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The Vedanta Society of Northern California was established by Swami Vivekananda on
April 14, 1900. Swamiji arrived at the Ferry Building of San Francisco on February 22, 1900, Washington's birthday. He stayed first at the Pine Street Home of Truth and gave his first San Francisco lecture the following day in Golden Gate Hall on "The Ideal of a Universal Religion." His second lecture two days later on "Vedantism" was delivered to a crowd of two thousand people at the Oakland Unitarian Church. During the three months he was here he moved several times to different quarters in San Francisco and once to the Alameda Home of Truth. From whichever city he was living in, he frequently crossed the bay to speak in the halls of downtown San Francisco, Oakland, or Alameda, giving about forty-five lectures that we know of.
Frank Rhodehamel, an Oakland devotee, tells how Vivekananda would make jokes and laugh at them with his audience, or tell enchanting stories or, in very plain language, call them up to their highest nature; he quotes him as saying once: "Don?t repent! Don?t repent! Spit, if you must, but go on. Throw off this load of sin, if there is such a thing, by knowing your true selves?the Pure, the Ever Free!" Swamiji?s effect on people was to lift their minds into the infinite reaches of their own true nature; they would come away, as one of them put it, walking on air. |