Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

by Vivekananda

(www.vivekananda.org).

www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info

Towards this end, he bent all his energies and passed away before he was forty.

The Youth of India needs to know what an invaluable legacy Swamiji has left for posterity, and try to cultivate the same love and spirit of sacrifice which he himself had and held aloft before them.

he was an educationist with several original plans and programmes; he was an orator by 'divine right'; he was a gifted composer of poems in Sanskrit, Bengali, and English; and he was blessed with a melodious voice which charmed his Master.

In addition to the five lectures — one on Krishna, three on the Gita, and one on Mohammed — from the Vedanta and the West of Hollywood, reproduced in the last printing, three more lectures — The Soul and God, Breathing, and Practical Religion:

Besides these, it includes reprints of two whole volumes, namely KARMA-YOGA and RAJA-YOGA, the lecture on "The Vedanta Philosophy" usually known as the Harvard Address, and several detached speeches delivered before various bodies in England and America.

The next part is intended to contain the whole volume of the JNANA-YOGA lectures delivered in England and also others on the same subject delivered in England and America, besides those on Sankhya Philosophy, Karma, Bhakti and Yoga.

BHAKTI-YOGA, with sketches of the mission and lives of the great teachers, Buddha, Christ, Shri Ramakrishna and others; also the speeches delivered by the Swami between his landing in Ceylon on January 15th, 1897, and his final lecture at Lahore in November of the same year, t...

The Swami Vivekananda lectured for the first time from a public platform on September 11th, 1893 and on July 4th, 1902, he passed away. The fact that so much has been permanently recorded of the immense work done in nine short years is largely due to the energy and devotion of his young English Secretary, J. J. Goodwin, who accompanied him to England from America in 1896, and to India from England in 1897, and who was the first of his personal disciples to fall, dying at Ootacamund, on 2nd June, 1898. Had Mr. Goodwin lived, we should doubtless have had further priceless records of the work done in California, at Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere, during the winter of 1899 to 1900.

And finally, it ought to be mentioned that much of the credit for the initiation of this work is due to the late Swami Swarupananda, whose death on June 27th, 1906, in the midst of the preparations for its publication, was a loss which is still felt by the whole staff at Mayavati.

Any work, any action, any thought that produces an effect is called a Karma.

It necessarily follows that law is possible only within this conditioned universe; beyond it there cannot be any law.

universe of the senses, which we can see, feel, touch, hear, think of, imagine.

no mental association of things in the region beyond the senses,

It is only when "being'' or existence gets moulded into name and form that it obeys the law of causation,

everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation.

But that which has become converted into the will, which was not the will before, but which, when it fell into this mould of space, time, and causation, became converted into the human will, is free; and when this will gets out of this mould of space, time, and causation, it will be free again.

from freedom it comes, in bondage it rests, and goes back into that freedom again.

one very small part thereof is man; this body and this mind which we see are only one part of the whole, only one spot of the infinite being.

universe; all our progression and digression

When a man says that he will have again and again this same thing which he is hating now, or, as I sometimes put it, when he asks for a comfortable religion, you may know that he has become so degenerate that he cannot think of anything higher than what he is now;

He thinks that this finite thing is the infinite; and not only so, he will not let this foolishness go. He clings on desperately unto Trishnâ, and the thirst after life, what the Buddhists call Tanhâ and Tissâ. There may be millions of kinds of happiness, and beings, and laws, and progress, and causation, all acting outside the little universe that we know;

Again, it is not, the Vedantists say, that there is something as phenomenon and something as noumenon. The rope is changed into the snake apparently only; and when the delusion ceases, the snake vanishes. When one is in ignorance, he sees the phenomenon and does not see God.

Maya is non-existence. Again, it cannot be said it is non-existence; for if it were, it could never produce phenomenon. So it is something which is neither; and in the Vedanta philosophy it is called Anirvachaniya or inexpressible. Maya, then, is the real cause of this universe.

We are all one, and the cause of evil is the perception of duality. As soon as I begin to feel that I am separate from this universe, then first comes fear, and then comes misery.

In the lowest worm, as well as in the highest human being, the same divine nature is present.

Behind everything the same divinity is existing, and out of this comes the basis of morality.

The Advaitist says, this little personalised self is the cause of all my misery.

When a man has become ready even to give up his life for a little insect, he has reached the perfection which the Advaitist wants to attain;

For a time, as it were, the whole of this phenomenal world will disappear for him, and he will realise what he is. But so long as the Karma of this body remains, he will have to live.

This state, when the veil has vanished and yet the body remains for some time, is what the Vedantists call the Jivanmukti,

Before the mirage first broke, the man could not distinguish between the reality and the deception. But when it has once broken, as long as he has organs and eyes to work with, he will see the image, but will no more be deluded.

The prison of misery has become changed into Sat, Chit, Ânanda — Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute — and the attainment of this is the goal of the Advaita Philosophy.