Swami Vivekanand on Children

Swami Vivekanand on Children

Swami Vivekananda was very interested in children. He felt that children held the key to the future evolution of man. In America he would sit and chat with the children of his devotees and even play with them as he ventured to unravel the mystery of the child-mind. He held the view that children think in a very different way than adults. He cited 'Alice in Wonderland' as a perfect book written for children. The fantastic things happening there in the plot of the novel, Swamiji thought was the way children fantasised and that was quite in keeping with Vedanta as Swamiji understood it. After all Swamiji was one of the first thinkers in modern times in the world and certainly the first thinker in modern India who held the view that Nature was both deterministic and non-deterministic in different phases and in different readings of the human mind. Today, these two opposing views are held by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics developed by Heisenberg and others. At the macroscopic level Nature seems to be causal in her behaviour but at the microscopic level Nature seems entirely unpredictable and, hence, probabilistic in her behaviour. These two opposing theories have long eluded the synthesis that Einstein so sought -- the Unified Field Theory.

The Quantum Theory of Gravity and the Unified Field Theory are both incomplete and do not successfully explain all of physical reality. Perhaps it was Swamiji who was after all right. His Vedantic theory was that all physical laws of Nature were thought-sequences and generalisations of thought, arrangements of the data of the human mind. In the 1890s Swamiji had pronounced these ideas which were in altered particulate terms corroborated much later by the discoveries of Quantum Physics. Today we know that the observer plays his role in altering the status of the observed event which is somewhat akin to Swamiji's ideas about phenomena perhaps. This, so far as Swamiji's deterministic ideas are concerned. But then he also held the view that there is after all no intrinsic correlation in the events taking place in Nature, that these correlations are our attempts to classify the events but that they are fundamentally mental constructs of varying degrees of refinement from the very gross physical, material hard-core facts of experience to the progressively subtler world of ideas culminating in transcendence of the mind and so achieving freedom from its processes, patterns and orderings. This meant total lawlessness at the very base or absolute freedom from determinism. Nature thus operates according to Swamiji in, so to say, three phases. First, the lowest deterministic phase, then the probabilistic phase and finally, the freedom 'phase' if one may be allowed the latitude to say so.

Events are disjoint, unconnected in themselves, only appearing to be connected by the queer phenomenon of the tendency of the mind to connect them, for thoughts have perhaps a certain sequential nature at the human level at least. Well, Shankaracharya had pronounced the epic statement, 'Anirvachaniya Maya,' that is, 'phenomenal reality is inexpressible.' The ancient seer must have thereby meant that Nature has discrepancies which make any pronouncement on its functioning puerile. Even Sri Ramakrishna had said that there are many contradictions in the functioning of Maya. Swamiji had said that since there was no way to know this world adequately well, the best alternative was to reject the very attempt to do so and try to free oneself of it. Even his Master Sri Ramakrishna had said that one may never get to comprehend a ten-millionth part of phenomena were one to analyse it for ten million years. Therefore, one should concentrate on realising the spiritual ideal rather than spend one's mental resources on this unknowable phenomenal reality.

Question arises what was Swamiji trying to understand from his interactions with small children in America? Was he trying to understand the workings of Maya through his attempted understanding of the carefree, unconditioned thought-processes of the child-mind? Did he get any inkling of the laws of Nature through his study of child psychology which devoid of the trappings of the adult mind must have been so different from it? Did Swamiji get to understand the laws of the evolution of the human mind which may have been so pertinent to him in his quest for the formula of engineering the accelerated evolution of the human species unto Godhead? Who can tell? But the fact remains that Swamiji perhaps believed that the study of the child-mind held the key to the principal questions of human evolution and thus he was so very eager to get the little children into chatting with him on their own terms and never his. Of course one cannot discount his vast love that naturally made him the friend of these innocent ones! Sweet little kids, unto you belongs the future of humanity. Jai Swamiji! Jai Hind!

Written by Sugata Bose