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"As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

«The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them...
Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, "I", "I", "I", what is the idea before me? The idea of body. Am I then, nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, "No". I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigour and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots ond only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial?... There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.»

- Swami Vivekananda, At the World's Parlament of Religions, Chicago, Sep 15, 1893

The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda are like doors to the vast universe of the Vedic scriptures. His sentences are laden with quotations from the Vedas and the Upanishads and he stands as an authentic interpreter and revealer of the Indian treasures. In his Master Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who lived and tought in the temple-garden at Dakshineshwar, he found the reality which the books only brokenly describe. Here was one to whom Samâdhi was a constant mode of knowledge and one who caught the vision of the divine. Upon his disciple "Naren", as Vivekananda was then called, came the desire for supreme knowledge "as if it had been a fever". So Vivekananda found the key to life.

Swami Vivekananda
The Complete Works
Mayavati Memorial Edition
published by Advaita Ashrama, Calcutta

Complete Works Volume 1 (UK order link)
Complete Works Volume 2 (UK order link)
Complete Works Volume 3 (UK order link)
Complete Works Volume 4 (UK order link)
Complete Works Volume 5 (UK order link)
Complete Works Volume 6 (UK order link)
Complete Works Volume 7 (UK order link)
Complete Works Volume 8 (UK order link)

Synopsis of Volume 1, 543 pages: Adresses at the Parliament of Religions; Karma-Yoga; Raja-Yoga; Lectures and Discourses; Soul, God and Religion; The Hindu Religion; What is Religion; Vedic Religious Ideals; The Vedanta Philosophy; Reason and Religion; Vedanta as a Factor in Civilisation; The Spirit and Influence of Vedanta; Steps of Hindu Philosophic Thought; Steps to Realization; Vedanta and Privilege; Krishna; Gita; Mohammed; Vilvamangala; The Soul and God; Breathing and Meditation; Index.

Last Updated Thursday, January 14, 1999