#SwamiVivekananda
Three religions now stand in the world which have came down to us from time prehistoric — Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their survival their internal strength.
From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the..
Where then, the question arises, is the common center to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest?
They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end.
It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant.
Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world.
Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning.
Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God.
Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd.
If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active providence by whose power systems after systems are..
This is what the Brâhmin boy repeats every day:
"The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons of previous cycles."
And this agrees with modern science.
The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances?
The Vedas declare, “No”. I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body.
Here am I in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living.
I had also a past.
The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a certain future dissolution.
If then the soul was created, it must die.
Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence.
Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one.
In the 2nd place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being.
Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited aptitude?
If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul.
But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of matter,and..
We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean..
There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth in a body which is..
This is in accord with science, for science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions.
So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born soul.
There is another suggestion.
Taking all these for granted, how is it that I do not remember anything of my past life?
This can be easily explained.
This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis.
So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit.
The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means the change of this centre..
How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect?
We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there.
But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same.
How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute, change even..
But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer is:
“I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of..
But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body.
The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body.
This is nothing more than what the Hindu says, "I do not know."
Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to another.
The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow
The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature.
Is there no hope? Is there no escape?
- was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair.
"Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside in higher spheres!
"Children of immortal bliss" - what a sweet, what a hopeful name!
Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name - heirs of immortal bliss -
It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature.
He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful.
"Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the..
Thus sang the Rishis of the Vedas.
And how to worship Him?
Through love.
"He is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life."
He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water..
It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is better to love God for love's sake, and the prayer goes:
Yudhishthira answered,
"Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord..
I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes.I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in love."
So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act?
He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only.
This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories.
He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts.
"I have seen the soul; I have seen God."
And that is the only condition of perfection.
Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God..
And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection?
“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”
I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies,the measure of happiness increasing..
Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little prison-individuality must go.
Science has proved to me that physical..
Science is nothing but the finding of unity.
Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all other could be made.
Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science.
Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with further..
Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in India.
It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the situation.
Names are not explanations.
I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick..
One of his hearers sharply answered, "If I abuse your God, what can He do?"
“You would be punished,” said the preacher,
"when you die."
"So my idol will punish you when you die," retorted the Hindu.
The tree is known by its fruits.
"Can sin beget holiness?"
Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy?
Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer?
Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church?
My brethren, we can no more think about anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing. By the law of association, the material image calls up the mental idea and vice versa.
It stands merely as a word, a symbol.
Has God superficial area?
If not, when we repeat that word "omnipresent", we think of the extended sky or of space, that is all.
Man is to become divine by realizing the divine.
Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports..
He must not stop anywhere.
"External worship, material worship," say the scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when..
Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, "Him the Sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine."
He recognizes in it a necessary stage of life.
"The child is father of the man."
Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?
Nor even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error.
To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth.
Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike.
The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realized, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols -
It is not that this help is necessary for every one, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.
It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths.
The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but..
If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.
And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more than..
Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man..
They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures.
"I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there."
I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved and not others.
Says Vyasa,
"We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed."
The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to..
They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.
The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the God..
It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be created in..
Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you.
It has been given to thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbor's blood, who never found out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one’s neighbors..
Thank-you for reading this 🙏
I will feel blessed even one of you gets moved. He may not be with us today, but his words have left an indelible mark on generations to come 😇😊
I think I'll never get over this.
To the person who introduced me to this:
A big big big thankyou 😇
🎥 Chicago Speeches Of Swami Vivekananda - YouTube