Narendranath Datta was born into a prominent Calcutta family on January 12 1863. His father was a well-known lawyer and his mother was a cultured and aristocratic woman. As a child he was uncontrollably boisterous and high spirited. As a boy he was a excellent athlete and superlative student. He read everything ravenously and retained everything he read. Never content to believe what he was told, he always demanded incontrovertible proof or experiential certainty before he would believe anything. He was deeply religious and this same integrity colored his quest for God. He went from religious man to religious man and asked them if they had seen God. Finally he met Sri Ramakrishna who was the only one to tell him that yes, he had seen and could show him to Narendranath. Thus began the discipleship of this highly educated and cultured boy to the mostly illiterate rustic temple priest saint.

After five years of training, his teacher died. Before diing, Sri Ramakrishna had named Narendranath the leader of all of his disciples. Narendra took the monastic name Swami Vivekananda and founded a monastery where he and his brother disciples could carry on their spiritual practices. Following Indian monastic tradition, he and the other monastics divided their time between the monastery and traveling as itinerant monks. Swami Vivekananda spent many years traveling through all parts of the indian subcontinent.

In May of 1893 a group of his disciples sent the Swami to the United States to attend the Parliment of World Religions that was being conducted in conjunction with the World's Fair in Chicago. His speeches at the parliment so impressed listeners that Swami Vivekananda was invited to speak around Chicago, and then all through the eastern United States. Everywhere he went he insipired people with his master's message: Each soul is divine and the goal of life is for each of us to realize that divinity for ourselves.

After four years of strenous teaching, the Swami returned to India to the accolades of the entire country. In India, Swamiji's message was a fiercely patriotic one. Because in his travels throughout India he had felt such impotent compassion for the poor and uneducated, when he returned to India, he exhorted his brother monks to serve the poor and the needy, to serve God as he manifests in man. In addition to realizing your own inherent divinity, you must see that same divinity in others and serve them. Thus , was born the Ramakrishna Mission the purpose of which is to help to alleviate the sufferrings of the poor on the Indian subcontinent.

Swamiji returned to the United States and taught for a short time primarily on the west coast before returning to his homeland where he died at the Monastery he founded in the village of Belur which is on the Ganges just north of Calcutta. In a fitting irony, the Swami, whose main teaching was done in the United States, died on July Fourth 1892 at the age of 39. In the ten years in which he preached Strength, Freedom, Manliness, and that every soul is Divine, he touched the hearts and minds, and changed the lives of many thousands of men and women around the world.