Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda is a vast corpus of writings of a great man. You get the positive statement of the essential and core features of Hinduism and the contributions of Bharath towards world-thought. But again to enter the CW, one needs some tips to steer one's way through the topology of ideas.
First, undoubtedly, the Chicago addresses form the natural introduction to his thoughts not only chronologically but also concept-wise. That too after the phenomenal 5 mts speech starting with Sisters and Brothers of America, the most important piece not to be missed is his PAPER ON HINDUISM. In that he has risen to a great challenge posed by the times and change of world culture. For the first time, almost, Hindu thoughts in essence and future relevance are given in the world language unmistakably. This comes in Volume I.
Next to that comes in the line of interest even according to his line of life-events, come his writings on an important theme. It is a great contribution to world-spirituality by Bharath-Desa. The Human being, if studied in its universal psychology, has the potencies of Work, Emotions, Deep Psycho-focus and expanding Knowledge. Sometimes you like to work and work. You do things, alter this and that, bring things to what shape you want and all that. But are you always working just like that? You have your moments of deep emotions. Feelings move you like anything. You show passion, affection, great friendliness. Sometimes you just want to be with somebody. You need not talk; you need not express as it were anything much; but just being with that somebody gives you great joy. Those are, yea, some moments.!
But it is not the full picture of life. Sometimes you are deep into some moods, some idea where your mind is totally engrossed. You may be a painter, who sits, stands before a growing concept on a canvas hours together. You are not satisfied with a stroke or a bend or a colour tone. You find your mind so docile and calm and arrested in that deep moment, perhaps not wanting to stir any more or much for sometime.
And again you are sometimes in vast knowing after knowing. The limits of your understanding go on extending. You comprehend more and more, linking this with that, incrementing the shades of meaning by linking across disciplines. The nascent vastness making you almost impersonal, making you a vibrant process of knowing. Yea, sometimes you are that, most universal, transcending all colours, creeds and even anthropic particulars. You are becoming the expanding itself in thought.
All these are comprehended by the concept of Yoga in Hinduism. And what better writings can there be on these aspects than that of Vivekananda? You find his great ideas in his explanations on these topics of Karma-Yoga, Raja-Yoga, Bhakti-Yoga and Jnana-Yoga. Human spiritual pathways of Work, Mental Control, Emotions and Knowledge. All these you can find in his Volumes . Karma-Yoga Raja-Yoga in Volume I and Jnaana Yoga in Volume II and Bhakti-Yoga in volume III. (Karma-Yoga - Yoga of Work; Raja-Yoga - Yoga of Mental Control; Jnaana-Yoga - Yoga of Knowledge; Bhakti-Yoga - Yoga of Emotions)
My recommendation is one must read through these works before reading his Lectures from Colombo to Almora, which is placed in the very first volume.
Chicago Addresses form a beautiful start real and chronological of the manifestation of his message. I always prefer to think that from that moment of the great Parliament on, Sri Ramakrishna took over the psycho-somatic medium of Vivekananda. From that moment on, it was the unified being of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda who was talking and writing. My doubt was due to that fantastic simplicity!
If all his works on the four types of Yoga are a potent communication of East-to-West, his Lectures of Colombo to Almora were vibrant adaptations of West-to East. The Lectures are where the Vivekananda in the two-in-one being Ramakrishna-Vivekananda become the active mode and the other one remains in the charging mode, if one may try to understand the phenomenon in this way. A charter of Hinduism in its age-old psyche and practice was begun on the podium of the Parliament but a new canon of Indian Nationalism was bequeathed to the Indian public through the Lectures from Colombo to Almora. IN the Lectures Swami was giving potent impulses and stirrings to the dormant national psyche of Bharath which began to manifest due to the effective nursing done by Sister Nivedita, in the year 1906 as national awareness and national awakening. The British were sharply perceptive about the potency of these lectures.
Apart from these his intimate personality along with his pondering fervour we will be getting in his Conversations and Dialogues. But these records inform us about his later stages. He was such a one that he should have been attended with a Boswell or a M, right from his itinerant days. And another intimate record is his Letters. A wonderful literature of heart and sentiments he has left behind, if we choose to leave his words as his own. These records show that he was thinking and living what he was writing and talking. The letters come in instalments starting from Volume V to Volume IX. This system I do not like. His letters should have been put in a single volume chronologically, with no change, however good-intentioned. But they are grand as they are in these volumes.
Coversations and Dialogues come in Volumes V, VI, VII. Again a work that must come in one full piece.
And another brilliant little work is his Inspired Talks. Whoever recorded these blessed be they! The words are fresh from the highs of ecstasy and they sometimes strike you dumb through some beautiful evenings. The Srirangam sky was a witness to many such evenings some forty years ago. It comes in Volume VII.
I think after finishing this first round of study and getting the personality in all its flavours, it will do well to come to his other translations and poems and essays on a second course of more familiar round.
Notes on his lectures, stray lectures compiled and the translated essays do form another strata not only buttressing his thoughts, but also giving some new dimensions. His essays East and West and Modern India and also Buddhist India, though in translation are some of the very good pieces of thought. Memoirs of European travel, a humorous piece of writing in Bengali, introduced as if a new genre and style of writing in the original language as per Rabindranath Tagore. It retains its original humour here in translation also.
But another source of writing, which is a must-reading along with CW in order to grasp the vastness and various nuances of his wonderful personality is two books by his famous disciple, Sister Nivedita - The Master as I saw Him and Notes on wanderings with Swami Vivekananda. Especially The Master, that book is a veritable commentary on Vivekanandean thought and personality. If the saying 'without Vivekananda it is difficult to understand Sri Ramakrishna' is true then saying 'without Sister Nivedita it is difficult to understand the total personality of Vivekananda' will not be anything less true. This book 'The Master as I saw Him' educated more nationalists in the seminal years of Swadeshi rise. Bharathi was a close student of this great book. To understand the perennial worth of this book it will suffice if we look at the comments of Rev.Canon D D, T K Cheyne in his Review on this book of Sister Nivedita, which appeared in the Hibbert Journal 1911:
"Religion, to him, was not an intellectual theory, but the realisation of truth. For this, spirituality was an indispensable prerequisite, and such a rare quality needed cultivation. Still, Western and Eastern ideas being so different, it was necessary to expound the latter, i.e. the ideas characteristic of orthodox Hinduism, not as mere ideas, but as life-giving truths. Three volumes of lectures remain, delivered partly in England, partly in America, partly in India, besides the address before the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, and scattered separate lectures, especially that called "My Master," an account of the Swami's Guru, the saintly, God-intoxicated Ramakrishna, and a lecture on the Vedantic philosophy, given at Harvard University. All these are helpful, not only for a clearer insight into Indian thought, but for a somewhat tantalising glimpse of Vivekananda's personality. The present work, however, by Miss Noble, who in India became his disciple, gives a much more satisfying view of the Master. It is not a biography, but what our German friends would call a Charakterbild, and as such it may be placed among the choicest religious classics, below the various Scriptures, but on the same shelf with the Confessions of St Augustine and Sabatier's Life of St Francis."
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