Swamiji's Transcendental State during Parliament days

I do not know whether this happens to every one but for me, as I earlier said, as I read the volumes, mentally I am travelling with Him... sitting somewhere like a speck of dust and watching the Divine drama unfolding before my eyes!!! And now after completing volumes am in a hurry to introduce you to Mrs. Bagley, Sister Christine, Laura Glenn and Sir Hiram Maxim and so many so many more. But till you know about His assignment with lecture bureau we cannot move ahead. Still before let us look at the exalted state of mind in which He would often move away from this worldly life into the higher realms.

In one of Mary Hale’s letters, she describes Swamiji as “the great and glorious soul that came to the Parliament of Religions, so full of love of God, that his face shone with Divine light, whose words were fire, whose very presence created an atmosphere of harmony and purity, thereby drawing all souls to himself.”

Some photographs that later came to Marie Louise Burke show Swamiji’s childlike and tender state. There’s an unbelievable story regarding these photos but for that we have to wait till tomorrow.

In 1939 Swami Vishwananda got a letter from Swamiji’s disciple Sarat Chandra Chakravarti whose diary is published in the Complete Works. This letter clearly indicates His exalted state!! Some portion of this letter is as follows:

             “... Swamiji once told me that one moonlight night when he was on the shore of Lake Michigan his mind began to merge in Brahman. Suddenly he saw Sri Ramakrishna and he remembered the work for which he had come to this world, and then his mind came down and again turned toward the fulfillment of his mission. I recorded this in my diary, but I did not think it necessary to make it public; therefore I have not published it as yet. I am letting only you know...”

During and after Parliament Swamiji lived in such a transcendental state when the world was His for asking!!! He was in demand everywhere and all the doors of the rich, the intellectual, the brilliant and the socially prominent, were all open to Him. But His difficulty was in not lifting His mind above the World  but to hold it down for the sake of his work. In the initial period in America the difficulty was rather more eminent as the above state occurred to Him always. Sister Nivedita  puts it aptly about Swamiji’s this state  –

“The Swami never seemed, it must be remembered, to be doing tapasya, but his whole life was a concentration so intense that for any one else it would have been a most terrible tapasya. When he first went to America, it was extremely difficult for him to control the momentum that carried him into meditation. "When he sits down to meditate," had said one whose guest he was in India, "in two minutes he feels nothing, though his body be black with mosquitoes." With this habit thus deeply ingrained, he landed in America, that country of railways and tramways, and complicated engagement lists, and at first it was no uncommon thing for him to be carried two or three times round a tram circuit, only disturbed periodically by the conductor asking for the fare. He was very much ashamed of such occurrences, however, and worked hard to overcome them.”