part 2 one

Part II

(Part II is not divided into chapters)

Analysis of “Duty”

    On duty and love. One day in the course of his lecture Swami Vivekananda began to speak to his audience in a new vein.
    “There is in English the word duty, meaning that work which one is obliged to do. Westerners do all their work impelled by this idea. Some powerful man, getting a weaker one under his control through fear or hope of gain, intimidates him. In all this work, whether such a person wants to do it or not, there is no consideration, as a lord giving orders to his slave takes his service without making any study of how he feels about it. “Duty expresses this idea about work. But Indians think differently about it. Their idea is to work with love. It is love that is the motive power of work. Sanskrit has no word corresponding to the former idea of duty, because the Hindus never thought of it in that way. Love means self-expansion or self-emanation. in any object or work the Self or I is seen in unmanifest or manifested form. So for the gain of that object or that work, the soul exerts itself. What is called in English the incentive for action, or the desire to be impelled to work – the purpose is to get one’s own image into the thing.
    “All work is to be done through love. It is only through love that the mother goes fearlessly to give her life to save her child in danger.
There is a bargaining mentality in “duty.” One person is doing work as if like a corpse or inert matter. It is like a commercial proposition. The Hindus’ idea is different. They are eager to love or to see the Atman in the object, so they try to do all work through love, not commercial mentality. It is love that is the road to action.
    “Why am I distressed at the suffering of another?” was the subject matter to one of Swamiji’s lectures. “European philosophers have written a lot of different ideas about this. One section of them say, ‘This fate may be mine in the future, so I must be ready to sympathize and try to remedy it or ward it off.’ No higher ideal than this is present. Another group says, ‘Without this mutual aid society will fall into disorder. Fellow-feeling among neighbors will disappear and the power to do cooperative work will dwindle.’ This is the reason given for sympathy.”    Then he began to show the profound ideas of the Hindu sastras.

    “The Hindu idea is different. It sees that within every soul and object there is the one Brahman. It is Brahman which has manifested in a thousand forms, covered with various veils such as objects, souls and living beings.’

All-pervadingness expounded

    Another day he said, “In the whole creation there is a continuity or sequence. I see something as a gross object but its subtle aspect is covering it. This subtle form is encased in another, very fine form. Finally, I feel that I am different from, or cut off from that which puts me in touch with, or joins me to, the whole of creation up to the heavens; then fear or depression come into the human heart. Not being able to understand, oftentimes, due to our weakness, we become cut off (so we think) and fear is introduced. But when I see that I exist in the gross and I am in touch with all on the subtle plane, and I am united with all, and gradually that I extend to subtler and subtler worlds, into the whole of sky, the firmament, the sun, outer space – then ananda enters my heart, and courage comes. If one body is destroyed, I remain in another. The dissolution of one body means that the molecules of one center have become separated but they are joined up with another center.
If we can get this idea, then there is no worry about death. While one portion is being disintegrated another portion or form is being integrated elsewhere. This vibration or impulse extends pervading the whole creation and fashions it accordingly. In the midst of this vibrational continuum no spot can remain empty or void. ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’
    A few days before, Swamiji had been filled with the scientific spirit. That is why on all these days, whatever he explained was expounded from a scientific standpoint. We used to see that whatever mood he was absorbed in, according to that the lecture would be; in a bhakti mood he spoke devotional things; jnana likewise. Whatever stories he had heard in childhood from his mother or grandmother, he would tell; sometimes he would repeat these from memory, but the direction of application would be his own, original. Always he would lose himself in the subject. No occasion for low-mindedness or petty anxiety was ever to be found in him. Thinker and thought seemed to become one, and it was difficult to say which was uppermost, so much was he one with what he spoke.
    “The universe is one undifferentiated mass of energy. If any new thing formed outside the creation, it would not have any place in the universe. Because the universe is all-pervading, there is no split or gap in it anywhere.” Sometimes he spoke so far over the heads of the audience that no one could follow. Mohendra remembers a lecture in which he said, “Every point is a center, but nowhere is the center.” No one seemed to understand.
    Once he recounted the experiment of a professor. In the pursuit of truth, before he reached what he was after, he saw a new thing: it was as if a completely new truth was staring him in the face. Utterly still, unmoving for a moment, uttering prolonged sighs, the professor said, “It is all one great Void!” Swamiji said “Ordinary people, unable to understand this Fullness describe it as a void.”

The term Hiranyagarbha

    Another day: “Hiranya-garbha: this idea was current among the Hindus from ancient times. This entity has been revered for a long time as an aspect of manifestation of God. Hiranyagarbha stands between the manifest and the Unmanifest. We can comprehend the former, but the manifest does not emerge totally from the Unmanifest. This state of transition or Point of Polarization is call Hiranyagarbha. What the unmanifest condition is, we cannot get by using speech or the power of thought etc., but we understand that it is. Mentation intimates, as a glimpse, that unmanifested state. But we cannot perceive this by cogitation. This intermediate ground is called Hiranyagarbha.”
    In fact, his lectures were not something to hear or understand; they were the concretization of ideas before one’s very eyes. He had an extraordinary power to make explicit the series of ideas which were being given out. Swamiji and his audience were detached from their bodies for the time being, so to speak, and he made them see these things directly. He had acquired a great surplus of this power; that is why he touched and seized upon the heart so much, in his lectures.
That is why one can remember in this way what he said, even now. There is a vast difference between hearing his lecture and reading his books.
    Explaining the subject of meditation one day Swamiji said, “Everything we see in the sense-bound world, its picture is on our conscious plane. Every moment new ideas, my knowledge of previously known objects – all are going from the conscious plane down to the subconscious where they stay for a long time. They rise again to the conscious when they get a fit stimulus. When we are drawn in toward the Inner Self, leaving the gross body for the subtle, that is the superconscious, and when time, space and causation are left far behind, then the idea or the perception is seen in all clarity, this is superconsciousness.

Lectures on Raja Yoga

    He particularly used to say, “I don’t believe in anything called miracles. There is a demonstrable cause for every event and that cause has it corresponding effect or manifestation. It is Raja Yoga that gives the diagnosis of the subtle causes. Even if I have not performed all the feats of Raja Yoga, I have come to the conclusion, about what I have done, that all that is written there is believable.” That is why he used to say (when questioned), “The book says so. The yogis of old following a method and being assured, have written all that. Have some gentlemanly faith [written in English].” “In Raja Yoga some ignorant person suddenly stumbling upon a truth made a big fuss over it to other untutored people, and ordinary folk all took it as a work of wonder and miracle. But Raja Yoga is a scientific system. Its every dictum was tested by experiment and all can try it for themselves.”
    The Raja Yoga series began. It was very crowded. Previously Swamiji had fascinated his audience with Bhakti Yoga, recounting episodes from the Puranas. But when they were able to grasp that, he returned to his own favorite them, expounding and explaining the Advaitavada. When he had first told them about the various preliminaries of the Raja Yoga, he would make them concentrate and gradually and imperceptibly lift their minds to the highest plane of meditation. We mentioned elsewhere that one evening he had said, “I am in the sun, I am in the moon, I am everywhere in the earth.” This lecture was of a very high order. His audience became utterly absorbed in the explanation of how the ego, now identified with this miserable little body, can feel itself all-pervading. This brought a new conception far beyond the Christian one.
Another day he had said, “I am a voice without form.” And another day, “Personal God is a big superstition.”
    One part of this lecture was about our being hypnotized. He said, “In spite of the marvelous innate power that is in us, we are always surprised by our own strength, like one hypnotized. Forgetting the Atman we always suppose ourselves weak. But when we come to know the power of the Atman, or have the sleeping Atman awakened, this befuddled condition departs and we manifest our own lion-like strength.”
    Nearly all that Swamiji said in the R.I.P.W. gallery has come out in book form, i.e., Jnana Yoga and Bhakti Yoga. So I need not repeat it here [but will add a little more.] “If I meditate on the brains of a Buddha, I become a Buddha; if on the brains of a Sankara, I become a Sankara.” (Speaking of his own method of inspiration): “Somebody never seen before appears and stands before me; I see and speak with him; nothing of what is said is my own.” From these few words we can understand to what a high state Swamiji was raised up. He used to call this ‘visualizing the idea’ – he would clearly see the ideas at the time of giving the lecture.