"The Prophet of Modern India" is a biography of Swami Vivekananda starting from his childhood till his last breath. Swamiji's courage, truthfulness, mission, spirituality and patriotism - all come to the fore in this beautifully written book.
I, hereby, list down the 25 Life Lessons that i learnt from this awesome book. These learnings are worded and appended in a way that makes it easier for most of us to understand and absorb.
If you are interested in reading about such learnings from other all time best selling books, you may click here.
So, here we go with our 25 Life Lessons from this book that influenced me immensely.
(1) Remain pure all your life; guard your own honour and never transgress the honour of others.
(2) He who cannot literally worship his mother can never become great.
(3) Do not believe a thing because another has said it so. Find out the truth for yourself. That is realisation.
(4) Education involves stimulating the mind and not superimposing the ideas.
(5) The greatest religion was to be true to oneself, to have faith in oneself.
(6) He who loves all beings, is the one who serves God.
(7) He felt that asking the Mother for pecuniary means was like asking a gracious king for mere vegetables
(8) All his pent up energy, which had tortured him earlier due to its not being released fully, now had a free hand and thus manifested itself as a torrent of spiritual energy.
(9) Just like the law of gravity existed even before it was actually discovered, the laws governing the spiritual relations between soul and soul, and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, had been there even before the various rishis discovered them at different times.
(10) The soul is divine and that it is possible for the individual spirit to become one with the Father of all spirits through mukti, which can be achieved only through purity. Thus, the whole object of Hinduism is to attain divinity through perfection, to see God and to reach Him.
(11) Pleasure and pain are good teachers, and so are good and evil, and all these go to build the character of a man.
(12) Knowledge is inherent in man, and learning is discovering or unveiling the cover of one's own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge. The external world is simply the suggestion that sets one to study one's own mind, the object of study being the mind itself.
(13) If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions
(14) Different people work with different motives — some work for fame, some for money, some for power, and some want to go to heaven. But there are a few exceptions, those who work for work's sake, those who do not care for name, or fame, or even to go to heaven, and it is from amongst such characters that a Christ or a Buddha is made.
(15) The weak and undeveloped minds of the worshippers on the lower strata of Bhakti are often carried away by the love of their own ideal only and shut themselves from other ideals, which may lead to fanaticism.
(16) Then only will India awake, when hundreds of large hearted men and women, giving up all desires of enjoying the luxuries of life, will long and exert themselves to their utmost for the well-being of the millions of their countrymen who are gradually sinking lower and lower in the vortex of destitution and ignorance.
(17) Freedom is the only condition of growth; take that off, the result is degeneration.
(18) gyan, bhakti and shakti are present in every man, it is only in the degree of manifestation that makes one great and another small; and once perfection is reached in the harmony of these three in any man, then he succeeds in achieving whatever he wants, whatever he wishes.
(19) The history of the world is the history of a few men who had faith in themselves.
(20) Service and not mercy should be your guiding principles...Karma is religion and religion is Karma. Karma leads man to God.
(21) Over-eating ruins both the body and the mind.
(22) I see as clear as daylight that the sameBrahma, the sameShakti, that is in me is in them as well. Only, there is a difference in the degree of manifestation that is all.
(23) In the whole history of the world, have you ever seen a country rise without a free circulation of the national blood throughout its entire body? If one limb is paralysed, then even with the other limbs whole, not much can be done with that body — know this for certain.
(24) He had great faith in the powers of brahmacharya, which he said could help one retain and reproduce exactly what one had heard or read even once, even if it was a long time ago. During his illness, the Swami had read the first ten volumes of the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he remembered every piece of information in all those ten volumes.
(25) It may be that I shall find it good to get outside my body — to cast it off like a worn-out garment. But I shall not cease to work! I shall inspire men everywhere
Hope these life lessons will help shape up your thought process tosome extent and help you lead a better life.
Don't have time to read the entire book?
Then, you can read the crux of some of the best selling books ever written.
Don't have time to read the entire book?
Then, you can read the crux of some of the best selling books ever written.
If you are interested in reading about such learnings from other 'all time best selling books', you may click here.
Cheers
Manoj Arora
Life elevating books :
Read it.... inspirational words.
ReplyDeleteCheers Rajiv
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