A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"JVEDANTA. 369vibrates a little ;this is the psychological manas. Thenthere is reaction, and immediately comes the idea that Ihave a mosquito on my hand, and that I shall have to driveit off. Thus these stones are thrown into the lake, but inthe case of the lake every blow that comes to it is from theexternal world, while in the case of the lake of the mindthe blows may either come from the external world, orthe internal world. This is what is called the antakama.Along with it you ought to understand one thing more thatwill help us in understanding the Advaita system lateron. It is this. All of you must have seen pearls, and mostof you know how pearls are made. Some irritating grainof dust or sand enters into the body of the mother-of-pearl,oyster, and sets up an irritation there, and the oyster sbodyreacts towards the irritation and covers the littlegrain with its own juice. That crystallizes and forms thepearl. So the whole universe is like that, the universe isthe pearl which is being formed by us. What we get fromthe external world is simply the blow. Even to know thatblow we have to react, and as soon as we react we projectreally a portion of our own mind towards the blow, andwhen we come to know of it, it is really our own mind as ithas been shaped by the blow. Therefore it is clear even tothose who want to believe in a hard and fast realism ofexternal world, and they cannot but admit it in these daysof physiology, that supposing that we represent the externalworld by "X" what we know really is "X" plus mind, andthis mind element is so great that it has covered the whole"of that X which has remained unknown and unknowable throughout, and therefore if there is an externalworld it isalwaysknow of it is as moulded, formed, fashioned by our ownanunknown and unknowable. What wemind. So with the internal world. The same applies as24