Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you Happy birthday dear daughter Happy birthday to you. Share this:TweetEmailPrintMoreRedditShare on TumblrLike this:Like Loading... Related 133135
And many more! Interesting day, in these interesting times, to be born on… Do you mind telling us more about your daughter, since she is the text-topic of this post?
Thanks for your wishes Gary. Fourth of July has another significance to me. It is the day Swami Vivekananda chose to give up his mortal coil. I say give up because it seems to have been a voluntary act: he sat down to meditate and when his fellow monks discovered him his body was unresponsive. There was no apparent reason for death, but clearly his body showed no signs of life. Not sure if you have heard of him. He was a Hindu monk/yogi who came to the US in the 1890s and spent many years here before going back. He was an enlightened person in the same way the Buddha was enlightened. Not sure I can fit in that whole story in a comment here but in brief it can be said that he was an embodiment/personification of the philosophy of ancient India. To others reading about it, directly from Indian texts or translated, that philosophy is just words and descriptions: how the mind works, how you can perceive oneness with everything etc. But once in a while there is someone who has actually put it to practice and lives it day to day. He was one of those. If you are curious I can tell you more. Vivekananda had a high opinion of the US, although not sure what he would think now. Anyway, coming to the point, this date is triply important to me is all. My daughter just turned 4 and shows no lack of character, cracking her own jokes, forming her own opinions. These years go by pretty fast. You want to see your children grow up but at the same time you want them to stay little. It’s a yin-yang, bitter-sweet experience the admixture known as maya.
Thanks for the info, Dev. Although I don’t know much about Swami Vivekananda, I’ve heard enough about him, often enough, to have formed a high opinion. So I’ve long regarded him as highly enlightened and visionary. Yes, I’d love to know more.
One thing I know is that Swami Vivekananda spoke at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, in Chicago. That’s significant to me because a different speaker at that same parliament read a speech by Rev. Henry Jessup containing the first public mention, in America, of the Baha’i Faith.
Vivekananda’s giving up of this mortal coil happened about 10 years before ‘Abdu’l-Baha, the son of our Faith’s founder, visited America in 1911-12. Had the Swami been alive then, I suspect they would have met, since ‘Abdu’l-Baha seems to have met just about every spiritual notable, of every faith, who was residing in America during those years! And I suspect they would have found whole continents of common ground.