by way of retracting his announcement, Mrs. Hansbrough did not say.

Perhaps a general lack of seriousness in the attitude of Swamiji’s Los Angeles audiences, a dilettantism that could have no place in the study and practice of raja yoga, was partly responsible for the fact that he discontinued this series of classes. In the last two sentences of "The Powers of the Mind," which have been omitted from the Complete Works but published in the Brahmavadian of September of 1901, he said (immediately following the above), "Well, I am very sorry to announce that, for several reasons, it has been thought best to drop this course of lectures altogether; so of this course, this is the first and the last. I am very thankful to you for all your kindness, and am so sorry that it should have to be dropped, but it has to be and there is no way out.

The following evening, January 8, the Swami commenced his second class on "Applied Psychology" with the title "The Powers of the Mind". As far as is known, this was his last public lecture in the city of Los Angeles.

Some of these "recent lectures" may have been given in private homes; for generally it was to private gatherings, as at Mrs. Severance’s, that Swamiji spoke of his hopes and needs for India. In any event, we know from a letter written by Mrs. Leggett to her husband that on January 12 he held a class at Mrs. Blodgett’s. "We have had a morning class here, about 20 women," Betty Leggett wrote on that day, "and have been permeated with great associations through one of Swami’s beat talks. He reaches his apogee always in small companies, as you once said, and although his addresses here have been fine, he seems inspired to wander into any depth or altitude when away from the restrictions of a stated subject. (It was possibly at this class that "like a simple child" he had asked Mrs. Leggett at its start, "What shall I say?

It is possible, however, that he spoke there often to private gatherings in the homes of his friends. We know, for instance, that he held a morning class on January 12 at Mrs. Blodgett's.

Beyond verbal expressions of interest and sympathy, Swamiji seems to have received little outside help for the establishment of industrial schools in India. Indeed, even an organized effort by Betty Leggett to help his cause brought almost no financial response. Without his knowledge, Mrs. Leggett wrote from Los Angeles to a large number of his friends, asking them each to subscribe one hundred dollars a year for ten years for his Indian work. It was an earnestly conceived idea, but it was doomed from the start to failure. Indeed, it succeeded only in bringing disappointment to Betty Leggett herselfe -and no little embarrassment to Swamiji. "[She] headed the list with her $100 for 1900," he wrote to Sister Nivedita on February 15, "and got 2 others here to do the same. Then she went on writing letters to all my friends asking each to join in it. When she went on writing to Miss Muller I was rather shy-but she did it before I knew.

In her eagerness to be of help to Swamiji, Mrs. Leggett seems to have overlooked the intensity of Swamiji’s friends in their relationship with him; they were never casual about it, and few could have welcomed the intervention of a third person in the matter of service to him. As for his acquaintances who had no deep interest in him or in his work, or cared with any fervor for India’s regeneration, they could not have been expected to pledge a hundred dollars a year for ten years-no trifling sum in those days-at Miss. Leggett’s urging. All in all, her effort, as far as raising money was concerned, was wasted. The initial three hundred dollars was all that came or ever would come of the plan.*_x000d_ _x000d_ * It is interesting to note that much as Betty Leggett loved Swamiji and wanted to help his Indian work, she cared almost nothing for his Western work. In a letter to her husband, dated January 29, 1900, she wrote, "I am writing to everyone who professes love for (Swami] to help a little towards the general fund I mentioned to you for work in India. The Vedanta Society knows nothing of it. I am not the least interested in it (the Vedanta Society) and want you to keep any small amount naturally destined for that work, for me and my help for him. A handful of second class workers in New York are not compared in my mind to the rehabilitation of a race" (Leggett Collection). And again on February 11, 1900, when trouble was brewing between Mr. Leggett and Swami Abhedananda, she wrote to Frank "You can resign from, the Vedanta when you choose. I care nothing for the work outside the personality of `Vivekananda’ "(loc. Cit.). And Mr. Leggett, being of like mind, would indeed resign.

Swamiji seems to have regretted particularly the letter to Mrs. Hale, whom he would not have asked for money through a third person, if at all. "A very polite but cold letter came [to Mrs. Leggett] in reply from Mrs. Hale, written by Mary, expressing their inability and assuring her of their love for me," he was to write to Nivedita in his letter of February 15. "I am afraid Mrs. Hale and Mary are displeased. But it was not my fault at all ! ! . . . Tell Mary when you see her next that I had nothing whatsoever to do with the proposal of $100 a year subscription to Mrs. Hale. I am so grateful to them. Yet Swamiji was touched by Betty Leggett’s well-meant efforts. "I am not at all sorry that more people did not respond to your call," he later consoled her in a letter of March 17. "I knew they would not. But I am eternally thankful to you for all your kindness. May all blessings follow you and yours for ever.

As we have seen, Swamiji’s need for money during this period had been urgent. During his first week or so in Los Angeles so desperate, in fact, had appeared to him the financial needs of the Math that an immediate return to India had seemed, after all, the best solution. "If anything is to be done in India," he had written to Mrs. Bull on December 12, "my presence is necessary." And he went on to assure her, "I am much better in health; possibly the sea will make me better. . . . Possibly Joe will help me out with the passage, and I have some money with Mr. Leggett. I have hopes of collecting some money in India yet. . . . If I cannot collect that-it is better to struggle and die for it than vegetate here in America. . . . As Mother wants it, so let it be. I am going to beg of Joe a passage via San Francisco to India. If she gives it, I start immediately via Japan. It would take a month. In India, I think, I can raise some money to keep things straight or on a better footing.

But if Swamiji "begged of Joe a passage," she either could not give it, or, perhaps wisely, would not. He was only just beginning to show the benefits of "California ozone," to say nothing of Mrs. Melton’s magnetic powers. And perhaps Swamiji himself soon changed his mind; for it had been just at this time that Mrs. Hansbrough and Helen Mead came to call and that, subsequently, his classes in Los Angeles began.

The first week of 1900 was a full one for Swamiji. In addition to his five morning classes, he gave two evening lectures in the auditorium of the Blanchard Building. The first, delivered on Tuesday, January 2, was entitled "India and Its People" (or "The People o£ India"), and the second, delivered on Saturday, January 6, "The History of India." (Admission to each was twenty-five cents.) We are fortunate enough to have an account, or summary, of the first of these lectures, which a Herald reporter, though fretful because Swamiji had chosen not to wear his colorful robe and turban, managed to write. His article appeared on January 3 and is reprinted here for the first time.

TOLD ABOUT INDIA_x000d_ Lecture last night at Blanchard Hall by Swami Vivekananda _x000d_ _x000d_ Swami Vivekananda, member of an ancient order of Hindu monks, who is giving a series of lessons and lectures in this city, addressed an audience last night at Blanchard hall upon the "History of India" ["The People of India"]. The Swami appeared before his audience in American dress, losing to a great degree the peculiar and character¬istic personality given him by the aesthetic silken robes and the turban worn by his order.

The speaker said India was not a country, but a continent containing a huge mass of races united by religion. India was of ancient date. It was inhabited, when through a desire to reach it by a shorter passage, Columbus discovered America, and its production of cotton, sugar, indigo and spices have enriched the world. This country inhabited by 200,000,000 of people, is full of little villages that extend through all the valleys and up the mountains thousands of feet above the sea level. The immense fertility of the soil owes much to the tremendous rainfall, which is often 1, 800 inches [.sic] in a season, averaging perhaps 600 inches. Many of the people, however, in spite of the abundant productions, live wholly on millet, a kind of cereal; no animal food is eaten; no meat, eggs or fish.

The country from most ancient times has kept its own customs, its own languages and its castes. It has by its religion saved itself while it has seen other sections [nations] rise and decay. Thc Babylonian civilization was not new, but India dates long before its rise and fall. The most ancient language, Sanskrit, is spoken by the priests, and was spoken once by all the different races. The speaker gave examples of many of our common English words coming from Sanskrit roots, and traced the old religious ideas and even mythology to the ancient Aryan races.

Many of the customs of the country were sketched, and further it was shown how this country was the seat of civilization, the center of arts, the sciences, the philo¬sophical thought of the world.

The people of India have saved themselves by making a wall around themselves by making the castes absolute. An emperor in India is glad to trace his descent from a priest, who is the highest caste. The castes do not exist as they did once, but they are divided into many divisions and sub-divisions. There are hundreds of them. No people of different castes eat together, or cook together. Marriage is not legal if made outside of one’s caste. The intricacy of the laws of caste is very great and branches out into the minutest detail. The poorest beggar or the viceroy of India may belong to the same caste.

Shoes are not allowed to be worn, as they are made from the skin of an animal. The women pay even more attention to these details than the men. All these customs have their philosophy. This is the true democracy, it is the socialistic idea, the development of the masses, not the individual.

The speaker closed with comparing the position of women in India with that of this country. In India the whole idea of womanhood is the mother. The mother is reverenced. She is the giver of life, the founder of the race.

The Los Angeles Evening Express also reported on "The People of India." But inasmuch as its article was short and added nothing to the above, the heading alone is given here, and this only by way of helping the present reader see the news as Los Angeles newspaper readers saw it:_x000d_ _x000d_ MANY CUSTOMS OF _x000d_ INDIA ARE DESCRIBED_x000d_ _x000d_ Swami Vivekananda Lectures About_x000d_ the Ancient and Modern _x000d_ Prac¬tices in His Own Country

One of the greatest lessons I have learnt in my life is to pay as much attention to the means of work as to its end. He was a great man from whom I learnt it, and his own life was a practical demonstration of this great principle. I have been always learning great lessons from that one principle, and it appears to be that all the secret of success is there; to pay as much attention to the means as to the end._x000d_ Our great defect in life is that we are so much drawn to the ideal, the goal is so much more enchanting, so much more alluring, so much bigger in our mental horizon, that we lose sight of the details altogether._x000d_ But whenever failure comes, if we analyse it critically, in ninety-nine per cent of cases we shall find that it was because we did not pay attention to the means. Proper attention to the finishing, strengthening, of the means is what we need. With the means all right, the end must come. We forget that it is the cause that produces the effect; the effect cannot come of itself; and unless the causes are exact, proper, and powerful, the effect will not be produced. Once the ideal is chosen and the means determined, we may almost let go the ideal, because we are sure it will be there, when the means are perfected. When the cause is there, there is no more difficulty about the effect, the effect is bound to come. If we take care of the cause, the effect will take care of itself. The realization of the ideal is the effect. The means are the cause: attention to the means, therefore, is the great secret of life. We also read this in the Gita and learn that we have to work, constantly work with all our power; to put our whole mind in the work, whatever it be, that we are doing. At the same time, we must not be attached. That is to say, we must not be drawn away from work by anything else; still, we must be able to quit the work whenever we like._x000d_ If we examine our own lives, we find that the greatest cause of sorrow is this: we take up something, and put our whole energy on it--perhaps it is a failure and yet we cannot give it up. We know that it is hurting us, that any further clinging to it is simply bringing misery on us; still, we cannot tear ourselves away from it. The bee came to sip the honey, but its feet stuck to the honey-pot and it could not get away. Again and again, we are finding ourselves in that state. That is the whole secret of existence. Why are we here? We came here to sip the honey, and we find our hands and feet sticking to it. We are caught, though we came to catch. We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life. We are being worked upon by other minds, and we are always struggling to work on other minds. We want to enjoy the pleasures of life; and they eat into our vitals. We want to get everything from nature, but we find in the long run that nature takes everything from us--depletes us, and casts us aside._x000d_ Had it not been for this, life would have been all sunshine. Never mind! With all its failures and successes, with all its joys and sorrows, it can be one succession of sunshine, if only we are not caught._x000d_ That is the one cause of misery: we are attached, we are being caught. Therefore says the Gita: Work constantly; work, but be not attached; be not caught. Reserve unto yourself the power of detaching yourself from everything, however beloved, however much the soul might yearn for it, however great the pangs of misery you feel if you were going to leave it; still, reserve the power of leaving it whenever you want. The weak have no place here, in this life or in any other life. Weakness leads to slavery. Weakness leads to all kinds of misery, physical and mental. Weakness is death. There are hundreds of thousands of microbes surrounding us, but they cannot harm us unless we become weak, until the body is ready and predisposed to receive them. There may be a million microbes of misery, floating about us. Never mind! They dare not approach us, they have no power to get a hold on us, until the mind is weakened. This is the great fact: strength is life, weakness is death. Strength is felicity, life eternal, immortal; weakness is constant strain and misery: weakness is death._x000d_ Attachment is the source of all our pleasures now. We are attached to our friends, to our relatives; we are attached to our intellectual and spiritual works; we are attached to external objects, so that we get pleasure from them. What, again, brings misery but this very attachment? We have to detach ourselves to earn joy. If only we had power to detach ourselves at will, there would not be any misery. That man alone will be able to get the best of nature, who, having the power of attaching himself to a thing with all his energy, has also the power to detach himself when he should do so. The difficulty is that there must be as much power of attachment as that of detachment. There are men who are never attracted by anything. They can never love, they are hard-hearted and apathetic; they escape most of the miseries of life. But the wall never feels misery, the wall never loves, is never hurt; but it is the wall, after all. Surely it is better to be attached and caught, than to be a wall. Therefore the man who never loves who is hard and stony, escaping most of the miseries of life, escapes also its joys. We do not want that. That is weakness, that is death. That soul has not been awakened that never feels weakness, never feels misery. That is a callous state. We do not want that._x000d_ At the same time, we not only want this mighty power of love, this mighty power of attachment, the power of throwing our whole soul upon a single object, losing ourselves and letting ourselves be annihilated, as it were, for other souls--which is the power of the gods--but we want to be higher even than the gods. The perfect man can put his whole soul upon that one point of love, yet he is unattached. How comes this? There is another secret to learn._x000d_ The beggar is never happy. The beggar only gets a dole with pity and scorn behind it, at least with the thought behind that the beggar is a low object. He never really enjoys what he gets._x000d_ We are all beggars. Whatever we do, we want a return. We are all traders. We are traders in life, we are traders in virtue, we are traders in religion. And alas! We are also traders in love._x000d_ If you come to trade, if it is a question of give-and-take, if it is a question of buy-and-sell, abide by the laws of buying and selling. There is a bad time and there is a good time; there is a rise and a fall in prices: always you expect the blow to come. It is like looking at the mirror. Your face is reflected: you make a grimace--there is one in the mirror; if you laugh, the mirror laughs. This is buying and selling, giving and taking._x000d_ We get caught. How? Not by what we give, but by what we expect. We get misery in return for our love; not from the fact that we love, but from the fact that we want love in return. There is no misery where there is no want. Desire, want, is the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of success and failure. Desires must bring misery._x000d_ The great secret of true success, of true happiness, then, is this: the man who asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish man, is the most successful. It seems to be a paradox. Do we not know that every man who is unselfish in life gets cheated, gets hurt? Apparently, yes. "Christ was unselfish, and yet he was crucified." True, but we know that his unselfishness is the reason, the cause of a great victory--the crowning of millions upon millions of lives with the blessings of true success._x000d_ Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come back to you--but do not think of that now, it will come back multiplied a thousandfold--but the attention must not be on that. Yet have the power to give: give, and there it ends. Learn that the whole of life is giving, that nature will force you to give. So, give willingly. Sooner or later you will have to give up. You come into life to accumulate. With clenched hands, you want to take. But nature puts a hand on your throat and makes your hands open. Whether you will it or not, you have to give. The moment you say, "I will not", the blow comes; you are hurt. None is there but will be compelled, in the long run, to give up everything. And the more one struggles against this law, the more miserable one feels. It is because we dare not give, because we are not resigned enough to accede to this grand demand of nature, that we are miserable. The forest is gone, but we get heat in return. The sun is taking up water from the ocean, to return it in showers. You are a machine for taking and giving: you take, in order to give. Ask, therefore, nothing in return; but the more you give, the more will come to you. The quicker you can empty the air out of this room, the quicker it will be filled up by the external air; and if you close all the doors and every aperture, that which is within will remain, but that which is outside will never come in, and that which is within will stagnate, degenerate, and become poisoned. A river is continually emptying itself into the ocean and is continually filling up again. Bar not the exit into the ocean. The moment you do that, death seizes you._x000d_ Be, therefore, not a beggar; be unattached. This is the most terrible task of life! You do not calculate the dangers on the path. Even by intellectually recognising the difficulties, we really do not know them until we feel them. From a distance we may get a general view of a park: well, what of that? We feel and really know it when we are in it. Even if our every attempt is a failure, and we bleed and are torn asunder, yet, through all this, we have to preserve our heart--we must assert our God-head in the midst of all these difficulties. Nature wants us to react, to return blow for blow, cheating for cheating, lie for lie, to hit back with all our might. Then it requires a superdivine power not to hit back, to keep control, to be unattached._x000d_ Every day we renew our determination to be unattached. We cast our eyes back and look at the past objects of our love and attachment, and feel how every one of them made us miserable. We went down into the depths of dependency because of our "love"! We found ourselves mere slaves in the hands of others, we were dragged down and down! And we make a fresh determination: "Henceforth, I will be master of myself; henceforth, I will have control over myself." But the time comes, and the same story once more! Again the soul is caught and cannot get out. The bird is in a net, struggling and fluttering. This is our life._x000d_ I know the difficulties. Tremendous they are, and ninety per cent of us become discouraged and lose heart, and in our turn, often become pessimists and cease to believe in sincerity, love, and all that is grand and noble. So, we find men who in the freshness of their lives have been forgiving, kind, simple, and guileless, become in old age lying masks of men. Their minds are a mass of intricacy. There may be a good deal of external policy, possibly. They are not hot-headed, they do not speak, but it would be better for them to do so; their hearts are dead and, therefore, they do not speak. They do not curse, not become angry; but it would be better for them to be able to be angry; a thousand times better, to be able to curse. They cannot. There is death in the heart, for cold hands have seized upon it, and it can no more act, even to utter a curse, even to use a harsh word._x000d_ All this we have to avoid: therefore I say, we require superdivine power. Superhuman power is not strong enough. Superdivine strength is the only way, the one way out. By it alone we can pass through all these intricacies, through these showers of miseries, unscathed. We may be cut to pieces, torn asunder, yet our hearts must grow nobler and nobler all the time._x000d_ It is very difficult, but we can overcome the difficulty by constant practice. We must learn that nothing can happen to us, unless we make ourselves susceptible to it. I have just said, no disease can come to me until the body is ready; it does not depend alone on the germs, but upon a certain predisposition which is already in the body. We get only that for which we are fitted. Let us give up our pride and understand this, that never is misery undeserved. There never has been a blow undeserved: there never has been an evil for which I did not pave the way with my own hands. We ought to know that. Analyse yourselves and you will find that every blow you have received, came to you because you prepared yourselves for it. You did half, and the external world did the other half: that is how the blow came. That will sober us down. At the same time, from this very analysis will come a note of hope, and the note of hope is: "I have no control of the external world, but that which is in me and nearer unto me, my own world, is in my control. If the two together are required to make a failure, if the two together are necessary to give me a blow, I will not contribute the one which is in my keeping; and how then can the blows come? If I get real control of myself, the blow will never come."_x000d_ We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame upon something outside ourselves. We are always standing up to set right other people, and not ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is a devil's world." We curse others and say, "What infatuated fools!" But why should we be in such a world, if we really are so good? If this is a devil's world, we must be devils also; why else should we be here? "Oh, the people of the world are so selfish!" True enough; but why should we be found in that company, if we be better? Just think of that._x000d_ We only get what we deserve. It is a lie when we say, the world is bad and we are good. It can never be so. It is a terrible lie we tell ourselves._x000d_ This is the first lesson to learn: be determined not to curse anything outside, not to lay the blame upon any one outside, but be a man, stand up, lay the blame on yourself. You will find, that is always true. Get hold of yourself._x000d_ Is it not a shame that at one moment we talk so much of our manhood, of our being gods--that we know everything, we can do everything, we are blameless, spotless, the most unselfish people in the world; and at the next moment, a little stone hurts us, a little anger from a little Jack wounds us--any fool in the street makes "these gods" miserable! Should this be so if we are such gods? Is it true that the world is to blame? Could God, who is the purest and noblest of souls, be made miserable by any of our tricks? If you are so unselfish, you are like God. What world can hurt you? You would go through the seventh hell unscathed, untouched. But the very fact that you complain and want to lay blame upon the external world shows that you feel the external world--the very fact that you feel shows that you are not what you claim to be. You only make your offence greater by heaping misery upon misery, by imagining that the external world is hurting you, and crying out, "Oh, this devil's world! This man hurts me; that man hurts me!" and so forth. It is adding lies to misery._x000d_ We are to take care of ourselves--that much we can do--and give up attending to others for a time. Let us perfect the means; the end will take care of itself. For the world can be good and pure, only if our lives are good and pure. It is an effect, and we are the means. Therefore, let us purify ourselves. Let us make ourselves perfect.

Whichever way we turn in trying to understand things in their reality, if we analyse far enough, we find that at last we come to a peculiar state of things, seemingly a contradiction: something which our reason cannot grasp and yet is a fact. We take up something--we know it is finite; but as soon as we begin to analyse it, it leads us beyond our reason, and we never find an end to all its qualities, its possibilities, its powers, its relations. It has become infinite. Take even a common flower, that is finite enough; but who is there that can say he knows all about the flower? There is no possibility of anyone's getting to the end of the knowledge about that one flower. The flower has become infinite--the flower which was finite to begin with. Take a grain of sand. Analyse it. We start with the assumption that it is finite, and at last we find that it is not, it is infinite; all the same, we have looked upon it as finite. The flower is similarly treated as a finite something._x000d_ So with all our thoughts and experiences, physical and mental. We begin, we may think, on a small scale, and grasp them as little things; but very soon they elude our knowledge and plunge into the abyss of the infinite. And the greatest and the first thing perceived is ourselves. We are also in the same dilemma about existence. We exist. We see we are finite beings. We live and die. Our horizon is narrow. We are here, limited, confronted by the universe all around. Nature can crush us out of existence in a moment. Our little bodies are just held together, ready to go to pieces at a moment's notice. We know that. In the region of action how powerless we are! Our will is being thwarted at every turn. So many things we want to do, and how few we can do! There is no limit to our willing. We can will everything, want everything, we can desire to go to the dogstar. But how few of our desires can be accomplished! The body will not allow it. Well, nature is against the accomplishment of our will. We are weak. What is true of the flower, of the grain of sand, of the physical world, and of every thought, is a hundredfold more true of ourselves. We are also in the same dilemma of existence, being finite and infinite at the same time. We are like waves in the ocean; the wave is the ocean and yet not the ocean. There is not any part of the wave of which you cannot say, "It is the ocean." The name "ocean" applies to the wave and equally to every other part of the ocean, and yet it is separate from the ocean. So in this infinite ocean of existence we are like wavelets. At the same time, when we want really to grasp ourselves, we cannot--we have become the infinite. _x000d_ We seems to be walking in dreams. Dreams are all right in a dream-mind; but as soon as you want to grasp one of them, it is gone. Why? Not that it was false, but because it is beyond the power of reason, the power of the intellect to comprehend it. Everything in this life is so vast that the intellect is nothing in comparison with it. It refuses to be bound by the laws of the intellect! It laughs at the bondage the intellect wants to spread around it. And a thousandfold more so is this the case with the human soul. "We ourselves"--this is the greatest mystery of the universe._x000d_ How wonderful it all is! Look at the human eye. How easily it can be destroyed, and yet the biggest suns exist only because your eyes see them. The world exists because your eyes certify that it exists. Think of that mystery! These poor little eyes! A strong light, or a pin, can destroy them. Yet the most powerful engines of destruction, the most powerful cataclysms, the most wonderful of existences, million of suns and stars and moons and earth--all depend for their existence upon, and have to be certified by, these two little things! They say, "Nature, you exist", and we believe nature exists. So with all our senses._x000d_ What is this? Where is weakness? Who is strong? What is great and what is small? What is high and what is low in this marvellous interdependence of existence where the smallest atom is necessary for the existence of the whole? Who is great and who is small? It is past finding out! And why? Because none is great and none is small. All things are interpenetrated by that infinite ocean; their reality is that infinite; and whatever there is on the surface is but that infinite. The tree is infinite; so is everything that you see or feel--every grain of sand, every thought, every soul, everything that exists, is infinite. Infinite is finite and finite infinite. This is our existence._x000d_ Now, that may be all true, but all this feeling after the Infinite is at present mostly unconscious. It is not that we have forgotten that infinite nature of ours: none can ever do that. Who can ever think that he can be annihilated? Who can think that he will die? None can. All our relation to the Infinite works in us unconsciously. In a manner, therefore, we forget our real being, and hence all this misery comes._x000d_ In practical daily life we are hurt by small things; we are enslaved by little beings. Misery comes because we think we are finite--we are little beings. And yet, how difficult it is to believe that we are infinite beings! In the midst of all this misery and trouble, when a little thing may throw me off my balance, it must be my care to believe that I am infinite. And the fact is that we are, and that consciously or unconsciously we are all searching after that something which is infinite; we are always seeking for something that is free. _x000d_ There was never a human race which did not have a religion and worship some sort of God or gods. Whether the God or gods existed or not is no question; but what is the analysis of this psychological phenomenon? Why is all the world trying to find, or seeking for, a God? Why? Because in spite of all this bondage, in spite of nature and this tremendous energy of law grinding us down, never allowing us to turn to any side--wherever we go, whatever we want to do, we are thwarted by this law, which is everywhere--in spite of all this, the human soul never forgets its freedom and is ever seeking it. The search for freedom is the search of all religions; whether they know it or not, whether they can formulate it well or ill, the idea is there. Even the lowest man, the most ignorant, seeks for something which has power over nature's laws. He wants to see a demon, a ghost, a god--somebody who can subdue nature, for whom nature is not almighty, for whom there is no law. "Oh, for somebody who can break the law!" That is the cry coming from the human heart. We are always seeking for someone who breaks the law. The rushing engine speeds along the railway track; the little worm crawls out of its way. We at once say, "The engine is dead matter, a machine; and the worm is alive," because the worm attempted to break the law. The engine, with all its power and might, can never break the law. It is made to go in any direction man wants, and it cannot do otherwise; but the worm, small and little though it was, attempted to break the law and avoid the danger. It tried to assert itself against law, assert its freedom; and there was the sign of the future God in it._x000d_ Everywhere we see this assertion of freedom, this freedom of the soul. It is reflected in every religion in the shape of God or gods; but it is all external yet--for those who only see the gods outside. Man decided that he was nothing. He was afraid that he could never be free; so he went to seek for someone outside of nature who was free. Then he thought that there were many and many such free beings, and gradually he merged them all into one God of gods and Lord of lords. Even that did not satisfy him. He came a little closer to truth, a little nearer; and then gradually found that whatever he was, he was in some way connected with the God of gods and Lord of lords; that he, though he thought himself bound and low and weak, was somehow connected with that God of gods. Then visions came to him; thought arose and knowledge advanced. And he began to come nearer and nearer to that God, and at last found out that God and all the gods, this whole psychological phenomenon connected with the search for an all-powerful free soul, was but a reflection of his own idea of himself. And then at last he discovered that it was not only true that "God made man after His own image", but that it was also true that man made God after his own image. That brought out the idea of divine freedom. The Divine Being was always within, the nearest of the near. Him we had ever been seeking outside, and at last found that He is in the heart of our hearts. You may know the story of the man who mistook his own heartbeat for somebody knocking at the door, and went to the door and opened it, but found nobody there, so he went back. Again he seemed to hear a knocking at the door, but nobody was there. Then he understood that it was his own heartbeat, and he had misinterpreted it as a knocking at the door. Similarly, man after his search finds out that this infinite freedom that he was placing in imagination all the time in the nature outside is the internal subject, the eternal Soul of souls; this Reality, he himself._x000d_ Thus at last he comes to recognise this marvellous duality of existence: the subject, infinite and finite in one--the Infinite Being is also the same finite soul. The Infinite is caught, as it were, in the meshes of the intellect and apparently manifests as finite beings, but the reality remains unchanged. _x000d_ This is, therefore, true knowledge; that the Soul of our souls, the Reality that is within us, is That which is unchangeable, eternal, ever-blessed, ever-free. This is the only solid ground for us to stand upon. _x000d_ This, then, is the end of all death, the advent of all immortality, the end of all misery. And he who sees that One among the many, that One unchangeable in the universe of change, he who sees Him as the Soul of his soul, unto him belongs eternal peace--unto none else._x000d_ And in the midst of the depths of misery and degradation, the Soul sends a ray of light, and man wakes up and finds that what is really his, he can never lose. No, we can never lose what is really ours. Who can lose his being? Who can lose his very existence? If I am good, it is the existence first, and then that becomes coloured with the quality of goodness. If I am evil, it is the existence first, and that becomes coloured with the quality of badness. That existence is first, last and always; it is never lost, but ever present._x000d_ Therefore, there is hope for all. None can die; none can be degraded for ever. Life is but a playground, however gross the play may be. However we may receive blows, and however knocked about we may be, the Soul is there and is never injured. We are that Infinite._x000d_ Thus sang a Vedantin, "I never had fear nor doubt. Death never came to me. I never had father or mother: for I was never born. Where are my foes?--for I am All. I am the Existence and Knowledge and Bliss Absolute. I am It. I am It. Anger and lust and jealousy, evil thoughts and all these things, never came to me; for I am the Existence, the Knowledge, the Bliss Absolute. I am It. I am It."_x000d_ That is the remedy for all disease, the nectar that cures death. Here we are in this world, and our nature rebels against it. But let us repeat, "I am It; I am It. I have no fear, nor doubt, nor death. I have no sex, nor creed, nor colour. What creed can I have? What sect is there to which I should belong? What sect can hold me? I am in every sect!"_x000d_ However much the body rebels, however much the mind rebels, in the midst of the uttermost darkness, in the midst of agonising tortures, in the uttermost despair, repeat this, once, twice, thrice, ever more. Light comes gently, slowly, but surely it comes._x000d_ Many times I have been in the jaws of death, starving, footsore, and weary; for days and days I had had no food, and often could walk no farther; I would sink down under a tree, and life would seem ebbing away. I could not speak, I could scarcely think, but at last the mind reverted to the idea: "I have no fear nor death; I never hunger nor thirst. I am It! I am It! The whole of nature cannot crush me; it is my servant. Assert thy strength, thou Lord of lords and God of gods! Regain thy lost empire! Arise and walk and stop not!" And I would rise up, reinvigorated, and here am I, living, today. Thus, whenever darkness comes, assert the reality and everything adverse must vanish. For, after all, it is but a dream. Mountain-high though the difficulties appear, terrible and gloomy though all things seem, they are but Maya. Fear not--it is banished. Crush it, and it vanishes. Stamp upon it, and it dies. Be not afraid. Think not how many times you fail. Never mind. Time is infinite. Go forward; assert yourself again and again, and light must come. You may pray to everyone that was ever born, but who will come to help you? And what of the way of death from which none knows escape? Help thyself out by thyself. None else can help thee, friend. For thou alone art thy greatest enemy, thou alone art thy greatest friend. Get hold of the Self, then. Stand up. Don't be afraid. In the midst of all miseries and all weakness, let the Self come out, faint and imperceptible though it be at first. You will gain courage, and at last like a lion you will roar out, "I am It! I am It!" "I am neither a man, nor a woman, nor a god, nor a demon; no, nor any of the animals, plants, or trees. I am neither poor nor rich, neither learned nor ignorant. All these things are very little compared with what I am: for I am It! I am It! Behold the sun and the moon and the stars: I am the light that is shining in them! I am the beauty of the fire! I am the power in the universe! For, I am It! I am It!"_x000d_ "Whoever thinks that I am little makes a mistake, for the Self is all that exists. The sun exists because I declare it does, the world exists because I declare it does. Without me they cannot remain, for I am Existence, Knowledge, and Bliss Absolute--ever happy, ever pure, ever beautiful. Behold, the sun is the cause of our vision, but is not itself ever affected by any defect in the eyes of any one; even so I am. I am working through all organs, working through everything, but never does the good and evil of work attach to me. For me there is no law, nor Karma. I own the laws of Karma. I ever was and ever am."_x000d_ "My real pleasure was never in earthly things--in husband, wife, children, and other things. For I am like the infinite blue sky: clouds of many colours pass over it and play for a second; they move off, and there is the same unchangeable blue. Happiness and misery, good and evil, may envelop me for a moment, veiling the Self; but I am still there. They pass away because they are changeable. I shine, because I am unchangeable. If misery comes, I know it is finite, therefore it must die. If evil comes, I know it is finite, it must go. I alone am infinite and untouched by anything. For I am the Infinite, that Eternal, Changeless Self."--So sings one of our poets._x000d_ Let us drink of this cup, this cup that leads to everything that is immortal, everything that is unchangeable. _x000d_ Fear not. Believe not that we are evil, that we are finite, that we can ever die. It is not true._x000d_ "This is to be heard of, then to be thought upon, and then to be meditated upon." When the hands work, the mind should repeat, "I am It. I am It." Think of it, dream of it, until it becomes bone of your bones and flesh of your flesh, until all the hideous dreams of littleness, of weakness, of misery, and of evil, have entirely vanished, and no more then can the Truth be hidden from you even for a moment.

On the afternoon of Sunday, January 7, Swamiji delivered at Payne’s Hall what is today one of his best known lectures of that period: "Christ’s Message to the World" (published in the Complete Works as "Christ, the Messenger"). This lecture, which is unique in being Swamiji’s only published lecture on Christ, may have been given in response to requests that he repeat his Home of Truth lecture on the same subject; but it was not, we may be sure, a simple repetition. ("I can talk on the same subject," Mrs. Hansbrough quotes him as having once said to Mr. Baumgardt, "but it will not be the same lecture.") "Christ’s Message to the World" was replete, however, with the same feeling of reverence that (according to Mr. Bransby) had marked the Home of Truth lecture. He repudiated strongly the modern concept of Jesus as having been merely a great man in the humanistic sense. "One gets sick at heart," he said, "at the different accounts of the life of the Christ that Western people give. I do not know what he was or what he was not! One would make him a great politician; another, perhaps, would make of him a great military general; another, a great patriotic Jew; and so on. Is there any warrant in the books for all such assumptions? The best commentary on the life of a great teacher is his own life. . . . Do you think that this mass of light, this God and not-man, came down to earth to be the brother of animals? And yet, people make him preach all sorts of things. He had no sex ideas! He was a soul! Nothing but a soul just working a body for the good of humanity; and that was all his relation to the body . . . The ideal may be far away beyond us. But never mind, keep to the ideal. Let us confess that it is our ideal, but we cannot approach it yet."

While Swamiji may at times have doubted the historicity of Jesus, he revered the highest Christian ideal as exemplified in the all-renouncing, totally selfless Christ. "It does not matter at all," he said in the Payne’s Hall lecture, "whether the New Testament was written within five hundred years of his birth, nor does it matter even, how much of that life is true. But there is something behind it, something we want to imitate. . . . There must have been a nucleus, a tremendous power that came down, a marvellous manifestation of spiritual power and of that we are speaking. It stands there. "My view of the great prophet of Nazareth [himself an Oriental of Orientals] would be from the standpoint of the Orient, he said in this same lecture. And it may have come as a surprise to his audience that from that standpoint he revered and loved Christ with as much intensity as the most ardent Christian devotee. "Had I lived in Palestine in the days of Jesus of Nazareth," Sister Nivedita quotes him as having once exclaimed, "I would have washed His feet, not with my tears, but with my heart’s blood!

On the afternoon of Sunday, January 7, the Swami delivered at Payne's Hall to a packed and overflowing house what is today one of his best known lectures of that period: "Christ's Message to the World". The lecture, unique in being his only published lecture on Christ, fully reveals his profound reverence for the highest Christian ideal as embodied in and empowered by the Christ. "It does not matter at all," he said, "whether the New Testament was written within five hundred years of his birth, nor does it matter even, how much of that life is true. But there is something behind it, something we want to imitate.... There must have been a nucleus, a tremendous manifestation of spiritual power — and of that we are speaking. It stands there."

The wave rises on the ocean, and there is a hollow. Again another wave rises, perhaps bigger than the former, to fall down again, similarly, again to rise--driving onward. In the march of events, we notice the rise and fall, and we generally look towards the rise, forgetting the fall. But both are necessary, and both are great. This is the nature of the universe. Whether in the world of our thoughts, the world of our relations in society, or in our spiritual affairs, the same movement of succession, of rises and falls, is going on. Hence great predominances in the march of events, the liberal ideals, are marshalled ahead, to sink down, to digest, as it were, to ruminate over the past--to adjust, to conserve, to gather strength once more for a rise and a bigger rise._x000d_ The history of nations also has ever been like that. The great soul, the Messenger we are to study this afternoon, came at a period of the history of his race which we may well designate as a great fall. We catch only little glimpses here and there of the stray records that have been kept of his sayings and doings; for verily it has been well said, that the doings and sayings of that great soul would fill the world if they had all been written down. And the three years of his ministry were like one compressed, concentrated age, which it has taken nineteen hundred years to unfold, and who knows how much longer it will yet take! Little men like you and me are simply the recipients of just a little energy. A few minutes, a few hours, a few years at best, are enough to spend it all, to stretch it out, as it were, to its fullest strength, and then we are gone for ever. But mark this giant that came; centuries and ages pass, yet the energy that he left upon the world is not yet stretched, nor yet expended to its full. It goes on adding new vigour as the ages roll on._x000d_ Now what you see in the life of Christ is the life of all the past. The life of every man is, in a manner, the life of the past. It comes to him through heredity, through surroundings, through education, through his own reincarnation--the past of the race. In a manner, the past of the earth, the past of the whole world is there, upon every soul. What are we, in the present, but a result, an effect, in the hands of that infinite past? What are we but floating wavelets in the eternal current of events, irresistibly moved forward and onward and incapable of rest? But you and I are only little things, bubbles. There are always some giant waves in the ocean of affairs, and in you and me the life of the past race has been embodied only a little; but there are giants who embody, as it were, almost the whole of the past and who stretch out their hands for the future. These are the sign-posts here and there which point to the march of humanity; these are verily gigantic, their shadows covering the earth--they stand undying, eternal! As it has been said by the same Messenger, "No man hath seen God at any time, but through the Son." And that is true. And where shall we see God but in the Son? It is true that you and I, and the poorest of us, the meanest even, embody that God, even reflect that God. The vibration of light is everywhere, omnipresent; but we have to strike the light of the lamp before we can see the light. The Omnipresent God of the universe cannot be seen until He is reflected by these giant lamps of the earth--the Prophets, the man-Gods, the Incarnations, the embodiments of God._x000d_ We all know that God exists, and yet we do not see Him, we do not understand Him. Take one of these great Messengers of light, compare his character with the highest ideal of God that you ever formed, and you will find that your God falls short of the ideal, and that the character of the Prophet exceeds your conceptions. You cannot even form a higher ideal of God than what the actually embodied have practically realised and set before us as an example. Is it wrong, therefore, to worship these as God? Is it a sin to fall at the feet of these man-Gods and worship them as the only divine beings in the world? If they are really, actually, higher than all our conceptions of God, what harm is there in worshipping them? Not only is there no harm, but it is the only possible and positive way of worship. However much you may try to struggle, by abstraction, by whatsoever method you like, still so long as you are a man in the world of men, your world is human, your religion is human, and your God is human. And that must be so. Who is not practical enough to take up an actually existing thing and give up an idea which is only an abstraction, which he cannot grasp, and is difficult of approach except through a concrete medium? Therefore, these Incarnations of God have been worshipped in all ages and in all countries._x000d_ We are now going to study a little of the life of Christ, the Incarnation of the Jews. When Christ was born, the Jews were in that state which I call a state of fall between two waves; a state of conservatism; a state where the human mind is, as it were, tired for the time being of moving forward and is taking care only of what it has already; a state when the attention is more bent upon particulars, upon details, than upon the great, general, and bigger problems of life; a state of stagnation, rather than a towing ahead; a state of suffering more than of doing. Mark you, I do not blame this state of things. We have no right to criticise it--because had it not been for this fall, the next rise, which was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth would have been impossible. The Pharisees and Sadducees might have been insincere, they might have been doing things which they ought not to have done; they might have been even hypocrites; but whatever they were, these factors were the very cause, of which the Messenger was the effect. The Pharisees and Sadducees at one end were the very impetus which came out at the other end as the gigantic brain of Jesus of Nazareth._x000d_ The attention to forms, to formulas, to the everyday details of religion, and to rituals, may sometimes be laughed at; but nevertheless, within them is strength. Many times in the rushing forward we lose much strength. As a fact, the fanatic is stronger than the liberal man. Even the fanatic, therefore, has one great virtue, he conserves energy, a tremendous amount of it. As with the individual so with the race, energy is gathered to be conserved. Hemmed in all around by external enemies, driven to focus in a centre by the Romans, by the Hellenic tendencies in the world of intellect, by waves from Persia, India, and Alexandria--hemmed in physically, mentally, and morally--there stood the race with an inherent, conservative, tremendous strength, which their descendants have not lost even today. And the race was forced to concentrate and focus all its energies upon Jerusalem and Judaism. But all power when once gathered cannot remain collected; it must expend and expand itself. There is no power on earth which can be kept long confined within a narrow limit. It cannot be kept compressed too long to allow of expansion at a subsequent period._x000d_ This concentrated energy amongst the Jewish race found its expression at the next period in the rise of Christianity. The gathered streams collected into a body. Gradually, all the little streams joined together, and became a surging wave on the top of which we find standing out the character of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, every Prophet is a creation of his own times, the creation of the past of his race; he himself is the creator of the future. The cause of today is the effect of the past and the cause for the future. In this position stands the Messenger. In him is embodied all that is the best and greatest in his own race, the meaning, the life, for which that race has struggled for ages; and he himself is the impetus for the future, not only to his own race but to unnumbered other races of the world._x000d_ We must bear another fact in mind: that my view of the great Prophet of Nazareth would be from the standpoint of the Orient. Many times you forget, also, that the Nazarene himself was an Oriental of Orientals. With all your attempts to paint him with blue eyes and yellow hair, the Nazarene was still an Oriental. All the similes, the imageries, in which the Bible is written--the scenes, the locations, the attitudes, the groups, the poetry, and symbol,--speak to you of the Orient: of the bright sky, of the heat, of the sun, of the desert, of the thirsty men and animals; of men and women coming with pitchers on their heads to fill them at the wells; of the flocks, of the ploughmen, of the cultivation that is going on around; of the water-mill and wheel, of the mill-pond, of the millstones. All these are to be seen today in Asia._x000d_ The voice of Asia has been the voice of religion. The voice of Europe is the voice of politics. Each is great in its own sphere. The voice of Europe is the voice of ancient Greece. To the Greek mind, his immediate society was all in all: beyond that, it is Barbarian. None but the Greek has the right to live. Whatever the Greeks do is right and correct; whatever else there exists in the world is neither right nor correct, nor should be allowed to live. It is intensely human in its sympathies, intensely natural, intensely artistic, therefore. The Greek lives entirely in this world. He does not care to dream. Even is poetry is practical. His gods and goddesses are not only human beings, but intensely human, with all human passions and feelings almost the same as with any of us. He loves what is beautiful, but, mind you, it is always external nature; the beauty of the hills, of the snows, of the flowers, the beauty of forms and of figures, the beauty in the human face, and, more often, in the human form--that is what the Greeks liked. And the Greeks being the teachers of all subsequent Europeanism, the voice of Europe is Greek._x000d_ There is another type in Asia. Think of that vast, huge continent, whose mountain-tops go beyond the clouds, almost touching the canopy of heaven's blue; a rolling desert of miles upon miles where a drop of water cannot be found, neither will a blade of grass grow; interminable forests and gigantic rivers rushing down to the sea. In the midst of all these surroundings, the oriental love of the beautiful and of the sublime developed itself in another direction. It looked inside, and not outside. There is also the thirst for nature, and there is also the same thirst for power; there is also the same thirst for excellence, the same idea of the Greek and Barbarian, but it has extended over a larger circle. In Asia, even today, birth or colour or language never makes a race. That which makes a race is its religion. We are all Christians; we are all Mohammedans; we are all Hindus, or all Buddhists. No matter if a Buddhist is a Chinaman, or is a man from Persia, they think that they are brothers, because of their professing the same religion. Religion is the tie, unity of humanity. And then again, the Oriental, for the same reason, is a visionary, is a born dreamer. The ripples of the waterfalls, the songs of the birds, the beauties of the sun and moon and the stars and the whole earth are pleasant enough; but they are not sufficient for the oriental mind. He wants to dream a dream beyond. He wants to go beyond the present. The present, as it were, is nothing to him. The Orient has been the cradle of the human race for ages, and all the vicissitudes of fortune are there--kingdoms succeeding kingdoms, empires succeeding empires, human power, glory, and wealth, all rolling down there; a Golgotha of power and learning. That is the Orient: a Golgotha of power, of kingdoms, of learning. No wonder, the oriental mind looks with contempt upon the things of this world and naturally wants to see something that changeth not, something which dieth not, something which in the midst of this world of misery and death is eternal, blissful, undying. An oriental Prophet never tires of insisting upon these ideals; and, as for Prophets, you may also remember that without one exception, all the Messengers were Orientals._x000d_ We see, therefore, in the life of this great Messenger of life, the first watchword: "Not this life, but something higher"; and, like the true son of the Oriental, he is practical in that. You people in the West are practical in your own department, in military affairs, and in managing political circles and other things. Perhaps the Oriental is not practical in those ways, but he is practical in his own field; he is practical in religion. If one preaches a philosophy, tomorrow there are hundreds who will struggle their best to make it practical in their lives. If a man preaches that standing on one foot would lead one to salvation, he will immediately get five hundred to stand on one foot. You may call it ludicrous; but, mark you, beneath that is their philosophy--that intense practicality. In the West, plans of salvation mean intellectual gymnastics--plans which are never worked out, never brought into practical life. In the West, the preacher who talks the best is the greatest preacher._x000d_ So, we find Jesus of Nazareth, in the first place, the true son of the Orient, intensely practical. He has no faith in this evanescent world and all its belongings. No need of text-torturing, as is the fashion in the West in modern times, no need of stretching out texts until they will not stretch any more. Texts are not India rubber, and even that has its limits. Now, no making of religion to pander to the sense vanity of the present day! Mark you, let us all be honest. If we cannot follow the ideal, let us confess our weakness, but not degrade it; let not any try to pull it down. One gets sick at heart at the different accounts of the life of the Christ that Western people give. I do not know what he was or what he was not! One would make him a great politician; another, perhaps, would make of him a great military general; another, a great patriotic Jew; and so on. Is there any warrant in the books for all such assumptions? The best commentary on the life of a great teacher is his own life. "The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." That is what Christ says as the only way to salvation; he lays down no other way. Let us confess in sackcloth and ashes that we cannot do that. We still have fondness for "me and mine". We want property, money, wealth. Woe unto us! Let us confess and not put to shame that great Teacher of Humanity! He had no family ties. But do you think that, that Man had any physical ideas in him? Do you think that, this mass of light, this God and not-man, came down to earth, to be the brother of animals? And yet, people make him preach all sorts of things. He had no sex ideas! He was a soul! Nothing but a soul--just working a body for the good of humanity; and that was all his relation to the body. In the soul there is no sex. The disembodied soul has no relation to the animal, no relationship to the body. The ideal may be far away beyond us. But never mind, keep to the ideal. Let us confess that it is our ideal, but we cannot approach it yet._x000d_ He had no other occupation in life, no other thought except that one, that he was a spirit. He was a disembodied, unfettered, unbound spirit. And not only so, but he, with his marvellous vision, had found that every man and woman, whether Jew or Gentile, whether rich or poor, whether saint or sinner, was the embodiment of the same undying spirit as himself. Therefore, the one work his whole life showed was to call upon them to realise their own spiritual nature. Give up he says, these superstitious dreams that you are low and that you are poor. Think not that you are trampled upon and tyrannised over as if you were slaves, for within you is something that can never be tyrannised over, never be trampled upon, never be troubled, never be killed. You are all Sons of God, immortal spirit. "Know", he declared, "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you." "I and my Father are one." Dare you stand up and say, not only that "I am the Son of God", but I shall also find in my heart of hearts that "I and my Father are one"? That was what Jesus of Nazareth said. He never talks of this world and of this life. He has nothing to do with it, except that he wants to get hold of the world as it is, give it a push and drive it forward and onward until the whole world has reached to the effulgent Light of God, until everyone has realised his spiritual nature, until death is vanished and misery banished._x000d_ We have read different stories that have been written about him; we know the scholars and their writings, and the higher criticism; and we know all that has been done by study. We are not here to discuss how much of the New Testament is true, we are not here to discuss how much of that life is historical. It does not matter at all whether the New Testament was written within five hundred years of his birth, nor does it matter even, how much of that life is true. But there is something behind it, something we want to imitate. To tell a lie, you have to imitate a truth, and that truth is a fact. You cannot imitate that which never existed. You cannot imitate that which you never perceived. But there must have been a nucleus, a tremendous power that came down, a marvellous manifestation of spiritual power--and of that we are speaking. It stands there. Therefore, we are not afraid of all the criticisms of the scholars. If I, as an Oriental, have to worship Jesus of Nazareth, there is only one way left to me, that is, to worship him as God and nothing else. Have we no right to worship him in that way, do you mean to say? If we bring him down to our own level and simply pay him a little respect as a great man, why should we worship at all? Our scriptures say, "These great children of Light, who manifest the Light themselves, who are Light themselves, they, being worshipped, become, as it were, one with us and we become one with them."_x000d_ For, you see, in three ways man perceives God. At first the undeveloped intellect of the uneducated man sees God as far away, up in the heavens somewhere, sitting on a throne as a great Judge. He looks upon Him as a fire, as a terror. Now, that is good, for there is nothing bad in it. You must remember that humanity travels not from error to truth, but from truth to truth; it may be, if you like it better, from lower truth to higher truth, but never from error to truth. Suppose you start from here and travel towards the sun in a straight line. From here the sun looks only small in size. Suppose you go forward a million miles, the sun will be much bigger. At every stage the sun will become bigger and bigger. Suppose twenty thousand photographs had been taken of the same sun, from different standpoints; these twenty thousand photographs will all certainly differ from one another. But can you deny that each is a photograph of the same sun? So all forms of religion, high or low, are just different stages toward that eternal state of Light, which is God Himself. Some embody a lower view, some a higher, and that is all the difference. Therefore, the religions of the unthinking masses all over the world must be, and have always been, of a God who is outside of the universe, who lives in heaven, who governs from that place, who is a punisher of the bad and a rewarder of the good, and so on. As man advanced spiritually, he began to feel that God was omnipresent, that He must be in him, that He must be everywhere, that He was not a distant God, but clearly the Soul of all souls. As my soul moves my body, even so is God the mover of my soul. Soul within soul. And a few individuals who had developed enough and were pure enough, went still further, and at last found God. As the New Testament says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." And they found at last that they and the Father were one._x000d_ You find that all these three stages are taught by the Great Teacher in the New Testament. Note the Common Prayer he taught: "Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name," and so on--a simple prayer, a child's prayer. Mark you, it is the "Common Prayer" because it is intended for the uneducated masses. To a higher circle, to those who had advanced a little more, he gave a more elevated teaching: "I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you." Do you remember that? And then, when the Jews asked him who he was, he declared that he and his Father were one, and the Jews thought that that was blasphemy. What did he mean by that? This has been also told by your old Prophets, "Ye are gods and all of you are children of the Most High." Mark the same three stages. You will find that it is easier for you to begin with the first and end with the last._x000d_ The Messenger came to show the path: that the spirit is not in forms, that it is not through all sorts of vexations and knotty problems of philosophy that you know the spirit. Better that you had no learning, better that you never read a book in your life. These are not at all necessary for salvation--neither wealth, nor position nor power, not even learning; but what is necessary is that one thing, purity. "Blessed are the pure in heart," for the spirit in its own nature is pure. How can it be otherwise? It is of God, it has come from God. In the language of the Bible, "It is the breath of God." In the language of the Koran, "It is the soul of God." Do you mean to say that the Spirit of God can ever be impure? But, alas, it has been, as it were, covered over with the dust and dirt of ages, through our own actions, good and evil. Various works which were not correct, which were not true, have covered the same spirit with the dust and dirt of the ignorance of ages. It is only necessary to clear away the dust and dirt, and then the spirit shines immediately. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." Where goest thou to seek for the Kingdom of God, asks Jesus of Nazareth, when it is there, within you? Cleanse the spirit, and it is there. It is already yours. How can you get what is not yours? It is yours by right. You are the heirs of immortality, sons of the Eternal Father._x000d_ This is the great lesson of the Messenger, and another which is the basis of all religions, is renunciation. How can you make the spirit pure? By renunciation. A rich young man asked Jesus, "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" And Jesus said unto him, "One thing thou lackest; go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasures in heaven: and come, take up thy cross, and follow Me." And he was sad at that saying and went away grieved; for he had great possessions. We are all more or less like that. The voice is ringing in our ears day and night. In the midst of our pleasures and joys, in the midst of worldly things, we think that we have forgotten everything else. Then comes a moment's pause and the voice rings in our ears: "Give up all that thou hast and follow Me." "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake shall find it." For whoever gives up this life for His sake, finds the life immortal. In the midst of all our weakness there is a moment of pause and the voice rings: "Give up all that thou hast; give it to the poor and follow me." This is the one ideal he preaches, and this has been the ideal preached by all the great Prophets of the world: renunciation. What is meant by renunciation? That there is only one ideal in morality: unselfishness. Be selfless. The ideal is perfect unselfishness. When a man is struck on the right cheek, he turns the left also. When a man's coat is carried off, he gives away his cloak also._x000d_ We should work in the best way we can, without dragging the ideal down. Here is the ideal. When a man has no more self in him, no possession, nothing to call "me" or "mine", has given himself up entirely, destroyed himself as it were--in that man is God Himself; for in him self-will is gone, crushed out, annihilated. That is the ideal man. We cannot reach that state yet; yet, let us worship the ideal, and slowly struggle to reach the ideal, though, maybe, with faltering steps. It may be tomorrow, or it may be a thousand years hence; but that ideal has to be reached. For it is not only the end, but also the means. To be unselfish, perfectly selfless, is salvation itself; for the man within dies, and God alone remains._x000d_ One more point. All the teachers of humanity are unselfish. Suppose Jesus of Nazareth was teaching, and a man came and told him, "What you teach is beautiful. I believe that it is the way to perfection, and I am ready to follow it; but I do not care to worship you as the only begotten Son of God." What would be the answer of Jesus of Nazareth? "Very well, brother, follow the ideal and advance in your own way. I do not care whether you give me the credit for the teaching or not. I am not a shopkeeper. I do not trade in religion. I only teach truth, and truth is nobody's property. Nobody can patent truth. Truth is God Himself. Go forward." But what the disciples say nowadays is: "No matter whether you practise the teachings or not, do you give credit to the Man? If you credit the Master, you will be saved; if not, there is no salvation for you." And thus the whole teaching of the Master is degenerated, and all the struggle and fight is for the personality of the Man. They do not know that in imposing that difference, they are, in a manner, bringing shame to the very Man they want to honour--the very Man that would have shrunk with shame from such an idea. What did he care if there was one man in the world that remembered him or not? He had to deliver his message, and he gave it. And if he had twenty thousand lives, he would give them all up for the poorest man in the world. If he had to be tortured millions of times for a million despised Samaritans, and if for each one of them the sacrifice of his own life would be the only condition of salvation, he would have given his life. And all this without wishing to have his name known even to a single person. Quiet, unknown, silent, would he work, just as the Lord works. Now, what would the disciple say? He will tell you that you may be a perfect man, perfectly unselfish; but unless you give the credit to our teacher, to our saint, it is of no avail. Why? What is the origin of this superstition, this ignorance? The disciple thinks that the Lord can manifest Himself only once. There lies the whole mistake. God manifests Himself to you in man. But throughout nature, what happens once must have happened before, and must happen in future. There is nothing in nature which is not bound by law; and that means that whatever happens once must go on and must have been going on._x000d_ In India they have the same idea of the Incarnations of God. One of their great Incarnations, Krishna, whose grand sermon, the Bhagavad-Gita, some of you might have read, says, "Though I am unborn, of changeless nature, and Lord of beings, yet subjugating My Prakriti, I come into being by My own Maya. Whenever virtue subsides and immorality prevails, then I body Myself forth. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked, and for the establishment of Dharma, I come into being, in every age." Whenever the world goes down, the Lord comes to help it forward; and so He does from time to time and place to place. In another passage He speaks to this effect: Wherever thou findest a great soul of immense power and purity struggling to raise humanity, know that he is born of My splendour, that I am there working through him._x000d_ Let us, therefore, find God not only in Jesus of Nazareth, but in all the great Ones that have preceded him, in all that came after him, and all that are yet to come. Our worship is unbounded and free. They are all manifestations of the same Infinite God. They are all pure and unselfish; they struggled and gave up their lives for us, poor human beings. They each and all suffer vicarious atonement for every one of us, and also for all that are to come hereafter._x000d_ In a sense you are all Prophets; every one of you is a Prophet, bearing the burden of the world on your own shoulders. Have you ever seen a man, have you ever seen a woman, who is not quietly, patiently, bearing his or her little burden of life? The great Prophets were giants--they bore a gigantic world on their shoulders. Compared with them we are pigmies, no doubt, yet we are doing the same task; in our little circles, in our little homes, we are bearing our little crosses. There is no one so evil, no one so worthless, but he has to bear his own cross. But with all our mistakes, with all our evil thoughts and evil deeds, there is a bright spot somewhere, there is still somewhere the golden thread through which we are always in touch with the divine. For, know for certain, that the moment the touch of the divine is lost there would be annihilation. And because none can be annihilated, there is always somewhere in our heart of hearts, however low and degraded we may be, a little circle of light which is in constant touch with the divine._x000d_ Our salutations go to all the past Prophets whose teachings and lives we have inherited, whatever might have been their race, clime, or creed! Our salutations go to all those Godlike men and women who are working to help humanity, whatever be their birth, colour, or race! Our salutations to those who are coming in the future--living Gods--to work unselfishly for our descendants.

On January 7, the following brevity appeared in the Times’s "City Briefs":_x000d_ _x000d_ Swami Vivekananda, on "Applied Psychology," Jan. 8, 10 and 11, at 8 p.m. 330, 1/2 S. Broadway (Payne’s Hall]._x000d_  For reasons that are not entirely clear, Swamiji gave only the first lecture in this intended series of three on "Applied Psychology." It was entitled "The Powers of the Mind," and a dated transcript of it has been published in the Complete Works. In this class, of which we shall have more to say later on, he once again stressed the extreme difficulty of the science of yoga. He had no wish to start a fad or lend support to those already existing in the name of metaphysics. "As with every other science," he said, "it is very difficult to make any great achievement, so also with this, nay much more. Yet most people think that these powers can be easily gained…. It requires rigorous training. People ask me why I do not give them practical lessons. Why, it is no joke. I stand upon this platform talking to you and you go home and find no benefit; nor do I. Then you say, `It is all bosh.’ It is because you wanted to make a bosh of it. . . . This science calls for more application than any business can ever require. . . . [Nor can it] be taught in lectures, for it is life; and life can only convey life. If there are any amongst you who are really determined to learn it, I shall be very glad to help them.

All over the world there has been the belief in the supernatural throughout the ages. All of us have heard of extraordinary happenings, and many of us have had some personal experience of them. I would rather introduce the subject by telling you certain facts which have come within my own experience. I once heard of a man who, if any one went to him with questions in his mind, would answer them immediately; and I was also informed that he foretold events. I was curious and went to see him with a few friends. We each had something in our minds to ask, and, to avoid mistakes, we wrote down our questions and put them in our pockets. As soon as the man saw one of us, he repeated our questions and gave the answers to them. Then he wrote something on paper, which he folded up, asked me to sign on the back, and said, "Don't look at it; put it in your pocket and keep it there till I ask for it again." And so on to each one of us. He next told us about some events that would happen to us in the future. Then he said, "Now, think of a word or a sentence, from any language you like." I thought of a long sentence from Sanskrit, a language of which he was entirely ignorant. "Now, take out the paper from your pocket," he said. The Sanskrit sentence was written there! He had written it an hour before with the remark, "In confirmation of what I have written, this man will think of this sentence." It was correct. Another of us who had been given a similar paper which he had signed and placed in his pocket, was also asked to think of a sentence. He thought of a sentence in Arabic, which it was still less possible for the man to know; it was some passage from the Koran. And my friend found this written down on the paper. _x000d_ Another of us was a physician. He thought of a sentence from a German medical book. It was written on his paper._x000d_ Several days later I went to this man again, thinking possibly I had been deluded somehow before. I took other friends, and on this occasion also he came out wonderfully triumphant._x000d_ Another time I was in the city of Hyderabad in India, and I was told of a Brahmin there who could produce numbers of things from where, nobody knew. This man was in business there; he was a respectable gentleman. And I asked him to show me his tricks. It so happened that this man had a fever, and in India there is a general belief that if a holy man puts his hand on a sick man he would be well. This Brahmin came to me and said, "Sir, put your hand on my head, so that my fever may be cured." I said, "Very good; but you show me your tricks." He promised. I put my hand on his head as desired, and later he came to fulfil his promise. He had only a strip of cloth about his loins, we took off everything else from him. I had a blanket which I gave him to wrap round himself, because it was cold, and made him sit in a corner. Twenty-five pairs of eyes were looking at him. And he said, "Now, look, write down anything you want." We all wrote down names of fruits that never grew in that country, bunches of grapes, oranges, and so on. And we gave him those bits of paper. And there came from under his blanket, bushels of grapes, oranges, and so forth, so much that if all that fruit was weighed, it would have been twice as heavy as the man. He asked us to eat the fruit. Some of us objected, thinking it was hypnotism; but the man began eating himself--so we all ate. It was all right. He ended by producing a mass of roses. Each flower was perfect, with dew-drops on the petals, not one crushed, not one injured. And masses of them! When I asked the man for an explanation, he said, "It is all sleight of hand."_x000d_ Whatever it was, it seemed to be impossible that it could be sleight of hand merely. From whence could he have got such large quantities of things?_x000d_ Well, I saw many things like that. Going about India you find hundreds of similar things in different places. These are in every country. Even in this country you will find some such wonderful things. Of course there is a great deal of fraud, no doubt; but then, whenever you see fraud, you have also to say that fraud is an imitation. There must be some truth somewhere, that is being imitated; you cannot imitate nothing. Imitation must be of something substantially true._x000d_ In very remote times in India, thousands of years ago, these facts used to happen even more than they do today. It seems to me that when a country becomes very thickly populated, psychical power deteriorates. Given a vast country thinly inhabited, there will, perhaps, be more of psychical power there. These facts, the Hindus, being analytically minded, took up and investigated. And they came to certain conclusions; that is, they made a science of it. They found out that all these, though extraordinary, are also natural; there is nothing supernatural. They are under laws just the same as any other physical phenomenon. It is not a freak of nature that a man is born with such powers. They can be systematically studied, practised, and acquired. This science they call the science of Raja-Yoga. There are thousands of people who cultivate the study of this science, and for the whole nation it has become a part of daily worship._x000d_ The conclusion they have reached is that all these extraordinary powers are in the mind of man. This mind is a part of the universal mind. Each mind is connected with every other mind. And each mind, wherever it is located, is in actual communication with the whole world. _x000d_ Have you ever noticed the phenomenon that is called thought-transference? A man here is thinking something, and that thought is manifested in somebody else, in some other place. With preparations--not by chance--a man wants to send a thought to another mind at a distance, and this other mind knows that a thought is coming, and he receives it exactly as it is sent out. Distance makes no difference. The thought goes and reaches the other man, and he understands it. If your mind were an isolated something here, and my mind were an isolated something there, and there were no connection between the two, how would it be possible for my thought to reach you? In the ordinary cases, it is not my thought that is reaching you direct; but my thought has got to be dissolved into ethereal vibrations and those ethereal vibrations go into your brain, and they have to be resolved again into your own thoughts. Here is a dissolution of thought, and there is a resolution of thought. It is a roundabout process. But in telepathy, there is no such thing; it is direct._x000d_ This shows that there is a continuity of mind, as the Yogis call it. The mind is universal. Your mind, my mind, all these little minds, are fragments of that universal mind, little waves in the ocean; and on account of this continuity, we can convey our thoughts directly to one another._x000d_ You see what is happening all around us. The world is one of influence. Part of our energy is used up in the preservation of our own bodies. Beyond that, every particle of our energy is day and night being used in influencing others. Our bodies, our virtues, our intellect, and our spirituality, all these are continuously influencing others; and so, conversely, we are being influenced by them. This is going on all around us. Now, to take a concrete example. A man comes; you know he is very learned, his language is beautiful, and he speaks to you by the hour; but he does not make any impression. Another man comes, and he speaks a few words, not well arranged, ungrammatical perhaps; all the same, he makes an immense impression. Many of you have seen that. So it is evident that words alone cannot always produce an impression. Words, even thoughts contribute only one-third of the influence in making an impression, the man, two-thirds. What you call the personal magnetism of the man--that is what goes out and impresses you._x000d_ In our families there are the heads; some of them are successful, others are not. Why? We complain of others in our failures. The moment I am unsuccessful, I say, so-and-so is the cause of the failure. In failure, one does not like to confess one's own faults and weaknesses. Each person tries to hold himself faultless and lay the blame upon somebody or something else, or even on bad luck. When heads of families fail, they should ask themselves, why it is that some persons manage a family so well and others do not. Then you will find that the difference is owing to the man--his presence, his personality._x000d_ Coming to great leaders of mankind, we always find that it was the personality of the man that counted. Now, take all the great authors of the past, the great thinkers. Really speaking, how many thoughts have they thought? Take all the writings that have been left to us by the past leaders of mankind; take each one of their books and appraise them. The real thoughts, new and genuine, that have been thought in this world up to this time, amount to only a handful. Read in their books the thoughts they have left to us. The authors do not appear to be giants to us, and yet we know that they were great giants in their days. What made them so? Not simply the thoughts they thought, neither the books they wrote, nor the speeches they made, it was something else that is now gone, that is their personality. As I have already remarked, the personality of the man is two-thirds, and his intellect, his words, are but one-third. It is the real man, the personality of the man, that runs through us. Our actions are but effects. Actions must come when the man is there; the effect is bound to follow the cause._x000d_ The ideal of all education, all training, should be this man-making. But, instead of that, we are always trying to polish up the outside. What use in polishing up the outside when there is no inside? The end and aim of all training is to make the man grow. The man who influences, who throws his magic, as it were, upon his fellow-beings, is a dynamo of power, and when that man is ready, he can do anything and everything he likes; that personality put upon anything will make it work._x000d_ Now, we see that though this is a fact, no physical laws that we know of will explain this. How can we explain it by chemical and physical knowledge? How much of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, how many molecules in different positions, and how many cells, etc., etc. can explain this mysterious personality? And we still see, it is a fact, and not only that, it is the real man; and it is that man that lives and moves and works, it is that man that influences, moves his fellow-beings, and passes out, and his intellect and books and works are but traces left behind. Think of this. Compare the great teachers of religion with the great philosophers. The philosophers scarcely influenced anybody's inner man, and yet they wrote most marvellous books. The religious teachers, on the other hand, moved countries in their lifetime. The difference was made by personality. In the philosopher it is a faint personality that influences; in the great prophets it is tremendous. In the former we touch the intellect, in the latter we touch life. In the one case, it is simply a chemical process, putting certain chemical ingredients together which may gradually combine and under proper circumstances bring out a flash of light or may fail. In the other, it is like a torch that goes round quickly, lighting others._x000d_ The science of Yoga claims that it has discovered the laws which develop this personality, and by proper attention to those laws and methods, each one can grow and strengthen his personality. This is one of the great practical things, and this is the secret of all education. This has a universal application. In the life of a householder, in the life of the poor, the rich, the man of business, the spiritual man, in every one's life, it is a great thing, the strengthening of this personality. There are laws, very fine, which are behind the physical laws, as we know. That is to say, there are no such realities as a physical world, a mental world, a spiritual world. Whatever is, is one. Let us say, it is a sort of tapering existence; the thickest part is here, it tapers and becomes finer and finer. The finest is what we call spirit; the grossest, the body. And just as it is here in microcosm, it is exactly the same in the macrocosm. The universe of ours is exactly like that; it is the gross external thickness, and it tapers into something finer and finer until it becomes God._x000d_ We also know that the greatest power is lodged in the fine, not the coarse. We see a man take up a huge weight, we see his muscles swell, and all over his body we see signs of exertion, and we think the muscles are powerful things. But it is the thin thread-like things, the nerves, which bring power to the muscles; the moment one of these threads is cut off from reaching the muscles, they are not able to work at all. These tiny nerves bring the power from something still finer, and that again in its turn brings it from something finer still--thought, and so on. So we can see the movements in the gross; but when fine movements take place, we cannot see them. When a gross thing moves, we catch it, and thus we naturally identify movement with things which are gross. But all the power is really in the fine. We do not see any movement in the fine, perhaps, because the movement is so intense that we cannot perceive it. But if by any science, any investigation, we are helped to get hold of these finer forces which are the cause of the expression, the expression itself will be under control. There is a little bubble coming out of the bottom of a lake; we do not see it coming all the time, we see it only when it bursts on the surface; so, we can perceive thoughts only after they develop a great deal, or after they become actions. We constantly complain that we have no control over our actions, over our thoughts. But how can we have it? If we can get control over the fine movements, if we can get hold of thought at the root, before it has become thought, before it has become action, then it would be possible for us to control the whole. Now, if there is a method by which we can analyse, investigate, understand, and finally grapple with those finer powers, the finer causes, then alone is it possible to have control over ourselves, and the man who has control over his own mind assuredly will have control over every other mind. That is why purity and morality have been always the object of religion; a pure, moral man has control of himself. And all minds are the same, different parts of one Mind. He who knows one lump of clay has known all the clay in the universe. He who knows and controls his own mind knows the secret of every mind and has power over every mind._x000d_ Now, a good deal of our physical evil we can get rid of, if we have control over the fine parts; a good many worries we can throw off, if we have control over the fine movements; a good many failures can be averted, if we have control over these fine powers. So far, is utility. Yet beyond, there is something higher._x000d_ Now, I shall tell you a theory, which I will not argue now, but simply place before you the conclusion. Each man in his childhood runs through the stages through which his race has come up; only the race took thousands of years to do it, while the child takes a few years. The child is first the old savage man--and he crushes a butterfly under his feet. The child is at first like the primitive ancestors of his race. As he grows, he passes through different stages until he reaches the development of his race. Only he does it swiftly and quickly. Now, take the whole of humanity as a race, or take the whole of the animal creation, man and the lower animals, as one whole. There is an end towards which the whole is moving. Let us call it perfection. Some men and women are born who anticipate the whole progress of mankind. Instead of waiting and being reborn over and over again for ages until the whole human race has attained to that perfection, they, as it were, rush through them in a few short years of their life. And we know that we can hasten these processes, if we be true to ourselves. If a number of men, without any culture, be left to live upon an island, and are given barely enough food, clothing, and shelter, they will gradually go on and on, evolving higher and higher stages of civilisation. We know also, that this growth can be hastened by additional means. We help the growth of trees, do we not? Left to nature they would have grown, only they would have taken a longer time; we help them to grow in a shorter time than they would otherwise have taken. We are doing all the time the same thing, hastening the growth of things by artificial means. Why cannot we hasten the growth of man? We can do that as a race. Why are teachers sent to other countries? Because by these means we can hasten the growth of races. Now, can we not hasten the growth of individuals? We can. Can we put a limit to the hastening? We cannot say how much a man can grow in one life. You have no reason to say that this much a man can do and no more. Circumstances can hasten him wonderfully. Can there be any limit then, till you come to perfection? So, what comes of it?--That a perfect man, that is to say, the type that is to come of this race, perhaps millions of years hence, that man can come today. And this is what the Yogis say, that all the great incarnations and prophets are such men; that they reached perfection in this one life. We have had such men at all periods of the world's history and at all times. Quite recently, there was such a man who lived the life of the whole human race and reached the end--even in this life. Even this hastening of the growth must be under laws. Suppose we can investigate these laws and understand their secrets and apply them to our own needs; it follows that we grow. We hasten our growth, we hasten our development, and we become perfect, even in this life. This is the higher part of our life, and the science of the study of mind and its powers has this perfection as its real end. Helping others with money and other material things and teaching them how to go on smoothly in their daily life are mere details._x000d_ The utility of this science is to bring out the perfect man, and not let him wait and wait for ages, just a plaything in the hands of the physical world, like a log of drift-wood carried from wave to wave and tossing about in the ocean. This science wants you to be strong, to take the work in your own hand, instead of leaving it in the hands of nature, and get beyond this little life. That is the great idea._x000d_ Man is growing in knowledge, in power, in happiness. Continuously, we are growing as a race. We see that is true, perfectly true. Is it true of individuals? To a certain extent, yes. But yet, again comes the question: Where do you fix the limit? I can see only at a distance of so many feet. But I have seen a man close his eyes and see what is happening in another room. If you say you do not believe it, perhaps in three weeks that man can make you do the same. It can be taught to anybody. Some persons, in five minutes even, can be made to read what is happening in another man's mind. These facts can be demonstrated._x000d_ Now, if these things are true, where can we put a limit? If a man can read what is happening in another's mind in the corner of this room, why not in the next room? Why not anywhere? We cannot say, why not. We dare not say that it is not possible. We can only say, we do not know how it happens. Material scientists have no right to say that things like this are not possible; they can only say, "We do not know." Science has to collect facts, generalise upon them, deduce principles, and state the truth--that is all. But if we begin by denying the facts, how can a science be?_x000d_ There is no end to the power a man can obtain. This is the peculiarity of the Indian mind, that when anything interests it, it gets absorbed in it and other things are neglected. You know how many sciences had their origin in India. Mathematics began there. You are even today counting 1,2,3, etc. to zero, after Sanskrit figures, and you all know that algebra also originated in India, and that gravitation was known to the Indian thousands of years before Newton was born._x000d_ You see the peculiarity. At a certain period of Indian history, this one subject of man and his mind absorbed all their interest. And it was so enticing, because it seemed the easiest way to achieve their ends. Now, the Indian mind became so thoroughly persuaded that the mind could do anything and everything according to law, that its powers became the great object of study. Charms, magic, and other powers, and all that were nothing extraordinary, but a regularly taught science, just as the physical sciences they had taught before that. Such a conviction in these things came upon the race that physical sciences nearly died out. It was the one thing that came before them. Different sects of Yogis began to make all sorts of experiments. Some made experiments with light, trying to find out how lights of different colours produced changes in the body. They wore a certain coloured cloth, lived under a certain colour, and ate certain coloured foods. All sorts of experiments were made in this way. Others made experiments in sound by stopping and unstopping their ears. And still others experimented in the sense of smell, and so on._x000d_ The whole idea was to get at the basis, to reach the fine parts of the thing. And some of them really showed most marvellous powers. Many of them were trying to float in the air or pass through it. I shall tell you a story which I heard from a great scholar in the West. It was told him by a Governor of Ceylon who saw the performance. A girl was brought forward and seated cross-legged upon a stool made of sticks crossed. After she had been seated for a time, the show-man began to take out, one after another, these cross-bars; and when all were taken out, the girl was left floating in the air. The Governor thought there was some trick, so he drew his sword and violently passed it under the girl; nothing was there. Now, what was this? It was not magic or something extraordinary. That is the peculiarity. No one in India would tell you that things like this do not exist. To the Hindu it is a matter of course. You know what the Hindus would often say when they have to fight their enemies--"Oh, one of our Yogis will come and drive the whole lot out!" It is the extreme belief of the race. What power is there in the hand or the sword? The power is all in the spirit._x000d_ If this is true, it is temptation enough for the mind to exert its highest. But as with every other science it is very difficult to make any great achievement, so also with this, nay much more. Yet most people think that these powers can be easily gained. How many are the years you take to make a fortune? Think of that! First, how many years do you take to learn electrical science or engineering? And then you have to work all the rest of your life._x000d_ Again, most of the other sciences deal with things that do not move, that are fixed. You can analyse the chair, the chair does not fly from you. But this science deals with the mind, which moves all the time; the moment you want to study it, it slips. Now the mind is in one mood, the next moment, perhaps, it is different, changing, changing all the time. In the midst of all this change it has to be studied, understood, grasped and controlled. How much more difficult, then, is this science! It requires rigorous training. People ask me why I do not give them practical lessons. Why, it is no joke. I stand upon this platform talking to you and you go home and find no benefit; nor do I. Then you say, "It is all bosh." It is because you wanted to make a bosh of it. I know very little of this science, but the little that I gained I worked for thirty years of my life, and for six years I have been telling people the little that I know. It took me thirty years to learn it; thirty years of hard struggle. Sometimes I worked at it twenty hours during the twenty-four; sometimes I slept only one hour in the night; sometimes I worked whole nights; sometimes I lived in places where there was hardly a sound, hardly a breath; sometimes I had to live in caves. Think of that. And yet I know little or nothing; I have barely touched the hem of the garment of this science. But I can understand that it is true and vast and wonderful._x000d_ Now, if there is any one amongst you who really wants to study this science, he will have to start with that sort of determination, the same as, nay even more than, that which he puts into any business of life._x000d_ And what an amount of attention does business require, and what a rigorous taskmaster it is! Even if the father, the mother, the wife, or the child dies, business cannot stop! Even if the heart is breaking, we still have to go to our place of business, when every hour of work is a pang. That is business, and we think that it is just, that it is right._x000d_ This science calls for more application than any business can ever require. Many men succeed in business; very few in this. Because so much depends upon the particular constitution of the person studying it. As in business all may not make a fortune, but everyone can make something, so in the study of this science each one can get a glimpse which will convince him of its truth and of the fact that there have been men who realised it fully._x000d_ This is the outline of the science. It stands upon its own feet and in its own light, and challenges comparison with any other science. There have been charlatans, there have been magicians, there have been cheats, and more here than in any other field. Why? For the same reason, that the more profitable the business, the greater the number of charlatans and cheats. But that is no reason why the business should not be good. And one thing more; it may be good intellectual gymnastics to listen to all the arguments and an intellectual satisfaction to hear of wonderful things. But, if any one of you really wants to learn something beyond that, merely attending lectures will not do. That cannot be taught in lectures, for it is life; and life can only convey life. If there are any amongst you who are really determined to learn it, I shall be very glad to help them.

We need not, however, reproduce the article here, for it adds nothing to the published transcript. Indeed, in its odd manner of editing Swamiji’s lectures, the Times simply cut off the text when space ran out, and in this particular case, space ran out about one-fourth of the way down. Fortunate we are to have what seems to be a full transcript in the Complete Works, for the last three-fourths of this unique lecture is the most moving, significant, and exalted part. However, the heading of the Times article, from which the published version evidently derives its title, and the first paragraph of the text are of interest. They read as follows:

_x000d_ "CHRIST, THE MESSENGER." _x000d_ SWAMI VIVEKANANDA’S VIEWS ON THE_x000d_ WORLD’S REDEEMER._x000d_ Hindu Preacher Speaks Before a Large Audience~Says the Poorest and the Meanest of Us Embody and Even Reflect God-Only Positive Worship That of the Man-God._x000d_ Swami Vivekananda, Hindu preacher and orator, and representative of Hinduism at the World’s Parliament of Religions, delivered a discourse on "Christ, the Messenger" yesterday at 2:30 p.m., ao. 330, 1/2 South Broadway, before an audience that packed the house to its capacity._x000d_ In the course of his discourse the speaker said: (The first quarter of the lecture follows.]

Searching through the Los Angeles newspapers, we find no announcements or reports to indicate that Swamiji again lectured in that city. This is not conclusive evidence, however, that he did not do so. Indeed, the following short paragraph from the Los Angeles Times of January 14, 1900, may indicate that there were one or two more lectures than we know of. (It seems also to indicate that as early as mid January there was a definite plan for a visit to San Francisco; more than a month was to pass, however, before any such prospect materialized.)

Swami Vivekananda leaves shortly for San Francisco. He is without doubt one of the greatest oriental scholars to ever visit these shores, and has aroused the enthusiasm of the cultured people of the city. Those who have not been in attendance at his recent lectures will be interested in knowing that the Swami’s mission in this country is not alone to teach philosophy, but to arouse interest in the establishment of industrial schools for the uplifting of the masses of India, these schools being on the same plan as our Pratt Institute.

17th January, 1900_x000d_ My Dear Dhira Mata {Mrs. Bull},_x000d_ I received yours with the enclosures for Saradananda; and there was some good news. I hope to get some more news this week. You did not write anything about your plans. I had a letter from Miss Greenstidel expressing her deep gratitude for your kindness--and who does not? Turiyananda is getting well by this time, I hope._x000d_ I have been able to remit Rs. 2,000 to Saradananda, with the help of Miss MacLeod and Mrs. Leggett. Of course they contributed the best part. The rest was got by lectures. I do not expect anything much here or anywhere by lecturing. I can scarcely make expenses. No, not even that; whenever it comes to paying, the people are nowhere. The field of lecturing in this country has been overworked; the people have outgrown that._x000d_ I am decidedly better in health. The healer thinks I am now at liberty to go anywhere I choose, the process will go on, and I shall completely recover in a few months. She insists on this, that I am cured already; only nature will have to work out the rest. _x000d_ Well, I came here principally for health. I have got it; in addition I got Rs. 2,000, to defray the law expenses. Good._x000d_ Now it occurs to me that my mission from the platform is finished, and I need not break my health again by that sort of work._x000d_ It is becoming clearer to me that I lay down all the concerns of the Math and for a time go back to my mother. She has suffered much through me. I must try to smooth her last days. Do you know, this was just exactly what the great Shankaracharya himself had to do! He had to go back to his mother in the last few days of her life! I accept it, I am resigned. I am calmer than ever. The only difficulty is the financial part. Well, the Indian people owe something. I will try Madras and a few other friends in India. Anyhow, I must try, as I have forebodings that my mother has not very many years to live. Then again, this is coming to me as the greatest of all sacrifices to make, the sacrifice of ambition, of leadership, of fame. I am resigned and must do the penance. The one thousand dollars with Mr. Leggett and if a little more is collected, will be enough to fall back upon in case of need. Will you send me back to India? I am ready any time. Don't go to France without seeing me. I have become practical at least compared to the visionary dreams of Joe and Margot. Let them work their dreams out for me--they are not more than dreams. I want to make out a trust-deed of the Math in the names of Saradananda, Brahmananda, and yourself. I will do it as soon as I get the papers from Saradananda. Then I am quits. I want rest, a meal, a few books, and I want to do some scholarly work. Mother shows this light vividly now. Of course you were the one to whom She showed it first. I would not believe it then. But then, it is now shown that--leaving my mother was a great renunciation in 1884--it is a greater renunciation to go back to my mother now . Probably Mother wants me to undergo the same that She made the great Acharya undergo in old days. Is it? I am surer of your guidance than of my own. Joe and Margot are great souls, but to you Mother is now sending the light for my guidance. Do you see light? What do you advise? At least do not go out of this country without sending me home._x000d_ I am but a child; what work have I to do? My powers I passed over to you. I see it. I cannot any more tell from the platform. Don't tell it to anyone--not even to Joe. I am glad. I want rest; not that I am tired, but the next phase will be the miraculous touch and not the tongue --like Ramakrishna's. The word has gone to you and the voice to Margo. No more it is in me. I am glad. I am resigned. Only get me out to India, won't you? Mother will make you do it. I am sure._x000d_ Ever your son,_x000d_ Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda: "Some persons desire to ask questions about Hindu Philosophy before the lecture and to question in general about India after the lecture; but the chief difficulty is I do not know what I am to lecture on. I would be very glad to lecture on any subject, either on Hindu Philosophy or on anything concerning the race, its history, or its literature. If you, ladies and gentlemen, will suggest anything, I would be very glad."_x000d_ Questioner: "I would like to ask, Swami, what special principle in Hindu Philosophy you would have us Americans, who are a very practical people, adopt, and what that would do for us beyond what Christianity can do."_x000d_ Swami Vivekananda: "That is very difficult for me to decide; it rests upon you. If you find anything which you think you ought to adopt, and which will be helpful, you should take that. You see I am not a missionary, and I am not going about converting people to my idea. My principle is that all such ideas are good and great, so that some of your ideas may suit some people in India, and some of our ideas may suit some people here; so ideas must be cast abroad, all over the world."_x000d_ Questioner: "We would like to know the result of your philosophy; has your philosophy and religion lifted your women above our women?"_x000d_ Swami Vivekananda: "You see, that is a very invidious question: I like our women and your women too."_x000d_ Questioner: "Well, will you tell us about your women, their customs and education, and the position they hold in the family?"_x000d_ Swami Vivekananda: "Oh, yes, those things I would be very glad to tell you. So you want to know about Indian women tonight, and not philosophy and other things?"_x000d_ The Lecture_x000d_ I must begin by saying that you may have to bear with me a good deal, because I belong to an Order of people who never marry; so my knowledge of women in all their relations, as mother, as wife, as daughter and sister, must necessarily not be so complete as it may be with other men. And then, India, I must remember, is a vast continent, not merely a country, and is inhabited by many different races. The nations of Europe are nearer to each other, more similar to each other, than the races in India. You may get just a rough idea of it if I tell you that there are eight different languages in all India. Different languages--not dialects--each having a literature of its own. The Hindi language, alone, is spoken by 100,000,000 people; the Bengali by about 60,000,000, and so on. Then, again, the four northern Indian languages differ more from the southern Indian languages than any two European languages from each other. They are entirely different, as much different as your language differs from the Japanese, so that you will be astonished to know, when I go to southern India, unless I meet some people who can talk Sanskrit, I have to speak to them in English. Furthermore, these various races differ from each other in manners, customs, food, dress, and in their methods of thought._x000d_ Then, again, there is caste. Each caste has become, as it were, a separate racial element. If a man lives long enough in India, he will be able to tell from the features what caste a man belongs to. Then, between castes, the manners and customs are different. And all these castes are exclusive; that is to say, they would meet socially, but they would not eat or drink together, nor intermarry. In those things they remain separate. They would meet and be friends to each other, but there it would end._x000d_ Although I have more opportunity than many other men to know women in general, from my position and my occupation as a preacher, continuously travelling from one place to another and coming in contact with all grades of society--(and women, even in northern India, where they do not appear before men, in many places would break this law for religion and would come to hear us preach and talk to us)--still it would be hazardous on my part to assert that I know everything about the women of India._x000d_ So I will try to place before you the ideal. In each nation, man or woman represents an ideal consciously or unconsciously being worked out. The individual is the external expression of an ideal to be embodied. The collection of such individuals is the nation, which also represents a great ideal; towards that it is moving. And, therefore, it is rightly assumed that to understand a nation you must first understand its ideal, for each nation refuses to be judged by any other standard than its own._x000d_ All growth, progress, well-being, or degradation is but relative. It refers to a certain standard, and each man to be understood has to be referred to that standard of his perfection. You see this more markedly in nations: what one nation thinks good might not be so regarded by another nation. Cousin-marriage is quite permissible in this country. Now, in India, it is illegal; not only so, it would be classed with the most horrible incest. Widow-marriage is perfectly legitimate in this country. Among the higher castes in India it would be the greatest degradation for a woman to marry twice. So, you see, we work through such different ideas that to judge one people by the other's standard would be neither just nor practicable. Therefore we must know what the ideal is that a nation has raised before itself. When speaking of different nations, we start with a general idea that there is one code of ethics and the same kind of ideals for all races; practically, however, when we come to judge of others, we think what is good for us must be good for everybody; what we do is the right thing, what we do not do, of course in others would be outrageous. I do not mean to say this as a criticism, but just to bring the truth home. When I hear Western women denounce the confining of the feet of Chinese ladies, they never seem to think of the corsets which are doing far more injury to the race. This is just one example; for you must know that cramping the feet does not do one-millionth part of the injury to the human form that the corset has done and is doing--when every organ is displaced and the spine is curved like a serpent. When measurements are taken, you can note the curvatures. I do not mean that as a criticism but just to point out to you the situation, that as you stand aghast at women of other races, thinking that you are supreme, the very reason that they do not adopt your manners and customs shows that they also stand aghast at you._x000d_ Therefore there is some misunderstanding on both sides. There is a common platform, a common ground of understanding, a common humanity, which must be the basis of our work. We ought to find out that complete and perfect human nature which is working only in parts, here and there. It has not been given to one man to have everything in perfection. You have a part to play; I, in my humble way, another; here is one who plays a little part; there, another. The perfection is the combination of all these parts. Just as with individuals, so with races. Each race has a part to play; each race has one side of human nature to develop. And we have to take all these together; and, possibly in the distant future, some race will arise in which all these marvellous individual race perfections, attained by the different races, will come together and form a new race, the like of which the world has not yet dreamed. Beyond saying that, I have no criticism to offer about anybody. I have travelled not a little in my life; I have kept my eyes open; and the more I go about the more my mouth is closed. I have no criticism to offer._x000d_ Now, the ideal woman in India is the mother, the mother first, and the mother last. The word woman calls up to the mind of the Hindu, motherhood; and God is called Mother. As children, every day, when we are boys, we have to go early in the morning with a little cup of water and place it before the mother, and mother dips her toe into it and we drink it._x000d_ In the West, the woman is wife. The idea of womanhood is concentrated there--as the wife. To the ordinary man in India, the whole force of womanhood is concentrated in motherhood. In the Western home, the wife rules. In an Indian home, the mother rules. If a mother comes into a Western home, she has to be subordinate to the wife; to the wife belongs the home. A mother always lives in our homes: the wife must be subordinate to her. See all the difference of ideas._x000d_ Now, I only suggest comparisons; I would state facts so that we may compare the two sides. Make this comparison. If you ask, "What is an Indian woman as wife?", the Indian asks, "Where is the American woman as mother? What is she, the all-glorious, who gave me this body? What is she who kept me in her body for nine months? Where is she who would give me twenty times her life, if I had need? Where is she whose love never dies, however wicked, however vile I am? Where is she, in comparison with her, who goes to the divorce court the moment I treat her a little badly? O American woman! Where is she?" I will not find her in your country. I have not found the son who thinks mother is first. When we die, even then, we do not want our wives and our children to take her place. Our mother!--we want to die with our head on her lap once more, if we die before her. Where is she? Is woman a name to be coupled with the physical body only? Ay! The Hindu mind fears all those ideals which say that the flesh must cling unto the flesh. No, no! Woman! Thou shalt not be coupled with anything connected with the flesh. The name has been called holy once and for ever, for what name is there which no lust can ever approach, no carnality ever come near, than the one word mother? That is the ideal in India._x000d_ I belong to an Order very much like what you have in the Mendicant Friars of the Catholic Church; that is to say, we have to go about without very much in the way of dress and beg from door to door, live thereby, preach to people when they want it, sleep where we can get a place--that way we have to follow. And the rule is that the members of this Order have to call every woman "mother"; to every woman and little girl we have to say "mother"; that is the custom. Coming to the West, that old habit remained and I would say to ladies, "Yes, mother", and they are horrified. I could not understand why they should be horrified. Later on, I discovered the reason: because that would mean that they are old. The ideal of womanhood in India is motherhood--that marvellous, unselfish, all-suffering, ever-forgiving mother. The wife walks behind--the shadow. She must imitate the life of the mother; that is her duty. But the mother is the ideal of love; she rules the family, she possesses the family. It is the father in India who thrashes the child and spanks when there is something done by the child, and always the mother puts herself between the father and the child. You see it is just the opposite here. It has become the mother's business to spank the children in this country, and poor father comes in between. You see, ideals are different. I do not mean this as any criticism. It is all good--this what you do; but our way is what we have been taught for ages. You never hear of a mother cursing the child; she is forgiving, always forgiving. Instead of "Our Father in Heaven", we say "Mother" all the time; that idea and that word are ever associated in the Hindu mind with Infinite Love, the mother's love being the nearest approach to God's love in this mortal world of ours. "Mother, O Mother, be merciful; I am wicked! Many children have been wicked, but there never was a wicked mother"--so says the great saint Ramprasad._x000d_ There she is--the Hindu mother. The son's wife comes in as her daughter; just as the mother's own daughter married and went out, so her son married and brought in another daughter, and she has to fall in line under the government of the queen of queens, of his mother. Even I, who never married, belonging to an Order that never marries, would be disgusted if my wife, supposing I had married, dared to displease my mother. I would be disgusted. Why? Do I not worship my mother? Why should not her daughter-in-law? Whom I worship, why not she? Who is she, then, that would try to ride over my head and govern my mother? She has to wait till her womanhood is fulfilled; and the one thing that fulfils womanhood, that is womanliness in woman, is motherhood. Wait till she becomes a mother; then she will have the same right. That, according to the Hindu mind, is the great mission of woman--to become a mother. But oh, how different! Oh, how different! My father and mother fasted and prayed, for years and years, so that I would be born. They pray for every child before it is born. Says our great law-giver, Manu, giving the definition of an Aryan, "He is the Aryan, who is born through prayer". Every child not born through prayer is illegitimate, according to the great law-giver. The child must be prayed for. Those children that come with curses, that slip into the world, just in a moment of inadvertence, because that could not be prevented--what can we expect of such progeny? Mothers of America, think of that! Think in the heart of your hearts, are you ready to be women? Not any question of race or country, or that false sentiment of national pride. Who dares to be proud in this mortal life of ours, in this world of woes and miseries? What are we before this infinite force of God? But I ask you the question tonight: Do you all pray for the children to come? Are you thankful to be mothers, or not? Do you think that you are sanctified by motherhood, or not? Ask that of your minds. If you do not, your marriage is a lie, your womanhood is false, your education is superstition, and your children, if they come without prayer, will prove a curse to humanity._x000d_ See the different ideals now coming before us. From motherhood comes tremendous responsibility. There is the basis, start from that. Well, why is mother to be worshipped so much? Because our books teach that it is the pre-natal influence that gives the impetus to the child for good or evil. Go to a hundred thousand colleges, read a million books, associate with all the learned men of the world--better off you are when born with the right stamp. You are born for good or evil. The child is a born god or a born demon; that is what the books say. Education and all these things come afterwards--are a mere bagatelle. You are what you are born. Born unhealthful, how many drug stores, swallowed wholesale, will keep you well all through your life? How many people of good, healthy lives were born of weak parents, were born of sickly, blood-poisoned parents? How many? None--none. We come with a tremendous impetus for good or evil: born demons or born gods. Education or other things are a bagatelle._x000d_ Thus say our books: direct the pre-natal influence. Why should mother be worshipped? Because she made herself pure. She underwent harsh penances sometimes to keep herself as pure as purity can be. For, mind you, no woman in India thinks of giving up her body to any man; it is her own. The English, as a reform, have introduced at present what they call "Restitution of conjugal rights", but no Indian would take advantage of it. When a man comes in physical contact with his wife, the circumstances she controls through what prayers and through what vows! For that which brings forth the child is the holiest symbol of God himself. It is the greatest prayer between man and wife, the prayer that is going to bring into the world another soul fraught with a tremendous power for good or for evil. Is it a joke? Is it a simple nervous satisfaction? Is it a brute enjoyment of the body? Says the Hindu: no, a thousand times, no!_x000d_ But then, following that, there comes in another idea. The idea we started with was that the ideal is the love for the mother--herself all-suffering, all-forbearing. The worship that is accorded to the mother has its fountain-head there. She was a saint to bring me into the world; she kept her body pure, her mind pure, her food pure, her clothes pure, her imagination pure, for years, because I would be born. Because she did that, she deserves worship. And what follows? Linked with motherhood is wifehood._x000d_ You Western people are individualistic. I want to do this thing because I like it; I will elbow every one. Why? Because I like to. I want my own satisfaction, so I marry this woman. Why? Because I like her. This woman marries me. Why? Because she likes me. There it ends. She and I are the only two persons in the whole, infinite world; and I marry her and she marries me--nobody else is injured, nobody else responsible._x000d_ Your Johns and your Janes may go into the forest and there they may live their lives; but when they have to live in society, their marriage means a tremendous amount of good or evil to us. Their children may be veritable demons--burning, murdering, robbing, stealing, drinking, hideous, vile._x000d_ So what is the basis of the Indian's social order? It is the caste law. I am born for the caste, I live for the caste. I do not mean myself, because, having joined an Order, we are outside. I mean those that live in civil society. Born in the caste, the whole life must be lived according to caste regulation. In other words, in the present-day language of your country, the Western man is born individualistic, while the Hindu is socialistic--entirely socialistic. Now, then, the books say: if I allow you freedom to go about and marry any woman you like, and the woman to marry any man she likes, what happens? You fall in love; the father of the woman was, perchance, a lunatic or a consumptive. The girl falls in love with the face of a man whose father was a roaring drunkard. What says the law then? The law lays down that all these marriages would be illegal. The children of drunkards, consumptives, lunatics, etc., shall not be married. The deformed, humpbacked, crazy, idiotic--no marriage for them, absolutely none, says the law._x000d_ But the Mohammedan comes from Arabia, and he has his own Arabian law; so the Arabian desert law has been forced upon us. The Englishman comes with his law; he forces it upon us, so far as he can. We are conquered. He says, "Tomorrow I will marry your sister". What can we do? Our law says, those that are born of the same family, though a hundred degrees distant, must not marry, that is illegitimate, it would deteriorate or make the race sterile. That must not be, and there it stops. So I have no voice in my marriage, nor my sister. It is the caste that determines all that._x000d_ We are married sometimes when children. Why? Because the caste says: if they have to be married anyway without their consent, it is better that they are married very early, before they have developed this love: if they are allowed to grow up apart, the boy may like some other girl, and the girl some other boy, and then something evil will happen; and so, says the caste, stop it there. I do not care whether my sister is deformed, or good-looking, or bad-looking: she is my sister, and that is enough; he is my brother, and that is all I need to know. So they will love each other. You may say, "Oh! They lose a great deal of enjoyment--those exquisite emotions of a man falling in love with a woman and a woman falling in love with a man. This is a sort of tame thing, loving each other like brothers and sisters, as though they have to." So be it; but the Hindu says, "We are socialistic. For the sake of one man's or woman's exquisite pleasure we do not want to load misery on hundreds of others."_x000d_ There they are--married. The wife comes home with her husband; that is called the second marriage. Marriage at an early age is considered the first marriage, and they grow up separately with women and with their parents. When they are grown, there is a second ceremony performed, called a second marriage. And then they live together, but under the same roof with his mother and father. When she becomes a mother, she takes her place in turn as queen of the family group._x000d_ Now comes another peculiar Indian institution. I have just told you that in the first two or three castes the widows are not allowed to marry. They cannot, even if they would. Of course, it is a hardship on many. There is no denying that not all the widows like it very much, because non-marrying entails upon them the life of a student. That is to say, a student must not eat meat or fish, nor drink wine, nor dress except in white clothes, and so on; there are many regulations. We are a nation of monks--always making penance, and we like it. Now, you see, a woman never drinks wine or eats meat. It was a hardship on us when we were students, but not on the girls. Our women would feel degraded at the idea of eating meat. Men eat meat sometimes in some castes; women never. Still, not being allowed to marry must be a hardship to many; I am sure of that._x000d_ But we must go back to the idea; they are intensely socialistic. In the higher castes of every country you will find the statistics show that the number of women is always much larger than the number of men. Why? Because in the higher castes, for generation after generation, the women lead an easy life. They "neither toil nor spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them". And the poor boys, they die like flies. The girl has a cat's nine lives, they say in India. You will read in the statistics that they outnumber the boys in a very short time, except now when they are taking to work quite as hard as the boys. The number of girls in the higher castes is much larger than in the lower. Conditions are quite opposite in the lower castes. There they all work hard; women a little harder, sometimes, because they have to do the domestic work. But, mind you, I never would have thought of that, but one of your American travellers, Mark Twain, writes this about India: "In spite of all that Western critics have said of Hindu customs, I never saw a woman harnessed to a plough with a cow or to a cart with a dog, as is done in some European countries. I saw no woman or girl at work in the fields in India. On both sides and ahead (of the railway train) brown-bodied naked men and boys are ploughing in the fields. But not a woman. In these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girl working in the fields. In India, even the lowest caste never does any hard work. They generally have an easy lot compared to the same class in other nations; and as to ploughing, they never do it."_x000d_ Now, there you are. Among the lower classes the number of men is larger than the number of women; and what would you naturally expect? A woman gets more chances of marriage, the number of men being larger._x000d_ Relative to such questions as to widows not marrying: among the first two castes, the number of women is disproportionately large, and here is a dilemma. Either you have a non-marriageable widow problem and misery, or the non-husband-getting young lady problem. To face the widow problem, or the old maid problem? There you are; either of the two. Now, go back again to the idea that the Indian mind is socialistic. It says, "Now look here! We take the widow problem as the lesser one." Why? "Because they have had their chance; they have been married. If they have lost their chance, at any rate they have had one. Sit down, be quiet, and consider these poor girls--they have not had one chance of marriage." Lord bless you! I remember once in Oxford Street, it was after ten o'clock, and all those ladies coming there, hundreds and thousands of them shopping; and some man, an American, looks around, and he says, "My Lord! How many of them will ever get husbands, I wonder!" So the Indian mind said to the widows, "Well, you have had your chance, and now we are very, very sorry that such mishaps have come to you, but we cannot help it; others are waiting."_x000d_ Then religion comes into the question; the Hindu religion comes in as a comfort. For, mind you, our religion teaches that marriage is something bad, it is only for the weak. The very spiritual man or woman would not marry at all. So the religious woman says, "Well, the Lord has given me a better chance. What is the use of marrying? Thank God, worship God, what is the use of my loving man?" Of course, all of them cannot put their mind on God. Some find it simply impossible. They have to suffer; but the other poor people, they should not suffer for them. Now I leave this to your judgment; but that is their idea in India._x000d_ Next we come to woman as daughter. The great difficulty in the Indian household is the daughter. The daughter and caste combined ruin the poor Hindu, because, you see, she must marry in the same caste, and even inside the caste exactly in the same order; and so the poor man sometimes has to make himself a beggar to get his daughter married. The father of the boy demands a very high price for his son, and this poor man sometimes has to sell everything just to get a husband for his daughter. The great difficulty of the Hindu's life is the daughter. And, curiously enough, the word daughter in Sanskrit is "duhita". The real derivation is that, in ancient times, the daughter of the family was accustomed to milk the cows, and so the word "duhita" comes from "duh", to milk; and the word "daughter" really means a milkmaid. Later on, they found a new meaning to that word "duhita", the milkmaid--she who milks away all the milk of the family. That is the second meaning._x000d_ These are the different relations held by our Indian women. As I have told you, the mother is the greatest in position, the wife is next, and the daughter comes after them. It is a most intricate and complicated series of gradation. No foreigner can understand it, even if he lives there for years. For instance, we have three forms of the personal pronoun; they are a sort of verbs in our language. One is very respectful, one is middling, and the lowest is just like thou and thee . To children and servants the last is addressed. The middling one is used with equals. You see, these are to be applied in all the intricate relations of life. For example, to my elder sister I always throughout my life use the pronoun apani, but she never does in speaking to me; she says tumi to me. She should not, even by mistake, say apani to me, because that would mean a curse. Love, the love toward those that are superior, should always be expressed in that form of language. That is the custom. Similarly I would never dare address my elder sister or elder brother, much less my mother or father, as tu or tum or tumi. As to calling our mother and father by name, why, we would never do that. Before I knew the customs of this country, I received such a shock when the son, in a very refined family, got up and called the mother by name! However, I got used to that. That is the custom of the country. But with us, we never pronounce the name of our parents when they are present. It is always in the third person plural, even before them._x000d_ Thus we see the most complicated mesh-work in the social life of our men and our women and in our degree of relationship. We do not speak to our wives before our elders; it is only when we are alone or when inferiors are present. If I were married, I would speak to my wife before my younger sister, my nephews or nieces; but not before my elder sister or parents. I cannot talk to my sisters about their husbands at all. The idea is, we are a monastic race. The whole social organisation has that one idea before it. Marriage is thought of as something impure, something lower. Therefore the subject of love would never be talked of. I cannot read a novel before my sister, or my brothers, or my mother, or even before others. I close the book._x000d_ Then again, eating and drinking is all in the same category. We do not eat before superiors. Our women never eat before men, except they be the children or inferiors. The wife would die rather than, as she says, "munch" before her husband. Sometimes, for instance, brothers and sisters may eat together; and if I and my sister are eating, and the husband comes to the door, my sister stops, and the poor husband flies out._x000d_ These are the customs peculiar to the country. A few of these I note in different countries also. As I never married myself, I am not perfect in all my knowledge about the wife. Mother, sisters--I know what they are; and other people's wives I saw; from that I gather what I have told you._x000d_ As to education and culture, it all depends upon the man. That is to say, where the men are highly cultured, there the women are; where the men are not, women are not. Now, from the oldest times, you know, the primary education, according to the old Hindu customs, belongs to the village system. All the land from time immemorial was nationalised, as you say--belonged to the Government. There never is any private right in land. The revenue in India comes from the land, because every man holds so much land from the Government. This land is held in common by a community, it may be five, ten, twenty, or a hundred families. They govern the whole of the land, pay a certain amount of revenue to the Government, maintain a physician, a village schoolmaster, and so on._x000d_ Those of you who have read Herbert Spencer remember what he calls the "monastery system" of education that was tried in Europe and which in some parts proved a success; that is, there is one schoolmaster, whom the village keeps. These primary schools are very rudimentary, because our methods are so simple. Each boy brings a little mat; and his paper, to begin with, is palm leaves. Palm leaves first, paper is too costly. Each boy spreads his little mat and sits upon it, brings out his inkstand and his books and begins to write. A little arithmetic, some Sanskrit grammar, a little of language and accounts--these are taught in the primary school. _x000d_ A little book on ethics, taught by an old man, we learnt by heart, and I remember one of the lessons:_x000d_ "For the good of a village, a man ought to give up his family;_x000d_ For the good of a country, he ought to give up his village;_x000d_ For the good of humanity, he may give up his country;_x000d_ For the good of the world, everything."_x000d_ Such verses are there in the books. We get them by heart, and they are explained by teacher and pupil. These things we learn, both boys and girls together. Later on, the education differs. The old Sanskrit universities are mainly composed of boys. The girls very rarely go up to those universities; but there are a few exceptions._x000d_ In these modern days there is a greater impetus towards higher education on the European lines, and the trend of opinion is strong towards women getting this higher education. Of course, there are some people in India who do not want it, but those who do want it carried the day. It is a strange fact that Oxford and Cambridge are closed to women today, so are Harvard and Yale; but Calcutta University opened its doors to women more than twenty years ago. I remember that the year I graduated, several girls came out and graduated--the same standard, the same course, the same in everything as the boys; and they did very well indeed. And our religion does not prevent a woman being educated at all. In this way the girl should be educated; even thus she should be trained; and in the old books we find that the universities were equally resorted to by both girls and boys, but later the education of the whole nation was neglected. What can you expect under foreign rule? The foreign conqueror is not there to do good to us; he wants his money. I studied hard for twelve years and became a graduate of Calcutta University; now I can scarcely make $5.00 a month in my country. Would you believe it? It is actually a fact. So these educational institutions of foreigners are simply to get a lot of useful, practical slaves for a little money--to turn out a host of clerks, postmasters, telegraph operators, and so on. There it is._x000d_ As a result, education for both boys and girls is neglected, entirely neglected. There are a great many things that should be done in that land; but you must always remember, if you will kindly excuse me and permit me to use one of your own proverbs, "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." Your foreign born ladies are always crying over the hardships of the Hindu woman, and never care for the hardships of the Hindu man. They are all weeping salt tears. But who are the little girls married to? Some one, when told that they are all married to old men, asked, "And what do the young men do? What! Are all the girls married to old men, only to old men?" We are born old--perhaps all the men there._x000d_ T

Los Angeles, California_x000d_ 24th Jan., 1900_x000d_ Dear Margot {Nivedita},_x000d_ I am afraid that the rest and peace I seek for will never come. But Mother does good to others through me, at least some to my native land, and it is easier to be reconciled to one's fate as a sacrifice. We are all sacrifices--each in his own way. The great worship is going on--no one can see its meaning except that it is a great sacrifice. Those that are willing escape a lot of pain. Those who resist are broken into submission and suffer more. I am now determined to be a willing one._x000d_ Yours etc.,_x000d_ Vivekananda