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Ruth Harris Biography

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“However, he still retained something of the fluid notions of male and female at the heart of the Ramakrishna's spiritual idealism: 'The true man is he who is strong as strength itself and yet possesses a woman's heart.' Central to this man-making was obedience: 'If your superiors order you to throw yourself into a river and catch a crocodile, you must first obey and then reason with him [sic].' This type of yogu put sacrifice before rationality: to give up one's life without a thought was to be the freest of all. He also emphasized an almost military loyalty to the order that squashed the temptation of sect and schism. And yet, there remained that impossible paradox: 'You must be free as the air, and as obedient as this plant and the dog.”

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Book:Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
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“Vivekananda's impressions had overwhelmed him, and he reacted by scolding his Madras disciples to emphasize the distance they still had to travel in comparison. He told them to hide their 'faces in shame' and called them a 'race of dotards, who spent hundred of years ... discussing the touchableness of this food or ... promenading the sea-shores with books in [their] hands - repeated undigested stray bits of European brainwork, and the whole soul bent upon getting a thirty-rupee clerkship ...' He implored them to come out of their 'narrow holes and have a look abroad ... to see how nations are on the march,' and called for sacrifice, especially for the poor and downtrodden, and acknowledged that the English 'had been the instrument' of breaking a 'crystallised civilisation' to force India, and especially her young men, to change. Both Hirai and Vivekananda regarded imperial assaults not as victimization alone, but also as opportunities for re-creation.”

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Book:Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
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“Cooking was creative, but also a quotidian process of transformation, central to Vivekananda's maternal relationship to his disciples. He bragged to his Bengali friends about his culinary prowess: 'Last night I made a dish. It was such a delicious mixture of saffron, lavender, mace, nutmeg, cubebs [a java pepper with a tang of allspice], cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, cream, lime juice, onions, raisins, almonds, peppers, and rice ....' He adored spices, but also loved sweetness, as the ingredients to this recipe suggests. In California, he taught his disciples to make rock candy, which he boiled and boiled to ensure its purity. For him, it symbolized the sweetness vital to his spiritual lessons.”

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Book:Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
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“Bose had demonstrated his experimental prowess with homemade instruments employing gunpowder and a bell before British officialdom in the Kolkata Town Hall. He used a homemade 'coherer,' an apparatus he did not seek to patent because he had no interest in making money. Instead, Guglielmo Marconi, who Bose had met in London in 1896, was celebrated for similar work in wireless telegraphy.”

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Book:Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
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“He later remarked at the end of his Royal Institution lecture-demonstration in May 1901 that ''It was when I came on this mute witness of life and saw an all-pervading beauty that binds together all things - it was then that for the first time I understood the message proclaimed on the banks of the Ganges thirty years ago - 'they who behold the One, in all the changing manifoldness of the universe, unto them belongs eternal truth, unto none else, unto none else.' Such statements caused as much of a stir as did his painstaking results. Geddes described Bose's interaction with Sir Michael Foster, a veteran Cambridge physiologist, who asked why the Indian showed him a graph with the 'curve os muscle response' to electrical stimulation, something he already knew about. Delighted, Bose replied, 'Pardon me; it is the response of metallic tin.”

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Book:Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
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