Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 215)

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SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON THE VEDAS AND UPANISHADS

By Sister Gayatriprana

part 215

The religion of Vedanta can satisfy the demands of the scientific world by

referring it to the highest generalization and to the law of evolution. That the

explanation of a thing comes from within itself is still more completely

satisfied by Vedanta. Brahman, the God of Vedanta, has nothing outside of

Itself, nothing at all. All this is indeed It [Cha. Up., 3.14.1] It is in the

universe, It is the universe itself…. God is immanent in the universe, the very

essence, the heart, the Soul of things. It manifests Itself, as it were, in the

universe. (40)

 

We have to come to an ultimate generalization, which not only will be the most

universal of all generalizations, but out of which everything else must come. It

will be of the same nature as the lowest effect; the cause, the highest, the

ultimate, the primal cause, must be the same as the lowest and most distant of

its effects, a series of evolutions. The Brahman of the Vedanta fulfills that

condition, because Brahman is the last generalization to which we can come. It

has no attributes but is Existence-Knowledge-Bliss absolute. [Npt. Up., 1.6]

Existence … is the very ultimate generalization to which the human mind can

come. Knowledge does not mean the knowledge we have [now], but the essence of

that, that which is expressing itself in the course of evolution in human beings

or in other animals as knowledge. [Here] the essence of that knowledge is meant

- the ultimate fact beyond (if I may be allowed to say so) even consciousness.

That is what is meant by knowledge and what we see in the universe as the

essential unity of things. To my mind, if modern science is proving anything

again and again, it is this: that we are one - mentally, spiritually and

physically. (41)