wards. The idea that these souls come back is already there. Those persons who do good work with the idea of a result, get it, but the result is not perma- nent. There we get the idea of causation very beauti- fully put forward, that the effect is only commen- surate with the cause. What the cause is, so the effect will be. The cause being finite, the effect must be finite. If the cause is eternal the effect can be eternal.
PRACTICAL VEDANTA 233 but all these causes, doing good work, and all other things, are only finite causes, and as such cannot produce infinite result.
We come to the other side of the question, that as there cannot be an eternal heaven, there cannot be an eternal hell, on the same grounds. Suppose I am a very wicked man. Suppose I do evil every minute of this life of mine. Still this whole life here, compared to my eternal life, is nothing. If there be an eternal punishment it will mean that there is an infinite effect produced by a finite cause. The infinite effect of my work will be produced by the finite cause of this life, and for this infinite result I shall have a finite cause which cannot be. If I do good all my life I cannot have an infinite heaven; it would be making the same mistake. But there is the third course, for those who have known the truth, for those who have realized. That is the only way to get out, as it were, beyond this veil of mdya, to realize what truth is, and the Upanishads indicate what line these are taking, what is meant by realizing the truth.
It means recognizing neither good nor bad, but knowing all as coming from the Self; self is in every- thing. It means denying the universe; closing your eyes; seeing the Lord in heaven and in hell also; seeing the Lord in life and in death also. This is the line which thought is taking in the passage I have just read to you, how this earth itself is a symbol of the Lord, how the sky is said to be the Lord, how the place we fill is said to be the Lord. Everything is Brahman. And this is to be seen, realized, not simply talked about, or thought about. We can see as a 234 JNANA YOGA logical consequence that when the soul has realized that everything in this universe, every place is full of the Lord, of Brahman; it will not mean anything to that soul whether it goes to heaven, or hell, or any- where. It does not mean anything to it whether it be born again on this earth, or in heaven. These have ceased to have any meaning, because for the soul that has realized its real nature, every place is the same, every place is the temple of the Lord, every place has become holy, and the presence of the Lord is all that it sees in heaven, or hell, or anywhere. Neither good nor bad, neither life nor death; only one Infinite Brahman exists for that soul.
When a man has arrived at that perception accord- ing to the Vedanta, he has become free, and, says the Vedanta, that is the only man who is fit to live in this world. Others are not. The man who sees evil, how can he live in this world? His life is a misery; it is a mass of misery here. The man who sees dangers here, his life is a misery; the man who sees death, his life is a misery. That man alone can live in this world, he alone can say: *T enjoy this life, and I am happy in this life,'' who has seen the truth, and the truth in everything. By the bye, I may tell you that the idea of hell does not occur in the Vedas anywhere. It comes into India with the Purdnas, much later. The worst punishment described in the Vedas is coming back here, having another chance on this earth. From the very first we see the idea is taking the impersonal turn. The ideas of punishment and reward are very material, and they are only consonant with the idea of a human God, a being who loves one and not another.
PRACTICAL VEDANTA 235 just as we do. Punishment and reward are only admissible with the existence of such a God. They had such a God in the Samhita, and there we find the idea of fear entering, but as soon as we come to the Upanishads the idea of fear vanishes, and the imper- sonal idea takes its place, and it is naturally the hardest thing to understand, this impersonal idea, in every country. Man is always clinging on to the person.
On the other hand the Impersonal God is a Hving God, a Principle. The difference between personal and impersonal is this, that the personal is only a little man, and the impersonal idea is that he is the animal, the man, the angel, and yet something more which we cannot see, because impersonality involves all per- sonality, is the sum-total of all personality in the universe, and infinitely more besides. "As the one fire coming into the world is manifesting itself in so many forms, and yet is infinitely more besides." Such is the Impersonal.
We want to worship a living God. I have seen nothing but God all my life, nor have you. To see this chair you first see God, and then the chair, in and through Him. He is there day and night, saying: "I am." The moment you say "I am" you are knowing existence. Where shall you go to find God if you cannot see Him in your own hearts, in living beings, in the man working in the street? "Thou art the man, Thou art the woman. Thou art the girl, and Thou art the boy. Thou art the old man tottering on a stick. Thou art the young man walking in the pride of his strength." He is all that exists, a wonderful living God, who is the only Fact in the Universe. This 236 J NANA YOGA seems to many to be a very terrible contradiction to the traditional God, who lives behind a veil some- where and whom nobody ever sees. The priests only give us an assurance that if we follow them, listen to their admonitions and walk in the way they mark out for us — then when we die, they will give us a pass- port, and we may happen to see the face of God! What are all these heaven ideas but simply modifica- tions of this nonsenical priestcraft?
Of course the impersonal idea is very destructive; it takes away all trade from the priests, all churches and temples will vanish. If they taught this imper- sonal idea to the people their occupation would be gone. Yet we have to teach it unselfishly, without priestcraft. You are God and so am I; who obeys whom? Who worships whom? You are the highest temple of God; I would rather worship you than any temple or any image or bible. Why are these people so contradictory in their thought? They are like fish slipping through our fingers. They say we are hard- headed practical men. Very good. But what is more practical than worshipping here, worshipping you? I see you, feel you, and I know you are God. The Mohammedan says there is no Gk)d but Allah. The Vedanta says there is no God but man. It may frighten many of you, but you will understand it by- and-by. The living God is within you, and yet you are building churches and temples and believing all sorts of imaginary nonsense. The only God to wor- ship is the human soul, or the human body. Of course all animals are temples, but man is the highest, the Taj Mahal of temples. If I cannot worship that, no PRACTICAL VEDANTA 237 Other temple will be of any advantage. The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being, and really see God, the moment that feeling comes to me, that moment I am free from bondage, everything vanishes, and I am free.
This is practical, the most practical of all worship. It does not have anything to do with theorizing and speculation; yet, if you tell it to most men, it frightens them. They say it is not right. They go on theoriz- ing about ideas their grandfathers told them, and their forefathers six thousand years ago, that a God some- where in heaven told somebody that he was God. Since that time we have only theories. This is practi- cality according to them, and our ideas are impractical. Each one must have his way, says the Vedanta, but this is the ideal. The worship of a god in heaven, and all these things, are not bad, but they are only steps towards the truth, and not the truth itself. They are good and beautiful, and some wonderful ideas are there, but the Vedanta says at every point: *'My friend, Him whom you are worshipping as unknown I worship as thee. Whom you are worshipping as unknown and trying to seek throughout the universe. He has been there all the time. You are living through Him. He is the eternal witness of the universe." **Him whom all the Vedas worship, nay, more, He who is always present in the eternal T,' He existing, the whole universe exists. He is the light of the universe. If the *r were not in you, you would not see the sun, everything would be a dark mass for you, non-exist- ence. He shining, you see the world," 238 J NANA YOGA One question is generally asked and it is this, that this may lead to a tremendous amount of difficulty. Every one of us will think I am God, whatever I do or think is good; God can do no evil. In the first place, even taking this danger of misinterpretation for granted, can it be proved that on the other side the same danger does not exist? They have been wor- shipping a God in heaven separate from them, and of whom they are so much afraid. They have come in shaking with fear, and all their life they go on shaking. Has the world been made much better? The same question you ask on the other side. Those who have understood and worshipped a personal God, and those who have understood and worshipped an impersonal God, on which side have been the great workers of the world? Gigantic workers, gigantic moral powers? Certainly the impersonal. How can you expect moral persons to be developed from fear? It can never be. "Where one sees another, where one hurts another, that is Maya. When one does not see another, when one does not hurt another, when everything has become the Atman, who sees whom, who perceives whom?" It is all He, and all I, at the same time. The soul has become pure. Then, and then alone we understand what is love, and can love come through fear? Its basis is in freedom; then comes love. We really begin to love the world, then we understand what is meant by brotherhood and mankind, and not before.
So it is not right to say this will lead to a tremen- dous amount of evil doing all over the world, as if the other doctrine never lends itself to the works of evil; PRACTICAL VEDANTA 239 as if it does not deluge this world in blood, as if it does not tear to pieces and lead to sectarianism. My God is the greatest God. Let us decide it by a free fight. That is the outcome of dualism all through the world. Come out into the broad open light of day, come out from the little narrow paths.. How can the great infinite human soul rest content to live and die in small ruts? There is the universe of light, everything in the universe is ours. Try to stretch out your arms and embrace the whole universe in love. If you have ever felt that you wanted to do that, you have felt God. You remember that passage in the sermon of Buddha, how he sent a thought of love towards the South, and the North, and the East, and the West, above and below, until the whole universe was filled with this love, grand and great and infinite. When you have that feeling that means true personality. The whole universe is one Person; let go these little things. Give up the small for this infinite enjoyment, give up small enjoyments for this infinite bliss. What use is it to have these small bits of bliss? And it is all yours, for you must remember that the impersonal includes the personal. So God is the Personal and the Impersonal at the same time. So man, the infinite, impersonal Man, is manifesting himself as this person. We the infinite have limited ourselves, as it were, into little bits. The Vedanta says this is the state of things. It will not vanish, it will remain, but now it is our- selves. We are limiting ourselves by our Karma, and that like a chain round our necks has dragged us into this limitation. Break that chain and be free. Tram- ple law under your feet. There is no law in human (( 240 JNANA YOGA nature, there is no destiny, no fate. How can there be law in infinity? Freedom is its watchword. Free- dom is its nature, its birthright. Be free, and then have any amount of Httle personaHties you Hke. Then we will play as the actor, as a king comes upon the stage and takes up the role of a beggar, and the actual beggar is walking through the streets. The scene is the same in both cases, the words are perhaps the same, but yet what a difference. The one enjoys his beg- gary and the other is suffering misery from it. And what makes this difference? The one is free and the other is bound. The king knows this beggary is not true, but that he has assumed it, taken it up just for play, and the beggar thinks that it is his familiar state and he has to bear it whether lie will or not. This is law, so he is miserable. You and I as long as we have no knowledge of our real nature, are these beggars, jostled about by every force in nature, made slaves by everything in nature, crying all the world over for help, and help never comes to us, trying to get help from every quarter, from imaginary fictitious beings, and yet never getting any help. Then thinking, this time it will come, and weeping and wailing and hoping, one life is passed and the same play goes on.
Be free; hope for nothing from any one else. I am sure if you all look back upon your lives you will find that you were always vainly trying to get help from others and it never came. All the help that has been given you was from within yourselves. You only had the fruits of what you yourselves worked for, and yet strangely hoping all the time for help. Like the rich man's parlor, always full, but if you watch it you do PRACTICAL VEDANTA 24I not find the same batch of people there. Always hoping that they will get something out of these rich men, but they never do. So are our lives, hoping, hoping, hoping, never coming to an end. Give up this hope, says the Vedanta. Why should you hope? You have everything. You are the king, the vSelf. What are you going to hope for? If the king goes mad, and goes about to find the king in his own country, he will never find him because he is the king himself. He may go through every village and city in his own coun- try, seeking in every house, he may weep and wail, but will never find any king because he is the king himself. It is better that we know we are the king and give up this fool's search after the king. Thus says the Vedan- ta, and knowing that we are the king we become happy and contented. Give up all these fools' searches, and then play on in the universe.
The whole vision is changed. Instead of an eternal prison this world has become a playground. Instead of a land of competition it is merely a land of Spring- time, where the butterflies are flitting about in mirth. This very world is then heaven, where in the first place it was hell. To the eyes of the bound it is a tremen- dous place of torment, and to the eyes of the free it is the only world that exists. Heavens and all these places are here. This one life is the universal life. All rebirths are here. All the gods are here, the pro- totypes of man. The gods did not create man after their type, but man created gods. And here are the prototypes, here is the Indra, the Karma, and all the gods of the universe sitting before him. You have been projecting your little doubles, and you are the 242 JNANA YOGA 242 JNANA YOGA originals, the real, the only gods to be worshipped. This is the view of the Vedanta, and this its practica- bility. Because we have become free, we shall not go mad and throw up society and fly off to die in the forest or the cave, we shall remain where we are, only we shall have understood the whole thing. The same phenomena will come, but with new meaning. We do not know the world yet; it is only through freedom that we see what it is, understand its nature. We shall see then that this so-called law, or fate, or des- tiny, occupied only an infinitesimal part of our nature. It was just one side, and on the other side there was freedom all the time, and we have been like the hunted hare putting our faces on the ground, and trying to save ourselves from evil.
We have through delusion been trying to forget our nature, and yet we could not forget, it was always calling upon us, and all our search after god or gods, or external freedom, was a search after our real nature. We mistook the voice. We thought it was from the fire, or from a god, or the sun, or moon, or stars, but at last we have found that it was from our- selves. Here is this eternal voice speaking of eternal freedom. Its music is eternally going on. Part of this music of the soul has become the earth, the law, this universe, but it was always ours and always will be. In one word the ideal of Vedanta is to know man as he really is, and this is the message, that if you can- not worship your brother man, the manifested God, neither can you worship a God who is unmanifested.
Do you not remember in the Christian Bible, if you cannot love your own brother whom you have seen.
PRACTICAL VEDANTA 243 how can you love God whom you have not seen? If you cannot see God in the human face divine, how can you see Him in the clouds, or in anything dull, or dead, or in mere fictitious stories of your brain? I will call you religious, from the day you begin to see God in men and women, for then you will understand what is meant by turning the left cheek to the man who strikes you on the right. When you see man as God, everything, even the tiger, will be welcome. Everything that comes is but the Lord in various forms, the Eternal, the Blessed One, our father, and mother, and friend, our own soul playing with us.
There is still a higher ideal than calling God Father; to call Him Mother. There are other ideals; He has been called "Friend"; still higher "the Beloved." The highest point of all is to see no difference between lover and beloved. You remember the old Persian story, how a lover came and knocked at the door and was asked, "Who is that." He answered, "It is I," and there was no answer. A second time he came, and answered "I am here,** but the door did not open. The third time the lover came, and the voice again asked, "Who is that." He replied, "I am thyself, my love," and the door opened. So, between God and ourselves. He is in everything. He is everything. Every man and woman is the palpable blissful living and only God. Who says God is unknown, who says He is to be searched after? We have found God eter- nally. We have been living in Him eternally. Every- where He is eternally known, eternally worshipped.
A great mistake is often made, that other forms of worship than our own are all errors. That is one of 244 J NANA YOGA the great points not to be forgotten, that those who worship God through ceremonials and forms, however crude we may think them, are not in error. It is the travel from truth to truth, from lower truth to higher truth. Darkness is less light; evil is less good; impurity is less purity. This must always be borne in mind that we have to see others with eyes of love, with sympathy, knowing that they are but going through the same path that we have trod. If you are free, you must know that all are coming up to be free sooner or later, and if you are free how do you see the impermanent? If you are really pure how do you see the impure, for what is within is without. We cannot see impurity without having it first inside. This is one of the practical sides of Vedanta, and I hope that we shall all try to carry it into our lives. The whole of life is for this to be carried into practice; but one great point we gain, that we shall work with satisfac- tion and contentment, instead of discontent and dissat- isfaction, for we know Truth is within us, we have it, it is our birthright, and we have only to manifest it, make it tangible.
XIV XIV PRACTICAL VEDANTA Part III In the Chandogya Upanishad we read that a sage called Narada came to another called Sanatkumara, arid asked various questions, and among them inquired if religion is the cause of things as they are. And Sanatkumara takes him, as it were, step by step, tells him that there is something higher than this earth, and something higher than that, and so on, till he comes to akasa, ether. Ether is higher than light, because in the ether are the sun and the moon, light- ning, the stars; it is in the ether we hear, in ether we live, and in ether we die. Then the question arises, is there anything higher than that, and he tells him of prdna. This prdna, according to the Vedanta, is the principle of life. It is like ether, an omnipresent prin- ciple, and all motion, either in the body or anywhere else, is the work of this prdna. Prdna is greater than dkdsa. Through prdna everything lives, prdna is in the mother, in the father, in the sister, in the teacher, prdna is the knower.
I will read another passage, where Svetaketu asks his father about the truth, and the father teaches him different things, and then at last answers "That which 246 J NANA YOGA is the fine cause in all these things, of it are all these things made. That is the all, that is truth, thou art That, O Svetaketu.'' And then he again gives various examples. "As a bee, O Svetaketii, gathers honey from different flowers, and as the different honeys do not know that they are from various trees, and from various flowers, so all of us, having come out of that existence, have forgotten that we have done so. Therefore, O Svetaketn, That thou art." He gives another example of the rivers running down to the ocean, and they do not know that they have risen as various rivers, so even we come out of that Existence, and do not know that we are That. "O Svetaketu, thou art That." So on he goes.
Now there are two principles of all knowledge. The one principle is that we can know by referring the particular to the general, and the general to the univer- sal; and the second principle is, that anything of which the explanation is sot^ght, is to be explained so far as possible from its own nature. Taking up the first principle we see that all our knowledge really consists of that classification going 'higher and higher. When something happens singly we are, as it were, dissati- fied. When it can be shown that that very thing hap- pens again and again we are satisfied, and call it law. When we find that one stone falls, or one apple falls, we are dissatified; when we find that all stones and all apples fall we call it the law of gravitation and are satisfied. The fact is that from the particular we deduce the general. When we want to study religion this is the scientific process.
To study religion, therefore, to make it scientific, PRACTICAL VEDANTA 247 we have to admit the same light. The same principle also holds good, and as a fact we find that that has been the course all through. In reading these books that I have been translating to you, the earliest idea that I can trace is from the particular to the general. We see how these "bright ones'* become merged together and become one principle, and how in the ideas of the cosmos they are going higher and higher, how from the fine elements they are going to finer and finer, and more embracing elements, how from particulars they come to one omnipresent ether, and how from even that they went to an all embracing force, or prdna, and in all this the principle that runs through all, is, that one is not separate from the others. It is the very ether that exists in the higher form, or, so to say, the higher form of prdna con- cretes and becomes ether and that ether becomes still grosser, and so on.