WHICH WAY IS IT?

Swami Prabhavananda maintained that the Brahman was only a witness to the manifested world and certainly did not participate in individual lives in any way, whereas Swami Vivekananda wrote that the Brahman “directs” our minds and bodies, and “guides and preserves” us.
 
Which is it?

Swami Tyagananda, the Head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston and the Hindu Chaplin at Harvard and MIT, suggested in an email that a reading of Vivekananda’s book Jnana Yoga would clarify this.

It turns out that there is both a Personal and an Impersonal Brahman.  Prabhavananda was referring to the latter, Vivekananda to the former.  As Vivekananda explains, “The difference between the Personal and Impersonal God is this:  The  Personal God is only a being (called Ishvara in Vedanta) whereas the Impersonal is everything in the universe, and infinitely more besides.

“The idea of the Personal God is that He is the omnipresent Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of everything, the eternal Father and Mother of the universe.

“Then there is the other idea of the Impersonal where all those adjectives are taken away as superfluous and illogical.”  This would be Prabhavanada’s position.

So, that is that.

Vivekananda’s Jnana Yoga is available, by the way, as a .pdf file on the Internet.