728 - Swami Vivekananda

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Monday, 16 Oct 2023 05:30.

Speech by Swami Vivekananda in Chicago – September 1893

(Text of speech along with relevant and supporting Shlokas from the Srimad Bhagavad Gita)

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THE DAY WAS THE 11TH OF SEPTEMBER IN 1893, WHEN SWAMI VIVEKANANDA, A YOUNG INDIAN FROM BENGAL, STARTED DELIVERING HIS POWERFUL SPEECHES AT THE PARLIAMENT OF WORLD’S RELIGIONS IN CHICAGO. HIS PROFOUND KNOWLEDGE OF VARIOUS SCRIPTURES INCLUDING THE SRIMAD BHAGAVAD GITA, APART FROM HIS DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF THE ADVAITA VEDANTA OR THE PHILOSOPHY OF NON-DUALISM AND UNIVERSAL ONENESS, CAN BE EASILY EXPERIENCED THROUGH HIS HISTORIC SPEECHES. SWAMI VIVEKANANDA, BORN NARENDRANATH DUTTA, WAS ONE OF THE EIGHT CHILDREN OF VISHWANATH DUTTA, AN INFLUENTIAL ATTORNEY IN CALCUTTA, AND BHUVANESHWARI DEVI, WHO HAD A GREAT INFLUENCE ON HIM. AS A YOUNG TALENTED BOY, HE WAS VERY INTELLIGENT AND EXCELLENT IN STUDIES. HE WAS A VORACIOUS READER AND STUDIED SANATANI (HINDU) AS WELL AS WESTERN PHILOSOPHY. HE WAS A BORN SEEKER AND WAS NOT EASILY SATISFIED WITH THE ANSWERS HE RECEIVED FROM OTHERS TO THE QUESTIONS HE HAD. HE WAS ALSO AN AGNOSTIC FOR A CERTAIN PERIOD OF TIME IN LIFE. 

THE SPEECHES GIVEN BY HIM ARE UNMATCHED IN QUALITY AND IN SUBSTANCE. THEY HELP SANATANIS (HINDUS) AND ALSO OTHERS GET A BETTER PERCEPTION OF THE GREAT SANATANA DHARMA (HINDUISM).       

 SWAMI VIVEKANANDA WAS TOTALLY AGAINST RELIGIOUS CONVERSIONS FOR REASONS HE HAS EXPLAINED VERY WELL IN HIS SPEECH. IN AN ERA OF FAKE GODMEN, CHARLATANS, MISSIONARIES WHO INTERPRET ANCIENT SCRIPTURES IN THEIR OWN WAYS IN ORDER TO AMASS WEALTH AND GATHER HUGE MASSES OF SYCOPHANTS AROUND THEM, LISTENING TO THE FOLLOWING SPEECHES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA AND TRYING TO COMPREHEND THEM CAN REMOVE A LOT OF MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE SANATANA DHARMA (HINDUISM) AND GIVE CLARITY TO THE MIND. IT CAN ALSO HELP PEOPLE BY ADDING THE ESSENCE OF SPIRITUALITY, GRATITUDE, BELIEF IN ONENESS, UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD AND SELFLESS LOVE FOR THE SUPREME BEING. 

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#PLEASE PLAY THE SPEECH ON THE YOUTUBE VIDEO BELOW AND FOLLOW THE TEXT GIVEN BELOW IT.

#THIS IS NOT THE VOICE OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA. THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF THE SPEECH WAS READ OUT BY ANOTHER PERSON FOR THE PURPOSE OF AUDIO RECORDING.

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/hi8g2h7mvMA

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11.9.1893

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome, which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world. I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks also to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honour of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as true.

I am proud to belong to a nation, which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions, and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion, which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation.

I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings:

‘As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which people take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.’

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita:

“Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach them; all are struggling through paths which in the end lead to Me.”

Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilisations and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention, may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

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15.09.1893

Why We Disagree:

I will tell you a little story. You have heard the eloquent speaker who has just finished say, “Let us cease from abusing each other,” and he was very sorry that there should be always so much variance.

But I think I should tell you a story that would illustrate the cause of this variance. A frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time. It was born there and brought up there, and yet was a little, small frog. Of course the evolutionists were not there then to tell us whether the frog lost its eyes or not but, for our story’s sake, we must take it for granted that it had its eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms and bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our modern bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little sleek and fat. Well, one day another frog that lived in the sea came and fell into the well.

“Where are you from?”

“I am from the sea.”

“The sea! How big is that? Is it as big as my well?” and he took a leap from one side of the well to the other.

“My friend,” said the frog of the sea, “how do you compare the sea with your little well?”

Then the frog took another leap and asked, “Is your sea so big?”

“What nonsense you speak, to compare the sea with your well!”

“Well, then,” said the frog of the well, “nothing can be bigger than my well. There can be nothing bigger than this. This fellow is a liar, so turn him out.”

That has been the difficulty all the while.

I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well and think the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and think that is the whole world. I have to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you to accomplish your purpose.

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19.09.1893

From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu’s religion.

Where then, the question arises, where is the common center to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall attempt to answer.

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical and relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honor them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.

Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore, there never was a time when there was no creation.

If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever-active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time, and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats every day:  “The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and the moons of previous cycles. ” And this agrees with modern science.

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, “I,” “I,” “I,” what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, “No”.  I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here I am in this body; it will fall, but shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination, which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health with beautiful body, mental vigor, and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable; some are without hands or feet; others again are idiots, and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy? Why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and merciful God?

In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes, then, before His birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.

Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence – one of the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of matter; and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by his past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would, by the laws of affinity, take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new born soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past lives.  

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained. I am now speaking in English. It is not my mother tongue; in fact, no words of my mother tongue are now present in my consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only the surface of mental ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even of your past life.

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up – try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce – him the fire cannot burn – him the water cannot melt – him the air cannot dry.

The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means the change of the centre from body to body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very essence, it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matter and thinks of itself as matter.

Why should the free, perfect, and pure be thus under the thralldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer is: “I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by matter.” But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in everybody’s consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the Hindu says, “I do not know.”

Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and from at the mercy of good and bad actions – a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect – a little moth placed under the wheel of causation, which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears or the orphan’s cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape? – was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: “Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! Even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again. “Children of immortal bliss” -what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name -heirs of immortal bliss – yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. We are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth – sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blessed and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One, “by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain and death stalks upon the earth.”

And what is His nature? He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. “Thou art our Father, Thou art our Mother, Thou art our beloved Friend, Thou art the Source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life.” Thus sang the Rishis of the Veda. And how to worship Him? Through love. “He is to be worshiped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life.”

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna whom the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth.

He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world – his heart to God and his hands to work.

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is better to love God for love’s sake; and the prayer goes: “Lord, I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth; but grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward – love unselfishly for love’s sake.” One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter with his queen, in a forest in the Himalayas and there one day, the queen asked how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered, “Be hold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me anything but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to beloved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love’s sake. I cannot trade in love.”

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is, therefore, Mukti – freedom, freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery.

And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very center, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories, If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: “I have seen the soul; I have seen God.” And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising – not in believing, but in being and becoming.

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Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God, and see God; and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus. 

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

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So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects of India; but then perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realize the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone.

“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness, being reached when it would become a universal consciousness.

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little prison individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter, and Advaita or unity, is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart – Soul.

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in discovering one energy of which all the others are but manifestations, and the science of religion become perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death; Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world; One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science.

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today; and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language and with further light from the latest conclusions of science.

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens, one will find the worshipers applying all the attributes of God, including omnipresence to the images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the situation.

“The rose, called by any other name, would smell as sweet.” Names are not explanations. The tree is known by its fruits.  When I have seen among them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom, in morality and spirituality and love, I have never seen anywhere, l stop and ask myself, “Can sin beget holiness?”

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing- By the law of association the material image calls up the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol when he worships.

He will tell you it helps to keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent. After all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat that word “omnipresent”, we think of the extended sky or of space – that is all.

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross. The Hindus have associated the ideas of holiness, purity, truth, omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms. But with this difference that while some people devote their whole lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation. Man is to become divine by realizing the Divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood; but on and on he must progress.

He must not stop anywhere. “External worship, material worship,” say the scriptures, “is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realised.” Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, “Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine.” But he does not abuse anyone’s idol or call its worship sin. He recognizes in it a necessary stage of life. “The child is father of the man.” Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not traveling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realised, or thought of, or stated through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols – so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.

One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbors. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why then, are there so many contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures.

It is the same light coming through glasses of different colors- And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna: “I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls.

Wherever thou sees extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there.” And what has been the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, “We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed.” One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total of all these and still have infinite space for development; which in its catholicity will embrace in infinite arms, and find a place for, every human being from the lowest grovelling savage, not far removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be centered in aiding humanity to realize its own true, divine nature.

May He, who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world, and now it is again rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo (Tsangpo), a thousand fold more effulgent than it ever was before.

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27.09.1893

Address at the Final Session:

The World’s Parliament of Religions has become an accomplished fact, and the merciful Father has helped those who labored to bring it into existence, and crowned with success their most unselfish labor. My thanks to those noble souls whose large hearts and love of truth first dreamt this wonderful dream and then realized it. My thanks to the shower of liberal sentiments that has overflowed this platform. My thanks to this enlightened audience for their uniform kindness to me and for their appreciation of every thought that tends to smooth the friction of religions. A few jarring notes were heard from time to time in this harmony. My special thanks to them, for they have, by their striking contrast, made the general harmony the sweeter.

Much has been said of the common ground of religious unity. I am not going just now to venture my own theory. But if anyone here hopes that this unity will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of the others, to him I say, “Friends, yours is an impossible hope.” Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid.

The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed around it. Does the seed become the earth, or the air, or the water? No. It becomes a plant, it develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth, and the water, converts them into plant substance, and grows into a plant. Similar is the case with religion. The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth.

If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: It has proved to the world that holiness, purity and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: ‘Help and not Fight’, ‘Assimilation and not Destruction’, ‘Harmony and Peace and not Dissension.

ॐ सह नाववतु । सह नौ भुनक्तु ।

सह वीर्यं करवावहै । तेजस्वि नावधीतमस्तु मा विद्विषावहै ।

ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥

Om saha naa-vavatu | Saha nau bhunaktu |

Saha veeryam kara-vaa-vahai | Tejasvi naava-dheetam-astu maa vidvishaa-vahai |

Om Shaantih Shaantih Shaantihi ||

Om, may we all be protected | May we all be nourished

May we all work together with energy | May we all be enlightened and rise to a higher degree of intellect and may there be no hostility

Om, Peace, Peace, Peace.

ॐ सर्वे भवन्तु सुखिनः सर्वे सन्तु निरामयाः ।

सर्वे भद्राणि पश्यन्तु मा कश्चिद्दुःखभाग्भवेत् ।

ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥

Om sarve bhavantu sukhinah | Sarve santu niraa-mayaah |

Sarve bhadraanni pashyantu | Maa kashcid-duhkha-bhaag-bhavet |

Om Shaantih Shaantih Shaantihi ||

May all be prosperous and be happy | May all be free from illness.

May all experience upliftment | May no one Suffer.

Om Peace, Peace, Peace.

                                                                                  Jai Bharat

                                                                              Jai Shri Krishna

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###OPINION : PEOPLE OF BHARATHAM POSITIVE :

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1. SANATANA DHARMA, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS HINDUISM IS ETERNAL, WHOLE UNIVERSE IS EXISTING IN THIS TRUTH

2.  EVER  EXISTING

3.  THERE IS NO SPACE FOR ADHARMA

4. ALL DEMONIC ELEMENTS DEMOLISHED BY DHARMA

5. SO NO QUESTION EVIL ASURIC DEMONIC FRAGMENT'S BARKING, THEY WILL BE   ULTIMATELY BURNED AND DESTROYED BY NATURE.

6. PURE CONSCIOUSNESS IS DIVINE AND SUPREME, ALL OTHERS MEANINGLESS

7. NATURE IS ABOVE ALL, EVER EXISTING, ALL OTHERS MEANINGLESS.

8. THE CONTENT OF SO CALLED HOLY BOOK IS NO HOLY AT ALL, AS IT PREACHES HATRED AND DESTRUCTION OF OTHER MANKIND, RELIGIOUS CONVERSIONS AND LIES OF UNCIVILIZED MATERIALS

9. CHRISTIANITY IS EQUALLY DEMONSTRATED CRUELTY, THE SO CALLED HOLY BOOK FULL OF LIES

10. BOTH  ARE NOT RELIGIONS BUT SAMPRADAYA (ILLITERATE MAN MADE, NOT BASED ON DHARMA

11. THE CULTURE OF BHARATHAM BASED ON UPANISHADS AND FULL OF  REALISATION TEXTS ARE PRODUCED BY GREAT RISHIS OF BHARATHAM

12. IN THIS MATERIALISTIC DESTRUCTIVE MINDED UNIVERSE, NO RELIGIONS COMPARABLE OR ABOVE SANATANA DHARMA OF BHARATHAM.

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Opinion : 

1.( i.n.d.i.a.)all stupid GOMMENDY union of idiots, dynasty rascals, fuedelists, congress, communists, latest announcement tha caste census, is dangerous and divisive hindus politics, and muslim christians votebank politics, people of Bharat awake and stop this attempt by kick these parties out of politics.( nehru of congress used this Adharma since independance followed by dynasty politics indira,rajiv,italian bahu,and now her stupid son and daughter ) 

1.1. Congress, a donkey  party, its so called day dreaming stupid leader rahul vinci, rahul gandi, frequent visit to foriegn countries, to abuse PM of this Nation, and Sanatana Dharma -exeeded all limits this time, his party and his family to be "condemned" and kicked away from politics, people should awake and realise the danger.

2. Congress & Communists destroyed this holy Nation Sanatana Dharama, The imported stupid secularism degenerated this Nation Ancient Culture and Civilisation

3. Till 2014 nation was ruled by corrupt idiots,and all regions too, Dynasty rule dominated than Nation intrests.

4. Brushing away main stream population sides and muslims and christians become political parties vote banks.

5. Communists openly abused  our ancient culture, upanishads,Ramayana, Mahabharatham, Bhagavtham and daites.

6. The communists  next donkey group, latest stunt of America visit and the comedy programme namely kerala sabha!? these buggers detroyed Kerala in all and joining with radical islam soon they will be eliminated, people of Kerala get up from donkey thoughts, otherwise kerala shrink to extinct in all way

7. Communists are danger to our civilisation, their lunatic theories disappered through out the world, Time has come crush them, and eliminate them from our nation, they are danger to this holy nation.

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NOTE:

1. POLITICIANS ( THOSE IGNORANT AND DEMONIC NATURED) ARE NOT THE AUTHORITY TO OPEN THEIR UGLY FOUL MOUTH AND UTTER NONSENSE UPON SANATHANA DHARMAM.

2. THE NONSENSE COMMENDY ALLIANCE ARE NOT THE AUTHORITY ON SANATHA DHARAMAM.

3. DK,DMK. AIADMKA AND ALL NONSENSE POLITICIANS BEWARE YOU WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY  WASHED OUT SOON.

4. COMMUNISTS  AND CONGRESS ARE THE ENEMY TO MANKIND DESTROY THEM.

5.ALL SANATHANA DHARAMAM FOLLOWERS (WHICH EVER YOUR POLITICAL INTEREST BE :YOUR POLITICAL MINDSET) TAKE A OATH THAT YOU STAND AGAINST ALL EVIL MINDSET AGAINST SANATHANA DHARMAM!!!

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######6. CRUSH THE ANTI NATIONAL ELEMENTS SUCH AS CONGRESS, COMMUNISTS, LEFT LIBERALS, URBAN NAXALS, TAMILNADU REGIONAL ANTI NATIONAL CUM ANTI SOCIAL POLITICAL PARTIES (DK,DMK,AIADMK, ALL SILLY SELF APPOINTED CASTE GROUPS), NEVER ALLOW THESE BUGGERS RAISE THER VOICE/HEADS. CRUSH THEM UNDER YOUR FEET.

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JAI HIND

JAI BHARATHAM

VANDHE MADHARAM

BHARAT MATHA KI JAI.

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