Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 94)

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Parts 1 to 93 were posted earlier. This is part 94. 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 94

 

 

2. The Idea of Absolute Freedom, Though Present in Every Religion, Is Most Prominent in Vedanta

What is... worth having? Mukti, freedom. Even in the highest of heavens, says our scriptures, you are a slave; what matters it if you are a king for twenty thousand years? So long as you have a body, so long as you are a slave to happiness, so long as time works on you, space works on you, you are a slave. The idea, therefore, is to be free of external and internal nature. Nature must fall at your feet and you must trample on it and be free and glorious by going beyond. No more is there life; therefore no more is there death. No more enjoyment: therefore no more misery. It is bliss unspeakable, indestructible, beyond everything. What we call happiness and good here are but particles of that eternal Bliss. And all this eternal Bliss is our goal. (6)

Blessedness, eternal peace, arising from perfect freedom, is the highest concept of religion underlying all the ideas of God in Vedanta - absolutely free Existence, not bound by anything, no change, no nature, nothing that can produce a change in It. This same freedom is in you and in me and is the only real freedom. (7)

The Vedantin thinker boldly says that the enjoyments in this life, even the most degraded joys, are but manifestations of that one divine Bliss, the essence of the soul.

This idea seems to be the most prominent in Vedanta and, as I have said, it appears that every religion holds it. I have yet to know the religion which does not. It is the one universal idea working through all religions. Take the Bible, for instance. You find there the allegorical statement that the first man Adam was pure, and that his purity was obliterated by his evil deeds afterwards. It is clear from this allegory that they thought that the nature of the primitive human being was perfect. The impurities that we see, the weaknesses that we feel, are but superimpositions on that nature, and the subsequent history of the Christian religions shows that they also believe in the possibility, nay the certainty, of regaining that old state. This is the whole history of the Bible, Old and New Testaments together. So with the Muslims: they also believed in Adam and in the purity of Adam, and through Muhammad the way was opened up to regain that lost state. So with the Buddhists: they believe in the state called nirvana which is beyond this relative world. It is exactly the same as the Brahman of the Vedantists, and the whole system of the Buddhists is founded upon the idea of regaining that lost state of nirvana. In every system we find this doctrine present, that you cannot get anything which is not yours already. You are indebted to nobody in this universe. You claim your own birthright, as has been most poetically expressed by a great Vedantin philosopher in the title of one of his works - The Attainment of Our Own Empire" [ Swarajasiddhi of ]. That empire is ours; we have lost it and we have to regain it. The mayavadin, however, says this losing of the empire was a hallucination; you never lost it. This is the only difference. (8)