A spiritual genius of commanding intellect and power, Vivekananda crammed immense labor and achievement into his short life, 1863-1902. Born in the Datta family of Calcutta, the youthful Vivekananda embraced the agnostic philosophies of the Western mind along with the worship of science.
At the same time, vehement in his desire to know the truth about God, he questioned people of holy reputation, asking them if they had seen God. He found such a person in Sri Ramakrishna, who became his master, allayed his doubts, gave him God vision, and transformed him into sage and prophet with authority to teach.
After Sri Ramakrishna's death, Vivekananda renounced the world and criss-crossed India as a wandering monk. His mounting compassion for India's people drove him to seek their material help from the West. Accepting an opportunity to represent Hinduism at Chicago's Parliament of Religions in 1893, Vivekananda won instant celebrity in America and a ready forum for his spiritual teaching.
For three years he spread the Vedanta philosophy and religion in America and England and then returned to India to found the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. Exhorting his nation to spiritual greatness, he wakened India to a new national consciousness. He died July 4, 1902, after a second, much shorter sojourn in the West. His lectures and writings have been gathered into nine volumes.
Swami Vivekananda's first ever series of public lectures were the ones he delivered at the Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893. All of these lectures, except the paper on Hinduism that he presented a few days later, were extempore. As we read his words, we can feel their awesome power even today. The reading this month is the response Swamiji offered to the warm welcome the delegates had received at the Parliament. It is published in the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 1: 3-4.
Response to Welcome
Sisters and Brothers of America,
It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world. I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.
My thanks also to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as true.
I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation.
I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, and which is every day repeated by millions of human beings:
As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which people take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.
The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita:
Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach them; all are struggling through paths which in the end lead to Me.Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.
This lecture on Jnana Yoga was delivered by Swami Vivekananda in London on June 21, 1896, and is reproduced here from his Complete Works, 2: 70-87.
The Search for Reality and Happiness
Great is the tenacity with which people cling to the senses. Yet, however substantial they may think the external world in which they live and move, there comes a time in the lives of individuals and of races when, involuntarily, they ask, "Is this real?" To those who never find a moment to question the credentials of their senses, whose every moment is occupied with some sort of sense-enjoyment--even to them death comes, and they also are compelled to ask, "Is this real?" Religion begins with this question and ends with its answer. Even in the remote past, where recorded history cannot help us, in the mysterious light of mythology, back in the dim twilight of civilization, we find the same question was asked, "What becomes of this? What is real?"
One of the most poetical of the Upanishads, the Katha Upanishad, begins with the inquiry: "When someone dies, there is a dispute. One party declares that the person has gone for ever, the other insists that he or she is still living. Which is true?" Various answers have been given. The whole sphere of metaphysics, philosophy, and religion is really filled with various answers to this question. At the same time, attempts have been made to suppress it, to put a stop to the unrest of mind that asks, "What is beyond? What is real?" But so long as death remains, all these attempts at suppression will always prove to be unsuccessful. We may talk about seeing nothing beyond and keeping all our hopes and aspirations confined to the present moment, and struggle hard not to think of anything beyond the world of senses; and, perhaps, everything outside helps to keep us limited within its narrow bounds. The whole world may combine to prevent us from broadening out beyond the present. Yet, so long as there is death, the question must come again and again, "Is death the end of all these things to which we are clinging, as if they were the most real of all realities, the most substantial of all substances?" The world vanishes in a moment and is gone. Standing on the brink of a precipice beyond which is the infinite yawning chasm, every mind, however hardened, is bound to recoil and ask, "Is this real?" The hopes of a lifetime, built up little by little with all the energies of a great mind, vanish in a second. Are they real? This question must be answered. Time never lessens its power; on the other hand, it adds strength to it.
Then there is the desire to be happy. We run after everything to make ourselves happy; we pursue our mad career in the external world of senses. If you ask the young man with whom life is successful, he will declare that it is real; and he really thinks so. Perhaps, when the same man grows old and finds fortune ever eluding him, he will then declare that it is fate. He finds at last that his desires cannot be fulfilled. Wherever he goes, there is an adamantine wall beyond which he cannot pass. Every sense-activity results in a reaction. Everything is evanescent. Enjoyment, misery, luxury, wealth, power, and poverty, even life itself, are all evanescent.
Two Options: (1) Nihilism or (2) Seeking the Real
Two positions are possible. One is to believe with the nihilists that all is nothing, that we know nothing, that we can never know anything either about the future, the past, or even the present. For we must remember that one who denies the past and the future and wants to stick to the present is simply mad. One may as well deny the father and mother and assert the child. It would be equally logical. To deny the past and future, the present must inevitably be denied also. This is one position, that of the nihilists. I have never seen a person who could really become a nihilist for one minute. It is very easy to talk.
Then there is the other position--to seek for an explanation, to seek for the real, to discover in the midst of this eternally changing and evanescent world whatever is real. In this body, which is an aggregate of molecules of matter, is there anything real? This has been the search throughout the history of the human mind. In the very oldest times, we often find glimpses of light coming into the minds of people. We find men and women, even then, going a step beyond this body, finding something which is not this external body, although very much like it, much more complete, much more perfect, and which remains even when this body is dissolved. We read in the hymns of the Rig-Veda, addressed to the God of Fire who is burning a dead body, "Carry him, O Fire, in your arms gently, give him a perfect body, a bright body, carry him where the fathers live, where there is no more sorrow, where there is no more death."
The Concept of "The Fall"
The same idea you will find present in every religion. And we get another idea with it. It is a significant fact that all religions, without one exception, hold that we humans are a degeneration of what we once were, whether they clothe this in mythological words, or in the clear language of philosophy, or in the beautiful expressions of poetry. This is the one fact that comes out of every scripture and of every mythology that we as we are now are a degeneration of what we were. This is the kernel of truth within the story of Adam's fall in the Jewish scripture. This is again and again repeated in the scriptures of the Hindus; the dream of a period which they call the Age of Truth (satya-yuga), when no one died unless they wished to die, when they could keep their bodies as long as they liked, and their minds were pure and strong. There was no evil and no misery; and the present age is a corruption of that state of perfection.
Side by side with this, we find the story of the deluge everywhere. That story itself is a proof that this present age is held to be a corruption of a former age by every religion. It went on becoming more and more corrupt until the deluge swept away a large portion of humanity, and again the ascending series began. It is going up slowly again to reach once more the early state of purity. You are all aware of the story of the deluge in the Old Testament. The same story was current among the ancient Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, and the Hindus. Manu, a great ancient sage, was praying on the bank of the Ganga, when a little minnow came to him for protection, and he put it into a pot of water he had before him. "What do you want?" asked Manu. The little minnow declared he was pursued by a bigger fish and wanted protection. Manu carried the little fish to his home, and in the morning he had become as big as the pot and said, "I cannot live in this pot any longer." Manu put him in a tank, and the next day he was as big as the tank and declared he could not live there any more. So Manu had to take him to a river, and in the morning the fish filled the river. Then Manu put him in the ocean, and he declared, "Manu, I am the Creator of the universe. I have taken this form to come and warn you that I will deluge the world. You build an ark and in it put a pair of every kind of animal, and let your family enter the ark, and there will project out of the water my horn. Fasten the ark to it; and when the deluge subsides, come out and people the earth." So the world was deluged, and Manu saved his own family and two of every kind of animal and seeds of every plant. When the deluge subsided, he came and peopled the world; and we are called "man", because we are the progeny of Manu.
Scientific Superstition vs. Religious Superstition
Now, human language is the attempt to express the truth that is within. I am fully persuaded that a baby whose language consists of unintelligible sounds is attempting to express the highest philosophy, it is just that the baby has neither the organs to express it nor the means. The difference between the language of the highest philosophers and the utterances of babies is one of degree and not of kind. What you call the most correct, systematic, mathematical language of the present time, and the hazy, mystical, mythological languages of the ancients, differ only in degree. All of them have a grand idea behind, which is, as it were, struggling to express itself; and often behind these ancient mythologies are nuggets of truth; and often, I am sorry to say, behind the fine, polished phrases of the moderns is arrant trash. So, we need not throw a thing overboard because it is clothed in mythology, because it does not fit in with the notions of Mr. So-and-so and Mrs. So-and-so of modern times. If people should laugh at religion because most religions declare that we must believe in mythologies taught by such and such a prophet, they ought to laugh more at these moderns. In modern times, if people quote a Moses or a Buddha or a Christ, they are laughed at; but let them give the name of a Huxley, a Tyndall, or a Darwin, and it is swallowed without salt. "Huxley has said it," and that is enough for many. We are free from superstitions indeed! That was a religious superstition, and this is a scientific superstition; only, in and through that superstition came life-giving ideas of spirituality; in and through this modern superstition come lust and greed. That superstition was worship of God, and this superstition is worship of filthy lucre, of fame and power. That is the difference.
The Theory of Cycles
To return to mythology. Behind all these stories we find one idea standing supreme--that we are a degeneration of what we were. Coming to the present times, modern research seems to repudiate this position absolutely. Evolutionists seem to contradict entirely this assertion. According to them, we humans have evolved from the mollusc; and, therefore, what mythology states cannot be true. There is in India, however, a mythology that is able to reconcile both these positions. The Indian mythology has a theory of cycles, which states that all progression is in the form of waves. Every wave is attended by a fall, and that by a rise the next moment, followed by a fall in the next, and again another rise. The motion is in cycles. Certainly it is true, even on the grounds of modern research, that human beings cannot be simply an evolution. Every evolution presupposes an involution. The modern scientist will tell you that you can only get as much amount of energy out of a machine as you have previously put into it. Something cannot be produced out of nothing. If we are an evolution of the mollusc, then the perfect amongst us--the Buddha, the Christ--was involved in the mollusc. If it is not so, whence come these gigantic personalities? Something cannot come out of nothing. Thus we are in the position of reconciling the scriptures with modern light. The energy that manifests itself slowly through various stages until it becomes the perfect person, cannot come out of nothing. It existed somewhere; and if the mollusc or the protoplasm is the first point to which you can trace it, that protoplasm, somehow or other, must have contained the energy.
Force and Matter
There is a great discussion going on as to whether the aggregate of materials we call the body is the cause of manifestation of the force we call the soul, thought, etc., or whether it is the thought that manifests this body. The religions of the world of course hold that the force called thought manifests the body, and not the reverse. There are schools of modern thought which hold that what we call thought is simply the outcome of the adjustment of the parts of the machine which we call body. Taking the second position that the soul or the mass of thought, or however you may call it, is the outcome of this machine, the outcome of the chemical and physical combinations of matter making up the body and brain, leaves the question unanswered.
What makes the body? What force combines the molecules into the body form? What force takes up material from the mass of matter around and forms my body one way, another body another way, and so on? What makes these infinite distinctions? To say that the force called soul is the outcome of the combinations of the molecules of the body is putting the cart before the horse. How did the combinations come; where was the force to make them? If you say that some other force was the cause of these combinations, and soul was the outcome of that matter, and that soul--which combined a certain mass of matter--was itself the result of the combinations, it is no answer. That theory ought to be taken which explains most of the facts, if not all, and that without contradicting other existing theories. It is more logical to say that the force that takes up the matter and forms the body is the same that manifests through that body. To say, therefore, that the thought forces manifested by the body are the outcome of the arrangement of molecules and have no independent existence has no meaning; neither can force evolve out of matter. Rather it is impossible to demonstrate that what we call matter does not exist at all. It is only a certain state of force. Solidity, hardness, or any other state of matter can be proved to be the result of motion. Increase of vortex motion imparted to fluids gives them the force of solids. A mass of air in vortex motion, as in a tornado, becomes solid-like and by its impact breaks or cuts through solids. A thread of a spider's web, if it could be moved at almost infinite velocity, would be as strong as an iron chain and would cut through an oak tree. Looking at it in this way, it would be easier to prove that what we call matter does not exist. But the other way cannot be proved.
What is the force that manifests itself through the body? It is obvious to all of us, whatever that force be, that it is taking particles up, as it were, and manipulating forms out of them--the human body. None else comes here to manipulate bodies for you and me. I never saw anybody eat food for me. I have to assimilate it, manufacture blood and bones and everything out of that food. What is this mysterious force? Ideas about the future and about the past seem to be terrifying to many. To many they seem to be mere speculation.
Individuality (Contd.)
We are not individuals yet. We are struggling towards individuality, and that is the Infinite, that is our real nature. Only the person whose life is in the whole universe really "lives." The more we concentrate our lives on limited things, the faster we go towards death. Those moments alone we live when our lives are in the universe, in others; and living this little life is death, simply death, and that is why the fear of death comes. The fear of death can only be conquered when we realize that so long as there is one life in this universe, we are living. When I can say, "I am in everything, in everybody, I am in all lives, I am the universe," then alone comes the state of fearlessness. To talk of immortality in constantly changing things is absurd. Says an old Sanskrit philosopher: It is only the Spirit that is the individual, because it is infinite. Infinity cannot be divided; infinity cannot be broken into pieces. It is the same one, undivided unit for ever, and this is the real individual, the Real Person. The apparent person is merely a struggle to express, or to manifest, this individuality that is beyond; and evolution is not in the Spirit. These changes that are going on--the wicked becoming good, the animal becoming human, take them in whatever way you like--are not in the Atman. They are the evolution of nature and manifestation of Atman.
Suppose there is a screen hiding you from me, in which there is a small hole through which I can see some of the faces before me, just a few faces. Now suppose the hole begins to grow larger and larger, and as it does so, more and more of the scene before me reveals itself and when at last the whole screen has disappeared, I stand face to face with you all. You did not change at all in this case; it was the hole that was evolving, and you were gradually manifesting yourselves. So it is with the Atman. No perfection is going to be attained. You are already free and perfect.
What are these ideas of religion and God and searching for the hereafter? Why do we look for a God? Why do we, in every nation, in every state of society, want a perfect ideal somewhere, either in human beings, or in God, or elsewhere? Because that idea is within us. It was our own heart beating and we did not know; we were mistaking it for something external. It is the God within our own self that is propelling us to seek for Him and to realize Him. After long searches here and there, in temples and in churches, in earths and in heavens, at last we come back, completing the circle from where we started, to our own soul and find that He for whom we have been seeking all over the world, for whom we have been weeping and praying in churches and temples, on whom we were looking as the mystery of all mysteries shrouded in the clouds, is nearest of the near, is our own Self, the reality of our life, body and mind. That is our own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become pure, we are pure already. We are not to become perfect, we are that already. Nature is like the screen which is hiding the reality beyond. Every good thought that we think or act upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were; and the purity, the Infinity, the God behind, manifests Itself more and more.
The "Why" of Ethics
This is the whole history of human evolution. Finer and finer becomes the veil, more and more of the light behind shines forth, for it is its nature to shine. It cannot be known; in vain we try to know it. Were it knowable, it would not be what it is, for it is the eternal subject. Knowledge is a limitation, knowledge is objectifying. He is the eternal subject of everything, the eternal witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degeneration. We are that eternal subject already; how can we know it? It is the real nature of every one of us, and we are struggling to express it in various ways; otherwise, why are there so many ethical codes? Where is the explanation of all ethics? One idea stands out as the centre of all ethical systems, expressed in various forms, namely, doing good to others. Our guiding motive should be charity towards fellow human beings, charity towards all animals. But these are all various expressions of that eternal truth that, "I am the universe; this universe is one." Or else, where is the reason? Why should I do good to my fellow beings? Why should I do good to others? What compels me? It is sympathy, the feeling of sameness everywhere. The hardest hearts feel sympathy for beings sometimes. Even those who gets frightened if they are told that this assumed individuality is really a delusion, that it is ignoble to try to cling to this apparent individuality, that very people will tell you that extreme self-abnegation is the center of all morality.
And what is perfect self-abnegation? It means the abnegation of this apparent self, the abnegation of all selfishness. This idea of "me and mine"--Ahamkâra and Mamatâ--is the result of past superstition, and the more this present self passes away, the more the real self, or the Atman, becomes manifest. This is true self-abnegation, the center, the basis, the gist of all moral teaching; and whether we know it or not, the whole world is slowly going towards it, practicing it more or less. Only, the vast majority of people are doing it unconsciously. Let them do it consciously. Let them make the sacrifice, knowing that this "me and mine" is not the real Atman but only a limitation. But one glimpse of that infinite reality which is behind--but one spark of that infinite fire that is the All--represents our present reality; the Infinite is our true nature.
The Utility of the Knowledge of Our Real Nature
What is the utility, the effect, the result, of this knowledge? In these days, we have to measure everything by utility--by how many pounds, shillings, and pence it represents. What right has a person to ask that truth should be judged by the standard of utility or money? Suppose there is no utility, will it be less true? Utility is not the test of truth. Nevertheless, there is the highest utility in this. Happiness, we see, is what everyone is seeking for, but the majority seek it in things which are evanescent and not real. No happiness was ever found in the senses. There never was a person who found happiness in the senses or in the enjoyment of the senses. Happiness is only found in the Atman. Therefore the highest utility for us all is to find this happiness in the Atman.
The next point is that ignorance is the great mother of all misery, and the fundamental ignorance is to think that the Infinite weeps and cries, that He is finite. This is the basis of all ignorance that we, the immortal, the ever pure, the perfect Atman, think that we are little minds, that we are little bodies; it is the mother of all selfishness. As soon as I think that I am a little body, I want to preserve it, to protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies; then you and I become separate. As soon as this idea of separation comes, it opens the door to all mischief and leads to all misery. This is the utility that if a very small fractional part of human beings living today can put aside the idea of selfishness, narrowness, and littleness, this earth will become a paradise tomorrow; but it will never be with just machines and improvements of material knowledge. These only increase misery, as oil poured on fire increase the flame all the more. Without the knowledge of the Atman, all material knowledge is only adding fuel to fire, only giving into the hands of selfish man one more instrument to take what belongs to others, to live upon the life of others, instead of giving up his life for them.
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