Life of swami vivekananda

The Proof Of God

When swami vivekananda was just 19 years of age, Vivekananda was a very logical, intellectual boy, and was full of fire. He wanted proper answers for everything. He came to Ramakrishna and asked, “You are talking God, God all the time. Where is the proof? Show me the proof!” Ramakrishna was so simple. He was not an educated man. He was a mystic, not a scholar. So he said, “I am the proof.”

Vivekananda did not know what to say because this was just utterly crazy. He was expecting some great intellectual explanation – “The proof of God is the seed sprouting and the planet spinning.” But Ramakrishna said, “I am the proof God exists.” “The way I am is the proof” – that is what Ramakrishna was saying. Vivekananda did not know what to say and he left.

Three days later, he came back and asked, “Okay, can you show me God?” Ramakrishna asked, “Do you have the courage to see?” The brave boy said, “Yes” because this was tormenting him. So Ramakrishna just placed his foot on Vivekananda’s chest and Vivekananda went into a certain period of samadhi where he was beyond the limitations of the mind. He did not come out of it for almost 12 hours and when he did, he was never the same boy again. He never asked another question in his life after that.

Swami Vivekananda On Prayer

Swami Vivekananda once said, “Kicking a football will take you closer to the Divine than any amount of prayer.” It is true, because you cannot play football unless you are absolutely involved. There is no personal intention in this, just involvement. What you can do and what you cannot do is already set and you have been trained for many years. Now it is just a question of involvement, no intention.

With prayer, after sometime you might be doing the prayer while you do so many other things – you could be doing whatever you want. In India, they made the prayers very complex – not just verbal, so that you have to involve yourself because they have seen all this “telling the prayer” business for thousands of years. They know what people will do so they made the prayer so complex, a whole procedure that you have to remember and act out properly, otherwise it is sacrilege. When that level of complexity is there, you cannot be doing something else during the prayer. So in that way a football game gets you into that level of involvement where you cannot be doing something else at all. Doing something else is totally absent and gone in you because you cannot do anything else, there is so much involvement in this.

In a soccer game, you have to learn to use your feet like a surgeon’s scalpel. This is a game which particularly demands a certain level of involvement because the limbs with which you handle the ball and the limbs with which you transport yourself at full speed are the same, and you have to avoid the ten other people who are trying to do everything that they can do with you. You have to dodge people, you have to take the ball, you have to be running at full speed; your feet must be as efficient as a surgeon’s scalpel because at that speed, at that activity, to direct the ball takes a phenomenal amount of skill. It takes a certain level of involvement where you are almost mindless.

If you do something with total involvement, you will see, there is just action – the mind is somewhere else. So in a soccer game, the players reach that kind of a state very often because it is all in one thing. That is the reason why it grabs half the world when things are being played intensely. There is a certain kind of transcendence – it is not really a spiritual transcendence, but there is a certain going beyond one’s limitations which sets fire to everybody else.

Vivekananda did not know what to say because this was just utterly crazy. He was expecting some great intellectual explanation – “The proof of God is the seed sprouting and the planet spinning.” But Ramakrishna said, “I am the proof God exists.” “The way I am is the proof” – that is what Ramakrishna was saying. Vivekananda did not know what to say and he left.

Three days later, he came back and asked, “Okay, can you show me God?” Ramakrishna asked, “Do you have the courage to see?” The brave boy said, “Yes” because this was tormenting him. So Ramakrishna just placed his foot on Vivekananda’s chest and Vivekananda went into a certain period of samadhi where he was beyond the limitations of the mind. He did not come out of it for almost 12 hours and when he did, he was never the same boy again. He never asked another question in his life after that.