‘Expansion is life’, says Swami Vivekananda. Humans can be their own masters and overcome all difficulties that will come in their path in the process of growing. It is religion which gives people the self-confidence and the will to remain undaunted by all the trials and tribulations in their lives.
In this fleeting world, spirituality alone remains constant. Realizing the truth behind the ever changing world alone can help is overcoming difficulties of life. To know the truth that happiness is not external can be achieved only through spiritual growth.
Spiritual growth cannot happen when we are under the notion that God is someone sitting in heaven with a remote control. Spiritual growth happens when we see God in all animate and inanimate.
Strength, courage, and self-confidence — these, according to Swami Vivekananda, constitute the essence of religion; all other things are peripheral. The growth is not physical or material; it is moral and spiritual.
According to Swami Vivekananda, if there has been one Buddha or …, there can be many more. Each soul is potentially divine: a human being is not just a human being, he or she is a god, and must make that divinity manifest through moral and spiritual growth.
‘Be like the arrow that darts from the bow and pierces its object’, so says Swami Sivananda on the goal of the spiritual aspirant. A spiritual aspirant never wavers from the goal. When the zenith is reached, one becomes ‘a circle with its circumference nowhere and centre everywhere’. Therefore, we may identify humanism as the exclusive and highest prerogative of humans. There can be no other perspective.