Swami Vivekananda Iv

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SWAMI VIVEKANADA Publisher: Advaita Ashrama Summary: Satyendra N. Dwivedi “Each soul is potentially divine. The Goal is to manifest this divinity, by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy – by one, or more, or all of these – and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.” - Swami Vivekananda PART IV THE SAGES OF INDIA The sages of India have been most innumerable, for what has the Hindu nation being doing for thousands of years except producing sages? The eternal relations which deal with the nature of the soul, and of God, and the relations between souls and God, are embodied in what we call the ‘Shrutis’, the Vedas. Our religion preaches an Impersonal Personal God. It preaches any amount of impersonal laws plus any amount of personality, but the very fountain-head of our religion is in the Shrutis, the Vedas, which are perfectly impersonal; the persons all come in the Smritis and Puranas, the great ‘Avatars’, Incarnations of God, prophets and so fourth. Krishna is not the authority of the Vedas, but the Vedas are the authority of Krishna himself. His glory is that he is the greatest preacher of the Vedas that ever existed. So with the other incarnations; so with all our sages. Our first principle is that all that is necessary for the perfection of man and for attaining unto freedom is there, in the Vedas. We find the word ‘Rishi’ again and again mentioned in the Vedas; it has become a common word at the present time. The Rishi is the great authority. The definition is that Rishi is the ‘Mantra-drashta’, the seer of thought. Being is not identical with consciousness, but consciousness is only one part of Being. Beyond consciousness is where the bold search. Consciousness is bound

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by the senses. Beyond that, beyond the senses, men must go, in order to arrive at truths of the spiritual world, and there are even now persons who succeed in going beyond the bounds of the senses. These are called Rishis, because they come face to face with spiritual truths. Religion is not in books, nor in theories, nor in dogmas, nor in talking, nor even in reasoning. It is being and becoming. Let us say in the language of the Vedanta, “This Atman is not to be reached by too much talk, no, not by the highest intellect, no, not even by the study of the Vedas themselves.” [Kathopanishad 1.2.23; Mundakopanishad 3.2.3] When you have known God your very face will be changed, your voice will be changed, your whole appearance will be changed. You will be a blessing to mankind; none will be able to resist the Rishi. This is Rishi-hood, the ideal of our religion. The other incarnations were but parts of the Lord. Krishna was the Lord Himself. He was the most wonderful ‘Sanyasin’ and the most wonderful house-holder in one; he had the most wonderful amount of Rajas, power, and was at the same time living in the midst of the most wonderful renunciation. Krishna can never be understood until you have studied the Gita, for he was the embodiment of his own teaching. India has to live, and the spirit of the Lord descended again. He who declared, “I will come whenever virtue subsides”, came again, and this time the manifestation was in the South, and up arose that young Brahmin of whom it has been declared that at the age of sixteen he had completed all his writings; the marvelous boy Shankaracharya arose. The writings of this boy of sixteen are the wonders of the modern world, and so was the boy. He wanted to bring back the Indian world to its pristine purity. Then came the brilliant Ramanuja. Shankara with his great intellect, I am afraid, had not as great a heart. Ramanuja’s heart was greater. He felt for the downtrodden, he sympathized with them. He took up the ceremonies, the accretions that had gathered, made them pure so far as they could be, and instituted new ceremonies, new methods of worship, for the people who absolutely required them. At the same time he opened the door to the highest spiritual worship from the Brahmin to the Pariah. This one great northern sage, Chaitanya, represented the mad love of the Gopis. Himself a Brahmin, born of one of the most rationalistic families of the day, himself a professor of logic fighting and gaining a world-victory, through the mercy of some sage, became one of the greatest teachers of Bhakti the world has ever known – mad Chaitanya. His Bhakti rolled over the whole land of Bengal, bringing solace to every one.

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MY MASTER To the Oriental, the world of spirit is as real as to the Occidental is the world of senses. In the spiritual, the Oriental finds everything he wants or hopes for; in it he finds all that makes life real to him. To the Occidental he is a dreamer; to the Oriental the Occidental is a dreamer playing with ephemeral toys, and he laughs to think that grown-up men and women should make so much of a handful of matter which they will have to leave sooner or later. That man alone, who is the Lord of his mind, can become happy, and none else. It is true that external nature is majestic, with its mountains, and oceans, and rivers, and with its infinite powers and varieties. Yet there is a more majestic internal nature of man, higher than the sun, moon, and stars, higher than this earth of ours, higher than the physical universe, transcending these little lives of ours, and it affords another field of study. The Indian nation cannot be killed. Deathless it stands, and it will stand so long as that spirit shall remain as the background, so long as her people do not give up their spirituality. In India, even an Emperor on the throne wants to trace his descent from some beggar-sage in the forest, from a man who wore the bark of a tree, lived upon the fruits of the forest and communed with God. That is the type of descent we want; and so long as holiness is thus supremely venerated, India cannot die. Life is but momentary, whether you have the knowledge of an angel or the ignorance of an animal. Life is but momentary, whether you have the poverty of the poorest man in rags or the wealth of the richest living person. Life is but momentary, whether you are a down-trodden man living in one of the big streets of the big cities of the west or a crowned Emperor ruling over millions. Life is but momentary, whether you have the best of health or the worst. Life is but momentary, whether you have the most poetical temperament or the most cruel. There is but one solution of life, says the Hindu, and that solution is what they call God and religion. Facts have to be perceived, and we have to perceive religion to demonstrate it to ourselves. We have to sense God to be convinced that there is God. The idea took possession of the boy and his whole life became concentrated upon that. Day after day he would weep and say, “Mother, is it true that thou existest, or is it all poetry?” Is the Blissful Mother an imagination of poets and misguided people, or is there such a reality? We must have seen that of books, of education in our sense of the word, he had none, and so much the more natural, so much the more healthy was his mind, so much the power his thoughts, undiluted by drinking in the thoughts of others.

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Man is a soul, and the soul is sexless, neither man nor woman. The idea of sex and the idea of money were the two things, he thought, that prevented him from seeing the Mother. This whole universe is the manifestation of the Mother, and she lives in every woman’s body. “Every woman represents the Mother; how can I think of woman in mere sex relation?” That was the idea: Every woman was his Mother, he must bring himself to the state when he would see nothing but Mother in every woman. And he carried it out in his life. “Do you think that a man, firmly persuaded that there is a Reality behind all these appearances, that there is God, that there is One who never dies, One who is infinite bliss, a bliss compared with which these pleasures of the senses are simply playthings, can rest contended without struggling to attain it? Can he cease his efforts for a moment? No, he will become mad with longing.” “My son, blessed is the man upon whom such madness comes. The whole of this universe is mad – some for wealth, some for pleasure, some for fame, some for a hundred other things. They are mad for gold, or husbands, or wives, or other trifles, mad to tyrannize over somebody, mad to become rich, mad for every foolish thing except God.” Blessed is the man who is mad after God. He went to all the sects he could find, and whatever he took up he went into with his whole heart. He did exactly as he was told, and in every instance he arrived at the same result. Thus from actual experience, he came to know that the goal of every religion is the same, the difference being in method and still more in language. “They worship Me best who worship my worshippers. These are all My children and your privilege is to serve them” – is the teaching of Hindu scriptures. He had not the least idea that he was a great teacher, he thought that it was Mother who was doing everything and not he. He always said, “If any good comes from my lips, it is the Mother who speaks, what have I to do with it.” “When the lotus opens, the bees come of their own accord to seek the honey; so let the lotus of your character be full-blown, and the results will follow.” All teaching implies giving and taking, the teacher gives and the taught receives, but the one must have something to give, and the other must be open to receive. “As different rivers, taking their start from different mountains, running crooked or straight, all come and mingle their waters in the ocean, so the different sects, with their different point of view, at last come unto Thee.”

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The only true teacher is he who can immediately come down to the level of the student, and transfer his soul to the student’s soul and see through the student’s eye and hear through his ears and understand through his mind. He was a triumphant example, a living realization of the complete conquest of lust and of desire for money. He was beyond all ideas of either, and such men are necessary for this century. The other idea of his life was intense love for others. The first part of my Master’s life was spent in acquiring spirituality, and the remaining years in distributing it. It is through this appreciation of spirituality in others that spirituality is produced. Whatever man wants and appreciates, he will get; and it is the same with nations. This man from a remote village of Bengal, without education, by the sheer force of his own determination, realized the truth and gave it to others, leaving only a few young boys to keep it alive. Today the name of Shri Ramakrishna Paramahansa is known all over India to its millions of people. Nay, the power of that man has spread beyond India; and if there has ever been a word of truth, a word of spirituality, that I have spoken anywhere in the world, I owe to my Master; only mistakes are mine. This is the message of Shri Ramakrishna to the modern world: “Do not care for doctrines, do not care for dogma, or sects, or churches, or temples; they count for little compared with the essence of existence in each man, which is spirituality; and the more this is developed in a man, the more powerful is he for good. Earn that first, acquire that, and criticize no one, for all doctrines and creeds have some good in them. Show by your lives that religion does not mean words, or names, or sects, but that it means spiritual realization. Only those can understand who have felt. Only those who have attained to spirituality can communicate it to others, can be great teachers of mankind. They alone are powers of light.” Therefore my Master’s message to mankind is: “Be spiritual and realize truth for yourself.” LORD BUDDHA Buddhism is one of our sects. It was founded by the great man called ‘Gautama’, who became disgusted with the eternal metaphysical discussions of his day, and the cumbrous rituals and more especially with the caste system. He preached a religion in which there was no motive power, and was perfectly agnostic about metaphysics or theories about God.

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Buddha said, “None can help you; help yourself; work out your own salvation.” He said about himself, “Buddha is the name of infinite knowledge, infinite as the sky; I, Gautama, have reached that state; you will all reach that too if you struggle for it.” He stands as the perfection of the active type, and the very height to which he attained shows that through the power of work we can also attain to the highest spirituality. Buddha may or may not have believed in God; that does not matter to me. He reached the same state of perfection to which others come by Bhakti – love of God, Yoga or Jnana. Perfection comes through the disinterested performance of action. THOUGHTS ON THE GITA Gita is like truths beautifully arranged together in their proper places – like a fine garland or a bouquet of choicest flowers. The Upanishads deal elaborately with ‘Shraddha’ at many places, but hardly mention Bhakti. In the Gita, on the other hand, the subject of Bhakti is not only again and again dealt with, but in it, the innate spirit of Bhakti has attained its culmination. Though before its advent, Yoga, Jnana, Bhakti, etc. had each its strong adherents, they all quarreled among themselves, each claiming superiority for his own chosen path; no one ever tried to seek for reconciliation among those different paths. It was the author of the Gita who for the first time tried to harmonize these. He took the best from what all sects then existing had to offer, and threaded them in the Gita. The reconciliation of the different paths of Dharma, and work without desire or attachment – these are the two special characteristics of the Gita. Hate not the most abject sinner, look not to his exterior. Turn your gaze inward where resides the ‘Parmatman’. Proclaim to the whole world with trumpet voice: “There is no sin in thee, there is no misery in thee; thou art the reservoir of omnipotent power. Arise, awake, and manifest the Divinity within.” If one reads the following shloka, he gets all the merits of reading the entire Gita; for in this one shloka lies embedded the whole message of the Gita:

“Yield not to unmanliness, O son of Pritha; it doth not befit you. Cast off this faintheartedness and arise, O scorcher of foes.” 28

INTERVIEWS When you have men who are ready to sacrifice their everything for their country, sincere to the backbone – when such men arise, India will become great in every respect. Each nation has a theme; everything else is secondary. India’s theme is religion. Social reform and everything else is secondary. Karma is the eternal assertion of human freedom. If we can bring ourselves down by our karma, surely it is in our power to raise ourselves by it. We have to learn from Englishmen, the idea of prompt obedience to leaders, the absence of jealousy, the indomitable perseverance, and the underlying faith in himself. India has to learn from Europe the conquest of external nature and Europe has to learn from India the conquest of internal nature. Unless a man chooses for himself, the very spirit of Hinduism is destroyed. The essence of our faith consists simply in the freedom of the ‘Ishta’. Shri Ramakrishna used to say that to pick out one thorn which has struck in the foot, another thorn is requisitioned, and when the thorn is taken out, both are thrown away. So the bad tendencies are to be countered by the good ones, but after that, the good tendencies have also to be conquered. God’s infinitude refers to the unlimited-ness of a purely spiritual entity, and as such, does not suffer in the least by expressing itself in a human form. INSPIRED TALKS All pleasures of the senses or even of mind are evanescent, but within ourselves is the one true unrelated pleasure, dependent upon nothing. It is perfectly free, it is bliss. The more our bliss is within, the more spiritual we are. The pleasure of the self is what we call religion. Neither seek nor avoid, take what comes. It is liberty to be affected by nothing; do not merely endure, be unattached. We are what our thoughts have made us, so take care of what you think. The Lord has hidden himself best and his work is best; so he, who hides himself best, accomplishes most. Conquer yourself and the whole universe is yours.

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Temples have no hold on Hindu religion; if they were all destroyed, religion would not be affected a grain. Perception is our only real knowledge or religion. Concentration of the powers of the mind is our only instrument to help us see God. If you know one soul (your own), you know all souls, past, present, and to come. The will concentrates the mind; certain things excite and control this will, such as reason, love, devotion, breathing. The concentrated mind is a lamp that shows us every corner of the soul. Three gifts we have – first, a human body. (The human mind is the nearest reflection of God; we are ‘His own image’.) Second, the desire to be free. Third, the help of a noble soul who has crossed the ocean of delusion, as a teacher. When you have these three, bless the Lord; you are sure to be free. God alone is true. All else is false. The soul never kills or is killed. Live alone or in the company of holy ones. ‘Drinking the cup of desire, the world becomes mad’. Day and night never come together, so desire and the Lord can never come together. Give up desire. Intellect ends where religion begins. Inspiration is much higher than reason, but it must not contradict it. Reason is the rough tool to do the hard work; inspiration is the bright light that shows us all truth. CONVERSATIONS The conviction has grown in my mind after my travels in various lands that no great cause can succeed without an organization. When with the spread of education the masses in our country grow more sympathetic and liberal, when they learn to have their thoughts expanded beyond the limits of sect or pathy, then it will be possible to work on the democratic basis of organization. For this reason it is necessary to have a dictator for this society. He who believes not, believes not even after seeing, and thinks that it is all hallucination, or dream and so on. The limits of all reasoning and arguing is in realm of Maya; it lies within the categories of time, space and causation. But He is beyond these categories. We speak of His law; still He is beyond all law. Put yourself to work, and you will find such tremendous power coming to you that you will feel it hard to bear. Even the least work done for others awakens the power within; even thinking the good of others gradually instills into the heart the strength of a lion. The essential thing is renunciation. Without renunciation none

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can pour out his heart in working for others. The man of renunciation sees all with an equal eye and devotes himself to the service of all. Realize in your own life this knowledge of Brahman which comprehends all theories and is the rationale of all truth, and preach it to the world. This will conduce to your own good and the good of others. Speak of this Atman to all, even to the lowest. By continued speaking, your own intelligence will also clear up. And all repeat the great mantras, and have the courage of a lion in the heart: • ‘Tattvamasi’ - “Thou are That” • ‘Sohamasmi’ – “I’m That” • ‘Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma’ – “All this is very Brahman” The body is an outer covering of the mind and whatever the mind will dictate to it, it will have to carry out. It is very difficult to understand why in this country so much difference is made between men and women, whereas the Vedanta declares that one and the same conscious Self is present in all beings. All nations have attained greatness by paying proper respect to the women. That country and that nation which do not respect the women have never become great, nor will ever be in future. The principal reason why your race has so much degenerated is that you had no respect for these living images of Shakti. Manu says, “Where women are respected, there the gods delight; and where they are not, there all works and efforts come to a naught.” I never objected to the worship of women, who are embodiments of Divine Mother, whose external manifestations, appealing to the senses, have maddened, but whose internal manifestations, such as knowledge, devotion, discrimination, and dispassion make man omniscient, of unfailing purpose, and a knower of Brahma. “She when pleased, becomes propitious and the cause of freedom of man.” Vedanta says that within man is all knowledge – even in a boy it is so – and it requires only an awakening, and that much is the work of a teacher. The use of higher education is to find out how to solve the problems of life, and this is what is engaging profound thought of modern civilized world, but it was solved in our country thousands of years ago. All the soul-elevating ideas and the different branches of knowledge that exist in the world are found on proper investigation to have their roots in India.

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By education I do not mean the present system, but something in the line of positive teaching. Mere book-learning won’t do. We want that education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can stand on one’s own feet. ESSAYS INDIA: THE LAND OF RELIGIONS In religion lies the vitality of India, and so long as the Hindu race does not forget the great inheritance of their forefathers, there is no power on earth to destroy them. The great seers of ancient India saw so far ahead of their time that the world has to await centuries yet to appreciate their wisdom, and it is this very inability on the part of their own descendants to appreciate the full scope of this wonderful plan, and that is one and only cause of the degeneration of India. IN DEFENCE OF HINDUISM Both ‘Jnana’ and ‘Bhakti’ are everywhere preached to be unconditional, and as such there is not one authority who lays down the conditions of cast or creed or nationality in attaining ‘Moksha’. The one idea the Hindu religions differ in from every other in the world, the one idea to express which the sages almost exhaust the vocabulary of the Sanskrit language, is that man must realize God even in this life. And the Advaita texts very logically add, “To know God is to become God.” Nishchaldasa, a Tyagi of the Dadupanthi sect, boldly declared in his ‘Vicharasagara’: “He who has known Brahman has become Brahman. His words are Vedas, and they will dispel the darkness of ignorance, either expressed in Sanskrit or any popular dialect.” Thus to realize God or Brahman, as the Dvaitins say, or to become Brahman, as the Advaitins say – is the aim and end of the whole teaching of the Vedas, and every other teaching therein contained represents a stage in the course of our progress thereto. And the great glory of Bhagavan Bhashyakara Shankaracharya is that it was his genius that gave the most wonderful expression to the ideas of Vyasa. As absolute, Brahman alone is true; as relative truth, all the different sects, standing upon different manifestations of the same Brahman, either in India or elsewhere, are true. Only some are higher than others. And as the Vedas are the only scriptures which treats that this absolute God of which all other ideas of God, are but minimized and limited versions; as the

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Shruti takes the devotee gently by hand, and leads him from one stage to another, through all the stages that are necessary for him to travel to reach the absolute; and as all other religions represent one or other of these stages in a unprogressive and crystallized form – all the other religions of the world are included in the nameless, limitless, eternal Vedic religion. Let us take our stand on the one central truth in our religion, the common heritage of the Hindus, the Buddhists, and Jains alike – the Spirit of man, the Atman of man, the immortal, birth-less, all-pervading, eternal Soul of man, whose glories the Vedas cannot themselves express, before whose majesty the universe with its galaxy after galaxy of suns and stars and nebulae is as a drop. Every man or woman, nay, from the highest Devas to the worm that crawls under your feet, is such a Spirit evoluted or involuted. The difference is not in kind, but in degree. The infinite power of the Spirit, brought to bear upon matter evolves material development, made to act upon thought evolves intellectuality and made to act upon Itself makes of man a God. LETTERS The life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive. I am thoroughly convinced that no individual or nation can live by holding itself apart from the community of others, and whenever such an attempt has been made under false ideas of greatness, policy or holiness, the result has always been disastrous to the secluding one. Liberty is the first condition of growth. Just as man must have liberty to think and speak, so he must have liberty in food, dress and marriage, and in every other thing, so long as he does not injure others. “Youth and beauty vanish, life and wealth vanish, even the mountains crumble into dust. Friendship and love vanish. Truth alone abides. God of Truth, be Thou alone my guide.” “Without fear, without shop-keeping, caring neither for friend nor foe, do thou hold on to truth, Sanyasin, and from this moment give up this world and the next and all that are to come – their enjoyments and their vanities. Truth, be Thou alone my guide.” Neither numbers nor powers nor wealth nor learning nor eloquence nor anything else will prevail, but ‘purity’, ‘living the life’, in one word, ‘Anubhuti’, realization. Let there be but a dozen such lion-souls in each country, lions who have broken their bonds, who have touched the infinite, whose soul is gone to

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Brahman, who care neither for wealth nor power nor fame, and there will be enough to shake the world. Here lies the secret. Says Patanjali, the father of Yoga: “When a man rejects all superhuman powers, then he attains to the cloud of virtue.” He sees God. He becomes God and helps others to become God. There is but one basis of well-being, social, political, or spiritual, to know that I and my brother are one. This is true for all countries and all people. Expansion is the sign of life, and we must spread over the world with our spiritual ideas.

“A kindred spirit is or will be born out of the limitless time and populous earth to accomplish the work.” No work is petty. Everything in this world is like a banyan-seed, which though appearing tiny as a mustard-seed, has yet the gigantic banyan tree latent within it. He indeed is intelligent who notices this and succeeds in making all work truly great. I want each of my children to be hundred times greater than I could ever be. Every one of you must be a giant – must, that is my word. Obedience, readiness, and love for the cause – if you have these three, nothing can hold you back. The training by which the current and expression of will are brought under control and become fruitful is called ‘education’. To advance oneself towards freedom, physical, mental, and spiritual, and help others to do so is the supreme prize of man. Those social rules which stand in the way of unfoldment of this freedom are injurious, and steps should be taken to destroy them speedily. Those institutions should be encouraged by which men advance in the path of freedom. “I am free. I am Mother’s child. She works, She plays. Why should I plan? What should I plan? Things came and went, just as She liked, without my planning. We are Her automata. She is the wire-puller.” “Oh, it is so calm! My thoughts seem to come from a great, great distance in the interior of my own heart. They seem like faint, distant whispers, and peace is upon everything, sweet, sweet peace, like that one feels for a few moments just before falling into sleep, when things are seen and felt like shadows – without

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fear, without love, without emotion. Peace that one feels alone surrounded with statues and pictures. I come, Lord, I come.” Summary: Satyendra N. Dwivedi

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