Ever wanted to hear Swami Vivekananda?MP3 Listen&Download Audio Speech

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Ever wanted to hear Swami Vivekananda?Posted in General by JD on the March 5th,

2005

 

 

 

If you are Indian, then Lt. Swami Vivekananda needs no introduction. You would

have also heard about his famous speechin Chicago in 1893, where he addressed

the attendees as ‘Sisters and Brothers’. Did you ever wanted to listen to the

actual speech? Find it right here.

 

Swami Vivekananda’s Speech - Part 1 Size - 7.16mb

Swami Vivekananda’s Speech - Part 2 Size - 4.78mb

 

There is bit of noise in starting of speech but overall the quality is good.

 

 

 

For listening For DOWNLOAD Right and Save Target As

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Source:

http://jdk.phpkid.org/2005/03/05/ever-wanted-to-hear-swami-vivekananda/

 

 

 

 

.............Some Burning Words Of Swami Vivekananda .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Our first duty is not to hate ourselves,because to advance we must have faith

in ourselves first and then in god.He who has no faith in himself in himself can

never have faith in God."

 

Take up one one idea.make that one idea your life -think of it dream of it live

on that idea.Let the brain,muscles,nerves,every part of your body be full of

that idea,and this is the way great spiritual gaints are produced.OTHERS ARE

MERE TALKING MACHINES.

 

"The earth is enjoyed by heros" - this is the unfailing truth.

 

Have faith in yourself.You people were once the VedicRishis.Only,you have come

in different forms,that is all.I see it clear as Daylight that you all have

infinite Power in you.Rouse that up;Arise Arise,apply yourselves heart and

soul,grid up your lions.

 

We are lions in sheep's clothing of habit,we are hypnotised into weakness by our

surroundings.

The history of the world is the history of few men who had faith in

themselves.AS SOON AS A MAN OR NATION LOSES FAITH,DEATH COMES.

 

 

Hinduism – A Brief Sketch

Swami Vivekananda

The foremost disciple of Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa

 

 

 

Paper on Hinduism

 

http://www.hinduism.co.za

Read at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago

19th September 1893

 

 

 

Three religions now stand in the world, which have come down to us from time

prehistoric- Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received

tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their survival their internal

strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of

its place of birth by its all conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is

all that remains to tell the tale of their grand religion (Zoroastrianism), sect

after sect arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its

very foundations, but like the waters of the sea shore in a tremendous

earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing

flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over,

these sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body

of the mother faith.

 

>From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest

discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its

multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the

Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu’s religion.

 

Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which all these

widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these

seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall attempt

to answer.

 

There never was a time when there was no creation.

 

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold

that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to

this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no

books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered

by different persons into different times. Just as the law of gravitation

existed before its discovery, and exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with

the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual

relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the father of

all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we

forgot them.

 

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as perfected

beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them

were women. Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but

they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without

beginning and end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic

energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where

was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In

that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him

mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo

that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd.

Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation.

 

If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without

beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever

active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of

chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy

repeats every day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and

moons of previous cycles." And this agrees with modern science.

 

I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body.

The body will die, but I shall not die.

 

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 substance? 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. I had also a past. The

soul was not created, for creation means a combination, which means a certain

future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born

happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigour and all wants

supplied. Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others

again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all

created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy,

why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those

who are miserable in this life will be happy in a

future one. Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and

merciful God?

 

In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but

simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been

causes, then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were

his past actions.

 

Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited

aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence- one of the mind, the other

of matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there

is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved

that thought has been evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is

inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a

materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

 

The natural habits of a new-born soul; since they were not obtained in this

present life, they must have come down from past lives.

 

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those

tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind

alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul

caused by its past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws

of affinity take birth in a body, which is the fittest instrument for the

display of that tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to

explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So

repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born soul. And

since they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from

past lives.

 

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it that I do

not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained. I am now

speaking English. It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother

tongue are now present in my consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and

they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental

ocean, and within its depths are stored up all the experiences. Try and

struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even of your past life.

 

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of

a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have

discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be

stirred up- try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

 

So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce, him

the fire cannot burn, him the water cannot melt (or make wet)- him the air

cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference

is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body and that death means the

change of this centre from body to body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions

of matter. In its very essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect.

But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of itself

as matter.

 

>Why should the free, perfect and pure being be thus under the thraldom of

matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul be deluded into the

belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the

question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to

answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific

names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the

same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the

absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is

sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to

face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer is: "I do not know how the

perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and

conditioned by matter." But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in

everybody’s consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The

Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The answer

that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the

Hindu says: "I do not know."

 

Well then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and

death means only a change of centre from one body to another. The present is

determined by our past actions and the future by the present. The soul will go

on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But

there is another question; Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on

a foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling

to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions- a powerless, helpless wreck in

an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause which rolls on

crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears or the

orphan’s cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is

there no hope? Is there no escape? –was the cry that went up from the bottom of

that heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and

consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood

up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: "Hear, ye

children of immortal bliss! Even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found

the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion. Knowing Him alone you

shall be saved from death over again."

 

"Children of immortal bliss"- what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to

call you, brethren, by that sweet name- heirs of immortal bliss- yea, the Hindu

refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the children of God, the sharers of immortal

bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth- sinners! It is a sin to

call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and

shake off the delusion, that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits

free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your

servant, not you the servant of matter.

 

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving

laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all

these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One "by

whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks

upon the earth."

 

And what is His nature?

 

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the all-merciful.

"Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art

the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the

burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang

the Rishis of the Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. "He is to be

worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next

life."

 

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see how it is

fully developed and taught by Krishna, who the Hindus believe to have been God

incarnate on earth.

 

He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows

in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world-

his heart to God and his hands to work.

 

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is

better to love God for love's sake, and the prayer goes:

 

"Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it be Thy will, I

shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that I may love Thee without

the hope of reward- love unselfishly for love’s sake."

 

One of the disciple of Krishna, the then emperor of India, was driven from his

kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter with his queen in a forest in the

Himalayas, and there one day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most

virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. King Yudhishthira answered:

 

"Behold my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them.

They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful,

therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all

beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to

love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for

anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love’s sake. I

cannot trade in love."

 

Purity is the condition of His mercy.

 

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter;

perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for

it is therefore, Mukti- freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from

death and misery.

 

And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this mercy

comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy

act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God,

yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is

made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law

of causation. This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism.

The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are existences

beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them.

If there is a soul in him, which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful

universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives

about the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have seen God." And that

is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in

struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine

or dogma, but in realising- not in believing, but in being and becoming.

 

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect,

to become divine, to reach God and see God, and this reaching God, seeing God,

becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven, is perfect, constitutes the

religion of the Hindus.

 

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss

infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing

in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

 

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects

of India: but then, perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or

three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a

soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would

only realise the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and

existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We

have often and often read this called the losing of individuality and becoming a

stock or a stone.

 

"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

 

I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the

consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the

consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness increasing with the

consciousness of an increasing number of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of

happiness being reached when it would become a universal consciousness.

 

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little

prison-individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with

life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then

alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the

necessary scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical

individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously

changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the

necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul.

 

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach

perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the

goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one

element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would

be able to fulfil its services in discovering one energy of which all the others

are but manifestations, and the science of religion become perfect when it would

discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant

basis of an ever changing world. One who is the only Soul of which all souls are

but delusive manifestations. Thus it is, through multiplicity and duality that

the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of

all science.

 

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation,

and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that

what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more

forcible language, and with further light from the latest conclusions of

science.

 

There is no polytheism in India

 

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the

ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in

India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens, one will find the

worshippers applying all the attributes of God, including omnipresence, to the

images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the

situation. "The rose called by any other name would smell as sweet." Names are

not explanations.

 

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India.

Among other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their

idol with his stick, what could it do?

 

One of his listeners sharply answered: "If I abuse your God, what can He do?"

 

The preacher said, "You would be punished when you die."

 

The Hindu retorted "So my idol will punish you when you die."

 

The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that are called

idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality and spirituality and love I have

never seen anywhere, I stop and ask myself, ‘Can sin beget holiness?’

 

We can no more think about anything without a

mental image than we can live without breathing.

 

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian

go to Church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in

prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there so

many images in the minds of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no

more think about anything without a mental image than we can live without

breathing. By the law of association, the material image calls up the mental

idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol when he

worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom

he prays. He knows as well you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent.

After all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands

merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat

that word ‘omnipresent’, we think of the extended sky or of space, that is all.

 

The whole religion of the Hindu

is centred in realisation.

 

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we

have to associate our ideas of infinity with the images of the blue sky, or of

the sea, so we naturally connect our idea of holiness with the image of a

church, a mosque, or a cross. The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness,

purity, truth, omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and

forms. But with this difference that while some people devote their whole lives

to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them religion

means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing good to their

fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation. Man is to

become divine by realising the divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are

only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must

progress.

 

He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material worship," say the

scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the

next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realised."

 

Mark the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, "Him the

sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express

Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine." But he does not

abuse anyone’s idol or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary

stage of life. "The child is father of the man." Would it be right for an old

man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

 

If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be

right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed that stage, should he call

it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from

truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the

lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, means so many attempts of the human

soul to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its

birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every

soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more

strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

 

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognised it. Every

other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to force society to

adopt them. It places before society only one coat, which must fit Jack and John

and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a

coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be

realised, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images,

crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols- so many pegs to hang the

spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every one, but

those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it

compulsory in Hinduism.

 

One thing I must tell you, Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It

is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of

undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults,

they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for

punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their

neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the

fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion

any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.

 

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming

up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to

the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man,

and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many

contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come

from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different

natures.

 

It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And these

little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of

everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His

incarnation as Krishna, "I am in every religion as the thread through a string

of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power

raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there." And what has been

the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of

Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved

and not others. Says Vyasa, "We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our

caste and creed." One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric

of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism

which is atheistic?

 

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their

religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a

God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son.. And

he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.

 

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the Hindus. The

Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but there is ever to be a

universal religion, it nust be one which will have no location in place or time;

which will be infinite like the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine

upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which

will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total

of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its

catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for, every human

being, from the lowest grovelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the

highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity,

making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a

religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity,

which will recognise divinity in every man and woman,

and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be created in aiding humanity to

realise its own true, divine nature.

 

Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Asoka’s council was

a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar’s, though more to the purpose, was only a

parlour meeting. It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters of the

globe that the Lord is in every religion.

 

May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians,

the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of

the Christians, give strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star

arose in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and

sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again

rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a thousandfold

more effulgent than it ever was before.

 

Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never

dipped her hand in her neighbour’s blood, who never found out that the shortest

way of becoming rich was by robbing one’s neighbours, it has been given to thee

to march at the vanguard of civilisation with the flag of harmony.

 

 

 

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