Realisation

[Guest guest]

This is one great idea to learn and to hold onto, this idea of

realisation. This turmoil and fight and difference in religions will

cease only when we understand that religion is not in books and

temples. It is an actual perception. Only the man who has actually

perceived God and soul has religion. There is no real difference

between the highest ecclesiastical giant who can talk by the volume,

and the lowest, most ignorant materialist. We are all atheists; let

us confess it. Mere intellectual assent does not make us religious.

Take a Christian, or a Mohammedan, or a follower of any other

religion in the world. Any man who truly realised the truth of the

Sermon on the Mount would be perfect, and become a god immediately.

Yet it is said that there are many millions of Christians in the

world. What is meant is that mankind may at some time try to realise

that Sermon. No one in twenty millions is a real Christian.

 

So, in India, there are said to be three hundred millions of

Vedantins. But if there were one in a thousand who had actually

realised religion, this world would soon be greatly changed. We are

all atheists, and yet we try to fight the man who admits it. We are

all in the dark; religion is to us a mere intellectual assent, a mere

talk, a mere nothing. We often consider a man religious who can talk

well. But this is not religion. " Wonderful methods of joining words,

rhetorical powers, and explaining texts of the books in various ways--

these are only for the enjoyment of the learned, and not religion. "

Religion comes when that actual realisation in our own soul begins.

That will be the dawn of religion; and then alone we shall be moral.

Now we are not much more moral than the animals. We are only held

down by the whips of society. If society said today, " I will not

punish you if you steal " , we should just make a rush for each other's

property. It is the policeman that makes us moral. It is social

opinion that makes us moral, and really we are little better than

animals. We understand how much this is so in the secret of our own

hearts. So let us not be hypocrites. Let us confess that we are not

religious and have no right to look down on others. We are all

brothers, and we shall be truly moral when we have realised religion.

 

If you have seen a certain country, and a man forces you to say that

you have not seen it, still in your heart of hearts you know you

have. So, when you see religion and God in a more intense sense than

you see this external world, nothing will be able to shake your

belief. Then you have real faith. That is what is meant by the words

in your Gospel, " He who has faith even as a grain of mustard seed. "

Then you will know the Truth because you have become the Truth.

 

- Swami Vivekananda

 

.... to be continued