78 Biography of a YogiSociety so that she might start her own “esoteric section,” and Vivekananda, who
held nothing but disdain for occultism and Theosophy, both made use of the
same “occult” scientific concept to justify a cosmos in which supranormal phe-
nomena could take place.
The Unlikely Metaphysical Duo: Vivekananda and Tesla
It is a common tendency among scholars of Vivekananda’s writings to dismiss his
ambitions of scientific legitimacy. Scholars such as De Michelis characterize his
work as an idealistic Naturphilosophie of principles that “rather than obeying the
laws of Newtonian physics, operate along the lines of more arcane associations
between microcosm and macrocosm.”^52 With respect to Vivekananda’s conviction
that Vedānta represented the singular scripture whose teachings could be brought
into “entire harmony” with modern science, Carl Jackson maintains that “such
assertions must have seemed startling and even absurd to contemporary Western
observers.”^53 Leaving aside momentarily the fact that Newton essentially created
the modern concept of ether while speculating that it might serve as the origin of
all natural phenomena, such characterizations are simply not reflective of contem-
porary scientific thought. In an essay on the nature of ether, Vivekananda links
the classic Greek element to the Hindu ākāśa as an example of ancient attempts to
establish the unity of all physical phenomena, after which he provides a brief but
rather thorough summary of modern developments in Western science, begin-
ning with Newton and tracing notable theoretical and experimental landmarks,
with the accuracy of a physics textbook. The aim: to find a corollary to ākāśa as
a universal substratum of matter in contemporary theories of the luminiferous
ether.^54
Toward the end of his sojourn in the United States, Vivekananda was in con-
tact the Nikola Tesla, indicating in a personal letter that “Mr. Tesla thinks he
can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential
energ y. I am to go and see him next week, to get this new mathematical demon-
stration.”^55 Unfortunately, the demonstration never materialized, though there is
evidence that the meeting did in fact occur. Moreover, Tesla’s own writings indi-
cate that he was quite in agreement with the spirit of Vivekananda’s metaphys-
ics and went so far as to adopt the language of prāṇa and ākāśa to describe his
theories.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, especially with regards to the Yogi’s
stage magic, the discrediting of paranormal phenomena grew into something
of a cottage industry toward the end of the nineteenth century. However, for
every scientifically minded detractor who decried the nonsense of parlor séances,
there was an equally committed scientist who sought to demonstrate that such