Realisation

[Guest guest]

This is the watchword of Vedanta--realise religion, no talking will

do. But it is done with great difficulty. He has hidden Himself

inside the atom, this Ancient One who resides in the inmost recess of

every human heart. The sages realised Him through the power of

introspection, and got beyond both joy and misery, beyond what we

call virtue and vice, beyond good and bad deeds, beyond being and non-

being; he who has seen Him has seen the Reality. But what then about

heaven? It was the idea of happiness minus unhappiness. That is to

say, what we want is the joys of this life minus its sorrows. That is

a very good idea, no doubt; it comes naturally; but it is a mistake

throughout, because there is no such thing as absolute good, nor any

such thing as absolute evil.

 

You have all heard of that rich man in Rome who learnt one day that

he had only about a million pounds of his property left; he

said, " What shall I do tomorrow? " and forthwith committed suicide. A

million pounds was poverty to him. What is joy, and what is sorrow?

It is a vanishing quantity, continually vanishing. When I was a child

I thought if I could be a cabman, it would be the very acme of

happiness for me to drive about. I do not think so now. To what joy

will you cling? This is the one point we must all try to understand,

and it is one of the last superstitions to leave us. Everyone's idea

of pleasure is different. I have seen a man who is not happy unless

he swallows a lump of opium every day. He may dream of a heaven where

the land is made of opium. That would be a very bad heaven for me.

Again and again in Arabian poetry we read of heaven with beautiful

gardens, through which rivers run. I lived much of my life in a

country where there is too much water; many villages are flooded and

thousands of lives are sacrificed every year. So, my heaven would not

have gardens through which rivers flow; I would have a land where

very little rain falls. Our pleasures are always changing. If a young

man dreams of heaven, he dreams of a heaven where he will have a

beautiful wife. When that same man becomes old he does not want a

wife. It is our necessities which make our heaven, and the heaven

changes with the change of our necessities. If we had a heaven like

that desired by those to whom sense-enjoyment is the very end of

existence, then we would not progress. That would be the most

terrible curse we could pronounce on the soul. Is this all we can

come to? A little weeping and dancing, and then to die like a dog!

What a curse you pronounce on the head of humanity when you long for

these things! That is what you do when you cry after the joys of this

world, for you do not know what true joy is. What philosophy insists

on is not to give up joys, but to know what joy really is. The

Norwegian heaven is a tremendous fighting place where they all sit

before Odin; they have a wild boar hunt, and then they go to war and

slash each other to pieces. But in some way or other, after a few

hours of such fighting, the wounds are all healed up, and they go

into a hall where the boar has been roasted and have a carousal. And

then the wild boar takes form again, ready to be hunted the next day.

This is much the same thing as our heaven, not a whit worse, only our

ideas may be a little more refined. We want to hunt wild boars, and

get to a place where all enjoyments will continue, just as the

Norwegian imagines that the wild boar is hunted and eaten every day,

and recovers the next day.

 

- Swami Vivekananda

 

.... to be continued