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Date Posted: 02:23:57 04/11/04 Sun
Author: knonymous - 18 Mar 2004
Subject: Vivekananda on God


Now we come to Advaita, the last of the Vedanta schools, and, as we think, the fairest flower of philosophy and religion that any country in any age has produced, where human thought attains its highest expression and even goes beyond the mystery which seems to be impenetrable. This is the Non-dualistic Vedanta. It is too abtruse, too elevated to be the religion of the masses. Even in India, its birthplace, where it has been ruling supreme for the last three thousand years, it has not beeen able to permeate the masses.

As we go on we shall find that it is difficult for even the most intelligent man and woman in any country to understand Advaita--we have made ourselves so weak; we have made ourselves so low. We may make a show of strength, but we want to lean on somebody else. We are like little, weak plants, always wanting a support. How many times I have been asked for a "comfortable religion!" Very few men ask for the truth, fewer still dare to learn the truth, and the fewest dare to follow it in all its practical bearings. It is not their fault; it is all weakness of the brain. Any new thought, especially of a high kind, creates a distubance, tries to make a new channel, as it were, in the brain matter, and that unhinges the system, throws men off their balance. They are used to certain surroundings and have to overcome a formidable mass of superstitions--ancestral superstition, class superstition, city superstition, country superstition--and above all, the innate superstition which makes men forget their divine nature. Yet there are a few brave souls who dare to conceive the truth, who dare to take it up, and who dare to follow it to the end.

...

What does the Advaitist preach? He dethrones all gods that ever existed or ever will exist in the universe, and puts in their place the Self of man, the Atman, higher than the sun and the moon, higher than the heavens, greater than this great universe itself. No books, no scriptures, no science, can ever imagine the glory of the Self, which appears as man--the most glorious god that ever was, the only God that ever existed, exists, or ever will exist. I am to worship, therefore, none but my Self. "I worship my Self," says the Advaitist. Who can help me, the one infinite being of the universe? Do not dream these foolish dreams. Who ever helped anyone? None. Whenever you see a weak man, a dualist, weeping and wailing for help from somewhere above the skies, it is because he does not know that the skies are in him. He wants help from the skies, and the help comes. We see that it comes; but it comes from within, and he mistakenly thinks it comes from without. It is as when, sometimes a sick man lying on his bed hears a tap on the door. He gets up and opens it and finds no one there. He goes back to bed, and again he hears a tap. He gets up and opens the door. Nobody is there. At last he finds that it was his own heartbeat, which he fancied to be a knock at the door.

Thus man, after this vain search for gods outside himself, completes the circle and comes back to the point from which he started--the human soul; and finds that the God whom he was searching for over hill and dale, whom he was seeking in every brook, in every temple, in every church, the God whom he was even imagining as sitting in heaven and ruling the world, is his own Self. I am He, and He is I. None but I was God; this little I never existed.

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