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This paper aims to explore Vivekananda’s message of human excellence. The central message of Vivekananda is: Man is not just man. Man is potentially divine. The goal of life is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. This message deserves to be spread across all human beings.

All individuals could try to improve the quality of their human material and thus gradually proceed towards the state of perfect human excellence by combining in them both the horizontal growth and the vertical growth.

It is possible to enrich the quality of our life to such an extent where the difference between man and God melts away.

The highest and finest human excellence is thus evolving a God out of the material man. It is the state when I know I am one with all. This is what Vivekananda wanted to impress upon mankind.

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).

This paper aims to study Vivekananda and the inner quest of humanity. Vivekananda’s quest was to hold up a mirror to us for our inner search. Vivekananda desired to show us the intrinsic truth, the innermost divinity and help manifest it. We have not reached the ultimate level of development and evolution. Swami Vivekananda was convinced that we are on the cusp of higher evolution and need to believe that we can move in that direction consciously.

We can rise to the highest levels of civilization and culture through personal research and discovery. Sustained human development is to have a goal and follow a well-thought path. The goal is the ultimate freedom.

All human beings have a spiritual core, whether we are aware of it or not; whether we manifest it or not; or whether we recognize it or not. Therefore, it is a matter of having faith that we are spiritual to begin with and then make the effort to manifest that truth.

In the East and in the Third World, civilizations had suffered severely due to invasions and colonization. They had to now struggle and achieve freedom, even at the political or social level. In the West, where human beings had a surfeit of physical enjoyment, they had to avoid the pitfalls of over-confidence and physical power.