Swamy Vivekanandas qoutes
“The older I grow ,the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness.”
The background,the reality,of everyone is that same eternal,ever blessed,ever pure and ever perfect one.It is the atman,the soul,in the saint and the sinner,in the happy and the miserable,in the beautiful and ugly,in men and in animals;it is the same throughout.It is the shining one.
Here I stand and if I shut my eyes,and try to conceive my existence,”I”,”I”,”I”,– what is the idea before me?The idea of a body.Am I,then,nothing but a combination of material substances?The Vedas declare,”No”.I am a spirit living in a body.I am not the body.The body will die,but I shall not die.Here am I in this body;it will fall,but I shall go on living.
The Vedas say the whole world is a mixture of independence and dependence,of freedom and slavery,but through it all shines the soul independent,immortal,pure,perfect,holy.For if it is independent,it cannot perish,as death is but a change,and depends upon conditions;if independent,it must be perfect,for imperfection is again but a condition ,and therefore dependent.And this immortal and perfect soul must be the same in the highest God as well as in the humblest man,the difference between them being only in the degree in which this soul manifests itself.
It cannot be that the soul knows,but it is knowledge.It connot be that the soul is happy,it is happiness itself.That which is happy,has borrowed its happiness;that which has knowledge,has received its knowledge;and that which has relative existence,has only a reflected existence.
hat very thing which we now see as the universe,will appear to us as God (Absolute),and that very God who has so long been external will appear to be internal,as our ownself.