A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

THE FREEDOM OF THE SOUL. 135and suffer, and enjoy, and it is our duty quietlyto suffer,and if we do not^we shall be punishedall the more. Howdo we know that ? Because the Vedas say so. And so theyhave their texts, their meanings, and they want to enforcethem.There are others who, though not admitting the Mayatheory, stand in the midway, and try to explain all this bysucceeding manifestations, succeeding development anddegradation of the nature of man. All souls are metaphorically expanded and contracted in turn. The whole ofthis creation forms, as it were, the body of God. God isthe soul of all souls and of the whole of Nature. Creationmeans the expansion of this nature of God, and after it isexpanded f^ a certain time it again begins to contract. Inthe case of individual souls the contraction comes from evil-"Whendoing. a man does anything evil, his soul begins tocontract in its power and so on it goes, until it does goodworks, and then it expands again. The one idea seems tobe common in all these various Indian systems, and to mymind in every system in the world, whether they know itor not, and that is what 1 should call the Divinity of Man.There is no one system in the world, no proper religion, whichdoes not hold somewhere or other, either expressed in thelanguage of mythology or in the language of allegory, orin the polished, clear language of philosophy, the one ideathat the human soul, whatever it be, or whatever its relation to God may be is essentially pure and perfect. Thatare itsalready is its nature, that blessedness and powernature, not weakness and not misery. Somehow or otherthis misery has come. The crude systems may call in apersonal evil, a devil, or an Ahriman to explain how thismisery came. Other systems may try to make a God anda devil in one, making some people miserable and some