HINTS ON PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY - Contd...

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HINTS ON PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY

Posted by: " Uttishthata " uttishthata

Sun May 13, 2007 8:05 pm (PST)

HINTS ON PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY - Swami Vivekananda

(Delivered at the Home of Truth, Los Angeles, California)

 

Now, coming back to the practical. The subject of the practical

application of psychology has been taken up in India from very early

times. About fourteen hundred years before Christ, there flourished

in India a great philosopher, Patanjali by name. He collected all the

facts, evidences, and researches in psychology and took advantage of

all the experiences accumulated in the past. Remember, this world is

very old; it was not created two or three thousand years ago. It is

taught here in the West that society began eighteen hundred years

ago, with the New Testament. Before that there was no society. That

may be true with regard to the West, but it is not true as regards

the whole world. Often, while I was lecturing in London, a very

intellectual and intelligent friend of mine would argue with me, and

one day after using all his weapons against me, he suddenly

exclaimed, " But why did not your Rishis come to England to teach us? "

I replied, " Because there was no England to come to. Would they

preach to the forests? "

 

" Fifty years ago, " said Ingersoll to me, " you would have been hanged

in this country if you had come to preach. You would have been burnt

alive or you would have been stoned out of the villages. "

 

So there is nothing unreasonable in the supposition that civilisation

existed fourteen hundred years before Christ. It is not yet settled

whether civilisation has always come from the lower to the higher.

The same arguments and proofs that have been brought forward to prove

this proposition can also be used to demonstrate that the savage is

only a degraded civilised man. The people of China, for instance, can

never believe that civilisation sprang from a savage state, because

the contrary is within their experience. But when you talk of the

civilisation of America, what you mean is the perpetuity and the

growth of your own race.

 

It is very easy to believe that the Hindus, who have been declining

for seven hundred years, were highly civilised in the past. We cannot

prove that it is not so.

 

There is not one single instance of any civilisation being

spontaneous. There was not a race in the world which became civilised

unless another civilised race came and mingled with that race. The

origin of civilisation must have belonged, so to say, to one or two

races who went abroad, spread their ideas, and intermingled with

other races and thus civilisation spread.

 

The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda Volume 2 [ Page : 27 ]

 

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QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Illness is not cured by saying the word " medicine, " but by taking

medicine. Enlightenment is not achieved by repeating the word " God "

but by directly experiencing God.

- Adi Shankaracharya