Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 93)

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Parts 1 to 92 were posted earlier. This is part 93. 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 93

 

The ideal of the Indian race is freedom of the soul. This world is nothing. It is a vision, a dream. This life is one of many millions like it. The whole of this nature is maya, is phantasm, a pest-house of phantasms. This is the philosophy. (4)

The goal of the soul among all the different sects in India seems to be the same: there is one idea with all, and that is liberation. Humanity is infinite; and this limitation in which it exists now is not its nature. All these combinations and re-combinations and manifestations that we see round us are not the aim or the goal, but merely the way and in passing. These combinations such as earths and suns and moons and stars, right and wrong, good and bad, our laughter and our tears, our joys and sorrows, are to enable us to gain experience through which the soul manifests its perfect nature and throws off limitation. No more, then, is it bound by laws, either of internal or external nature. It has gone beyond all law, beyond all limitations, beyond all nature. Nature has come under the control of the soul, not the soul under the control of nature, as it thinks it is now. That is the one goal that the soul has; and all the succeeding steps through which it is manifesting, all the successive experiences through which it is passing in order to attain to that goal - freedom - are represented as its births. The soul is, as it were, taking up a lower body and trying to express itself through that. It finds that to be insufficient, throws it aside, and a higher one is taken up. Through that it struggles to express itself. That also is found to be insufficient, is rejected, and a higher one comes; so on and on until a body is found through which the soul manifests its highest aspirations. Then the soul becomes free. (5)