Prayer Book: Divinity of Man

Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.

The Vedantist begs the liberty to call the expiration of man. At the same time he does not quarrel with other sects; the Vedanta has no quarrel with those who do not understand this divinity of man. Consciously or unconsciously, every man is trying to unfold that divinity.

Man is the best mirror, and the purer the man, the more clearly can he reflect God.

Therefore utter no words of condemnation. Close your lips and let your hearts open. Work out the salvation of this land and of the whole world, each of you thinking that the entire burden is on your shoulders. Carry the light and the life of the Vedanta to every door., and rouse up the divinity that is hidden within every soul.

Teach yourselves, teach everyone, his real nature, call upon the sleeping soul and see how it awakes. Power will come, glory will come, goodness will come, purity will come, and everything that is excellent will come, when this sleeping soul is roused to self-conscious activity.

Manifest the divinity within you, and everything will be harmoniously arranged around it. 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.

All power is within you; you can do anything and everything. Believe in that, do not believe that you are weak. Stand up and express the divinity within you, Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth - sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature.

India will be raised , not with the power of the flesh, but with the power of the spirit; not with the flag of destruction, but with the flag of peace and love. The garb of the Sannyasin; not by the power of Wealth, but by the power of begging bowl. Say not that you are weak. The spirit is omnipotent.

This infinite power of the spirit, brought to bear upon matter evolves material development, made to act upon thought evolves intellectuality, and made to act upon itself makes of man a God. if the fisherman thinks that he is the Spirit he will be a better fisherman, if the student thinks he is the Spirit, he will be a better student. If the lawyer think that he is the Spirit, he will be a better lawyer.

The attempt to remove evil form the world by killing a thousand evil-doers only adds to the evil in the world. But if the people can be made to desist from evil doing, by means of spiritual instruction, there is no more evil in the world.

Let the lion of Vedanta road; the foxes will fly to their holes. Throw the ideas broadcast, and let the results take care of itself. Let us put the chemicals together; the crystallization will take its own course.

First deluge the land with spiritual ideas. The first work that demands our attention is that the most wonderful truths confined in our Upanishads, in our scriptures, in our Puranas must be brought out from the books, brought out from the monasteries, brought out from the forests, brought out from the possession of selected bodies of people and scattered broadcast all over the land, so that these truths may run like fire all over the country from north to south and east to west.

It is remarkable also that the possession of India by a foreign power has always been a turning - point in the history of that power, bringing to it wealth, prosperity, dominion, and spiritual ideas. While the Western man tries to measure how much it is possible for him to possess and to enjoy, the Eastern seems to take the opposite course, and to measure how little of material possession he can do with.

The Vedanta lays down that each man should be treated not as what he manifests, but as what he stands for. Each human being stands for the divine, and, therefore, every teacher should be helpful, not by condemning man, but by helping him to call forth the divinity that is within him.