The Real Nature of Man

[Guest guest]

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 positions remain to mankind. 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 he who denies the past and the future and wants

to stick to the present is simply a madman. 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 man 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 which is 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 men's

minds. We find man, 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 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 man is a

degeneration of what he was, 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 the man that is, is a

degeneration of what he was. 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, when no man died unless he wished to die,

when he could keep his body as long as he liked, and his mind was

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 mankind, 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.

 

- Swami Vivekananda

 

.... to be continued