“Swami Vivekananda on the Vedic Journey from the Gods to the ABSOLUTE”, eSamskriti, 09 Oct 2026.

“There is a persistent assumption in modern discussions on religion that the movement from many gods to one God represents the natural and highest trajectory of religious development. According to this familiar narrative, primitive man, confronted with the bewildering multiplicity of nature, first worshipped several gods associated with different forces of the cosmos; with the gradual refinement of religious consciousness, these scattered divine powers were consolidated into the conception of one supreme personal God.

In this scheme, monotheism becomes the mature form of religion. Whatever lies beyond is dismissed as mystical speculation or a departure from the proper conception of God. Swami Vivekananda’s reading of the Vedic tradition presents a very different intellectual history.

For him, the extraordinary feature of the Vedic mind is precisely that it did not regard the conception of one supreme personal God as the terminus of religious inquiry. Monotheism appears in the Vedic development, but the Indian mind, according to Vivekananda, soon found that even this conception did not exhaust the philosophical problem. The question no longer was whether there were many gods or one God but a more fundamental question arose……………”

Read the full article at eSamskriti.