Essay on The Real Nature of Man, Chapter 2 of Jnana Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

By Patrick Horn (“Rishi”)
The shift from sensate focus to impersonal Truth is a difficult task, and mankind generally favors phenomenalism and error-as-habit. She seeks pleasure and fears death. She is ruled by desire. She discovers the joys of the world are impermanent and suffers failure of will, changes of fortune, loss of friends and family, sickness, and old age. There are two attitudes toward these unavoidable problems. The first is nihilism: rejection of value, meaning, and purpose; iconoclastic doubt and extreme skepticism; denial of authority and the possibility of Knowledge; selfishness and despair. This is a dominant perspective in the contemporary age. The second attitude is the search for the Real amidst fleeting appearances.

The Quest for Freedom plays out in both the fields of religion and science. In the mythic imagination, mankind degenerated to ignorance and chaos from a past state of perfection. Swami Vivekananda refers to the Biblical legend of the Flood, which appears also in the stories of the Hindus, Chinese, Babylonians, and Egyptians. The Masonic tradition supposedly preserves a pre-diluvian original knowledge corrupted, lost, and partially recovered. According to Western esotericism, when mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth, the Council of Immortals saw that the land was filled with violence. Humans were arrogant, ambitious, and murderous fools. Creation was wicked, overpopulated, and noisy. First, a flood nearly destroyed the world; then Noah cursed his grandsons into slavery to their Uncles. With one language and the same words, they spread across the face of the earth and built upon the Plains a city with a tower reaching for Heaven. The Council of Immortals frustrated understanding and co-operation among men by confusing their language. The world was spoiled by lust and greed.

Science, in contrast, observes physical motion by inductive empiricism and posits metaphysical principles of Existence in deductive reasoning and analogy. The apparent universe is limited by space, time, and causality; forms evolve and dissolve in cyclical processes of creation, preservation, and destruction. Most people identify with the body, but this is evanescent from the perspective of the elemental existence. The atoms, molecules, and cells of the body are constantly changing, yet this aggregate of matter does not represent the authentic self. Swamiji suggests the gross physical body is an effect animated by a “bright body,” which is equivalent to the personality in the dream-state and transmigrates after death. In turn, this subtle form is animated by the causal state, the soul (or, Atman) which is equivalent to the undivided, unchanging, infinite Spirit (or, Brahman). This is the Real Nature of Man.

The aim is character transformation to attain the vision of God. We must be bold. Knowledge is not the Experience. The goal is to know the Truth and live it. We must dare to fill the mind with the highest ideals. Swamiji insists that society must be molded to Truth made practical. He says, “society has to pay homage to Truth or die.” If altruism is impossible, it is better to live in the forest.

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Essay on Maya and Illusion, Chapter 3 of Jnana Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

by Charles Feldman (Prana)
Maya is “what we are and what we see around us.” The mind cannot go beyond the limits of time, space and causation. The world exists only in relation our minds. Our life is “a contradiction, a mixture of existence and non-existence.” We are torn between our impulse toward selfishness and the morality of unselfishness. All aspects of our life have one end – death. We cling to life due to Maya. We each think we will get the golden fleece, due to Maya. Attempts at reform bring new evils in their place. The strong prey upon the weak, and this is Maya. The more we progress, the more we are open to pain, and this is Maya. Maya is a statement of fact that “the very basis of our being is contradiction . . . that wherever there is good, there must also be evil, and wherever there is evil, there must also be some good. . . . Nor can this state of things be remedied.” Vedanta says that at some point, we will laugh at our being afraid to give up our individuality. We do good because it is the only way to make ourselves happy, and the only way of getting out of this life of contradictions. Desire increases through our attempts at enjoyment, as when butter is poured on a fire. Chastity is the life of a nation. Vedanta is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, because “our evil is of no less value than our good . . . .” Life is a search after the ideal. All religions struggle toward freedom. Vedanta has found something beyond Maya, and the Personal God is only the beginning.
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Essay on the Necessity of Religion, Chapter 1 of Jnana Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

by Patrick Horn (“Rishi”)
Religion is etymologically related to the Latin word religare, “to bind.” This is similar to the older Sanskrit word yoga, “to yoke.” Both words imply union. Religion, when it is pure, is the quest for transcendence of limited embodiment and absorption in the freedom, joy, and peace of absolute Existence.

Swami Vivekananda suggests that religion originated from 1) ancestor worship, which is the attempt to extend the life of a body after death, and also from 2) awe of the natural world. In the former, the idea of a soul separate from the life of the body is inferred from the dream-state; it was assumed that if the mind is active while the body is inert, then something lives through the body that is not dependent on the body and therefore immortal. The latter idea, of nature worship, when explicated further, explains the birth of various traditions as Truth was transmitted from India into China, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Jewish mysticism, and the Roman Initiatory Schools that became Christianity.

The ancient seers of all traditions made observations of the natural world, from which they inferred universal principles of number, geometry, astronomy, and the cycles of fertility and farming. They discovered minerals and plants for food and medicine, attained mastery over animals, and learned the secrets of human psychology. They protected and preserved this information in myth and symbols. This was necessary for several reasons. First, philosophy is too abstract for most people. They are entangled in sense perception and need concrete examples based on common experience to grasp ideals of human perfection and divinity. Thus, concepts and patterns were translated into stories inspired by the movements and correspondences of the stars and other environmental and anthropological phenomena. Second, the information was dangerous. As the foundation of civilization (influencing and in turn influenced by: economics, politics, science, and art), those who acquired it gained serious power. Consequently, extreme caution was taken to both defend it from those who lacked the virtue to apply it righteously, and moreover, guard the social order against enemies and corruption. It was transferred to writing because a) premature deaths of Masters caused much loss of knowledge, b) worthy successors were not always easily found, and c) the coded hoax could survive persecution and war and serve as a test for aspirants.

In addition to ritual symbolism and myths describing universal principles of number, geometry, astronomy, cycles of fertility and farming, and psychology, each religious tradition shares the idea of the omnipresent Being: an infinite, undivided, unchanging Reality not obvious to the senses but accessible to the intuition and known by analogy. This is the Source and End of all creation, the Essence and Sustenance of all creatures, and the basis for morality and ethics. All forms are interdependent, as a point with no dimension gains dimension through relation to another point. Out of mutual arising come obligations and duties.

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Essay on The Real Nature of Man, Chapter 2 of Jnana Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

by Charles Feldman (Prana)
With death, “The hopes of a lifetime, build up little by little . . . [and] vanish in a second.” So we need to ask: What is real? All religions hold that man is a degeneration of what he was, as in the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. Mythology contains nuggets of truth. Evolution seems to contradict the idea of degeneration, yet Hindu mythology reconciles these with the idea of cycles of rising and falling. Whatsoever has form requires something to move it, which is ultimately traced back to the Atman, which, being beyond time, space and causation, must be infinite. We may be happy one moment and unhappy the next, but the infinite spirit never changes. We don’t want to give up our individuality, yet the body changes, and we may give up bad habits. The true individuality is beyond all changes – the infinite. The fear of death goes when we realize that we are one with everything. Ethics is based on self-abnegation. Religion cannot be measured in terms of material profit, but it is ultimately practical. We cannot see evil and sin in the world unless we see it in ourselves. Sin is based on weakness, and we need to see ourselves as divine in order to overcome it.
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Essay on The Necessity of Religion, Chapter 1 of Jnana Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

by Charles Feldman (Prana)

Religion has the strongest bonds of loyalty of any human institution. Religion originates because “the human mind, at certain moments, transcends not only the limitations of the senses, but also the power of reasoning.”  Yet religion is not contrary to reason. All religions have “an Ideal Unit Abstraction, which is . . . either in the form of a Person or an Impersonal Being, or a Law, or a Presence, or an Essence.” There is a search for infinite power and pleasure, through renunciation, which is the basis of ethics. Religion must be universal and not sectarian. Religions that look upon other religions with contempt have done more injury than good. Religions need to have a fellow feeling with all other religions, as they stand or fall together.

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