DISCIPLESHIP
(This lecture was given by Vivekananda on March 30th, 1900 in San Francisco)

Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol. VIII, pp. 106-121

The first condition is that the student who wants to know the truth must give up all desires for gain in this world, or in the life to come. The truth is not what we see. What we see is not truth as long as any desire creeps into the mind. God is true! The world is not true. So long as there is, in the heart, the least desire for the world, the truth will not come. Let the world fall to ruin around my ear! I do not care. So
is with the next life. I do not care to go to heaven. What is heaven ? Only the continuation of this Earth. We would be better and the little foolish dreams we are dreaming would break sooner, if there were no heaven, no continuation of this silly life, on Earth. By going to heaven we only prolong the miserable illusions. What do you gain in Heaven! You become Gods, drink nectar and get rheumatism! There is
less misery there but also less Truth. The very rich can understand truth much less than the poorer people. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God. The rich man has no time beyond his wealth and power, his comforts and indulgences. The rich rarely become religious. Why? Because they think, if they become religious they will have no more fun in life! In the same way there is very little chance to become spiritual in heaven. There is too much of comfort and enjoyment there. The dwellers in heaven are disinclined to give up their fun. They say, there shall be no more weeping in heaven. I do not trust a man who never weeps! He has a big block of granite where the heart should be. It is evident that the heavenly people have not much sympathy. There are vast masses of them over there and we are miserable creatures suffering in this horrible place. They could pull us all out of it. But they do not. They do not weep! There is no sorrow or misery there, therefore they do not care for anyone's misery. They drink their nectar; dances go on, beautiful wives and so on. Going beyond these things, the disciple should say, "I do not care for
anything in this life, nor for all the heavens that have existed, I do not care to go to any one of them, I do not want this sense life in any form!" This is identification of my self with the body. As I feel now, I am this body this huge mass of flesh. This is what I feel I am. I refuse to believe that. The world and heavens, all these are bound up with senses. Heaven is also the world. Earth, heaven and all that between have but one name, Earth. Therefore the disciple, knowing the past and the present and thinking of future knowing what prosperity means what happiness means, gives up all these and seeks to know the Truth and the Truth alone. This is the first condition.

The second condition is that the disciple must be able to control the internal and external senses and must be established in several other spiritual virtues. The external senses are the visible organs situated in different parts of the body. The internal senses are intangible. We have the external eyes, ears, nose and so on and we have the corresponding internal senses. We are continually at the beck and call of both these groups of senses. Corresponding to the senses are sense objects. If any sense objects are nearby the senses are compel us to perceive them. We have no choice or independence! There is the big nose. A little fragrance is there; I have to smell it. If there were a bad odor, I would say to myself, "Do not smell it", but nature say, "Smell", and I smell it. Just think what we have become! We have bound ourselves. I have eyes, anything going on, good or bad, I must see it. It is the same with hearing. If anyone speaks unpleasantly with me, I must hear it. My sense of hearing compels me to do so and how miserable I feel. Curse or praise, man has got to hear. I've seen many deaf people who do not usually hear but anything about themselves, they always hear. All these senses, external and internal must be under the disciple's perfect control. By hard practice he has to arrive at this where he can assert his mind against the senses, against the commands of nature. He should be able to say to his mind, "You are mine, I order you, do not see or hear anything", and the mind will not see or hear anything. No form or sound will react on the mind. In that state the mind has become free of the domination of the senses, has become separated from them, no longer is it attached t o the senses. The external things cannot order the mind now. The mind refuses to attach itself to them. Beautiful fragrance is there. The disciple says to the mind, "Do not smell", and the mind does not perceive the fragrance. When you have arrived at that point, you are beginning to be a DISCIPLE. That is why when everybody says, I know the truth, I say, "If you know the truth you must have self control and if you have control of yourself show it by controlling these organs". 

Next, the mind must be made to quite down. It is rushing about. Just as I sit down to meditate, all the vilest subjects in the world come up. The whole thing is nauseating. Why should the mind think thoughts I do not want it to think? I am as it were a slave to the mind! No spiritual knowledge is possible so long as the mind is restless and out of control. The disciple has to learn to control the mind. Yes! it is the function of the mind to think but it must not think if the disciple does not want it to. It must stop thinking when he commands it to. To qualify as a disciple this state of my mind is necessary. Also the disciple must have a great power of endurance. Life seems comfortable and you find the mind behaves well when everything is going well with you. But if something goes wrong, your mind loses its balance. That is not good. Bear all evil and misery without one murmur of hurt, without one thought of unhappiness, resistance, remedy or retaliation. That is true endurance and that you must acquire. Good and evil are always there in the world. Many forget there is any evil, atleast they try to forget and when evil comes upon them they are overwhelmed by it and feel bitter. There are others who deny that there is any evil at all and consider everything good. That also, is a weakness. That also precedes from a fear of evil. If something is evil smelling, why sprinkle it with rose water and call it fragrant? Yes, there are good and evil in the world! God has put evil in the world! But, you do not have to white wash him! Why there is evil is none of your business. Please, have faith and keep quite! 

When my master Sri Ramakrishna fell ill, a Brahmin, suggested to him that he apply his tremendous mental power to cure himself and he said that if my master would concentrate his mind on the diseased part of the body, it would heal. Sri Ramakrishna answered, "What! Bring down the mind that I've given to God to this little body!!" He refused to think of body and illness. It was dedicated to him utterly. He would not use it for any other purpose. This craving for health, wealth, long life and the like, the so-called "Good", is nothing but an illusion. To devote the mind to them in order to secure them only strengthens the delusion. We have these dreams and illusions in the life and we want to have more of them in the life to come, in heaven, more and more illusion. Resist not evil, face it! You are higher than evil! There is this misery in this world. It has to be suffered by someone. You cannot act without making evil to somebody! And when you expect worldly good, you only avoid an evil, which must be suffered by somebody else. Everybody is trying to put it on someone else?s shoulders. The disciple says, "Let the miseries of the world come to me, I shall endure them all. Let others go free." Remember the Man on the Cross? He could have brought dozens of angels to victory. But he did not resist! He pitied those who crucified him. He endured every humiliation and suffering. He took the burden of all upon himself. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and all the heavy laden and I shall give you rest." Such is true endurance. How very high he was above this life, so high that we cannot understand it, we slaves! No sooner does a man slap me in the face then my hand hits back. Bang, it goes! How can I understand the greatness and blessedness of the glorified one? How can I see the glory of it! 

But I will not drag the ideal down. I feel, I am the body resisting evil. If I get a headache, I go all over the world to have it cured. I drink two thousand bottles of medicine! How can I understand these marvelous minds? I can see the ideal but how much of that ideal? None of this consciousness of this body, of the little self of its pleasures and pains, of its hurts and comforts, none of these can reach that atmosphere. By thinking only of the spirit and keeping the mind out of matter all the time, I can catch a faint glimpse of that ideal. Material thought and forms of the senses have no place in that ideal. Take them off and put the mind upon the Sprit. Forget your life and death, your pains and pleasures, your name and fame and realize that your neither body nor mind but the pure Spirit. When I say "I", I mean this "Spirit". Close your eyes and see what picture of the body that comes or of your mental nature? If so, you have not realized the true "I" yet. The time will come however, when as soon as you say "I", you will see the universe, the infinite being. Then you will have realized your true Self and found that you are Infinite. That is the Truth. You are the Spirit, You are not matter. There is such a thing as illusion. In it one thing is taken for another. "Matter" is taken for "Spirit", the "Body" for "Soul". That is the tremendous illusion! It must go!"

The next qualification is that the disciple must have faith in the guru, the teacher. In the west the teacher simply gives intellectual knowledge, that is all. The relationship with the teacher is the greatest in life. My dearest and nearest relative in life is my guru. Next my mother, then my father. My first reverence is to the Guru. If my father says, "Do this", and my Guru says, "Do not do this", I do not do it. The Guru frees my soul. My mother and father give me birth in this body, but my Guru gives rebirth in the Soul. 

We have certain peculiar beliefs, one of them is that there are some souls, a few exceptional ones who are already free and who will be born here for the good of the world, ho help the world. They are free already. They do not care for their own salvation. They want to help others. They do not required to be taught anything. From their childhood they know everything. They may speak the highest truths even when they are babies six months old!

Upon these free souls depends the spiritual growth of mankind. They are like the first lamps are lighted. True, the light is in everyone, but in most men it is hidden. The great souls are shining lights from the beginning. Those who come into contact with them have as it were their own lamps lighted. By this the first lamp does not lose anything, yet it communicates its light to other lamps. A million lamps are lighted but the first lamp goes on shining with undiminished light. The first lamp is the Guru and the lamp that is lighted from it is the Disciple. The second in turn becomes the Guru and so on. 

These great ones are whom you call incarnations of God are mighty spiritual giants. They come and set into motion a tremendous spiritual current by transferring their power to their immediate disciples and through them, to generation after generation of Disciples. 

A bishop in a Christian church, by the laying of a hand claims to transmit the power, which he had supposed to have received from the preceding bishops. The bishop says that Jesus Christ transmitted his power to his immediate disciples and they to other and that is how the Christ's power has come to him. We hold that every one of us, not bishops only, ought to have such power. There is no reason why each of you cannot be a vehicle of the mighty current of Spirituality. But first you must find the teacher and you must remember that he is not just a man. You may get a teacher in the body, but the real teacher is not in the body. He is not the physical man. He is not as he appears to your eyes. It may be that the teacher may come to you as a human being and you will receive the power from him. Sometimes he may come in a dream and transmit things to the world. The power of the teacher may come to us in many ways but for us ordinary mortals, the teacher must come and our preparation must go till he comes.

We attend lectures, read books, argue and reason about God and Soul, religion and salvation. These are not Spirituality! because spirituality does not exist in books or in theories or in philosophies. It is not in learning and reasoning but in actual inner growth. Even parrots can learn things by heart. If you become learned, What of it! Asses can carry whole libraries! So when real light will come, there will be no more of this learning from books. No more book learning! The man who cannot write his own name can be perfectly religious and the man who has all the libraries of the world in his head may fail to be. Learning is not a condition of spiritual growth; scholarship is not a condition. The touch of the Guru, the transmittal of spiritual energy will quicken the heart. Then will begin the growth. That is the real baptism
by fire. No more stopping! You go on and on! 

Some years ago, one of your Christians teachers, a friend of mine, said, "Do you believe in Christ", 

"Yes", I answered but perhaps with a little more reverence. 

"Then why don't you be baptized? 

How could I be baptized! By whom? Where is the man who can give true Baptism? What is Baptism? Is it sprinkling some water over you or dipping you in water in water while muttering formulas?! Baptism is the direct introduction into the life of the Spirit. If you receive the real baptism, you know you are not the body but the Spirit. Give me that baptism if you can. If not, you are not Christians. Even after the so-called baptism, which you received, you have remained the same! What is the sense in merely saying that you have been baptized in the name of Christ? Mere talk, talk! ever disturbing the world with your foolishness. Ever steeped in the darkness of ignorance, yet considering themselves wises and learned. The fools go round and round, staggering to and fro, like the blind led by the blind. Therefore do not say that you are Christians! Do not brag about baptism and things of that sort! Of course, there is true baptism. There was baptism in the beginning, when Christ came to the earth and taught. The illumined souls, the great ones that come to the earth from time to time, have the power to reveal the supernal vision to us. This is true Baptism! You see, before the formulas and ceremonies of every religion there existed a germ of universal truth. In course of time this truth becomes forgotten. It becomes as it were strangled by forms and ceremonies. The forms remain; we find the casket with the Spirit all gone. You
have the "Form" of baptism but few can evoke the living spirit of baptism. The "Form" will not suffice! If we want to gain the living knowledge of the living truth we must be truly initiated into it. 

This is the ideal. The Guru must teach me and lead me into the light, make me a link in that chain of which he himself is a link. The man in the street cannot claim to be a Guru. The guru must be the man who has known, who has actually realized the divine truth, has perceived himself as the Spirit. A mere talker cannot be a Guru. A talkative fool like me can talk much but cannot be the Guru. A true Guru will tell the disciple, "Go and sin no more", and no more can he sin. No more has the person the power to sin. I had seen such men in this life. I had read the Bible and all such books. They alone are fit to be Gurus. You and I are only hollow talk - not teachers. We are disturbing the world more by talking, making bad vibrations. We hope and pray and struggle on and the day will come when we shall arrive at the Truth and we shall not have to speak. The teacher was a boy of sixteen, he taught a man of eighty. Silence was the method of teaching and the doubts of the disciple vanished forever. That is the Guru. Just think, if you find such man a man, what faith and love you ought to have for that such person. Why, he is God himself! Nothing less than that. That is why Christ's disciples worshipped him as God. The disciple must worship the Guru as God himself. All the man can know is the living God. God as embodied in man, until he himself has realized God. How else would he know? 

Here is man in America, born 1900 years after Christ, who does not even belong to the same race of Christ, the Jewish race. He has not seen Jesus or his family. He says, Jesus is God. If you do not believe it, you go to hell. We can understand how the disciples believed it, that Christ as God. He was their Guru and they must have believed he was God. But what has this American man got to do with a man born 1900 years ago. This young man tells me that I do not believe in Jesus and I have to go to hell!  What does he know of Jesus! He is fit for a lunatic asylum. This kind of belief won't do! He must find his Guru! Jesus may be born again, may come to you. Then if you worship him as God, you are all right. We must all wait till the Guru comes. The Guru must be worshipped as God. He is God; he is nothing less than that. As you look at him, the Guru gradually melts away and what is left! The Guru picture gives place to God himself. The guru is a bright mask that God wears in order to come to us. As we look steadily on, gradually the mask falls off and God is revealed. 

I bow to the Guru who is the embodiment of the bliss divine. The personification of the highest knowledge and the giver of the greatest beatitude, who is pure, perfect, one without a second, eternal, beyond pleasure and pain, beyond all thought and all qualification, Transcendental. Such, in reality, the Guru! No wonder, the disciple looks upon him as God himself, trusts him, reveres him, obeys him, follows him unquestioningly. This is the relation between the Guru and the Disciple.

The next condition the disciple must fulfill is to conceive an extreme desire to be free. We are like moths plunging into the flaming fire, knowing that it will burn us, knowing that the senses will only burn us, that they only enhance desire. Desire is never cessiated by enjoyment! Enjoyment only increases desire as butter fed into fire only increases the fire. Desire is increased by desire. Knowing all this, people still plunge into it. All the time, life after life. They've been going after the objects of desire, suffering extremely in consequence, yet they cannot give up desire. Even religion, which should rescue them from this terrible bondage to desire, they have made means to satisfy desire. Rarely do they ask God to free from the bondage to the body and senses, from slavery of desires. Instead they pray to him for health and prosperity, for long life. "O God! Cure my headache, give me some money or something" The circle of vision has become so narrow, so degraded, so beastly, so animal. None is desiring anything beyond this body. Oh, this terrible degradation! The terrible misery of it! What little flesh! The five senses, the stomach. What is the world but a combination of stomach and sex? Look at millions of men and women. That is what they are living for. Take these things away from them and they will find their empty, meaningless and intolerable. Such are we and such is our mind. It is continually hankering for ways and means to satisfy the hunger of the stomach and sex. All the time, this is going on. There is also endless suffering. These desires of the body bring only momentary satisfaction and endless suffering. It is like drinking a cup of which the surface layer is nectar while underneath all is poison. But we still hanker for all these things. What can be done? Renunciation of the senses and desires is the only way out of this misery. If you want to be spiritual, you must Renounce. This is the real test. Give up the world! The nonsense of the senses! There is only one real desire, to know what is True, to be Spiritual. No more materialism, no more this egoism. I must become Spiritual. Strong, intense must be the desire. If a man's hands and feet were so tied that he could not no move and then a burning piece of charcoal were placed on his body, if would struggle with all his power to throw it off. When I shall I have that sort of extreme desire, that restless struggle, to throw off this burning world, then the time will have come for me to glimpse the divine truth. Look at me! If I lose my little pocket book with two or three dollars in it I go twenty times into the house to find that pocket book. The anxiety, the worry, the struggle. If one of you crosses me, I remember it twenty years. I cannot forgive and forget! For the little things of the senses, I can struggle like that. Who is there who struggles for God that way? 

Children forget everything in their play, the young are mad after the enjoyment of the senses; they do not care for anything else. The old are brooding over their past misdeeds. They are thinking of their past enjoyments, chewing the cud, that is the best they can do. None crave for the Lord! , in the same intense spirit for which they crave for the things of the senses. They all say that God is the Truth, the only
thing that really exists, that Spirit alone is, not matter, yet things they seek of God are rarely Spirit! They ask always for material things. In their prayers, Spirit is not separated from matter. Degradation, that is what religion has turned out to be. The whole thing is becoming a sham. And the years are rolling on and rolling on and nothing spiritual is being attained. But man must hunger for one thing alone, the Spirit, because Spirit alone exists. That's the ideal! If you cannot attain it now say, "I cannot do it. That is the ideal. I know but I cannot follow it yet." But that is not what you do! You degrade religion to your low level and seek matter in the name of Spirit. You are all atheists! You do not believe in anything except the senses. So and so said such and such. There may be something to it, let us try and have the fun. Possibly some benefit will come; possible my broken leg will get straight. Miserable are the diseased people. They are great worshippers of the Lord for they hope that if they pray to him, he will heal them. Not that that is all together bad! if such prayers are honest and if they remember that that is not religion. 

Sri Krishna says in the Gita, four classes of people worship me. The Distressed,the Seeker of material things, the Inquirer and the Knower of Truth. People who are in distress approach god for relief. If they are ill, they worship him to be healed. If they lose their wealth, they pray him to get it back. They are other people who ask him for all kinds things because they are full of desires, name fame, wealth, position and so on. Hey will say, "O Virgin Mary, I will make you an offering to you if you get what I want, if you are successful in granting my prayers, I will worship God and give you a part of everything. Men not so material as that but still no faith in God feel inclined to know about him. They study philosophies, read scriptures, listen to lectures and so on. They are the Inquirers. The last class are those who worship God and know Him. All four classes of people are good, not bad. All of them worship Him. But we are trying to be Disciples! 

Our sole concern is to know the highest Truth, our goal, the loftiest. We have said big words to ourselves, Absolute realization and all that. Let us measure up to the words. Let us worship the Spirit in Spirit, standing on Sprit. Let the foundation be Spirit, the middle Spirit, and the culmination, Spirit! There will be no world anywhere. Let it go and whirl into space. Who cares? Stand Thou in Thy Spirit! 

That is the goal. We know we cannot reach it yet. Never mind! Do not despair and do not drag the ideal down. The important thing is how much less you think of the body, of your self as matter, as dead dull incensiant matter. How much more you think of yourself as shining immortal Spirit, the more eager you will be, to be absolutely free of matter, body and senses. This is the intense desire to be free.

The fourth and last condition of Discipleship the Discrimination of the Real from the Unreal. There is only one thing that is Real! God! All the time, the mind should be drawn to him. God exists, nothing else exists. Everything comes and goes. Any desire for the world is illusion, because the world is Unreal. More and more the mind must become conscious of God alone until everything appear as it really is, Unreal.

These are the four conditions which one wants to be a Disciple must fulfill. Without fulfilling them he will not be able to come into contact with the true Guru. And even if he is fortunate enough to find one, he will not be quickened by the power that the Guru may transmit. There cannot be any compromising of these conditions. With the fulfillment of these conditions, with all these preparations, the "Lotus" of the
Disciple's heart will open and the "Bee" shall come. Then the Disciple knows that the Guru was within the body, within himself. He opens out. He realizes. He crosses the Ocean of Life. He goes beyond. He crosses this terrible ocean and in mercy, without a thought of gain and praise, he in his turn, helps others to Cross.