Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 225)

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SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON THE VEDAS AND UPANISHADS

By Sister Gayatriprana

part 225

 

 

3. The Theories of Vedanta and the Western Evolutionists Demonstrate the Fight between Eastern Spiritualism and Western Materialism

So far as explaining the tendencies of the present life by past conscious efforts goes, the reincarnationists of India and the latest school of evolutionists are at one; the only difference is that the Hindus, as spiritualists, explain it by the conscious efforts of individual souls, and the materialistic school of evolutionists by hereditary physical transmission. The schools which hold the theory of creation out of nothing are entirely out of court.

The issue has to be fought out between the reincarnationists, who hold that all experiences are stored up as tendencies in the subjects of those experiences - the individual soul - and the materialists who hold that the brain is the subject of all actions and the theory of transmission through cells.

It is thus that the doctrine of reincarnation assumes an infinite importance to our mind, for the fight between the reincarnationists and mere cellular transmission is, in reality, the fight between spiritualism and materialism. If cellular transmission is the all-sufficient explanation, materialism is inevitable and there is no necessity for the theory of a soul. If it is not a sufficient explanation, the theory of an individual soul bringing into this life the experiences of the past is as absolutely true. There is no escape from the alternative, reincarnation or materialism. Which shall we accept? (66)

Each involution presupposes an evolution and each evolution an involution; we see, therefore, that instinct is involved reason. What we call instinct in humans or animals must therefore be involved, degenerated voluntary actions; and voluntary actions are impossible without experience. Experience started that knowledge and that knowledge is there. The fear of death, the duckling taking to the water, and all involuntary actions in the human being which have become instinctive, are the results of past experiences. So far we have proceeded very clearly, and so far the latest science is with us. But here comes one more difficulty. The latest scientific [thinkers]are coming back to the ancient sages and as far as they have done so, there is perfect agreement. They admit that each human being and each animal is born with a fund of experience, and that all these actions in the mind are the result of past experience. "But what", they ask, "is the use of saying that that experience belongs to the soul? Why not say it belongs to the body, and the body alone? Why not say it is hereditary transmission?" This is the last question. Why not say that all the experience with which I am born is the resultant effect of all the past experience of my ancestors? The sum total of experience from the little protoplasm up to the highest human being is in me, but it has come from body to body in the course of hereditary transmission. Where will the difficulty be? This question is very nice, and we admit some part of this hereditary transmission. How far? As far as furnishing the material. We, by our past actions, conform ourselves to a certain birth in a certain body, and the only suitable material for that body comes from the parents who have made themselves fit to have that soul as their offspring.

The simple hereditary theory takes for granted the most astonishing proposition, without any proof, that mental experience can be recorded in matter, that mental experience can be involved in matter. When I look at you, in the lake of my mind there is a wave. That wave subsides, but it remains in a fine form, as an impression. We understand a physical impression remaining in the body. But what proof is there for assuming that the mental impression can remain in the body, since the body goes to pieces? What carries it? Even granting it were possible for each mental impression to remain in the body, that every impression, beginning from the first human being down to my father, was in my father’s body, how could it be transmitted to me? Through the bioplasmic cell? How could that be? Because the father’s body does not come to the child in toto. The same parents may have a number of children; then, from this theory of hereditary transmission, where the impression and the impressed, (that is to say, material), are one, if the parents should transmit the whole of their impressions then, after the birth of the first child, their minds would be a vacuum.