A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

,THE REAL AND THE APPARENT MAN. 199to the presentissimply a madman. One may as well denythe father and mother and assert the child. It would betequally logical. To deny the past and future, the presentmust inevitably be denied also. This is one position,thatof the Nihilists. I have never seen a man who couldbecome a Nihilist for one minute. It is very easy to talk.Then there is the other position, to seek for an explanation, to seek for the real, to discover in the midst of thiseternally changing and evanescent world whatever is real.In this body which is an aggregation of molecules of matteris there anything which is real? And this has been the searchthroughout the history of the human mind. In the veryoldest times we often find glimpses of light coming into men sminds. We find man even then going a step beyond thisbody finding Something which is not this external body,but which although very much like it, is not it, being muchmore complete, much more perfect, which remains evenwhen this bodyis dissolved. We read in the hymns of eventhe Rig Veda addresses to the god of Fire who is burning adead body, "Carry him, Fire, in your arms gently, give hima perfect body, a bright body, carry him where the fatherslive, where there is no more sorrow, where there is no moredeath." The same idea you will find present in everyreligion, and we get another idea with it. It is a curiousfact that all religions, without one exception hold that manis a degeneration of what he was, whether they clothe thisin mythological words, or in theclear language of philosophy, or in the beautiful expessions of poetry. This is theone fact that comes out of every scripture and of everymythology, that the man that is, is a degeneration of whathe wan. This is the kernel of truth behind the story ofAdam s fall in the Jewish scripture. This is again andagain repeated in the scriptures of the Hindus the;dream