1

How Swami Vivekananda Learned the Message of Sri Ramakrishna

Lesson I: Spiritual Humanism.
By Sister Gayatriprana/Jean C. MacPhail
Vedanta Kesari, 1995: April-September, Volume 8, 4-9.
Ramakrishna Math, Chennai.

Abstract
This presentation—Spiritual Humanism—is the first of five, intended to demonstrate
the interaction from 1881-1886 between Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) and the young
Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), in which Sri Ramakrishna transmitted to the student
the essence of his vision of the contemporary meaning of Vedanta.

Overall, this is a large historical narrative which I approach through a spectrum of five
levels of increasing ontological context. I relate these in turn to those found in the
Mundaka Upanishad and Kashmir Shaivism. In these primary texts these levels are
referred to as lessons. I discern these as the basic structure of Sri Ramakrishna’s
message and Vivekananda’s later teaching. Within each level I point to the evidence
of an epistemology or inner development in a gamut of five states experienced by
Vivekananda which give increasing depth and meaning to the levels, individually and
as a group. These states, which I dub classes within the lessons, seem to demonstrate
those described and utilized in Sankhya, Vedanta and Tantra. In both the lessons and
the classes I include a fifth member of the series, in the light of the findings of Kashmir
Shaivism and also Sri Ramakrishna’s stress on vijnana, a way of knowing beyond even
the glorious summit of the fourth level and state, the acme of non-dual Vedanta.
Vijana seems to be the worldview that permeates the work of Sri Ramakrishna and
Vivekananda all the way through, in some ways causing conceptual dissonance in
view of its rather “new” (although actually very ancient) features. These features will
be amply demonstrated in the material I am posting here.

In addition, I include two systems of values that seems to run through the whole
narrative—that of Western materialism and Indian transcendentalism—the burning
issue of the day then and now, and the reconciliation of which is really the primary
dynamic of this material. I also mention further work in which I developed a matriceal
model as the best method of visualizing the whole sweep of Integral Vedanta in a
numericized manner. This methodology serves to demonstrate how all of the parts are
integral to the whole story and uniquely meaningful in contributing to and
maintaining the whole itself. This is a quasi-mathematical way of illustrating the
holism that permeates the message of Sri Ramakrishna as spread throughout the
world by Swam Vivekananda. I include a final note on work recently done to relate
the matrices to the work of Sri Aurobindo, the emerging Invariance Principle as
applied to the range of ontology from Western physics to holism, and ongoing work
in Siberia on quantum findings relating to human experience and the matrices they
generate.
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Introduction
Five Different Discernible Levels of Swami Vivekananda’s Thinking: A Vedantic
Ontology
This study was occasioned by a previous work of compilation of Vivekananda’s
commentaries on the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavadgita, canonical texts of
Vedanta. Vivekananda had wanted to create systematic presentations on these texts,
but did not live long enough to do so. Therefore, the work of presentating “systematic
commentaries” had to be done by pinpointing the relevant materials from
Vivekananda’s voluminous work—covering ten years, both in India and in the West
and in a multitude of different contexts and modes of presentation—and putting them
together as coherently and consistently as possible.

Under each mantra I decided to organize the materials in the sequence usually
followed in a Western-style research project:

1. Vivekananda’s summaries of pre-existing and long-settled “facts” in Vedanta.

2. The methods he proposed to investigate and revision such facts in
contemporary times.
3. His approach to resolving the kinds of conceptual issues that arise when one is
about to bring one’s methodology to bear on the pre-existing materials, largely
the resolution of apparent contradictions.
4. That process completed, what tended to emerge was a model of a progressive
array of stages in an “evolutionary ontology”, through which apparently
irresolvable contradictions between the stages are worked out, as in
evolutionary theory itself.
5. Finally came his conclusions, almost all of which were so original and
counterintuitive I was at times hard put to see how they held together, far less
worked, as they most certainly did, in both his Indian and Western work from
1892-1902. In a nutshell, his thinking automatically included, along with the
assertion of the deepest interior experiences of the human soul, issues
pertaining to everyday life, what had been considered “materialistic” or
“secular” in previous versions of Vedanta, and more or less rejected as
“unreal”. So long had this view dominated India that Vivekananda was, in fact,
rather flying in the face of tradition. Just how he had arrived at this point of
view was, at least at the beginnning, an enigma for me, and later I learned for
a good many other people, not only in India but in the West. On which principle
had he arrived at this unusual integration of what has been called spirit and
matter or divine and secular, or God and human?

Probably arising from the systematism of the above approach and offering a solution
to these questions in a series of at first rather counterintuitive combinations of East-
West concepts, I did find recognizable landmarks in this mass of material. I pinpointed
five contexts that stood out from the materials of Vivekananda’s commentaries and
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seemed to constitute a kind of organized aspect of Vivekananda’s thought. These

were:

I. Spiritual Humanism: The coordination of the immediate physical reality of

actual, concrete human beings—as in the first level of vaishvanara (what is
common to all human beings) of the Mandukya Upanishad, verse 3—with the
millennial testimony of all religions to the inner spirit or Soul and its power
to transform human life. This is supported by a first inkling that the
experience of these two apparently contradictory elements are not contrary
to each other, but rather reciprocal.
II. Yoga as a Science: How the systematic investigations within and testimony
of Indian yoga stand up as a science, a science of inner transformation in
which our attention is drawn, step by step, from the difficult facts of our
physical existence towards lives transformed and lighted up with the
illuminating brilliance (taijasa of the Mandukya Upanishad, verse 4) by the
ever increasing and deepening experience of the Soul. In this context, the
two apparent opposites can be seen as basically compatible with each other.
Yoga does not deny materialist science, but rather complements it in the
overarching context of spiritual humanism.
III. Maya as a Mode of Mind: Here we begin to see the mutuality between the
traditional Indian notion of maya and Western psychology. In Western
idiom maya is the riddle of how we cannot do the good things we want to
do, nor can we not do the bad things we do not want to do. Western
pyschology is concerned—like yoga itself, but in a more external mode—
with taking control of our lives, learning to objectify our minds so that we
get control over them, thereby opening up the possibility of experiencing
who we really are. Here Vivekananda’s Vedanta supplies the option of the
Atman, or Soul, itself, by definition not only “who we really are”—the direct
link between outer and inner, the world and spirit—but also the reality of
conjugation between them, the solid basis of an ongoing empowerment of
whomever attains to this reality. This is the import of prajna or deeper
knowledge in Mandukya, verses 5-6, and thereby the beginning of mastery
over the conundrums of physical existence.
IV. Holovolution: This is a sythesis of Western evolutionary theory with that of
the traditional spiritual notion of involution, found in most of the world’s
religions. By definition evolution is a movement from a lesser or more
restricted form of being to more and more expanded ones, traditionally
from matter to spirit—what Vivekananda calls realization, or an awakening
to our deeper and deeper, more and more expanded potentials. Involution
means movement from a more expanded form to lesser and lesser ones,
more and more confined by the limitations of intellect, mind, emotions and
matter. This is what Vivekananda calls manifestation. Conceptually, at this
point in time, evolution—which is equated with materialist science—and
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involution, which is favored by religious systems of thought, are mutually

exclusionary. In classical Vedanta, however, when one has attained to the
turiya (fourth) level and therein to that which transcends all such categories
of distinction (Mandukya, verse 7), these two processes are witnessed, as I
all else, with complete dispassion and objectivity:
Similar to the image of a town as seen in the mirror,
When one sees the image of the world within him,
The world appears as if it is outside. 1
Vivekananda’s own experience on attaining interiorly to the fourth level of
the fully detached witness under Sri Ramakrishna’s guidance is testimony
that the elements of evolution and involution are, in fact, two sides of the
same coin. He expresses this insight in his twin poems, The Hymn of Samadhi
and The Hymn of Creation.2 Coming from one and the same psyche in
concrete terminology and clearly reflecting and “modelling” each other,
they are not mutually exclusive, but are profoundly co-related and symbiotic
with each other.
V. Holism: Here we arrive at the concluding level, in which differentiation of
the West and India—or of any sort whatsoever—no longer applies. What
appeared to be opposites in one way or another have now become
integrated with each other in such a way that each can retain its own
particular form and sense of reality without being attacked or constricted
by the other, but both realize that the other is as necessary, as important,
and as precious as the other. The focus now is on the best way to support
each other and to provide space to grow and to develop optimally within
their own context and as partners with others. Underlying this worldview
is a sense of the isomorphism or identity of form that underlies the ability to
see things this way. For Vivekananda the deeply interconnecting identity
that supports isomorphism is nothing other than the human Soul that for
him was the pivot of every stage we have described here.
Holism/integration is a very new concept in the market place, but one that
is urgently needed, if we are to survive the current tsunami of global
misunderstanding and hostilities.
Technically, this level is called by Sri Ramakrishna himself vijnana, or a
greater knowledge than what we have as yet acquired, even at the fourth,
the deepest of levels. This level does not occur in the Mandukya, but occurs
in Kashmir Shaivism, where it is called turiyatita or beyond the fourth, and
is described as:

The absolute fullness of the Self. It is filled with all consciousness and bliss. It
is really the last and the supreme state of the Self. You not only find this state

1
Dakshinamurti Stotram, Verse 2. http://www.hindupedia.com/en/Sri_Dakshinamurthy_Stotram
2 Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (CW), Volume 4 (1972), 497-498.
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in samadhi (transcendental experience and perception), but in each and every

activity of the world. (Lakshman Jee, 19883, p.83; italics mine).

In Vivekananda’s own idiom, vijnana means:

Knowledge Absolute means not the knowledge we know, not intelligence, not
reason, not instinct, but that which when it becomes manifested we call by these
names. When that Knowledge Absolute becomes limited we call it intuition,
and when it becomes still more limited we call it reason, instinct, etc. That
Knowledge Absolute is vijnana. The nearest translation of it is all-knowingness.
There is no combination in it. It is the nature of the Soul (Vivekananda, 1907,
pp.83-84).4
Sri Aurobindo’s definition shows resonances with this:

The Supermind . . . is directly truth-conscious, a divine power of immediate,

inherent and spontaneous knowledge, an Idea holding luminously all realities
and not depending on indications and logical or other steps from the known to
the unknown like the mind which is a power of . . . Ignorance (Aurobindo 1920,
p.4).5
Vijnana not only accepts and validates the understanding of Ultimate
Reality that emanates from the acession of the fourth level, but also moves
from there, relating in full to all of the levels that “preceded” it, i.e.
holovolution, maya as a mode of mind, yoga as a science, and spiritual
humanism, thereby closing into a circle the whole spectrum of human
consciousness, so that there is a seamless intercommunication and deep
respect between all levels within it.
In a recent publication6 I present how “vertical ontologies” like this have appeared
throughout history and compare recent ones from criteria of spiritual patient care
through physics to Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Integral Vedanta to demonstrate how
they can be seen to correspond through the invariance principle, a contemporary

3
Lakshman Jee. 1988. Kashmir Shaivism: The Secret Supreme. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications.
4
“Sankhya and Advaita” in Vedanta Philosophy: Jnana Yoga, Part II; Seven Lectures by Swami
Vivekananda. New York: The Vedanta Society, c1907, pp. 83-84 (CW, Vol.2: Sankhya and Vedanta,
p.459).
5
Aurobindo Ghosh: Synthesis of Yoga, Chapter XIX: The Nature of the Supermind (July, 1920). This
material is taken from http://surasa.net/aurobindo/synthesis/ where it is stated: “This index page
has been copied from the website intyoga.online.fr, which has much more extensive information about
the chronology and other details, but not the book itself. This book used to be available on a "Webserver
for Integral Yoga", which is no longer accessible. Fortunately, I found a copy that I downloaded long
ago. I present that version.” Page numbers are my own.
6
Jean Catherine MacPhail (Sister Gayatriprana). 2018. “Vertical hierarchy and the invariance
principle in four models of consciousness/spirituality”, in Journal for the Study of Spirituality, 7.2:99-
113.
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yjss20/current?nav=tocList
https://independent.academia.edu/JeanMacPhail
 6

rendering of the meaning of Ekam sat vipra bahudha vedanti (Rig Veda, 1.164.46)—“truth
is one, sages give it many different names”, in my view.

An Apparent Dynamic of Development throughout the Levels Discerned in the

Materials

In studying what I dubbed levels in the Vivekananda commentaries, I was also aware
that there was a progression of meaningful content within each and every level or
context. This was especially seen in the very large commentaries on certain mantras
of extreme importance, such as the four great sayings or mahavakyas of Classical
Vedanta and also others that Vivekananda especially emphasized, such as Ekam sat
and also Sat-chit-ananda: “Existence, Knowledge, Bliss”, which he tends to use as a
formulation for Ultimate Reality or what classically was termed Brahman.

This was an unexpected discovery with a lot of implications for what is special and
new in the worldview of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. My question was:
Is there a basis in the biographical literature that supports these impressions, and how
did they emerge in Vivekananda’s life? What were the events and sequences that
established and formed a philosophy that so generously excluded none of the others
and appeared to integrate them into a workable whole? The information I found that
supported a dialogical process leading up to and including such a level of
understanding was as follows:
a) The Basic Dynamic between Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.
Vivekananda was a product of the relentless English education that was
superimposed on India from 1836. When he met Sri Ramakrishna he despised things
Indian and extolled the Western worldview and was adamant in demanding at all
times rational and cogent reasons for everything, even from Sri Ramakrishna. Sri
Ramakrishna, on the other hand, was “a country boy” with all but no awareness or
knowledge of Westernism, and saturated in the storied experiences of spiritual India.
Completely free of superimposed ideas, he was a powerhouse of spiritual energy that
could withstand even Vivekananda’s firepower—and, in the last event, actually could
hold its own and radically transform the young man’s militant worldview and his
sallies against the radical insights of the Indian spiritual tradition.

Although this insight has come to me just recently, it would not be difficult to think
of Vivekananda at that time as a poster boy for what Iain McGilchrist delineates as
Western “left brain thinking” in his 2009 book,7 which presents in detail how, in its
focus on detail, differentiation, and exclusion, much havoc has been brought to the
West as it has more and more rejected the balancing power of “right brain thinking”.
Right brain thinking embraces the whole, integration and inclusion, which the author

7
McGilchrist, Iain. 2009. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western
World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
 7

does not illustrate empirically, but is dealt with in principle by Amit Goswami (1995)8
under the rubric of “quantum brain”. Along that line of thought, the final result of the
cosmic battle between Vivekananda’s “left-brain” approach and Sri Ramakrishna’s
translucent and all-encompassing “right brain” insight was in fact not a decisive
victory for either, but a finely tuned and stable dynamic equibrium in which both
“sides” participated without coercion and with ease and grace that makes the final
result a tremendous new way of dealing with conflict on all levels. This engagement
brought out a sustained dialog all the way through each level, transforming its
meaning in a stepwise manner, as I hope to demonstrate in the materials presented
here.

At the time of writing the materials I present here I was unaware of the literature I
have just mentioned, but I did perceive that at every stage in the interaction between
Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda there were always two ways Sri Ramakrishna
conveyed what he had to give to his student. One was what I dubbed “conceptual”,
i.e. explanations, stories, examples, exhortations, any mode that required the use of
language and some form of logic, and the other “experiential”, i.e. direct transmission
of the gestalt or whole picture without words or words used to open up
understanding in a mode other than purely verbal and logical. The best example of
this would be the very first interaction between the two, when Sri Ramakrishna
catapaulted Vivekananda much against his will into the first samadhi of the whole
experience, one which took him totally out of the physical body and any identification
with it. Now I would correlate these two modes with “left” and “right” ways of
communication. This original observation was purely empirical, but later appeared to
be rather important in how Vivekananda later worked out the meaning and
application of all that he learned from Sri Ramakrishna.
b) Evidence of Progression in the Source Materials

Going back to the early stages of this project, it occurred to me that the coming
together of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda as they did for five years in Kolkata
might have something to do with the emergence of the holistic sacred/secular
worldview I was encountering all the way through Vivekananda’s thoughts on the
most sacred texts of Vedanta. I therefore decided to systematically study the
interaction between Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda between their first
meeting in 1881 and 1886, the year of Sri Ramakrishna’s death.

To that end I utilized documents by Swami Vivekananda himself and the primary
literature written by close associates and eyewitnesses. These included Sri Ramakrishna
the Great Master by Swami Saradananda9, an in-depth presentation of the historical
events of the interaction, along with what Vivekananda himself told the author,

8
Goswami, Amit, with Richard E Reed and Maggie Goswami (1995). The Self-Aware Universe: How
Consciousness Creates the Material World. New York: Jeremy Tarcher.
9
Saradananda, Swami. 1951. Sri Ramakrishna, the Great Master, trans. Swami Jagadananda. Sri
Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, Madras.
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himself a man of great spiritual realization as well as documented clarity of thought

and the ability to systematize data and extract from it its likely implications. I
juxtaposed with this data from the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Mahendranath
Gupta10. This is a more or less “CCTV” account of the author’s visits to Sri
Ramakrishna and what went on during them. M., as he preferred to call himself, made
no pretensions to interpretation, but strove for literal and accurate reporting of what
he realized were moments of high significance. He gives the date of each entry, which
of course is invaluable for systematic study, and also who were present on each date.
I was therefore able to detect which of Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings were heard
directly by Vivekananda, as also how the two interacted with each other at each stage
of their relationship. As Sri Ramakrishna was in fact unlettered, we are deeply
indebted to M for this work of close adherence to accuracy of facts and awareness of
place and time. When this data pertaining to the interaction with Vivekananda is
correlated with the materials in The Great Master, it is of course of major importance
and throws floods of light on the content of the story.

What emerged from both of these major sources was that the five levels did indeed
apear and that over time each was developed in a rather systematic, stepwise, and
cogent manner through Sri Ramakrishna’s trenchant remarks and exchanges with
Vivekananda. In the primary materials I present here I dub the levels lessons, and the
interior development of all of them classes.

Vivekananda’s own contributions are included in The Great Master materials, and also
in conversations with his own disciples contained in the official Complete Works of
Swami Vivekananda, where he divulged in his own words the content of some of his
major samadhis, or turning-points in his spiritual development and understanding of
what he was in the process of learning. These events can be seen as major turning
points in the classes documented in our material.

Evidence That Vivekananda’s Work Demonstrates a Similar Pattern to What He

Went Through in His Own Training.

With regard to Vivekananda’s own teachings, it seemed clear that it was important to
study if there was any later sign of the pattern he had gone through with Sri
Ramakrishna. If that were so, it would be confirmatory evidence of my developing
thesis. However, in order to do this, it was necessary to have a reliable chronology of
Vivekananda’s own work both in India and in the West. It so happened that at that
time Marie Louise Burke’s magisterial six volume work Swami Vivekananda in the West:
New Discoveries, published by Advaita Ashrama in Kolkata from 1983 through 1987
had come out. There she not only presents several at that time unpublished valuable
lectures and other materials by Vivekananda, but also, after years of careful research,
had crafted an accurate chronology of all of Vivekananda’s work in the West.

10
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. 2000. Originally recorded in Bengali by M., trans. Swami
Nikhilananda. Sri Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, Chennai.
 9

I had the good fortune of almost weekly contact with Marie Louise, who was deeply
interested in my project. Her own spiritual teacher, Swami Ashokananda—himself a
disciple of Swami Vivekananda—had developed a settled conviction that Swami
Vivekananda’s work had taken a number of different forms over time, culminating in
a glorious finale in San Francisco. This was not a popular idea in India, and Marie
Louise mentions it only in passing in her books. But with me she enthusiastically
engaged with the ideas I was working on and supplied me with the precise
chronology of Vivekananda’s work that she had put together from all of her research
work.

I immediately sat down to re-read all of Vivekanana’s Western work in strict

chronological order. It was nothing short of a total revelation, giving his work not only
a sense of coherent development, but also highly suggestive of five different phases
that I could correlate with those he went through with Sri Ramakrishna. To give an
idea here of how I saw this, his first address in public in the West—Paper on Hinduism
at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 189311—was clearly coming from the
standpoint of Spiritual Humanism, while his yoga classes and lectures in New York
from 1895-1896 were an exposition on Yoga as a Science. This is particularly applicable
to Raja Yoga12, where he time and time again compares the yoga of meditation to
Western science. The materials on Maya as a Mode of Mind in London are definitively
his three lectures on maya in London in the summer of 199613, where he advances his
highly “psychological” interpretation for the resolution of the problem. Immediately
thereafter, in the autumn and winter of 1996 Vivekananda explores Holovolution in the
magisterial four lectures on Practical Vedanta14 in London.

Vivekananda then returned to India for three years and was immersed in conveying
his message to his homeland. In 1899 he returned to the West, where his work was
largely in California. There he gave several lectures and classes, most of which were
taken down by a trainee stenographer who put them in a storage box and forgot about
them. These materials, which finally surfaced in the early nineteen fifties, are blazing
holograms of holism, the most powerful of which is Is Vedanta the Future Religion?15,
his concluding lecture in the Bay Area. This central lecture was edited from the bare
transcript by none other than Swami Ashokananda, whose vision of Vivekananda was
capable of encompassing this very new and world-challenging point of view. There
Vivekananda gives out purely impersonally the holistic message of Sri Ramakrishna
and a powerful message it is, highly counterintuitive to a conventional mind.

As I went through these materials I noted not only five radical changes in overall
context, but also that each specific context emerged as he undertook work with a new
or different group of people. This, I remembered, had been the model with Sri

11 CW, Vol.1 (1965).

12 CW, Vol.1 (1965).
13 CW, Vo.2 (1971).
14 CW, Vol.2 (1971).
15 CW, Vol.8 (1971).
 10

Ramakrishna: when Vivekananda had attained samadhi—the “aha” moment—in any

context, Sri Ramakrishna would immediately explicitly introduce the “next” context.
In addition, what interested me deeply, and struck me as a manifestation of vijnana,
Vivekananda had, like Sri Ramakrishna before him, not only brought out the major
context applicable to each group, but at the same time also included the other four
contexts indirectly. Probably to make the others palatable within the main context,
Vivekananda, like Sri Ramakrishna, had worded each context in the language that
would appeal to his audience. To illustrate this idea—in his first lecture Paper on
Hinduism in Chicago, the context was definitely Spiritual Humanism, and through this
perspective colored Vivekananda’s references in the paper to yoga, maya,
holovolution, and holism. In this way his hearers were introduced in a mode familiar
to them to contexts that, for the most part, certainly were not. This method applied to
all stages of his work in the West and in India. What this phenomenon supplies is an
inbuilt pattern that interconnects all of his work in and through the spectrum of the
levels itself.

In passing I note that the materials on Holism in California came out so much later
than the bulk of the other published material that in many ways they simply did not
have the impact that the others did, especially as the materials were presented not in
one place, but in several different volumes of the Complete Works. Specifically, I was
impressed by the words of Sri Aurobindo, whose muse was vijnana or
holism/integral, in answer to a question as to why Vivekananda—who had himself
transmitted the very insight to Sri Aurobindo—had not spoken about it or promoted
it in public. He did not contest that Vivekananda had not overtly spoken about it, but
surmised that as a yogi, Vivekananda had chosen not to.16 I was amazed at this, as I
detect holism all the way through Vivekananda’s work, only spoken of in the
languaging of other levels of consciousness as described above. This could of course,
would be misleading to almost anyone. But then I also realized that Sri Aurobindo
died in 1950, just a few years before the blazing radiance of holism that had lain for
over fifty years in a chest in San Francisco had finally appeared in print, albeit rather
informally and not in an organized manner. At that time Sri Aurobindo was probably
one of the few that would have recognized it, but circumstances did not permit of it.

From this study it seemed to me that Vivekananda had indeed followed the same
pattern with his students as Sri Ramakrishna did with him. I therefore selected at each
stage of his interaction with his students Vivekananda’s quotes from the comparable
stage of his own learning process. Readers of the materials I am presenting here may
decide whether or not these selections do reflect Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings at each
stage of his work with Vivekananda. In so doing, it must be borne in mind that while
Vivekananda’s overall pattern was the same as that which Sri Ramakrishna used with
him, in his languaging of it, it smacks as much of his Western education as it does of

16
From a "note kept by Anilbaran of a talk with Sri Aurobindo in July 1926" [10 July?] as quoted in an
addition from the Editors in Nirodbaran's Talks with Sri Aurobindo, Volume 1, pp.245-246.
 11

Sri Ramakrishna’s more mythic and mystical Indian spirituality. In addition, of

course, at this particular juncture we are looking at not only the West, but wild and
woolly America in its Gilded Age, and England in its rapidly growing obsession with
materialistic science, which of course affects the mode of language being used.
Moreover, I realized that in this deeply materialistic milieu,Vivekananda’s emphasis
was on what I was calling “experiential”(or “right brain”), the deeply transformative
language and methods of transformation of consciousness that India had developed
over millennia. The conclusion seemed to be that he was conveying to the West the
“antidote” to their raging materialism before it “carried off the patient.” However, this
was done not at the expense of Western science, with which he repeatedly engaged
and extolled as a valid background to the new project of deeply examining its inner
meaning.

Having completed this project I then turned to the Indian materials. Would these also
tend to support my thesis? Here the issue was that of chronology, which was more of
a Western focus at that time. In addition, while the Western materials were all
delivered in English, much of the Indian materials, containing invaluable insights,
were translations from Bengali or Hindi. Could I find original materials in English
sufficient to support the pattern I was looking for? I took heart in the fact that
Vivekananda had spent a more or less equal time of five years teaching in both
locations, and within that time and volume of work had given some recorded lectures
in English. I therefore ventured forth to study the “layout” in India in this material. I
was able to pinpoint Notes Taken Down in Madras, 1892-189317 as the Indian exposition
of Spiritual Humanism, his bold manifesto to those wonderful South Indian students
who gave their hearts and lives to implementing his vision for India.

With regard to Yoga as a Science, Vivekananda was in the West at most of this “stage”
(from 1894-1896), but he saw to it that as soon as the yogas of karma, bhakti and jnana
were published in the West, they were sent to India to precisely his students in
Madras, where they came out in Indian editions. What is especially interesting about
this material is that Vivekananda wrote a totally Indian version of the first part of
Bhakti Yoga, emphasizing traditional mythology and devotionalism, which he
eschewed in the West. This fact supported my growing sense that his work in India
tended to be be more traditional, more conceptual, and focused especially on external
action for others, applying the principles of the deeply embedded Vedanta in the
physical world. The new “yoga” for India was to get involved in the world and to
apply the spirituality cultured over millennia to it.

However, in the context of yoga, we do have the Reply to the Madras Address, 189418,
written in English by Vivekananda, which lays out in no uncertain terms and in
humanistically oriented language, the same vision of the great texts, goals and

17 CW, Vol.6 (1968).

18 CW, Vol.4 (1972).
 12

practices of India now turning to the great work of transforming humanity at large
without any distinctions or invidiousness.

By the time we might expect Vivekananda’s disquisitions on maya, he was back in

India and delived a massive whammy in his lectures from Colombo to Almora
(1897)19, given to a whole array of different groups in the lingua franca of English. In
those lectures the practical issue of reconciling Vedanta with Western views takes a
central place, along with consideration of the many practical problems involved in
such a project.

Holovolution then appears, as it did in London, right on the heels of the maya
discussion. The final lecture on his triumphal progress from the South to the North
took place in Lahore in The Vedanta, a magisterial presentation in English of the vision
of holovolution, which to my mind at least is the counterpart of Practical Vedanta in
London.

The “holistic” stage in India is the most difficult to pinpoint in words, because his
English stenographer had died and therefore there are only a few English
pronouncements extant in written testimony. His long discussions in Bengali with
various learned disciples certainly offer powerful indications of a holistic view, and
the emphasis for India being action, involvement, etc., of which there was a massive
explosion at that time are almost surely “proof” of it. In and through all of his Indian
presentations at no time is there any diminution in his zeal to retain the Vedantic
tradition in full while at the same time working to make it practical, as he called it. This
mirrors the way he had called on the West not to reject its crown jewel of science, but
to spiritualize it thoroughly.

I decided for the purposes of this study to go with the two extant lectures in English:
What I Have I Learned? and The Religion We Are Born In, given in 190120. Once again,
readers can decide for themselves whether these materials from Vivekananda’s own
teaching actually support my thesis that he was in fact reproducing the process he had
gone through with Sri Ramakrishna some ten to fifteen years prior.

To conclude, I felt that the analysis of the Indian materials supported the paradigm
that was emerging, and that in fact, although Vivekananda’s message was the same in
both India and the West in the five years he taught in each location, there was a
definite difference in how he presented the insights he sought to convey. In India he
tended to emphasize a more conceptual or “left brain” approach, a bringing of the
findings of traditional subjectivity to the level of concrete words and especially actions
for the common good. This was in order to bring India into the community of nations
that was then in the formative stage. In the West his focus was relentlessly on the
interior world of the “right brain”and the urgent need to “dive deep” into the
subjective world if the West was to avoid the inevitable crash that he foresaw coming

19 CW, Vol.3 (1970).

20 CW, Vol.3 (1970).
 13

within fifty years as the result of galloping materialism. World War I, the economic
Depression, and World War II, for example.

For the purpose of providing quotes from Vivekananda to “match” with what he had
received from Sri Ramakrishna, I decided to bring in Western quotes for the
“experiential” side of the matter and Indian for the “conceptual”. Vivekananda had
received both, more or less simultaneously, from Sri Ramakrishna, but in his own
work which included both Indian and Western audiences, he seemed to have
conveyed to the West what would challenge it to tackle the interior, “experiential”
world, and to India what would challenge it to tackle the exterior, “conceptual” side.
From an impartial point of view, this made sense, given the issues each situation was
facing at the time. And that is what I have done in these materials, all the way through.

Just as I had concluded all of this research in my quest to understand the highly
counterintuitive aspects of Vivekananda’s commentaries on the Shrutis, Swami
Tyagananda, the then editor of Vedanta Kesari, the English-language journal of Sri
Ramakrishna Math, Chennai, raised the question in the journal: How can we
understand the work of Swami Vivekananda? I immediately sent off my materials and
was gratified that he accepted them for publication. Though not all of the sections
were in the last event to be published, enough came out that I was able to find out
how the work struck the readers of the journal. I received a lot of appreciation,
especially in the West, but also from very senior Indian swamis and scholars who were
involved in shaping the best way to assimilate the vast proportions and scope of
Vivekananda’s work.

I naturally was feeling a need for this kind of professionally informed corroboration
of the work, which, after the materials were published, came to me from many
sources, perhaps the most incisive of which was from Professor Rabindra Kumar
Dasgupta, who wrote:

I have not read anything on the subject which is as profound and illuminating as
your work.
I have read [it] with great interest and a sense of personal profit and I look forward
to being able to make use of your observations in my lectures at the Ramakrishna
Institute of Culture, Kolkata, as its Vivekananda professor. (Personal
communication, December 28, 1996).

These materials—which I am here presenting online—on the levels within the

transmission from Sri Ramakrishna to Vivekananda were published in Vedanta Kesari
from 1995-1998. As the material was presented at that time each level, which I then
labeled a lesson is considered as a stand-alone, which makes sense, given that each has
a different context from the others, albeit that the range of lessons/contexts does
suggest a conceptual progression from humanism to holism. In addition, each
underwent its own unique internal development as Ramakrishna took Vivekananda
 14

through the range of five experiential states over the period 1882-1886. This was the
temporal development of each lesson in what I call classes in this material.

This material constituted for me what I later regarded as a “database” for my ongoing
study of the underlying dynamics of the development of Vivekananda’s
understanding and presentation to the world of what he had in fact learned from Sri
Ramakrishna. I based this analysis on the premise that these five levels can be related
to five conceptual contexts of consciousness in Vedanta and also to the five
experiential states or stages of meaning of Vivekananda’s interior development that I
related to the five states of consciousness—waking, dream, deep sleep, the fourth and
beyond the fourth—as described in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Tantra and Vedanta.
The Ongoing Analysis and Methodology of This Work

For me it was inescapable that there were innate connections of context between the
lessons, which I chose to think of as conceptual, and occurring as a group in every one
of Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings at all stages.21 This regular appearance of the spectrum
of contexts, levels or lessons throughout seemed, not only to validate the idea that
they do in fact represent a coherent ontological whole, but also to justify the moniker
atemporal (not affected by time) and therefore to justify mathematical alignment on a
vertical axis, when the horizontal axis stands for temporal progression. A cogency of
similar regularity appeared to be true of the classes, the nature of each of which was
determined by the sequential development of the same five classic states of
consciousness, as already mentioned. These are, of course, experiential in nature,
occurring over the time period of the study—itself a five year item. These I placed on
a horizontal axis, denoting their relationship to the factor of time. This mathematical
representation denotes that Vivekananda’s succeeding state experiences were
engaging, during their appearance and development, with the fixed ontological array
of contexts that Sri Ramakrishna was holding out to him. This is the basic dynamic of
a matrix and seems to illustrate the whole dynamic of holism or vijnana.

For those who might want a further perspective on this complex work, a later paper
(MacPhail, 2019)22 written for professional mathematicians and statisticians, does give
a bird’s-eye view of the whole process in the context of relating it to contemporary
work on quantum theories of experience. It has helped me to see things more clearly
than before and might help others who at this stage are finding the whole thing rather
too complex.

21
Documentation of this fact is one reason why the database is so long. I was very surprised to note this
phenomenon, but realized it was of prime importance in understanding Sri Ramakrishna’s method of
teaching. I observed the same thing in Vivekananda’s later teaching and factored it in to the matrices I
developed for his work.
22
MacPhail. Jean C. 2019. “Matrices of Consciousness in the Light of Co Eventum Mechanics.” In
Proceedings of the XVII Conference on FAMEMS and the III Workshop on Hilbert's sixth problem.
Krasnoyarsk, SFU, 54-69, 2018: 54.
 15

This whole experience would of course have presented great difficulties to the fiery
young Vivekananda, who at first tended to ridicule all but humanism, and totally
block out things like holovolution or holism. But as his training proceeded and he
accessed states of deeper and deeper character, he became more and more open to the
more “advanced” levels and aquired the ability not only to access their more and more
expanded context, but also to discover the full range of meaning of each context
through his inexorable journey along the experiential states. The decisive factor in
sealing all of this into place were the five samadhis Vivekananda experienced during
this period, as documented in the Great Master. Vivekananda himself corroborates
three of these (1, 4, and 5) in the Complete Works. These, along with their significance,
will be seen in the texts I am proposing to post.

These lines of thought led me finalize in my mind that the matriceal form was the best
to illustrate visually as well as conceptually the notion of holism, integral, or vijnana.
This approach lays out the whole spectrum of interactions of the process in a manner
that interrelates every single item in the database to all of the others. I see this as a
very holistic process because it gives a definite and crucial place for all possible
combinations between the cells of the matrices as well as providing the “rationale” for
the cogency of interrelatedness vertically, horizontally and diagonally across the
whole of Sri Ramakrishna’s message. As I see this, it is a quasi-mathematical
demonstration of the meaning and import of Ramakrishna’s transmission of vijnana
or Integral Vedanta to Vivekananda.

Unfortunately, the original article on Holism was not brought out in Chennai. It still
awaits publication in the mode I am using here, i.e. an unannotated Indian database.
However, I later got the opportunity to publish this concept in 2013, when I modified
it somewhat to make it accessible to a European audience as the basis of what had by
that time become a doctoral thesis, Learning in Depth: A Case Study in Twin 5x5 Matrices
of Consciousness (MacPhail, 2013).23 In working this all through I was helped
immensely by the input of Dr. G. S. Murty, retired physicist and mathematician from
the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and author of many books
relating advanced mathematics to classical Sanskrit texts.24. We worked through
together and verified the content of each and every cell of the matrices and assessed
the cogency of its placement in the matrices, as well as, in his estimation, its
congruence with advanced mathematical theories which at the time I understood but
now cannot reproduce.

Later studies have revealed that Vedantic leaders such as Sri Shankaracharya and
Sureshwaracharya toyed with the matriceal idea and that the Kashmir Shaivites

23
MacPhail, Jean C. 2013. Learning in Depth: A Case Study in Twin 5x5 Matrices of Consciousness.
Viadrina University, Frankfurt on Oder, Germany
https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-euv/frontdoor/index/index/docId/72
https://independent.academia.edu/JeanMacPhail
24
Murty, G. S. 2002. Paratattvaganitadarsanam: Egometry or Principles of Transcendent Philosophy of
Mathematical Truth. New Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass.
 16

carried it forward with a considerable degree of sophistication, all of which I discuss

in a recent paper (MacPhail, 2019, p.60). Sri Aurobindo’s work can also be seen to be
a sophisticated presentation that lends itself to matriceal form (MacPhail, 2015) 25,
thereby interrelating East and West, and indeed any other entity when seen in this
light as deeply engaged with and meaningful to each other.

For the moment, in this series of posts I hope to present the original “database” as it
appeared in Vedanta Kesari. I naturally start with Spiritual Humanism, the “first”
conceptual focus or context of Vivekananda’s work and how I related it to Sri
Ramakrishna’s teaching and the five stages of its development in his interaction with
Vivekananda. I hope to follow it with Yoga as a Science, Maya as a Mode of Mind, and
Holovolution. Again, in all of these papers I refer to the array of five conceptual levels
as Lessons, and to the five historical stages of internal development within each Lesson
as Classes.

In this present communication I merely seek to present in complete detail the narrative
of the interaction between Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna and how it
seems to fall into natural patterns that repeat from level to level in the overall picture.
As and when any publisher would like to publish the fifth level in this format, I would
be amenable to digging it up, wherever it is sojourning at the moment. It does contain
all of the data pertaining to the interaction between Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda
on the important and immediately active topic of vijnana and its correlates holism,
isomorphism and integration.

For now, what I reproduce here is the first exercise of the series, Spiritual Humanism. I
trust that what I have said in this introduction may help readers to understand the
methodology I have followed and the larger implications of this first level for what is
to follow.

Pravrajika Gayatriprana/Jean C. MacPhail, , 2019

25MacPhail, Jean C. 2015. Vijnana in the Works of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo: Two Comparable
Models. Society for Consciousness Studies Conference, Yale, Newhaven.
http://www.author-me.com/nonfiction/vijnana.htm
https://independent.academia.edu/JeanMacPhail
 17

How Swami Vivekananda Learned the Message of Sri Ramakrishna

The First Lesson: Spiritual Humanism

Volume 82: April to September, 1995

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