On 30 December 1894, at the Brooklyn Ethical society, Swamiji declared: “I have a message to the West, as Buddha had a message to the East.”
(p. 45, God Lived With Them)
If I am God, then my soul is a temple of the Highest, and my every motion should be a worship — love for love’s sake, duty for duty’s sake, without hope of reward or fear of punishment. Thus my religion means expansion, and expansion means realisation and perception in the highest sense — no mumbling words or genuflections. Man is to become divine, realising the divine more and more from day to day in an endless progress.
(p.332, V.1, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Swamiji’s lecture on ‘Hindu Religion’ delivered at Ethical Society, Brooklyn on 30 December 1894)