Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 53)

May 21, 2001

Parts 1 to 52 were posted earlier. This is part 53. Your comments are welcome... Vivekananda Centre London

Earlier postings can be seen at http://www.vivekananda.btinternet.co.uk/veda.htm

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON THE VEDAS AND UPANISHADS

By Sister Gayatriprana

part 53

f) The Impersonal God of the Upanishads Is Immanent in the Whole Universe

What is the effect of accepting... an impersonal Being, an impersonal deity? What shall we gain? Will religion stand as a factor in human life, our consoler, helper? What becomes of the desire of the human heart to pray for help to some being? That will all remain. The personal God will remain, but on a better basis. It has been strengthened by the impersonal.... Without the impersonal, the personal cannot remain. If you mean to say there is a Being entirely separate from this universe, who has created this universe out of nothing just by His or Her will, , that cannot be proved. Such a state of things cannot be. But if we understand the idea of the impersonal, then the idea of the personal can remain there also. This universe, in its various forms, is but the various readings of the same impersonal. When we read it with the five senses, we call it the material world. If there be a Being with more senses than five, he or she will read it as something else. If one of us gets an electric sense, he or she will see the universe as something else again. There are various forms of that Oneness of which all these various ideas of worlds are but various readings, and the personal God is the highest reading of that impersonal that can be attained to by the human intellect. (45)

In our thought of God there is human limitation, personality; with Shakti [God as Mother] comes the idea of one universal Power.... The Upanishads did not develop this thought, for Vedanta does not care for the God idea. (46)

The God preached in the Vedas is the formless, infinite, impersonal. (47)

What is salvation? To live with God. Where? Anywhere. Here this moment. One moment in infinite time is quite as good as any other moment. This is the old doctrine of the Vedas. (48)

Just as in the West we find this prominent fact in the political development of Western races that they cannot bear absolute rule, that they are always trying to prevent any one person from ruling over them and are gradually advancing to higher and higher democratic ideas, higher and higher ideas of physical liberty, so in Indian metaphysics exactly the same phenomenon appears in the development of spiritual life. The multiplicity of gods gave place to one God of the universe, and in the Upanishads there is a rebellion even against that one God. Not only was their idea of many governors of the universe ruling their destinies unbearable, but it was also intolerable that there should be one person ruling this universe. This is the first thing that strikes us. The idea grows and grows until it attains its climax. In almost all of the Upanishads we find the climax coming at the last, and that is the dethroning of the God of the universe. The personality of God vanishes, the impersonality comes. God is no more a person, no more a human being, however magnified and exaggerated, who rules this universe, but has become an embodied principle in every being, immanent in the whole universe. (49)

Unless there is unity at the universal heart, we cannot understand variety. Such is the conception of the Lord in the Upanishads. Sometimes it rises even higher, presenting to us an ideal before which at first we stand aghast - that we are in essence one with God. (50)

Cross reference to:

Brihad. Up., 1.4.10

2.3.6