Thoughts of Swami Vivekananda on Human Excellence.

1. Why does Swami Vivekananda consider building up our character as an essential element to Human Excellence?
Every individual is unique and the character is his identity. Building up character is through the process of education. Education is not only the process of acquiring knowledge, but also how efficient you are in putting the knowledge to action for handling men and nature around him. This education combines with strength of self conviction and the depth of thought enables a person reach character excellence. The character energy that comes out of this human development through education, especially the tremendous amount of faith in one-self enables him to overcome any difficulty or obstacle that comes in his way to reach his objective. Only those people with a high degree of character excellence can nourish this world. Hence the character-energy / excellence is an essential element for human excellence.

2. What is the learning from the west on managing self?
According to Peter Drucker each person has inherent strengths and weaknesses. One cannot identify the strengths of self and identification of areas of self strength can be only though feedback analysis. A person’s performance/ efficiency can be improved only in his areas of strengths and trying to improve the weakness will only lead to mediocrity. The above points are quite against the principles of the east. The west agrees with the concept of self-conviction when they state that “only internal success leads to external success”.

3. What does Upanishad talks about efficiency?
According to Upanishad, anything done with vidya, sraddha and upanisad can alone become supremely efficient. To be efficient you need to equip yourself with the knowledge or know-how first. Once you equip yourself with the knowledge, efficiency can only come if you have a strong faith in yourself and the personal conviction to do it. It is a totality of positive attitudes that you develop towards achieving your objective. Upanishad considers that you are completely equipped to achieve the efficiency only you do think deeply and meditate on the subjects required to achieve the concerned objective. When all these three powers are combines you get a superlative degree of efficiency which he terms as human excellence.

4. What is the learning from the east on managing self?
Knowledge is the manifestation of what is already innate in man. The east believes that any of the competency or skill can be learnt and the superlative degree of efficiency can be achieved by equipping oneself with knowledge, having self-conviction to achieve it and by thinking deeply thinking and meditating on the competency concerned.

5. What constitute human excellence?
There lies an infinite man behind the finite and an immortal man behind the mortal man which are not within sensory cognition. Improving ones efficiency to a superlative degree with vidya, sraddha and upanisad exposes the infinite and immortal man within who has the energy to achieve any objective which nourishes and heals the world. This constitutes human excellence.