Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda - Vol-1
Lectures and Discourses
SOUL, GOD AND RELIGION
Through the vistas of the past the voice of the centuries is
coming down to us; the voice of the sages of the Himalayas and
the recluses of the forest; the voice that came to the Semitic
races; the voice that spoke through Buddha and other spiritual
giants; the voice that comes from those who live in the light
that accompanied man in the beginning of the earth - the light
that shines wherever man goes and lives with him for ever - is
coming to us even now. This voice is like the little rivulets;
that come from the mountains. Now they disappear, and now they
appear again in stronger flow till finally they unite in one
mighty majestic flood. The messages that are coming down to us
from the prophets and holy men and women of all sects and
nations are joining their forces and speaking to us with the
trumpet voice of the past. And the first message it brings us
is: Peace be unto you and to all religions. It is not a message
of antagonism, but of one united religion.
Let us study this message first. At the beginning of this
century it was almost feared that religion was at an end. Under
the tremendous sledge-hammer blows of scientific research, old
superstitions were crumbling away like masses of porcelain.
Those to whom religion meant only a bundle of creeds and
meaningless ceremonials were in despair; they were at their
wit's end. Everything was slipping between their fingers. For a
time it seemed inevitable that the surging tide of agnosticism
and materialism would sweep all before it. There were those who
did not dare utter what they thought. Many thought the case
hopeless and the cause of religion lost once and for ever. But
the tide has turned and to the rescue has come - what? The study
of comparative religions. By the study of different religions we
find that in essence they are one. When I was a boy, this
scepticism reached me, and it seemed for a time as if I must
give up all hope of religion. But fortunately for me I studied
the Christian religion, the Mohammedan, the Buddhistic, and
others, and what was my surprise to find that the same
foundation principles taught by my religion were also taught by
all religions. It appealed to me this way. What is the truth? I
asked. Is this world true? Yes. Why? Because I see it. Are the
beautiful sounds we just heard (the vocal and instrumental
music) true? Yes. Because we heard them. We know that man has a
body, eyes, and ears, and he has a spiritual nature which we
cannot see. And with his spiritual faculties he can study these
different religions and find that whether a religion is taught
in the forests and jungles of India or in a Christian land, in
essentials all religions are one. This only shows us that
religion is a constitutional necessity of the human mind. The
proof of one religion depends on the proof of all the rest. For
instance, if I have six fingers, and no one else has, you may
well say that is abnormal. The same reasoning may be applied to
the argument that only one religion is true and all others
false. One religion only, like one set of six fingers in the
world, would be unnatural. We see, therefore, that if one
religion is true, all others must be true. There are differences
in non-essentials, but in essentials they are all one. If my
five fingers are true, they prove that your five fingers are
true too. Wherever man is, he must develop a belief, he must
develop his religious nature.
And another fact I find in the study of the various religions of
the world is that there are three different stages of ideas with
regard to the soul and God. In the first place, all religions
admit that, apart from the body which perishes, there is a
certain part or something which does not change like the body, a
part that is immutable, eternal, that never dies; but some of
the later religions teach that although there is a part of us
that never dies, it had a beginning. But anything that has a
beginning must necessarily have an end. We - the essential part
of us - never had a beginning, and will never have an end. And
above us all, above this eternal nature, there is another
eternal Being, without end - God. People talk about the
beginning of the world, the beginning of man. The word beginning
simply means the beginning of the cycle. It nowhere means the
beginning of the whole Cosmos. It is impossible that creation
could have a beginning. No one of you can imagine a time of
beginning. That which has a beginning must have an end. "Never
did I not exist, nor you, nor will any of us ever hereafter
cease to be," says the Bhagavad-Gita. Wherever the beginning of
creation is mentioned, it means the beginning of a cycle. Your
body will meet with death, but your soul, never.
Along with this idea of the soul we find another group of ideas
in regard to its perfection. The soul in itself is perfect. The
Old Testament of the Hebrews admits man perfect at the
beginning. Man made himself impure by his own actions. But he is
to regain his old nature, his pure nature. Some speak of these
things in allegories, fables, and symbols. But when we begin to
analyse these statements, we find that they all teach that the
human soul is in its very nature perfect, and that man is to
regain that original purity. How? By knowing God. Just as the
Bible says, "No man can see God but through the Son." What is
meant by it? That seeing God is the aim and goal of all human
life. The sonship must come before we become one with the
Father. Remember that man lost his purity through his own
actions. When we suffer, it is because of our own acts; God is
not to be blamed for it.
Closely connected with these ideas is the doctrine - which was
universal before the Europeans mutilated it - the doctrine of
reincarnation. Some of you may have heard of and ignored it.
This idea of reincarnation runs parallel with the other doctrine
of the eternity of the human soul. Nothing which ends at one
point can be without a beginning and nothing that begins at one
point can be without an end. We cannot believe in such a
monstrous impossibility as the beginning of the human soul. The
doctrine of reincarnation asserts the freedom of the soul.
Suppose there was an absolute beginning. Then the whole burden
of this impurity in man falls upon God. The all-merciful Father
responsible for the sins of the world! If sin comes in this way,
why should one suffer more than another? Why such partiality, if
it comes from an all-merciful God? Why are millions trampled
underfoot? Why do people starve who never did anything to cause
it? Who is responsible? If they had no hand in it, surely, God
would be responsible. Therefore the better explanation is that
one is responsible for the miseries one suffers. If I set the
wheel in motion, I am responsible for the result. And if I can
bring misery, I can also stop it. It necessarily follows that we
are free. There is no such thing as fate. There is nothing to
compel us. What we have done, that we can undo.
To one argument in connection with this doctrine I will ask your
patient attention, as it is a little intricate. We gain all our
knowledge through experience; that is the only way. What we call
experiences are on the plane of consciousness. For illustration:
A man plays a tune on a piano, he places each finger on each key
consciously. He repeats this process till the movement of the
fingers becomes a habit. He then plays a tune without having to
pay special attention to each particular key. Similarly, we find
in regard to ourselves that our tendencies are the result of
past conscious actions. A child is born with certain tendencies.
Whence do they come? No child is born with a tabula rasa - with
a clean, blank page - of a mind. The page has been written on
previously. The old Greek and Egyptian philosophers taught that
no child came with a vacant mind. Each child comes with a
hundred tendencies generated by past conscious actions. It did
not acquire these in this life, and we are bound to admit that
it must have had them in past lives. The rankest materialist has
to admit that these tendencies are the result of past actions,
only they add that these tendencies come through heredity. Our
parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents come down to us
through this law of heredity. Now if heredity alone explains
this, there is no necessity of believing in the soul at all,
because body explains everything. We need not go into the
different arguments and discussions on materialism and
spiritualism. So far the way is clear for those who believe in
an individual soul. We see that to come to a reasonable
conclusion we must admit that we have had past lives. This is
the belief of the great philosophers and sages of the past and
of modern times. Such a doctrine was believed in among the Jews.
Jesus Christ believed in it. He says in the Bible, "Before
Abraham was, I am." And in another place it is said, "This is
Elias who is said to have come."
All the different religions which grew among different nations
under varying circumstances and conditions had their origin in
Asia, and the Asiatics understand them well. When they came out
from the motherland, they got mixed up with errors. The most
profound and noble ideas of Christianity were never understood
in Europe, because the ideas and images used by the writers of
the Bible were foreign to it. Take for illustration the pictures
of the Madonna. Every artist paints his Madonna according to his
own pre-conceived ideas. I have been seeing hundreds of pictures
of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ, and he is made to sit at a
table. Now, Christ never sat at a table; he squatted with
others, and they had a bowl in which they dipped bread - not the
kind of bread you eat today. It is hard for any nation to
understand the unfamiliar customs of other people. How much more
difficult was it for Europeans to understand the Jewish customs
after centuries of changes and accretions from Greek, Roman, and
other sources! Through all the myths and mythologies by which it
is surrounded it is no wonder that the people get very little of
the beautiful religion of Jesus, and no wonder that they have
made of it a modern shop-keeping religion.
To come to our point. We find that all religions teach the
eternity of the soul, as well as that its lustre has been
dimmed, and that its primitive purity is to be regained by the
knowledge of God. What is the idea of God in these different
religions? The primary idea of God was very vague. The most
ancient nations had different Deities - sun, earth, fire, water.
Among the ancient Jews we find numbers of these gods ferociously
fighting with each other. Then we find Elohim whom the Jews and
the Babylonians worshipped. We next find one God standing
supreme. But the idea differed according to different tribes.
They each asserted that their God was the greatest. And they
tried to prove it by fighting. The one that could do the best
fighting proved thereby that its God was the greatest. Those
races were more or less savage. But gradually better and better
ideas took the place of the old ones. All those old ideas are
gone or going into the lumber-room. All those religions were the
outgrowth of centuries; not one fell from the skies. Each had to
be worked out bit by bit. Next come the monotheistic ideas:
belief in one God, who is omnipotent and omniscient, the one God
of the universe. This one God is extra-cosmic; he lies in the
heavens. He is invested with the gross conceptions of His
originators. He has a right side and a left side, and a bird in
His hand, and so on and so forth. But one thing we find, that
the tribal gods have disappeared for ever, and the one God of
the universe has taken their place: the God of gods. Still He is
only an extra-cosmic God. He is unapproachable; nothing can come
near Him. But slowly this idea has changed also, and at the next
stage we find a God immanent in nature.
In the New Testament it is taught, "Our Father who art in
heaven" - God living in the heavens separated from men. We are
living on earth and He is living in heaven. Further on we find
the teaching that He is a God immanent in nature; He is not only
God in heaven, but on earth too. He is the God in us. In the
Hindu philosophy we find a stage of the same proximity of God to
us. But we do not stop there. There is the non-dualistic stage,
in which man realises that the God he has been worshipping is
not only the Father in heaven, and on earth, but that "I and my
Father are one." He realises in his soul that he is God Himself,
only a lower expression of Him. All that is real in me is He;
all that is real in Him is I. The gulf between God and man is
thus bridged. Thus we find how, by knowing God, we find the
kingdom of heaven within us.
In the first or dualistic stage, man knows he is a little
personal soul, John, James, or Tom; and he says, "I will be
John, James, or Tom to all eternity, and never anything else."
As well might the murderer come along and say, "I will remain a
murderer for ever." But as time goes on, Tom vanishes and goes
back to the original pure Adam.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Can we
see God? Of course not. Can we know God? Of course not. If God
can be known, He will be God no longer. Knowledge is limitation.
But I and my Father are one: I find the reality in my soul.
These ideas are expressed in some religions, and in others only
hinted. In some they were expatriated. Christ's teachings are
now very little understood in this country. If you will excuse
me, I will say that they have never been very well understood.
The different stages of growth are absolutely necessary to the
attainment of purity and perfection. The varying systems of
religion are at bottom founded on the same ideas. Jesus says the
kingdom of heaven is within you. Again he says, "Our father who
art in Heaven." How do you reconcile the two sayings? In this
way: He was talking to the uneducated masses when he said the
latter, the masses who were uneducated in religion. It was
necessary to speak to them in their own language. The masses
want concrete ideas, something the senses can grasp. A man may
be the greatest philosopher in the world, but a child in
religion. When a man has developed a high state of spirituality
he can understand that the kingdom of heaven is within him. That
is the real kingdom of the mind. Thus we see that the apparent
contradictions and perplexities in every religion mark but
different stages of growth. And as such we have no right to
blame anyone for his religion. There are stages of growth in
which forms and symbols are necessary; they are the language
that the souls in that stage can understand.
The next idea that I want to bring to you is that religion does
not consist in doctrines or dogmas. It is not what you read, nor
what dogmas you believe that is of importance, but what you
realise. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God," yea, in this life. And that is salvation. There are those
who teach that this can be gained by the mumbling of words. But
no great Master ever taught that external forms were necessary
for salvation. The power of attaining it is within ourselves. We
live and move in God. Creeds and sects have their parts to play,
but they are for children, they last but temporarily. Books
never make religions, but religions make books. We must not
forget that. No book ever created God, but God inspired all the
great books. And no book ever created a soul. We must never
forget that. The end of all religions is the realising of God in
the soul. That is the one universal religion. If there is one
universal truth in all religions, I place it here - in realising
God. Ideals and methods may differ, but that is the central
point. There may be a thousand different radii, but they all
converge to the one centre, and that is the realisation of God:
something behind this world of sense, this world of eternal
eating and drinking and talking nonsense, this world of false
shadows and selfishness. There is that beyond all books, beyond
all creeds, beyond the vanities of this world and it is the
realisation of God within yourself. A man may believe in all the
churches in the world, he may carry in his head all the sacred
books ever written, he may baptise himself in all the rivers of
the earth, still, if he has no perception of God, I would class
him with the rankest atheist. And a man may have never entered a
church or a mosque, nor performed any ceremony, but if he feels
God within himself and is thereby lifted above the vanities of
the world, that man is a holy man, a saint, call him what you
will. As soon as a man stands up and says he is right or his
church is right, and all others are wrong, he is himself all
wrong. He does not know that upon the proof of all the others
depends the proof of his own. Love and charity for the whole
human race, that is the test of true religiousness. I do not
mean the sentimental statement that all men are brothers, but
that one must feel the oneness of human life. So far as they are
not exclusive, I see that the sects and creeds are all mine;
they are all grand. They are all helping men towards the real
religion. I will add, it is good to be born in a church, but it
is bad to die there. It is good to be born a child, but bad to
remain a child. Churches, ceremonies, and symbols are good for
children, but when the child is grown, he must burst the church
or himself. We must not remain children for ever. It is like
trying to fit one coat to all sizes and growths. I do not
deprecate the existence of sects in the world. Would to God
there were twenty millions more, for the more there are, there
will be a greater field for selection. What I do object to is
trying to fit one religion to every case. Though all religions
are essentially the same, they must have the varieties of form
produced by dissimilar circumstances among different nations. We
must each have our own individual religion, individual so far as
the externals of it go.
Many years ago, I visited a great sage of our own country, a
very holy man. We talked of our revealed book, the Vedas, of
your Bible, of the Koran, and of revealed books in general. At
the close of our talk, this good man asked me to go to the table
and take up a book; it was a book which, among other things,
contained a forecast of the rainfall during the year. The sage
said, "Read that." And I read out the quantity of rain that was
to fall. He said, "Now take the book and squeeze it." I did so
and he said, "Why, my boy, not a drop of water comes out. Until
the water comes out, it is all book, book. So until your
religion makes you realise God, it is useless. He who only
studies books for religion reminds one of the fable of the ass
which carried a heavy load of sugar on its back, but did not
know the sweetness of it."
Shall we advise men to kneel down and cry, "O miserable sinners
that we are!" No, rather let us remind them of their divine
nature. I will tell you a story. A lioness in search of prey
came upon a flock of sheep, and as she jumped at one of them,
she gave birth to a cub and died on the spot. The young lion was
brought up in the flock, ate grass, and bleated like a sheep,
and it never knew that it was a lion. One day a lion came across
the flock and was astonished to see in it a huge lion eating
grass and bleating like a sheep. At his sight the flock fled and
the lion-sheep with them. But the lion watched his opportunity
and one day found the lion-sheep asleep. He woke him up and
said, "You are a lion." The other said, "No," and began to bleat
like a sheep. But the stranger lion took him to a lake and asked
him to look in the water at his own image and see if it did not
resemble him, the stranger lion. He looked and acknowledged that
it did. Then the stranger lion began to roar and asked him to do
the same. The lion-sheep tried his voice and was soon roaring as
grandly as the other. And he was a sheep no longer.
My friends, I would like to tell you all that you are mighty as
lions.
If the room is dark, do you go about beating your chest and
crying, "It is dark, dark, dark!" No, the only way to get the
light is to strike a light, and then the darkness goes. The only
way to realise the light above you is to strike the spiritual
light within you, and the darkness of sin and impurity will flee
away. Think of your higher self, not of your lower.
* * *
Some questions and answers here followed.
Q. A man in the audience said, "If ministers stop preaching
hell-fire, they will have no control over their people."
A. They had better lose it then. The man who is frightened into
religion has no religion at all. Better teach him of his divine
nature than of his animal.
Q. What did the Lord mean when he said, "The kingdom of heaven
is not of this world?"
A. That the kingdom of heaven is within us. The Jewish idea was
a kingdom of heaven upon this earth. That was not the idea of
Jesus.
Q. Do you believe we come up from the animals?
A. I believe that, by the law of evolution, the higher beings
have come up from the lower kingdoms.
Q. Do you know of anyone who remembers his previous life ?
A. I have met some who told me they did remember their previous
life. They had reached a point where they could remember their
former incarnations.
Q. Do you believe in Christ's crucifixion?
A. Christ was God incarnate; they could not kill him. That which
was crucified was only a semblance, a mirage.
Q. If he could have produced such a semblance as that, would not
that have been the greatest miracle of all?
A. I look upon miracles as the greatest stumbling-blocks in the
way of truth. When the disciples of Buddha told him of a man who
had performed a so-called miracle - had taken a bowl from a
great height without touching it - and showed him the bowl, he
took it and crushed it under his feet and told them never to
build their faith on miracles, but to look for truth in
everlasting principles. He taught them the true inner light -
the light of the spirit, which is the only safe light to go by.
Miracles are only stumbling-blocks. Let us brush them aside.
Q. Do you believe Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount?
A. I do believe he did. But in this matter I have to go by the
books as others do, and I am aware that mere book testimony is
rather shaky ground. But we are all safe in taking the teachings
of the Sermon on the Mount as a guide. We have to take what
appeals to our inner spirit. Buddha taught five hundred years
before Christ, and his words were full of blessings: never a
curse came from his lips, nor from his life; never one from
Zoroaster, nor from Confucius.
THE HINDU RELIGION
My religion is to learn. I read my Bible better in the light of
your Bible and the dark prophecies of my religion become
brighter when compared with those of your prophets. Truth has
always been universal. If I alone were to have six fingers on my
hand while all of you had only five, you would not think that my
hand was the true intent of nature, but rather that it was
abnormal and diseased. Just so with religion. If one creed alone
were to be true and all the others untrue, you would have a
right to say that that religion was diseased; if one religion is
true, all the others must be true. Thus the Hindu religion is
your property as well as mine. Of the two hundred and ninety
millions of people inhabiting India, only two millions are
Christians, sixty millions Mohammedans and all the rest are
Hindus.
The Hindus found their creed upon the ancient Vedas, a word
derived from Vid, "to know". These are a series of books which,
to our minds, contain the essence of all religion; but we do not
think they alone contain the truths. They teach us the
immortality of the soul. In every country and every human breast
there is a natural desire to find a stable equilibrium -
something that does not change. We cannot find it in nature, for
all the universe is nothing but an infinite mass of changes. But
to infer from that that nothing unchanging exists is to fall
into the error of the Southern school of Buddhists and the
Chârvâkas, which latter believe that all is matter and nothing
mind, that all religion is a cheat, and morality and goodness,
useless superstitions. The Vedanta philosophy teaches that man
is not bound by his five senses. They only know the present, and
neither the future nor the past; but as the present signifies
both past and future, and all three are only demarcations of
time, the present also would be unknown if it were not for
something above the senses, something independent of time, which
unifies the past and the future in the present.
But what is independent? Not our body, for it depends upon
outward conditions; nor our mind, because the thoughts of which
it is composed are caused. It is our soul. The Vedas say the
whole world is a mixture of independence and dependence, of
freedom and slavery, but through it all shines the soul
independent, immortal, pure, perfect, holy. For if it is
independent, it cannot perish, as death is but a change, and
depends upon conditions; if independent, it must be perfect, for
imperfection is again but a condition, and therefore dependent.
And this immortal and perfect soul must be the same in the
highest God as well as in the humblest man, the difference
between them being only in the degree in which this soul
manifests itself.
But why should the soul take to itself a body? For the same
reason that I take a looking-glass - to see myself. Thus, in the
body, the soul is reflected. The soul is God, and every human
being has a perfect divinity within himself, and each one must
show his divinity sooner or later. If I am in a dark room, no
amount of protestation will make it any brighter - I must light
a match. Just so, no amount of grumbling and wailing will make
our imperfect body more perfect. But the Vedanta teaches - call
forth your soul, show your divinity. Teach your children that
they are divine, that religion is a positive something and not a
negative nonsense; that it is not subjection to groans when
under oppression, but expansion and manifestation.
Every religion has it that man's present and future are modified
by the past, and that the present is but the effect of the past.
How is it, then, that every child is born with an experience
that cannot be accounted for by hereditary transmission? How is
it that one is born of good parents, receives a good education
and becomes a good man, while another comes from besotted
parents and ends on the gallows? How do you explain this
inequality without implicating God? Why should a merciful Father
set His child in such conditions which must bring forth misery?
It is no explanation to say God will make amends; later on - God
has no blood-money. Then, too, what becomes of my liberty, if
this be my first birth? Coming into this world without the
experience of a former life, my independence would be gone, for
my path would be marked out by the experience of others. If I
cannot be the maker of my own fortune, then I am not free. I
take upon myself the blame for the misery of this existence, and
say I will unmake the evil I have done in another existence.
This, then, is our philosophy of the migration of the soul. We
come into this life with the experience of another, and the
fortune or misfortune of this existence is the result of our
acts in a former existence, always becoming better, till at last
perfection is reached.
We believe in a God, the Father of the universe, infinite and
omnipotent. But if our soul at last becomes perfect, it also
must become infinite. But there is no room for two infinite
unconditional beings, and hence we believe in a Personal God,
and we ourselves are He. These are the three stages which every
religion has taken. First we see God in the far beyond, then we
come nearer to Him and give Him omnipresence so that we live in
Him; and at last we recognise that we are He. The idea of an
Objective God is not untrue - in fact, every idea of God, and
hence every religion, is true, as each is but a different stage
in the journey, the aim of which is the perfect conception of
the Vedas. Hence, too, we not only tolerate, but we Hindus
accept every religion, praying in the mosque of the Mohammedans,
worshipping before the fire of the Zoroastrians, and kneeling
before the cross of the Christians, knowing that all the
religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism,
mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the
infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and
association, and each of them marking a stage of progress. We
gather all these flowers and bind them with the twine of love,
making a wonderful bouquet of worship.
If I am God, then my soul is a temple of the Highest, and my
every motion should be a worship - love for love's sake, duty
for duty's sake, without hope of reward or fear of punishment.
Thus my religion means expansion, and expansion means
realisation and perception in the highest sense - no mumbling
words or genuflections. Man is to become divine, realising the
divine more and more from day to day in an endless progress.
(Summary of a lecture delivered before the Ethical Society,
Brooklyn, at the Pouch Gallery in Clinton Avenue, on the 30th
December, 1894. Reproduced from the Brooklyn Standard Union.)
WHAT IS RELIGION?
A huge locomotive has rushed on over the line and a small worm
that was creeping upon one of the rails saved its life by
crawling out of the path of the locomotive. Yet this little
worm, so insignificant that it can be crushed in a moment, is a
living something, while this locomotive, so huge, so immense, is
only an engine, a machine. You say the one has life and the
other is only dead matter and all its powers and strength and
speed are only those of a dead machine, a mechanical
contrivance. Yet the poor little worm which moved upon the rail
and which the least touch of the engine would have deprived of
its life is a majestic being compared to that huge locomotive.
It is a small part of the Infinite and, therefore, it is greater
than this powerful engine. Why should that be so? How do we know
the living from the dead? The machine mechanically performs all
the movements its maker made it to perform, its movements are
not those of life. How can we make the distinction between the
living and the dead, then? In the living there is freedom, there
is intelligence; in the dead all is bound and no freedom is
possible, because there is no intelligence. This freedom that
distinguishes us from mere machines is what we are all striving
for. To be more free is the goal of all our efforts, for only in
perfect freedom can there be perfection. This effort to attain
freedom underlies all forms of worship, whether we know it or
not.
If we were to examine the various sorts of worship all over the
world, we would see that the rudest of mankind are worshipping
ghosts, demons, and the spirits of their forefathers - serpent
worship, worship of tribal gods, and worship of the departed
ones. Why do they do this? Because they feel that in some
unknown way these beings are greater, more powerful than
themselves, and limit their freedom. They, therefore, seek to
propitiate these beings in order to prevent them from molesting
them, in other words, to get more freedom. They also seek to win
favour from these superior beings, to get by gift of the gods
what ought to be earned by personal effort.
On the whole, this shows that the world is expecting a miracle.
This expectation never leaves us, and however we may try, we are
all running after the miraculous and extraordinary. What is mind
but that ceaseless inquiry into the meaning and mystery of life?
We may say that only uncultivated people are going after all
these things, but the question still is there: Why should it be
so? The Jews were asking for a miracle. The whole world has been
asking for the same these thousands of years. There is, again,
the universal dissatisfaction. We make an ideal but we have
rushed only half the way after it when we make a newer one. We
struggle hard to attain to some goal and then discover we do not
want it. This dissatisfaction we are having time after time, and
what is there in the mind if there is to be only
dissatisfaction? What is the meaning of this universal
dissatisfaction? It is because freedom is every man's goal. He
seeks it ever, his whole life is a struggle after it. The child
rebels against law as soon as it is born. Its first utterance is
a cry, a protest against the bondage in which it finds itself.
This longing for freedom produces the idea of a Being who is
absolutely free. The concept of God is a fundamental element in
the human constitution. In the Vedanta, Sat-chit-ânanda
(Existence-Knowledge-Bliss) is the highest concept of God
possible to the mind. It is the essence of knowledge and is by
its nature the essence of bliss. We have been stifling that
inner voice long enough, seeking to follow law and quiet the
human nature, but there is that human instinct to rebel against
nature's laws. We may not understand what the meaning is, but
there is that unconscious struggle of the human with the
spiritual, of the lower with the higher mind, and the struggle
attempts to preserve one's separate life, what we call our
"individuality".
Even hells stand out with this miraculous fact that we are born
rebels; and the first fact of life - the inrushing of life
itself - against this we rebel and cry out, "No law for us." As
long as we obey the laws we are like machines, and on goes the
universe, and we cannot break it. Laws as laws become man's
nature. The first inkling of life on its higher level is in
seeing this struggle within us to break the bond of nature and
to be free. "Freedom, O Freedom! Freedom, O Freedom!" is the
song of the soul. Bondage, alas, to be bound in nature, seems
its fate.
Why should there be serpent, or ghost, or demon worship and all
these various creeds and forms for having miracles? Why do we
say that there is life, there is being in anything? There must
be a meaning in all this search, this endeavour to understand
life, to explain being. It is not meaningless and vain. It is
man's ceaseless endeavour to become free. The knowledge which we
now call science has been struggling for thousands of years in
its attempt to gain freedom, and people ask for freedom. Yet
there is no freedom in nature. It is all law. Still the struggle
goes on. Nay, the whole of nature from the very sun to the atoms
is under law, and even for man there is no freedom. But we
cannot believe it. We have been studying laws from the beginning
and yet cannot - nay, will not - believe that man is under law.
The soul cries ever, "Freedom, O Freedom!" With the conception
of God as a perfectly free Being, man cannot rest eternally in
this bondage. Higher he must go, and unless the struggle were
for himself, he would think it too severe. Man says to himself,
"I am a born slave, I am bound; nevertheless, there is a Being
who is not bound by nature. He is free and Master of nature."
The conception of God, therefore, is as essential and as
fundamental a part of mind as is the idea of bondage. Both are
the outcome of the idea of freedom. There cannot be life, even
in the plant, without the idea of freedom. In the plant or in
the worm, life has to rise to the individual concept. It is
there, unconsciously working, the plant living its life to
preserve the variety, principle, or form, not nature. The idea
of nature controlling every step onward overrules the idea of
freedom. Onward goes the idea of the material world, onward
moves the idea of freedom. Still the fight goes on. We are
hearing about all the quarrels of creeds and sects, yet creeds
and sects are just and proper, they must be there. The chain is
lengthening and naturally the struggle increases, but there need
be no quarrels if we only knew that we are all striving to reach
the same goal.
The embodiment of freedom, the Master of nature, is what we call
God. You cannot deny Him. No, because you cannot move or live
without the idea of freedom. Would you come here if you did not
believe you were free? It is quite possible that the biologist
can and will give some explanation of this perpetual effort to
be free. Take all that for granted, still the idea of freedom is
there. It is a fact, as much so as the other fact that you
cannot apparently get over, the fact of being under nature.
Bondage and liberty, light and shadow, good and evil must be
there, but the very fact of the bondage shows also this freedom
hidden there. If one is a fact, the other is equally a fact.
There must be this idea of freedom. While now we cannot see that
this idea of bondage, in uncultivated man, is his struggle for
freedom, yet the idea of freedom is there. The bondage of sin
and impurity in the uncultivated savage is to his consciousness
very small, for his nature is only a little higher than the
animal's. What he struggles against is the bondage of physical
nature, the lack of physical gratification, but out of this
lower consciousness grows and broadens the higher conception of
a mental or moral bondage and a longing for spiritual freedom.
Here we see the divine dimly shining through the veil of
ignorance. The veil is very dense at first and the light may be
almost obscured, but it is there, ever pure and undimmed - the
radiant fire of freedom and perfection. Man personifies this as
the Ruler of the Universe, the One Free Being. He does not yet
know that the universe is all one, that the difference is only
in degree, in the concept.
The whole of nature is worship of God. Wherever there is life,
there is this search for freedom and that freedom is the same as
God. Necessarily this freedom gives us mastery over all nature
and is impossible without knowledge. The more we are knowing,
the more we are becoming masters of nature. Mastery alone is
making us strong and if there be some being entirely free and
master of nature, that being must have a perfect knowledge of
nature, must be omnipresent and omniscient. Freedom must go hand
in hand with these, and that being alone who has acquired these
will be beyond nature.
Blessedness, eternal peace, arising from perfect freedom, is the
highest concept of religion underlying all the ideas of God in
Vedanta - absolutely free Existence, not bound by anything, no
change, no nature, nothing that can produce a change in Him.
This same freedom is in you and in me and is the only real
freedom.
God is still, established upon His own majestic changeless Self.
You and I try to be one with Him, but plant ourselves upon
nature, upon the trifles of daily life, on money, on fame, on
human love, and all these changing forms in nature which make
for bondage. When nature shines, upon what depends the shining?
Upon God and not upon the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars.
Wherever anything shines, whether it is the light in the sun or
in our own consciousness, it is He. He shining, all shines after
Him.
Now we have seen that this God is self-evident, impersonal,
omniscient, the Knower and Master of nature, the Lord of all. He
is behind all worship and it is being done according to Him,
whether we know it or not. I go one step further. That at which
all marvel, that which we call evil, is His worship too. This
too is a part of freedom. Nay, I will be terrible even and tell
you that, when you are doing evil, the impulse behind is also
that freedom. It may have been misguided and misled, but it was
there; and there cannot be any life or any impulse unless that
freedom be behind it. Freedom breathes in the throb of the
universe. Unless there is unity at the universal heart, we
cannot understand variety. Such is the conception of the Lord in
the Upanishads. Sometimes it rises even higher, presenting to us
an ideal before which at first we stand aghast - that we are in
essence one with God. He who is the colouring in the wings of
the butterfly, and the blossoming of the rose-bud, is the power
that is in the plant and in the butterfly. He who gives us life
is the power within us. Out of His fire comes life, and the
direst death is also His power. He whose shadow is death, His
shadow is immortality also. Take a still higher conception. See
how we are flying like hunted hares from all that is terrible,
and like them, hiding our heads and thinking we are safe. See
how the whole world is flying from everything terrible. Once
when I was in Varanasi, I was passing through a place where
there was a large tank of water on one side and a high wall on
the other. It was in the grounds where there were many monkeys.
The monkeys of Varanasi are huge brutes and are sometimes surly.
They now took it into their heads not to allow me to pass
through their street, so they howled and shrieked and clutched
at my feet as I passed. As they pressed closer, I began to run,
but the faster I ran, the faster came the monkeys and they began
to bite at me. It seemed impossible to escape, but just then I
met a stranger who called out to me, "Face the brutes." I turned
and faced the monkeys, and they fell back and finally fled. That
is a lesson for all life - face the terrible, face it boldly.
Like the monkeys, the hardships of life fall back when we cease
to flee before them. If we are ever to gain freedom, it must be
by conquering nature, never by running away. Cowards never win
victories. We have to fight fear and troubles and ignorance if
we expect them to flee before us.
What is death? What are terrors? Do you not see the Lord's face
in them? Fly from evil and terror and misery, and they will
follow you. Face them, and they will flee. The whole world
worships ease and pleasure, and very few dare to worship that
which is painful. To rise above both is the idea of freedom.
Unless man passes through this gate he cannot be free. We all
have to face these. We strive to worship the Lord, but the body
rises between, nature rises between Him and us and blinds our
vision. We must learn how to worship and love Him in the
thunderbolt, in shame, in sorrow, in sin. All the world has ever
been preaching the God of virtue. I preach a God of virtue and a
God of sin in one. Take Him if you dare - that is the one way to
salvation; then alone will come to us the Truth Ultimate which
comes from the idea of oneness. Then will be lost the idea that
one is greater than another. The nearer we approach the law of
freedom, the more we shall come under the Lord, and troubles
will vanish. Then we shall not differentiate the door of hell
from the gate of heaven, nor differentiate between men and say,
"I am greater than any being in the universe." Until we see
nothing in the world but the Lord Himself, all these evils will
beset us and we shall make all these distinctions; because it is
only in the Lord, in the Spirit, that we are all one; and until
we see God everywhere, this unity will not exist for us.
Two birds of beautiful plumage, inseparable companions, sat upon
the same tree, one on the top and one below. The beautiful bird
below was eating the fruits of the tree, sweet and bitter, one
moment a sweet one and another a bitter. The moment he ate a
bitter fruit, he was sorry, but after a while he ate another and
when it too was bitter, he looked up and saw the other bird who
ate neither the sweet nor the bitter, but was calm and majestic,
immersed in his own glory. And then the poor lower bird forgot
and went on eating the sweet and bitter fruits again, until at
last he ate one that was extremely bitter; and then he stopped
again and once more looked up at the glorious bird above. Then
he came nearer and nearer to the other bird; and when he had
come near enough, rays of light shone upon him and enveloped
him, and he saw he was transformed into the higher bird. He
became calm, majestic, free, and found that there had been but
one bird all the time on the tree. The lower bird was but the
reflection of the one above. So we are in reality one with the
Lord, but the reflection makes us seem many, as when the one sun
reflects in a million dew-drops and seems a million tiny suns.
The reflection must vanish if we are to identify ourselves with
our real nature which is divine. The universe itself can never
be the limit of our satisfaction. That is why the miser gathers
more and more money, that is why the robber robs, the sinner
sins, that is why you are learning philosophy. All have one
purpose. There is no other purpose in life, save to reach this
freedom. Consciously or unconsciously, we are all striving for
perfection. Every being must attain to it.
The man who is groping through sin, through misery, the man who
is choosing the path through hells, will reach it, but it will
take time. We cannot save him. Some hard knocks on his head will
help him to turn to the Lord. The path of virtue, purity,
unselfishness, spirituality, becomes known at last and what all
are doing unconsciously, we are trying to do consciously. The
idea is expressed by St. Paul, "The God that ye ignorantly
worship, Him declare I unto you." This is the lesson for the
whole world to learn. What have these philosophies and theories
of nature to do, if not to help us to attain to this one goal in
life? Let us come to that consciousness of the identity of
everything and let man see himself in everything. Let us be no
more the worshippers of creeds or sects with small limited
notions of God, but see Him in everything in the universe. If
you are knowers of God, you will everywhere find the same
worship as in your own heart.
Get rid, in the first place, of all these limited ideas and see
God in every person - working through all hands, walking through
all feet, and eating through every mouth. In every being He
lives, through all minds He thinks. He is self-evident, nearer
unto us than ourselves. To know this is religion, is faith, and
may it please the Lord to give us this faith! When we shall feel
that oneness, we shall be immortal. We are physically immortal
even, one with the universe. So long as there is one that
breathes throughout the universe, I live in that one. I am not
this limited little being, I am the universal. I am the life of
all the sons of the past. I am the soul of Buddha, of Jesus, of
Mohammed. I am the soul of the teachers, and I am all the
robbers that robbed, and all the murderers that were hanged, I
am the universal. Stand up then; this is the highest worship.
You are one with the universe. That only is humility - not
crawling upon all fours and calling yourself a sinner. That is
the highest evolution when this veil of differentiation is torn
off. The highest creed is Oneness. I am so-and-so is a limited
idea, not true of the real "I". I am the universal; stand upon
that and ever worship the Highest through the highest form, for
God is Spirit and should be worshipped in spirit and in truth.
Through lower forms of worship, man's material thoughts rise to
spiritual worship and the Universal Infinite One is at last
worshipped in and through the spirit. That which is limited is
material. The Spirit alone is infinite. God is Spirit, is
infinite; man is Spirit and, therefore, infinite, and the
Infinite alone can worship the Infinite. We will worship the
Infinite; that is the highest spiritual worship. The grandeur of
realising these ideas, how difficult it is! I theorise, talk,
philosophize; and the next moment something comes against me,
and I unconsciously become angry, I forget there is anything in
the universe but this little limited self, I forget to say, "I
am the Spirit, what is this trifle to me? I am the Spirit." I
forget it is all myself playing, I forget God, I forget freedom.
Sharp as the blade of a razor, long and difficult and hard to
cross, is the way to freedom. The sages have declared this again
and again. Yet do not let these weaknesses and failures bind
you. The Upanishads have declared, "Arise ! Awake ! and stop not
until the goal is reached." We will then certainly cross the
path, sharp as it is like the razor, and long and distant and
difficult though it be. Man becomes the master of gods and
demons. No one is to blame for our miseries but ourselves. Do
you think there is only a dark cup of poison if man goes to look
for nectar? The nectar is there and is for every man who strives
to reach it. The Lord Himself tells us, "Give up all these paths
and struggles. Do thou take refuge in Me. I will take thee to
the other shore, be not afraid." We hear that from all the
scriptures of the world that come to us. The same voice teaches
us to say, "Thy will be done upon earth, as it is in heaven,"
for "Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory." It is
difficult, all very difficult. I say to myself, "This moment I
will take refuge in Thee, O Lord. Unto Thy love I will sacrifice
all, and on Thine altar I will place all that is good and
virtuous. My sins, my sorrows, my actions, good and evil, I will
offer unto Thee; do Thou take them and I will never forget." One
moment I say, "Thy will be done," and the next moment something
comes to try me and I spring up in a rage. The goal of all
religions is the same, but the language of the teachers differs.
The attempt is to kill the false "I", so that the real "I", the
Lord, will reign. "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God. Thou
shalt have no other gods before me," say the Hebrew scriptures.
God must be there all alone. We must say, "Not I, but Thou," and
then we should give up everything but the Lord. He, and He
alone, should reign. Perhaps we struggle hard, and yet the next
moment our feet slip, and then we try to stretch out our hands
to Mother. We find we cannot stand alone. Life is infinite, one
chapter of which is, "Thy will be done," and unless we realise
all the chapters we cannot realise the whole. "Thy will be done"
- every moment the traitor mind rebels against it, yet it must
be said, again and again, if we are to conquer the lower self.
We cannot serve a traitor and yet be saved. There is salvation
for all except the traitor and we stand condemned as traitors,
traitors against our own selves, against the majesty of Mother,
when we refuse to obey the voice of our higher Self. Come what
will, we must give our bodies and minds up to the Supreme Will.
Well has it been said by the Hindu philosopher, "If man says
twice, 'Thy will be done,' he commits sin." "Thy will be done,"
what more is needed, why say it twice? What is good is good. No
more shall we take it back. "Thy will be done on earth as it is
in heaven, for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory
for evermore."
VEDIC RELIGIOUS IDEALS
What concerns us most is the religious thought - on soul and God
and all that appertains to religion. We will take the Samhitâs.
These are collections of hymns forming, as it were, the oldest
Aryan literature, properly speaking, the oldest literature in
the world. There may have been some scraps of literature of
older date here and there, older than that even, but not books,
or literature properly so called. As a collected book, this is
the oldest the world has, and herein is portrayed the earliest
feeling of the Aryans, their aspirations, the questions that
arose about their manners and methods, and so on. At the very
outset we find a very curious idea. These hymns are sung in
praise of different gods, Devas as they are called, the bright
ones. There is quite a number of them. One is called Indra,
another Varuna, another Mitra, Parjanya, and so on. Various
mythological and allegorical figures come before us one after
the other - for instance, Indra the thunderer, striking the
serpent who has withheld the rains from mankind. Then he lets
fly his thunderbolt, the serpent is killed, and rain comes down
in showers. The people are pleased, and they worship Indra with
oblations. They make a sacrificial pyre, kill some animals,
roast their flesh upon spits, and offer that meat to Indra. And
they had a popular plant called Soma. What plant it was nobody
knows now; it has entirely disappeared, but from the books we
gather that, when crushed, it produced a sort of milky juice,
and that was fermented; and it can also be gathered that this
fermented Soma juice was intoxicating. This also they offered to
Indra and the other gods, and they also drank it themselves.
Sometimes they drank a little too much, and so did the gods.
Indra on occasions got drunk. There are passages to show that
Indra at one time drank so much of this Soma juice that he
talked irrelevant words. So with Varuna. He is another god, very
powerful, and is in the same way protecting his votaries, and
they are praising him with their libations of Soma. So is the
god of war, and so on. But the popular idea that strikes one as
making the mythologies of the Samhitas entirely different from
the other mythologies is, that along with every one of these
gods is the idea of an infinity. This infinite is abstracted,
and sometimes described as Âditya. At other times it is affixed,
as it were, to all the other gods. Take, for example, Indra. In
some of the books you will find that Indra has a body, is very
strong, sometimes is wearing golden armour, and comes down,
lives and eats with his votaries, fights the demons, fights the
snakes, and so on. Again, in one hymn we find that Indra has
been given a very high position; he is omnipresent and
omnipotent, and Indra sees the heart of every being. So with
Varuna. This Varuna is god of the air and is in charge of the
water, just as Indra was previously; and then, all of a sudden,
we find him raised up and said to be omnipresent, omnipotent,
and so on. I will read one passage about this Varuna in his
highest form, and you will understand what I mean. It has been
translated into English poetry, so it is better that I read it
in that form.
The mighty Lord on high our deeds, as if at hand, espies;
The gods know all men do, though men would fain their acts
disguise;
Whoever stands, whoever moves, or steals from place to place,
Or hides him in his secret cell - the gods his movements trace.
Wherever two together plot, and deem they are alone,
King Varuna is there, a third, and all their schemes are known.
This earth is his, to him belong those vast and boundless skies;
Both seas within him rest, and yet in that small pool he lies,
Whoever far beyond the sky should think his way to wing.
He could not there elude the grasp of Varuna the King.
His spies, descending from the skies, glide all this world
around;
Their thousand eyes all-scanning sweep to earth's remotest
bound.
So we can multiply examples about the other gods; they all come,
one after the other, to share the same fate - they first begin
as gods, and then they are raised to this conception as the
Being in whom the whole universe exists, who sees every heart,
who is the ruler of the universe. And in the case of Varuna,
there is another idea, just the germ of one idea which came, but
was immediately suppressed by the Aryan mind, and that was the
idea of fear. In another place we read they are afraid they have
sinned and ask Varuna for pardon. These ideas were never
allowed, for reasons you will come to understand later on, to
grow on Indian soil, but the germs were there sprouting, the
idea of fear, and the idea of sin. This is the idea, as you all
know, of what is called monotheism. This monotheism, we see,
came to India at a very early period. Throughout the Samhitas,
in the first and oldest part, this monotheistic idea prevails,
but we shall find that it did not prove sufficient for the
Aryans; they threw it aside, as it were, as a very primitive
sort of idea and went further on, as we Hindus think. Of course
in reading books and criticisms on the Vedas written by
Europeans, the Hindu cannot help smiling when he reads, that the
writings of our authors are saturated with this previous
education alone. Persons who have sucked in as their mother's
milk the idea that the highest ideal of God is the idea of a
Personal God, naturally dare not think on the lines of these
ancient thinkers of India, when they find that just after the
Samhitas, the monotheistic idea with which the Samhita portion
is replete was thought by the Aryans to be useless and not
worthy of philosophers and thinkers, and that they struggled
hard for a more philosophical and transcendental idea. The
monotheistic idea was much too human for them, although they
gave it such descriptions as "The whole universe rests in Him,"
and "Thou art the keeper of all hearts." The Hindus were bold,
to their great credit be it said, bold thinkers in all their
ideas, so bold that one spark of their thought frightens the
so-called bold thinkers of the West. Well has it been said by
Prof. Max Müller about these thinkers that they climbed up to
heights where their lungs only could breathe, and where those of
other beings would have burst. These brave people followed
reason wherever it led them, no matter at what cost, never
caring if all their best superstitions were smashed to pieces,
never caring what society would think about them, or talk about
them; but what they thought was right and true, they preached
and they talked.
Before going into all these speculations of the ancient Vedic
sages, we will first refer to one or two very curious instances
in the Vedas. The peculiar fact - that these gods are taken up,
as it were, one after the other, raised and sublimated, till
each has assumed the proportions of the infinite Personal God of
the Universe - calls for an explanation. Prof. Max Müller
creates for it a new name, as he thinks it peculiar to the
Hindus: he calls it "Henotheism". We need not go far for the
explanation. It is within the book. A few steps from the very
place where we find those gods being raised and sublimated, we
find the explanation also. The question arises how the Hindu
mythologies should be so unique, so different from all others.
In Babylonian or Greek mythologies we find one god struggling
upwards, and he assumes a position and remains there, while the
other gods die out. Of all the Molochs, Jehovah becomes supreme,
and the other Molochs are forgotten, lost for ever; he is the
God of gods. So, too, of all the Greek gods, Zeus comes to the
front and assumes big proportions, becomes the God of the
Universe, and all the other gods become degraded into minor
angels. This fact was repeated in later times. The Buddhists and
the Jains raised one of their prophets to the Godhead, and all
the other gods they made subservient to Buddha, or to Jina. This
is the world-wide process, but there we find an exception, as it
were. One god is praised, and for the time being it is said that
all the other gods obey his commands, and the very one who is
said to be raised up by Varuna, is himself raised up, in the
next book, to the highest position. They occupy the position of
the Personal God in turns. But the explanation is there in the
book, and it is a grand explanation, one that has given the
theme to all subsequent thought in India, and one that will be
the theme of the whole world of religions: "Ekam Sat Viprâ
Bahudhâ Vadanti - That which exists is One; sages call It by
various names." In all these cases where hymns were written
about all these gods, the Being perceived was one and the same;
it was the perceiver who made the difference. It was the
hymnist, the sage, the poet, who sang in different languages and
different words, the praise of one and the same Being. "That
which exists is One; sages call It by various names." Tremendous
results have followed from that one verse. Some of you, perhaps,
are surprised to think that India is the only country where
there never has been a religious persecution, where never was
any man disturbed for his religious faith. Theists or atheists,
monists, dualists, monotheists are there and always live
unmolested. Materialists were allowed to preach from the steps
of Brahminical temples, against the gods, and against God
Himself; they went preaching all over the land that the idea of
God was a mere superstition, and that gods, and Vedas, and
religion were simply superstitions invented by the priests for
their own benefit, and they were allowed to do this unmolested.
And so, wherever he went, Buddha tried to pull down every old
thing sacred to the Hindus to the dust, and Buddha died of ripe
old age. So did the Jains, who laughed at the idea of God. "How
can it be that there is a God?" they asked; "it must be a mere
superstition." So on, endless examples there are. Before the
Mohammedan wave came into India, it was never known what
religious persecution was; the Hindus had only experienced it as
made by foreigners on themselves. And even now it is a patent
fact how much Hindus have helped to build Christian churches,
and how much readiness there is to help them. There never has
been bloodshed. Even heterodox religions that have come out of
India have been likewise affected; for instance, Buddhism.
Buddhism is a great religion in some respects, but to confuse
Buddhism with Vedanta is without meaning; anyone may mark just
the difference that exists between Christianity and the
Salvation Army. There are great and good points in Buddhism, but
these great points fell into hands which were not able to keep
them safe. The jewels which came from philosophers fell into the
hands of mobs, and the mobs took up their ideas. They had a
great deal of enthusiasm, some marvellous ideas, great and
humanitarian ideas, but, after all, there is something else that
is necessary - thought and intellect - to keep everything safe.
Wherever you see the most humanitarian ideas fall into the hands
of the multitude, the first result, you may notice, is
degradation. It is learning and intellect that keep things sure.
Now this Buddhism went as the first missionary religion to the
world, penetrated the whole of the civilised world as it existed
at that time, and never was a drop of blood shed for that
religion. We read how in China the Buddhist missionaries were
persecuted, and thousands were massacred by two or three
successive emperors, but after that, fortune favoured the
Buddhists, and one of the emperors offered to take vengeance on
the persecutors, but the missionaries refused. All that we owe
to this one verse. That is why I want you to remember it: "Whom
they call Indra, Mitra, Varuna - That which exists is One; sages
call It by various names."
It was written, nobody knows at what date, it may be 8,000 years
ago, in spite of all modern scholars may say, it may be 9,000
years ago. Not one of these religious speculations is of modern
date, but they are as fresh today as they were when they were
written, or rather, fresher, for at that distant date man was
not so civilised as we know him now. He had not learnt to cut
his brother's throat because he differed a little in thought
from himself; he had not deluged the world in blood, he did not
become demon to his own brother. In the name of humanity he did
not massacre whole lots of mankind then. Therefore these words
come to us today very fresh, as great stimulating, life-giving
words, much fresher than they were when they were written: "That
which exists is One; sages call It by various names." We have to
learn yet that all religions, under whatever name they may be
called, either Hindu, Buddhist, Mohammedan, or Christian, have
the same God, and he who derides any one of these derides his
own God.
That was the solution they arrived at. But, as I have said, this
ancient monotheistic idea did not satisfy the Hindu mind. It did
not go far enough, it did not explain the visible world: a ruler
of the world does not explain the world - certainly not. A ruler
of the universe does not explain the universe, and much less an
external ruler, one outside of it. He may be a moral guide, the
greatest power in the universe, but that is no explanation of
the universe; and the first question that we find now arising,
assuming proportions, is the question about the universe:
"Whence did it come?" "How did it come?" "How does it exist?"
Various hymns are to be found on this question struggling
forward to assume form, and nowhere do we find it so poetically,
so wonderfully expressed as in the following hymn:
"Then there was neither aught nor naught, nor air, nor
sky, nor anything. What covered all? Where rested all? Then
death was not, nor deathlessness, nor change to night and day."
The translation loses a good deal of the poetical beauty. "Then
death was not, nor deathlessness, nor change to night and day;"
the very sound of the Sanskrit is musical. "That existed, that
breath, covering as it were, that God's existence; but it did
not begin to move." It is good to remember this one idea that it
existed motionless, because we shall find how this idea sprouts
up afterwards in the cosmology, how according to the Hindu
metaphysics and philosophy, this whole universe is a mass of
vibrations, as it were, motions; and there are periods when this
whole mass of motions subsides and becomes finer and finer,
remaining in that state for some time. That is the state
described in this hymn. It existed unmoved, without vibration,
and when this creation began, this began to vibrate and all this
creation came out of it, that one breath, calm, self-sustained,
naught else beyond it.
"Gloom existed first." Those of you who have ever been in India
or any tropical country, and have seen the bursting of the
monsoon, will understand the majesty of these words. I remember
three poets' attempts to picture this. Milton says, "No light,
but rather darkness visible." Kalidasa says, "Darkness which can
be penetrated with a needle," but none comes near this Vedic
description, "Gloom hidden in gloom." Everything is parching and
sizzling, the whole creation seems to be burning away, and for
days it has been so, when one afternoon there is in one corner
of the horizon a speck of cloud, and in less than half an hour
it has extended unto the whole earth, until, as it were, it is
covered with cloud, cloud over cloud, and then it bursts into a
tremendous deluge of rain. The cause of creation was described
as will. That which existed at first became changed into will,
and this will began to manifest itself as desire. This also we
ought to remember, because we find that this idea of desire is
said to be the cause of all we have. This idea of will has been
the corner-stone of both the Buddhist and the Vedantic system,
and later on, has penetrated into German philosophy and forms
the basis of Schopenhauer's system of philosophy. It is here we
first hear of it.
Now first arose desire, the primal seed of mind.
Sages, searching in their hearts by wisdom, found the bond,
Between existence and non-existence.
It is a very peculiar expression; the poet ends by saying that
"perhaps He even does not know." We find in this hymn, apart
from its poetical merits, that this questioning about the
universe has assumed quite definite proportions, and that the
minds of these sages must have advanced to such a state, when
all sorts of common answers would not satisfy them. We find that
they were not even satisfied with this Governor above. There are
various other hymns where the same idea, comes in, about how
this all came, and just as we have seen, when they were trying
to find a Governor of the universe, a Personal God, they were
taking up one Deva after another, raising him up to that
position, so now we shall find that in various hymns one or
other idea is taken up, and expanded infinitely and made
responsible for everything in the universe. One particular idea
is taken as the support, in which everything rests and exists,
and that support has become all this. So on with various ideas.
They tried this method with Prâna, the life principle. They
expanded the idea of the life principle until it became
universal and infinite. It is the life principle that is
supporting everything; not only the human body, but it is the
light of the sun and the moon, it is the power moving
everything, the universal motive energy. Some of these attempts
are very beautiful, very poetical. Some of them as, "He ushers
the beautiful morning," are marvellously lyrical in the way they
picture things. Then this very desire, which, as we have just
read, arose as the first primal germ of creation, began to be
stretched out, until it became the universal God. But none of
these ideas satisfied.
Here the idea is sublimated and finally abstracted into a
personality. "He alone existed in the beginning; He is the one
Lord of all that exists; He supports this universe; He who is
the author of souls, He who is the author of strength, whom all
the gods worship, whose shadow is life, whose shadow is death;
whom else shall we worship? Whose glory the snow-tops of the
Himalayas declare, whose glory the oceans with all their waters
proclaim." So on it goes, but, as I told you just now, this idea
did not satisfy them.
At last we find a very peculiar position. The Aryan mind had so
long been seeking an answer to the question from outside. They
questioned everything they could find, the sun, the moon, and
stars, and they found all they could in this way. The whole of
nature at best could teach them only of a personal Being who is
the Ruler of the universe; it could teach nothing further. In
short, out of the external world we can only get the idea of an
architect, that which is called the Design Theory. It is not a
very logical argument, as we all know; there is something
childish about it, yet it is the only little bit of anything we
can know about God from the external world, that this world
required a builder. But this is no explanation of the universe.
The materials of this world were before Him, and this God wanted
all these materials, and the worst objection is that He must be
limited by the materials. The builder could not have made a
house without the materials of which it is composed. Therefore
he was limited by the materials; he could only do what the
materials enabled him to. Therefore the God that the Design
Theory gives is at best only an architect, and a limited
architect of the universe; He is bound and restricted by the
materials; He is not independent at all. That much they had
found out already, and many other minds would have rested at
that. In other countries the same thing happened; the human mind
could not rest there; the thinking, grasping minds wanted to go
further, but those that were backward got hold of them and did
not allow them to grow. But fortunately these Hindu sages were
not the people to be knocked on the head; they wanted to get a
solution, and now we find that they were leaving the external
for the internal. The first thing that struck them was, that it
is not with the eyes and the senses that we perceive that
external world, and know anything about religion; the first
idea, therefore, was to find the deficiency, and that deficiency
was both physical and moral, as we shall see. You do not know,
says one of these sages, the cause of this universe; there has
arisen a tremendous difference between you and me - why? Because
you have been talking sense things and are satisfied with
sense-objects and with the mere ceremonials of religion, while I
have known the Purusha beyond.
Along with this progress of spiritual ideas that I am trying to
trace for you, I can only hint to you a little about the other
factor in the growth, for that has nothing to do with our
subject, therefore I need not enlarge upon it - the growth of
rituals. As those spiritual ideas progressed in arithmetical
progression, so the ritualistic ideas progressed in geometrical
progression. The old superstitions had by this time developed
into a tremendous mass of rituals, which grew and grew till it
almost killed the Hindu life And it is still there, it has got
hold of and permeated every portion of our life and made us born
slaves. Yet, at the same time, we find a fight against this
advance of ritual from the very earliest days. The one objection
raised there is this, that love for ceremonials, dressing at
certain times, eating in a certain way, and shows and mummeries
of religion like these are only external religion, because you
are satisfied with the senses and do not want to go beyond them.
This is a tremendous difficulty with us, with every human being.
At best when we want to hear of spiritual things our standard is
the senses; or a man hears things about philosophy, and God, and
transcendental things, and after hearing about them for days, he
asks: After all, how much money will they bring, how much
sense-enjoyment will they bring? For his enjoyment is only in
the senses, quite naturally. But that satisfaction in the
senses, says our sage, is one of the causes which have spread
the veil between truth and ourselves. Devotion to ceremonials,
satisfaction in the senses, and forming various theories, have
drawn a veil between ourselves and truth. This is another great
landmark, and we shall have to trace this ideal to the end, and
see how it developed later on into that wonderful theory of Mâyâ
of the Vedanta, how this veil will be the real explanation of
the Vedanta, how the truth was there all the time, it was only
this veil that had covered it.
Thus we find that the minds of these ancient Aryan thinkers had
begun a new theme. They found out that in the external world no
search would give an answer to their question. They might seek
in the external world for ages, but there would be no answer to
their questions. So they fell back upon this other method; and
according to this, they were taught that these desires of the
senses, desires for ceremonials and externalities have caused a
veil to come between themselves and the truth, and that this
cannot be removed by any ceremonial. They had to fall back on
their own minds, and analyse the mind to find the truth in
themselves. The outside world failed and they turned back upon
the inside world, and then it became the real philosophy of the
Vedanta; from here the Vedanta philosophy begins. It is the
foundation-stone of Vedanta philosophy. As we go on, we find
that all its inquiries are inside. From the very outset they
seemed to declare - look not for the truth in any religion; it
is here in the human soul, the miracle of all miracles in the
human soul, the emporium of all knowledge, the mine of all
existence - seek here. What is not here cannot be there. And
they found out step by step that that which is external is but a
dull reflection at best of that which is inside. We shall see
how they took, as it were, this old idea of God, the Governor of
the universe, who is external to the universe, and first put Him
inside the universe. He is not a God outside, but He is inside;
and they took Him from there into their own hearts. Here He is
in the heart of man, the Soul of our souls, the Reality in us.
Several great ideas have to be understood, in order to grasp
properly the workings of the Vedanta philosophy. In the first
place it is not philosophy in the sense we speak of the
philosophy of Kant and Hegel. It is not one book, or the work of
one man. Vedanta is the name of a series of books written at
different times. Sometimes in one of these productions there
will be fifty different things. Neither are they properly
arranged; the thoughts, as it were, have been jotted down.
Sometimes in the midst of other extraneous things, we find some
wonderful idea. But one fact is remarkable, that these ideas in
the Upanishads would be always progressing. In that crude old
language, the working of the mind of every one of the sages has
been, as it were, painted just as it went; how the ideas are at
first very crude, and they become finer and finer till they
reach the goal of the Vedanta, and this goal assumes a
philosophical name. Just at first it was a search after the
Devas, the bright ones, and then it was the origin of the
universe, and the very same search is getting another name, more
philosophical, clearer - the unity of all things - "Knowing
which everything else becomes known."