Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 226)

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SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON THE VEDAS AND UPANISHADS

By Sister Gayatriprana

part 226

 

 

 

 

Again, if in the bioplasmic cell the infinite amount of impressions from all time has entered, where and how is it? This is a most impossible position; and until those physiologists can prove how and where those impressions live in that cell and what they mean by a mental impression sleeping in the physical cell, their position cannot be taken for granted. So far it is clear, then, that this impression is in the mind, that the mind comes to take its birth and rebirth and uses the material which is most proper for it, and that the mind which has made itself fit for only a particular kind of body will have to wait until it gets that material. This we understand. The theory, then, comes to this: that there is hereditary transmission so far as furnishing the material to the soul is concerned. But the soul migrates and manufactures body after body, and each thought we think, and each deed we do, is stored in it in fine forms, ready to spring up again and take a new shape. When I look at you a wave rises in my mind. It dives down, as it were, and becomes finer and finer, but it does not die. It is ready to start up again as a wave in the shape of memory. So all these impressions are in my mind and, when I die, the resultant force of them will be upon me.

A ball is here and each one of us takes a mallet in his or her hands and strikes the ball from all sides; the ball goes from point to point in the room, and when it reaches the door it flies out. What does it carry out with it? The resultant of all those blows. That will give it its direction. So, what directs the soul when the body dies? The resultant, the sum total of all the works it has done, of the thoughts it has thought. If the resultant is such that it has to manufacture a new body for further experience, it will go to those parents who are ready to supply it with suitable material for that body. Thus, from body to body it will go, sometimes to a heaven and back again to earth, becoming human or some lower animal. This way it will go on until it has finished its experience and completed the circle. It then knows its own nature, knows what it is; and ignorance vanishes, its powers become manifest, it becomes perfect; no more is there any necessity for the soul to work through physical bodies, nor is there any necessity for it to work through finer, or mental bodies. It shines in its own light and is free, no more to be born, no more to die. (67)