Swami Vivekananda’s contribution to the religion of India can be summed up as follows:
1. God is "impersonal" so far as an ultimate analysis of His being is concerned, for since, in his essence, He is superior to spatial limitation or temporal sequence, He cannot be located in space or limited by time. At the same time, to the individual believer, who has focused his attention on some aspect of His Being, in his desire to visualise His nature and let it be a source of inspiration for his personal needs, God is "personal". But this is a lower degree of "realisation". To the initiated the Divinity is the Reality that pervades the whole Universe and is operative in human thought as well as in the evolution of the Universes. In that mighty consciousness slumbers the mysteries of the worlds and the secrets of human development.
2. Being and Becoming are different aspects of the same reality and are only relative to our intelligence. Man has the promise and potentiality of divine realisation, of spiritual perfection and therefore is God in the making, for even his humanity is intelligible only if regarded as an individualised self-expression of God. It is derogatory to human nature, therefore, to attribute sin to man. Besides, God being the sole and supreme Reality, how could a foreign element like sin invade the sanctuary of being? "The Hindus refuse to call you sinners'. Ye, divinities on earth, sinners! It is a sin to call man so! It is a standing libel on human nature" (from the Swami's address at the Parliament of Religions). On another occasion he wrote: "The sages who wrote the Vedas were preachers of principles. Now and then their names are mentioned, but that is all. We do not know who or what they were. At the same time, just as our God is an impersonal and yet a personal one, so our religion is a most intensely impersonal one, and yet has an infinite scope for the play of persons".
3. The claim of Hinduism to be the universal religion is that it preaches principles and does not demand loyalty to persons. As for religions that have gathered round the personality of some individual, "smash the historicity of the man, and the religion tumbles to the ground. The glory of Krishna was not that he was a Krishna, but that he was a teacher of Vedanta."
4. Since God is all and all is God, the world perceived by the senses is of an illusory nature, the only true world or state of being is that of intuitive realisation of spiritual reality, which is the recognition of the soul's identity with the Ultimate Reality called Brahma. According to this hypothesis the Ideal and the Real merge into one and all discriminations are brushed aside between Being and Becoming. It falls beyond the scope of this book to offer criticisms of the above statements. We can only say in passing that side by side with vigorous and bold thinking, there is serious confusion of issues and impatience with reducing the ideas to a system. The Swami's ideas have not been reduced to a coherent system, but are brilliant flashes of genius alternating with mere verbal jugglery and empty flourishes of rhetoric.
5. The East is profoundly spiritual and religious, the West profoundly practical and political, but in the main, irreligious and materialistic. Both have to learn a great deal from each other. The Swami's great ambition was to set up a commerce in ideas between the East and the West, analogous to the exchange of commodities between the nations. He would say: "Send a ship-load of doctors and teachers out to India, and we shall send you missionaries of religion." He would also say: "For clear thinking and sound idealism the Greeks ; for efficiency, business reliability and the love for personal and national freedom the English ; but for audacity in religious thinking and for philosophical acumen the Indians".
6. He had a bold vision of a spiritual federation of humanity, heedless of caste, colour and creed. He was grievously disappointed at the treatment meted out to the African Americans in America.
7. The fundamental unity of mankind he perceived in the central fact of the common relation all bore to the Immanent Life. He had great veneration for Christ and spoke of Him as "a disembodied, unfettered soul." He would ever and anon speak of the "Christ in you," the kingdom of heaven in your hear" and so on.
8. But finally his lasting achievement was to infuse a spirit of active philanthropy and social cooperation into an individualistic scheme of abstract philosophy. He called it "practical vedantism" or New Vedantism, the idea being that reunion with the Divine Life is best accomplished through selfless service and devotion to man.
