His very humanness is engaging...he doesn't prescribe any complicated set of metaphysical mental, psychological or emotional acrobatics. One trusts, one learns to believe and one wants to live what one has learnt to believe...
Here are 10 Life lessons given by him:
1. You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.
2. Arise! Awake! and stop not until the goal is reached.
3. You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.
4. In a conflict between the heart and the brain, follow your heart.
(The wisdom of the heart that we reap in that vulnerable state is of a wholly different order to the intellectual insight we synthesize through deliberate rational thought (Brain Pickings). The insights we get through our intellectual activity and acumen have to be filtered into the heart so that the wisdom of the heart may then, finally, help us to take the right decision, or cope with the effects of a wrong decision.)
5. They alone live, who live for others.
6. Neither seek nor avoid, take what comes.
7. Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.
8. The fire that warms us can also consume us; it is not the fault of the fire.
9. Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come back to you, but do not think of that now.
10. Do one thing at a time, and while doing it put your whole soul into it to the exclusion of all else.
Sync-ing the Swamiji's teaching with Native American wisdom. See what Willaru Huayta, an Incan Spiritual Messenger from Cusco, Peru, says. (Huayta was born a Quechua Indian; he learned to receive esoteric truth during his spiritual quests in the Amazon jungles.)
"The most important thing now is to reveal the inner temple of the soul with right thinking
and right activity."
Just like a tree, in order to grow strong and tall needs a good system of roots, so, too, we need a good set of Life lessons to help us stand straight and withstand the winds that buffet us...