The Real Nature of Man

[Guest guest]

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, only the baby has not 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 men must believe in mythologies taught by such and such

a prophet, they ought to laugh more at these moderns. In modern

times, if a man quotes a Moses or a Buddha or a Christ, he is laughed

at; but let him give the name of a Huxley, a Tyndall, or a Darwin,

and it is swallowed without salt. " Huxley has said it " , 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.

 

To return to mythology. Behind all these stories we find one idea

standing supreme--that man is a degeneration of what he was. Coming

to the present times, modern research seems to repudiate this

position absolutely. Evolutionists seem to contradict entirely this

assertion. According to them, man is the evolution of the mollusc;

and, therefore, what mythology states cannot be true.

 

There is in India, however, a mythology which is able to reconcile

both these positions. The Indian mythology has a theory of cycles,

that all progression is in the form of waves. Every wave is attended

by a fall, and that by a rise the next moment, that 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 man cannot be

simply an evolution. Every evolution presupposes an involution. The

modern scientific man will tell you that you can only get the amount

of energy out of a machine which you have previously put into it.

Something cannot be produced out of nothing. If a man is an evolution

of the mollusc, then the perfect man--the Buddha-man, the Christ-man--

was evolved 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.

That energy which manifests itself slowly through various stages

until it becomes the perfect man, 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.

 

- Swami Vivekananda

 

.... to be continued