A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

252 THE COSMOS: THE MACROCOSM.drifting away into the ocean, settling dofm on the bed bfthe ocean, layer after layer, becoming hard as rocks, againin the future to be heaped up and become mountains of afuture generation. Againit will be pounded, pulverized,and that course goes on. From sands rise these mountains ;unto sands they go. So with big luminaries : this earthof ours has come out of nebulous forms, becoming colderand colder, throwing up this crystallized form upon v&ichwe live, and in the future will again become colder andcolder till it dies, and will break into pieces,will be pulverized, go back into rudimentary nebulous fine form.This ishappening before us everyday. This has beenhappening throughtime immemorial. This is the wholehistory of man, the whole history of Nature,the wholehistory of life.If it be true that nature is uniform in all her works,if it be true, and so far no human experience has contradicted it, that the same plan and method of laws underwhich a small grain of sand is created, works in creatingthe gigantic suns and stars, and all this universe, if it betrue that the whole of this universe is built in exactly thesame plan as one atom, if it be true that the same law prevails throughout the universe, then, as it has been alreadysaid in the Vedas, "Knowing one lump of clay we know thenature of all the clay that is the universe." Take up onelittle plant and study its life,and we know the universe as itis. Watch the movement in one grain of sand, and we understand the whole secret of the universe.Therefore, applyingthis study to these phenomena, we find in the first place,that everythingis almost similar at the beginning and theend. The mountain comes from the sand, goes back tothe sand ;the river comes out of vapour, and goes back tovapour ; plant life comes from the seed, and goes back to