Editorial

Where Am I?

“Man is a compound of animality, humanity, and divinity” says Swami Vivekananda. In our daily life we function from one of these, or from the borderlines of any of these three levels of life.

Our life manifests at the animal or pashutva level when our senses, behaving like wild horses, drags us to experience the pleasures of sense objects. Dictated by bodily instincts, our thoughts and actions remain selfish and flow mainly towards food, sleep, and lust. We begin to function at the human or manushatva level when our mind awakens to higher thoughts and develops the capacity for rational thinking in different fields of knowledge like natural sciences, humanities, and religion. At both these animal and human levels we remain bounded by the laws of Nature or prakriti. It is when we struggle against this bondage to Nature that we begin to manifest the divinity or daivatva in us which is variously known as Self, Soul, or Atman.

To break free from the shackles of prakriti, our scriptures and saints give us powerful tools in the form of awakening questions like ‘Who am I?’, ‘Where have I come from?’, ‘Where am I going?’…. When we deeply engage with such awakening questions they unveil the divinity within us.

There is another question we can ask ourselves as we go through our daily lives; it is: ‘Where am I?’

This down-to-earth question with no metaphysical trappings, has the power to awaken us into the present moment — the only window of time through which we can realise the inner divinity.

Asking ‘Where am I?’ creates multiple levels of awareness in us — we recognise the influence of external circumstances on us, we understand the nature and dynamics of our relationship with things and people, we realise where we stand in our spiritual journey, and at a deeper level we become aware of where our attention is.

This last awareness is most important because basically we are where are attention is. When our attention flows out into the world through the senses or through thoughts, we become entrapped in the things of the world. Hence, the degree of control we have over our attention decides at what level our life manifests — animal, or human, or divine.

Again, the question ‘Where am I?’ presumes that we have a clear idea of where we want to be. Without this clarity, the question loses its significance. Speaking about his mission in life, Swamiji declares that it is “to preach unto mankind their divinity, and how to make it manifest in every movement of life.” This then is where we should seek to be: A state of experiencing and manifesting the inner divinity through our every thought, feeling, and action as a loving service to the Lord manifest as the world.

As we travel through life with this ideal, let us remember to ask ourselves every now and then ‘Where am I?’

The Blue Plaque in London

DR VAYU NAIDU

Blue Plaque is a scheme under which London keeps its history alive by marking out buildings and places associated with eminent people of the past. One such Blue Plaque building is associated with Swami Vivekananda. In 1896, on his second visit to England, Swamiji stayed here along with his brother-disciple Swami Saradananda, his disciple J.J.Goodwin, his younger brother Mahendranath Datta who was there to pursue higher studies, and an American friend. Dr Vayu Naidu who lives in London draws attention to this building sanctified by the two swamis’ stay. This article was commissioned by the Royal Literary Fund when the author was a

Fellow at Royal Holloway University College London in 2019 and was originally an audio podcast broadcast by RLF VOX on social media.

Inever dreamed that it was literature that drew me to London. Increasingly, I’ve found location inspired by English politician and courtier Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of Saint Albans (1605-1684) and the court myself visiting locations that are signposted in novels, to work out where the action takes place. Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty is a well-known example, and following its television series as well, I decided to stand on the site and get the measure of how it appears in reality compared to how the writer creates it in my imagination. The difference in scale can result in a multitude of responses culminating in congratulating a brilliant writer for evoking a whole new world peopled with imaginary lives and or a consummate loss of innocence from where it started.

I was mulling on how words can transport readers across spaces as I was standing beneath the alley’s signpost of Apple Tree Yard within the proximity of The London Library, and Beau Brummel’s London, all layered in a favourite of Queen Henrietta Maria, consort of Charles I of England. I was trapezing across time. By happenstance I looked across and had another ripple of history. Just opposite was a new building, on the site of an older one that commemorated where Sir Edwin Lutyens unfurled his plans of building New Delhi for the British Raj between 1912-1930. A little over a hundred years on I was standing on a razed site dedicated to the place which laid plans for the city of my birth – New Delhi; a confluence of traditional Mughal and colonial style architectures that have influenced the languages I think, dream, speak and write in. It struck me then, that the realities created by literature through imagination, and the reality across linear time categorised as History can both be experienced in the present,

Dr Vayu Naidu continues to unravel the profound meaning of Sri Ramakrishna’s tales and parables, researches global oral traditions as Literacy, and is a novelist. vayu@vayunaidu.com

if we can locate it. Perhaps that is what makes for Tourism – tourists taking a tour of time past in the present seeking out the grand buildings that are or on that site what once stood. I’ve often spotted individuals, or couples, or a tour group gazing at rubble or a humble brick wall as if the thing itself is there in its glory. In other times of history, these might have been pilgrims seeking salvation. In the here and now a significant life qualified by contributions to, let’s say evolution of thought, rather than civilisation, is signalled by the English Heritage Blue Plaque.

London’s Blue plaques have spurred my enthusiasm for rediscovering literature, its

The Victoria Coach Station takes up considerable destination attention with tourists, inlanders, and daily commuters who barely notice any other landmark. On one of my lucid unemployed days I decided to turn off the beaten Ebury Bridge Road toward Victoria underground and rail station, and found myself on the borderland of Pimlico on St. George’s Drive. I stumbled on a Blue Plaque on 63 St George’s Drive, SW 1 which fixed my attention completely. It read:

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA (1863-1902) Hindu Philosopher lived here in 1896.

Vivekananda would not have considered himself a philosopher. Yet English Heritage subscribes to the documentary evidence provided by the Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, UK, ‘informing the public’ that Swami Vivekananda as he was known in the West, continues that trajectory of contribution to human thought that changed the world.

While the plaque was installed on the 5th of July 2004, I had not then realised this was the 156th anniversary.

Of course, I could hear Victorian London in motion: People and carriages hurtling past. And time stopped its meaning as I have known it from a schedule of arrivals and departures. I was in a time which was an age of oratory and empire.

From India, Vivekananda entered the world of philosophy at Chicago’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. He fundraised both voyage and entrance to the platform to speak on Hindu thought. This was the first time Hinduism was not represented by a Christian missionary. The Address was to an American audience of seven thousand without a microphone, in clear British English. “Sisters and Brothers of America” it began, on the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus. It was the 11th of September 1893.

Swami Vivekananda in London, 1896 writers, with the additional reality of a historical perspective which enables my search entering the palimpsest of realities, simultaneously. No passports or security checks required. This is the liberation that London brings with the Blue Plaque. But the flight is not as easy as it sounds. The enigma is: Which Blue Plaque to select to begin the journey?

When I read the published lecture, I find a pivotal literary moment inspired by a socialist thrust prompted by the freedom of the human spirit. In attempting to answer the question in his words, about the “common centre to which all widely diverging radii converge”, he is referring to the changing tides of older civilisations, its epic existences, subsumed by the inventions of the new travelling and trading industries. He is not nostalgic for a past glory: “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 discoverers of these laws are called Rishis...I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.” The point of discovery is appropriate to the location of the time – the land mass now known as America existed, long before Vespucci or Columbus ‘discovered’ it. His unravelling in English of ‘discovered’ truths that formed a vast tract of literature written as poems or haiku, was inspired by the Upanishads. While much of this and the Bhagavad Gita were in Sanskrit, he brought to it the craft of the epic poets. He was at once, transporting a concept of time and space from a different cultural (Hindu) way of being, from the Sanskrit into English with all the practitioner’s rationality and musical heart of an Indian raga into its cadence. At the centre of this science of self-discovery and connectedness was the notion of Time and how human consciousness can experience true freedom which is the essence of Vedanta.

He was invited to England not through an institutional capacity, but as a guest of the Sesame Club that was interested in education and among the first that had men and women as its members. This was co-founded by Lady Isabel Margesson and Lady Rippon who brought in May 1896, the Galsworthys, Margaret Noble, Canon Albert Wilberforce among others to attend. Swami Vivekananda’s lecture on another occasion, ‘Privilege,’ sums up the tension between differentiation and unification and what the role of Ethics is, in humanising the individual and as united members of a society. None is superior or inferior, each does a task that is different towards a unified end. The real privilege is in understanding the nature of work.

His literary feat in unlocking the potential of the Indic oral traditions, and the epics based on strong philosophical arguments into an age of industrialisation and empire while working across the divergences of class and race was inspired by his guru Sri Ramakrishna, a visionary teacher in all respects.

Today our understanding of time as linear, non-linear, cyclical, light years and infinity seems commonplace. But it was not so in 1896 when Vivekananda began his classes and lectures, and published essays on the subject.

Swamiji stayed at 63 St George’s Drive which was rented by Mr. Sturdy from Lady Isabel Margesson from 1st May to 1st July for his stay and classes. He held four classes a week in the

first-floor double drawing room. Around a hundred people attended these classes which culminated in the books on Raja Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. The Blue Plaque write-up at the English Heritage site notes that the hub of Swamiji’s “everyday life was the ground-floor parlour, fronting on to the street, while he slept in a windowless room immediately to the rear. Other parts of the house were given over to his entourage…”

The two forces of differentiation and unity are best defined in the symbol of Kali in regional folk and classical Indian poetry. The symbol in calendar art was significant during the Bengal Renaissance and indeed, in India’s Freedom Movement in the twentieth century. Kali is also a female force that is dynamic – associated with the process of constantly becoming. Constant and becoming are not seen as contradictory – they are two forces of the same, one revealing the other, and the essence of the ‘play’ or interaction of these two forces, is to eliminate any trace of privilege which is tightly packed in the fear of loss. It is this ‘fear of loss’ that obstructs the Light behind the creative imagination. The light of the creative imagination shines with the loss of fear, or the death of the limited self.

The age of iron and industrialisation is also referred to as Kali yuga. So, as I stand outside 63 St. George’s Drive, I relish the generosity of the Blue Plaque for liberating me across time zones and continents and tumbling down the walls of historical time for a unique experience of freedom. In a poem that beats to the pounding rhythm of wheels of the steam engine, as of his time, Swami Vivekananda writes about the vision of progress through an all-pervading time in his:

KALI THE MOTHER

The stars are blotted out, The clouds are covering clouds,

It is darkness vibrant, sonant. In the roaring, whirling wind

Are the souls of a million lunatics Just loosed from the prison-house,

Wrenching trees by the roots, Sweeping all from the path.

The sea has joined the fray, And swirls up mountain-waves,

To reach the pitchy sky.

The flash of lurid light

Reveals on every side A thousand, thousand shades

Of Death begrimed and black — Scattering plagues and sorrows,

Dancing mad with joy, Come, Mother, come!

For Terror is Thy name, Death is in Thy breath,

And every shaking step Destroys a world for e’er.

Thou “Time”, the All-Destroyer! Come, O Mother, come!

Who dares misery love, And hug the form of Death,

Dance in Destruction’s dance, To him the Mother comes.

For details about Swami Vivekananda’s stay at the house, I’m indebted to Swami Tripurananda for archival notes, and Swami Sarvasthananda who is Minister-in-Charge Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, UK. Also, Sri Rathin Das who did the research for the book Swami Vivekananda in England: A Pictorial Guide published by Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, UK.