What Was The Central Message Of Swami Vivekanada?

Swami Vivekananda's lectures, talks, letters, poems--his life's work--is published in nine volumes entitled THE COMPLETE WORK OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA. Is there any central message of swamiji that runs through the pages of these nine volumes? Let us hear Swamiji himself: ''My ideal indeed can be put into a few words and that is: to preach unto mankind their divinity, and how to make it manifest in every movement of life.'' Man's inherent divinity was Swamiji's central message. The following famous quotation of Swamiji can be our mantra for personality development: 'Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal.'

Swamiji was never tired of rousing people to be conscious of their inherent divinity and perfection. He wanted this divinity and perfection. He wanted this divinity to manifest in our day-to-day lives. In fact, he held this manifestation of divinity as the sole index of civilization of human kind:
''A nation may conquer the waves, control the elements, develop the utilitarian problems of life seemingly to the utmost limits, and yet not realize that in the individual, the highest type of civilization is found in him who has learned to conquer self.''

''This universe is simply a gymnasium in which the soul is taking exercise; and after these exercises we become good. So the value of everything is to be decided by how far it is a manifestation of God. Civilization is the manifestation of that divinity in man.''

This divinity in use is the repository of eternal existence, eternal knowledge and eternal bliss. The more it manifests, the more we experience abiding happiness and get supreme knowledge.

Strengthening of will-power, the essence of personality development::-
¤ physical dimension consisting of our body and senses.
¤ Energy dimension which performs digestion of food, circulation of blood, respiration and other activities in the body.
¤ Mental dimension characterized by the activities of the mind, like, thinking, feeling and emotions, etc.
¤ Intellectual dimension characterized by the determinative faculty in a person. This is also the seat of discrimination and will-power.
¤ Blissful dimension experienced as bliss during deep sleep.

Each succeeding dimension is subtler than the preceding one and pervades it.

Personality development implies progressive identification with higher dimensions of personality. Thus a person identified only with the physical dimension without exercising his higher mental faculties, lives not far different from animals, whose pleasure and pain are restricted to the sensory system.

Development involves struggle with one's lower mind characterized by desires, old habits, wrong tendencies, impulses and bad impressions. The lesser we identify with the lower mind, and the more we identify with the higher mind, and exercise our buddhi(discrimination), the more develop will our personality be. This involves struggle to grapple with one's mind and its old habits, to cultivate new and wholesome ones. But this struggle is the greatest of all struggles in that it makes us civilized in the real sense of the term by manifesting our divinity and thereby our hidden perfection.