Why Vivekananda Wrote Rajayoga
Pradeep B. Deshpande and Sanjeev A. Aroskar
Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) was an Indian monk having no need for accolades, so why did he write the book, Rajayoga?
Vivekananda visited America in 1893 to make a presentation on Hinduism to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago where he was given a “rock star” reception. He stayed on in America for three years during which he gave many lectures. His discourses were so well received that Harvard made him an offer to head a new Department of Eastern Religion as did Columbia, but he declined both. Nikola Tesla was heavily influenced by his interactions with Swami Vivekananda.
In July 1896, Swami Vivekananda published the book, Rajayoga, which presented his interpretation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Patanjali was a sage who lived around the time of the Buddha, 5th century B.C. That book remains in print today.
In publishing the book, Swami Ji appears to have reasoned that the significance of the works would be understood when the world was ready. Maybe that time has come.
The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant is widely regarded as one of the most influential in Western philosophy. Tucked in Rajayoga is this information: According to Kant, all knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason!
The best-of-the-best products of reason include science, six sigma, laws, policies, rules & regulations, proclamations and the like.
In contrast, Swami Vivekananda asserts, “Indian thought dares to seek, and successfully finds, something higher than reason.”
These gems of wisdom assert that the best of the best products of reason are necessary and useful, but transcending reason may deliver additional benefits, and in some cases, transcending reason may be the only pathway to progress.
How does one discover something higher than reason? Obviously, one cannot use reason itself for such an inquiry.
Seers have left behind ample clues in the form of discoveries that could not have been sourced from previous knowledge, and in every case, the process used is meditation, or more generally yoga, known for thousands of years.
Meditation also brings about a rise in internal excellence, inducing positive changes from within. And this hypothesis can be tested as internal excellence can be measured.
Several examples are presented here by way of corroboration of this proposition.
Intuition is the notion of knowing something without access to the rational mind and the five senses. Intuition, self-awareness, and emotional excellence are now recognized as critical components of leadership. The myriad of human problems will require a much larger number of a different class of leaders.
We all have a certain level of intuition, but the accuracy is generally too low to be of any practical value. Universal Peace Foundation founded by my guru, H. H. Gurumahan conducts a seven-day yoga program to enhance intuition among children, 8 to 14 years of age. Watch this short video clip showing the children doing several tasks blind-folded, implying that their intuition skills have shot up. Science has no understanding with which to design such a program.
Parents, children and teachers attest to the efficacy of the program in bringing about positive changes in the children: Improvement in concentration and academic performance, better relationships with parents, peers, and teachers, and less TV and cell phone use.
Three hundred and fifty Indian children have been trained so far, and the success rate is 80%. The program will be extended to non-Indian children once the pandemic comes under control.
As the next example, Mumbai’s Dabbawalas are a group of 5,000 semi-literate lunchbox delivery boys who deliver 200,000 lunchboxes a day, six days a week, producing 1 defect (late delivery; wrongful delivery) in 6 million deliveries according to Forbes and they have been at it since 1890. They are an envy of the corporate world, eager to learn how these semi-literate folks with no understanding of statistics are able to deliver such incredible performance so that they too can replicate it. Unfortunately, they are looking from the prism of reason, but the solution is not to be found there.
As the article, “How Mumbai’s Dabbawalas Achieve Better than Six Sigma Performance” explains, theirs is a six sigma operation, but unknowingly, they have transcended the bondage of reason. The Dabbawalas are all Varkaris (pilgrims) who travel 200 km on foot every year from one set of temple towns to another. In other words, their internal excellence is high. To the Dabbawalas their customer is God. How dare they deliver food late or deliver it to the wrong address! See this paper, The Secret of Exemplary Performance.
Next, the prestigious Business Roundtable released a New Statement on August 19, 2019 redefining the purpose of a corporation signed by 181 CEOs of some of the largest companies in the world including Amazon and Apple. The CEOs committed to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders — suppliers, employees, customers, communities and shareholders, and away from shareholders-first ideology.
This sounds great, but Gallup estimates that there are more than 22 million workers in the United States alone who are “extremely negative” or “actively disengaged”, costing the US economy nearly $1 trillion annually.
Given this rampant negativity, what products of reason will motivate one group of stakeholders to work for the benefit of all stakeholders? There are none. Rising internal excellence is the only plausible path to progress.
Now on to the consideration of societal issues.
President Joe Biden has identified uniting the nation and achieving racial harmony as two of the topmost priorities of his administration.
President Biden has just issued a series of executive orders to ensure racial equity across the country, acting on one of his core campaign promises to dismantle “systemic racism” that has plagued America far too long.
Prior to this action, the American society tried a number of other products of reason to tackle racial discrimination for no less than 155 years: The thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery in 1865 and a host of newer laws, policies, rules, and regulations have been adopted since then, and yet the experiences of the last year suggest that racial disharmony persists. Is 155 years long enough to conclude that the products of reason are not working?
Introduce meditation and you should see a statistically significant improvement in racial harmony and it should be possible to audit the benefits.
In the November 2020 elections, 81 million citizens voted for Biden while 74 million for Trump. Given this national divide, can you think of a product of reason that can unite the nation? Uniting the nation is not about Red States vs Blue States; it is all about internal excellence, and internal excellence has nothing to do with race, religion, gender, political affiliation or national origin.
The only way to unite the nation is to enhance the societal level of internal excellence through meditation which will bring about the required positive changes from within.
Against this background, I present two breakthrough discoveries, clearly impossible with any products of reason.
After a decade-long search which included interactions with some of the best brains in physics, including Stephen Hawking and John Archibald Wheeler, a colleague of Albert Einstein at Princeton, Amanda Gefter finally concluded that the universe came out of nothing, a void, pursuant to a big bang event some 13.8 billion years ago. Gefter released her findings in her path-breaking book, “Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn” in 2014.
Says Jim Kowall, it is a big mystery how the energy phase of the big bang, incredibly small — the size of Planck length (about 10–33 cm in diameter), unbelievably hot and immensely dense, gave rise to the universe, but a bigger mystery is how nothing transformed into the energy phase of the big bang.
He says, the term nothing should be interpreted as nothing physical. It is true that nothing physical, including the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force), can fall through the size of Planck length in a free fall, in the sense of relativity theory, and be present on the other side, but consciousness can, as consciousness is not physical.
Jim is a triple board certified American physician who also holds a doctorate in Theoretical Physics. Jim released his findings in an article titled, “The Physicist’s Dilemma: Ultimate Reality — The Nonphysical Nature of Consciousness” in 2015. He was inspired by the works of Nisarga Datta and Adi Shankara.
Eons ago, Paratpara Shiva and Adyashakti explained the mystery of the universe and the mystery of life to the Sapta Rishis (seven sages). Says Shiva in a Puranic story, Shiva is only a potentiality and consciousness and energy (Adyashakti) are both required for creation. Shiva also goes by the name, Ardhanareshwar (half-male, half female). There was no modern physics then.
The hypothesis, consciousness of the void created the universe, can be tested as we all have consciousness, which implies that we too are creators (Aham Brahmasmi) and this leads to the last example.
Whatever matter there is in the universe now in the manifest form was already there in the unmanifest form in the energy phase of the big bang. After all, the universe came out of it.
Ancient seers gave the unmanifest a name: Panch Maha Bhoot — Five Principal Elements. They are: Prithvi- Earth, Jal-Water, Agni-Fire, Vayu-Air, and Akash-Space (energy, Prana).
There are ancient temples in South India (four in Tamil Nadu, and one in neighboring Andhra Pradesh), each dedicated to one of the five principal elements: Earth (Ekambareswarar), Jal (Thiruvanaikaval), Agni, Thiruvannamalai, Vayu, Kalahasthi (Andhra Pradesh) and Akash (Chidambaram). Vice President Kamala Harris’s mother hailed from Tamil Nadu.
Control the five principal elements and you control nature. Control of the five principal elements can be thought of in terms of Albert Einstein’s famous equation, e = mc2.
In Rajayoga, Swami Vivekananda explains Patanjali’s eight-step (Ashthanga Yoga) process and the sutra for controlling the five elements.
We have corroborated one of them, transforming some of the matter into energy so it becomes possible to lift from the ground. This phenomenon does not violate the law of gravity because we have made ourselves lighter.
In this connection, see this video clip from Jaya TV’s newscast showing a yogi flying away. This example needs to be further corroborated.
Yogananda Paramahansa (1893–1952) was a yogi who spent nearly half his life in America. He wrote the book, Autobiography of a Yogi that sold 4 million copies and has been translated into fifty languages. This was reported to be the only book on Apple Co-founder Steve Jobs’s IPad. So moved was Jobs by Autobiography of a Yogi that he made arrangements to distribute a gift-wrapped copy of the book to everyone who came to his funeral service in 2011.
In the Autobiography of a Yogi, there is a chapter on a Yogi with two bodies, the ability of a yogi to be in two different place at the same time. In the same book, there is a photograph of Yogananda having lunch with Mahatma Gandhi as well as information on his interactions with Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the famous scientist, Sir J. C. Bose.
The second author has first-hand experience of interacting with two yogis who had demonstrated the phenomena of multiple bodies. His guru explained this phenomena thus: We send our subtle body to the desired destination (this process is instantaneous as the subtle body is not physical) and attract the five principal elements to create one more of ourselves and then do the reverse once the need is over.
Siddhi powers are a consequence of controlling the five principal elements. The understanding of the control of five principal elements throws open the possibility that appropriate sutras may exist which might be able to tackle some of the most intractable problems facing humanity such as global warming.
In closing
The implications of Swami Vivekananda’s wisdom on transcending reason are analyzed. They suggest that limiting ourselves to the products of reason may not deliver satisfactory results. On the flip side, transcending reason with meditation is the pathway to breakthrough progress.
Swami Vivekananda explains the process with which to make progress in his book, Rajayoga. Applications include pursuit of exemplary performance, racial harmony and national unification.
Control of the five elements may hold the key to the solution of some of the most intractable problems facing humanity.
Acknowledgments
This paper is written with the blessings of H. H. Gurumahan. The interactions with Jim Kowall over the years are gratefully acknowledged.
About the Authors
Pradeep Deshpande is Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at the University of Louisville and President of Louisville, KY-based Six Sigma and Advanced Controls, Inc. Pradeep has developed a scientific framework for external and internal excellence toward a better and more peaceful world. He has published several papers on the various aspects of the framework in India and the United States and has made presentations in several countries including the office of the Prime Minister of India and the Parliament of Peru always to enthusiastic audiences. In 2015 his company published the book “Six Sigma for Karma Capitalism” (amazon) and another titled, “The Nature of Ultimate Reality and How It Can Transform Our World” coauthored with James P. Kowall, a triple board certified physician with a PhD in Theoretical Physics (amazon).
Sanjeev Aroskar is an entrepreneur based in India. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Sanjeev has completed several software projects connected to India’s Prithvi Missile under Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam when the latter was Project Director with the Indian Army. Dr. Kalam subsequently became President of India.
