Heaven are only other states of existence with added senses and heightened powers.
All higher bodies also are subject to disintegration as is the physical. Death comes to all forms of bodies in this and other lives. Devas are also mortal and can only give enjoyment.
Behind all Devas there is the Unit Being -- God, as behind this body there is something higher that feels and sees.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Thoughts on the Vedas and Upanishads’,
Notes of Class Talks and Lectures
… get your mind to cling to Him [God] as far as you can. For then only the great magic of this world will break of itself.
But then, you must persevere. You must take off your mind from lust and lucre, must discriminate always between the real and the unreal -- must settle down into the mood of bodilessness with the brooding thought that you are not this body, and must always have the realisation that you are the all-pervading Atman.
This persevering practice is called Purushakara (self-exertion -- as distinguished from grace). By such self-exertion will come true reliance on Him, and that is the goal of human achievement.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Conversations and Dialogues,
recorded by Sharat Chandra Chakravarty
No man is born to any religion; he has a religion in his own soul.
Any system which seeks to destroy individuality is in the long run disastrous. Each life has a current running though it, and this current will eventually take it to God.
The end and aim of all religions is to realise God. The greatest of all training is to worship God alone. If each man chose his own ideal and stuck to it, all religious controversy would vanish.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Religion and Science’,
Notes of Class Talks and Lectures
Meditation is the means of unification of the subject and object.
Meditate:
Above, it is full of me; below, it is full of me; in the middle, it is full of me. I am in all beings, and all beings are in me.
Om Tat Sat, I am It.
I am existence above mind. I and the one spirit of the universe. I am neither pleasure nor pain.
The body drinks, eats, and so on. I am not the body. I am not mind. I am He.
I am the witness. I look on. When health comes I am the witness. When disease comes I am the witness.
I am Existence, Knowledge, Bliss.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘On Jnana-Yoga’,
Notes of Class Talks and Lectures
We say we do, we are made to do.
We say we work, we are made to labour.
We say we live, we are made to die every moment.
We are in the crowd, we cannot stop, must go on -- it deserves no cheering. Had it not been so, no amount of cheering would make us undertake all this pain and misery for a grain of pleasure -- which, alas, in most cases is only a hope!
- Swami Vivekananda, Writings
He is indeed a Yogi who sees himself in the whole universe and the whole universe in himself.
Self-sacrifice, not self-assertion, is the law of the highest universe.
The world is so evil because Jesus' teaching, "Resist not evil", has never been tried. Selflessness alone will solve the problem. Religion comes with intense self-sacrifice.
Desire nothing for yourself. Do all for others. This is to live and move and have your being in God.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Religion is Self-Abnegation’,
Notes of Class Talks and Lectures
Experience is the only source of knowledge.
In the world, religion is the only science where there is no surety, because it is not taught as a science of experience.
This should not be.
There is always, however, a small group of men who teach religion from experience. They are called mystics, and these mystics in every religion speak the same tongue and teach the same truth.
This is the real science of religion.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Religion and Science’,
Notes of Class Talks and Lectures
The language of the soul is one, the languages of nations are many; their customs and methods of life are widely different.
Religion is of the soul and finds expression through various nations, languages, and customs. Hence it follows that the difference between the religions of the world is one of expression and not of substance; and their points of similarity and unity are of the soul, are intrinsic, as the language of the soul is one, in whatever peoples and under whatever circumstances it manifests itself.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘The Vedanta Philosophy and Christianity’ –
Talk in California
Religion deals with the truths of the metaphysical world just as chemistry and the other natural sciences deal with the truths of the physical world.
The book one must read to learn chemistry is the book of nature. The book from which to learn religion is your own mind and heart.
The sage is often ignorant of physical science, because he reads the wrong book -- the book within; and the scientist is too often ignorant of religion, because he too reads the wrong book -- the book without.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Religion and Science’,
Notes of Class Talks and Lectures
1. Bhakti is intense love for God.
2. It is the nectar of love;
3. Getting which man becomes perfect, immortal, and satisfied for ever;
4. Getting which man desires no more, does not become jealous of anything, does not take pleasure in vanities;
5. Knowing which man becomes filled with spirituality, becomes calm, and finds pleasure only in God.
- Swami Vivekananda,
A free translation of ‘Narada-Bhakti-Sutras’
dictated in America
As to which is first -- matter or mind, let me illustrate:
A hen lays an egg; the egg brings out another hen; that hen lays another egg; that egg brings out another hen, and so on in an endless chain.
Now which is first -- the egg or the hen? You cannot think of an egg that was not laid by a hen, or a hen that was not hatched out of an egg. It makes no difference which is first.
Nearly all our ideas run themselves into the hen and egg business.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Nature and Man’ – Talk in California
Now that which we call matter and mind are one and the same substance. The only difference is in the degree of vibration.
Mind at a very low rate of vibration is what is known as matter. Matter at a high rate of vibration is what is known as mind. Both are the same substance; and therefore, as matter is bound by time and space and causation, mind which is matter at a high rate of vibration is bound by the same law.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Nature and Man’ – Talk in California
We want Shraddha, we want faith in our own selves.
Strength is life, weakness is death.
'We are the Atman, deathless and free; pure, pure by nature. Can we ever commit any sin? Impossible!'-- such a faith is needed. Such a faith makes men of us, makes gods of us.
It is by losing this idea of Shraddha that the country has gone to ruin.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Conversations and Dialogues, at Calcutta,
Surendra Nath Sen Diary
Never loved a husband the wife for the wife's sake or
the wife the husband for the husband's sake.
It is God in the wife the husband loves, and God in the husband the wife loves.
It is God in every one that draws us to the one we love, God in everything and in everybody that makes us love. God is the only love.
- Swami Vivekananda
The goal of the soul among all the different sects in India seems to be the same.
There is one idea with all, and that is liberation.
Man is infinite; and this limitation in which he exists now is not his nature. But through these limitations he is struggling upward and forward until he reaches the infinite, the unlimited, his birthright, his nature.
- Swami Vivekananda,
The Nature of the Soul and Its Goal
Show me by your actions that your reading the Vedanta has been fruitful of the highest good.
Go and tell all, "In every one of you lies that Eternal Power", and try to wake It up.
What will you do with individual salvation? That is sheer selfishness.
Throw aside your meditation, throw away your salvation and such things! Put your whole heart and soul in the work to which I have consecrated myself.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Conversations and Dialogues,
recorded by Sharat Chandra Chakravarty
Q.-- If unity is the only reality, how could duality which is perceived by all every moment have arisen?
A.-- Perception is never dual; it is only the representation of perception that involves duality.
If perception were dual, the known could have existed independently of the knower, and vice versa.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Selections from the Math Diary
Q.-- What is the true meaning of the assertion that we should depend on ourselves?
A.-- Here self means the eternal Self. But even dependence on the non-eternal self may lead gradually to the right goal, as the individual self is really the eternal Self under delusion.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Selections from the Math Diary
First deluge the land (India) with spiritual ideas, then other ideas will follow.
The gift of spirituality and spiritual knowledge is the highest, for it saves from many and many a birth;
the next gift is secular knowledge, as it opens the eyes of human beings towards that spiritual knowledge;
the next is the saving of life;
and the fourth is the gift of food.
- Swami Vivekananda,
On Bhakti-Yoga,
Notes from Lectures and Discourses
Q.-- Do our spirits pass at death into a state of happiness?
A.-- Death is only a change of condition: time and space are in you, you are not in time and space.
It is enough to know that as we make our lives purer and nobler, either in the seen or the unseen world, the nearer we approach God, who is the center of all spiritual beauty and eternal joy.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Q & A at the Brooklyn Ethical Society, Brooklyn
The Vedanta system begins with tremendous pessimism, and ends with real optimism.
We deny the sense-optimism but assert the real optimism of the Supersensuous. That real happiness is not in the senses but above the senses; and it is in every man.
The sort of optimism which we see in the world is what will lead to ruin through the senses.
- Swami Vivekananda,
On the Vedanta Philosophy,
Notes from Lectures and Discourses
The Bauddhas, the Christians, the Mussulmans, and the Jains prescribe, in their folly, the same law and the same rule for all.
That is a great mistake; education, habits, customs, laws, and rules should be different for different men and nations, in conformity with their difference of temperament.
What will it avail, if one tries to make them all uniform by compulsion?
- Swami Vivekananda,
The East and The West
There is not the least likeness between the Aryan and the Greek dramas; rather the dramas of Shakespeare resemble to a great extent the dramas of India.
So the conclusion may also be drawn that Shakespeare is indebted to Kalidasa and other ancient Indian dramatists for all his writings, and that the whole Western literature is only an imitation of the Indian.
- Swami Vivekananda,
At Paris Congress of History of Religions
Isolation of the soul from all objects, mental and physical, is the goal; when that is attained, the soul will find that it was alone all the time, and it required no one to make it happy.
As long as we require someone else to make us happy, we are slaves. When the Purusha finds that It is free, and does not require anything to complete Itself, that this nature is quite unnecessary, then freedom (Kaivalya) is attained.
- Swami Vivekananda,
On Karma-Yoga,
Notes from Lectures and Discourses
Our method is very easily described. It simply consists in reasserting the national life.
Buddha preached renunciation. India heard, and yet in six centuries she reached her greatest height. The secret lies there.
The national ideals of India are RENUNCIATION and SERVICE. Intensify her in those channels, and the rest will take care of itself.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Prabuddha Bharata Interview (September 1898)
