[Buddha-l] Modern Advaita sages

[curt]

I am still waiting for the Complete Works of Vivekananda to arrive (it 
should be here Thursday). In the meantime here's a little excerpt from 
his "Prajna Yoga", which can be found at amazon ("inside this book"):

"One of the most poetical of the Unpanishads, the Katha Upanishad, 
begins with the inquiry: 'When a man dies, there is a dispute: one party 
declares that he has gone forever; the other insists that he is still 
living. Which is the truth?' Various answers have been given. The whole 
sphere of metaphysics, philosophy, and religion is really filled with 
various answers to this question. At the same time, attempts have been 
made to suppress it, to put a stop to the unrest of the mind, which 
asks: 'What is beyond? What is real?' But so long as death remains, all 
these attempts at suppression will prove unsuccessful. We may talk about 
seeing nothing beyond and keeping all our hopes and aspirations confined 
to the present moment, and struggle hard not to think of anything beyond 
the world of the senses. And perhaps everything outside may help to keep 
us limited within its narrow bounds; the whole world may combine to 
prevent us from broadening out beyond the present. Yet, so long as there 
is death, the question must come again and again: 'Is death the end of 
all these things to which we are clinging, as if they were the most real 
of all realities, the most substantial of all substances?' The world 
vanishes in a moment and is gone. Standing on the brink of a precipice 
beyond which is the infinite yawning chasm, every mind, however 
hardened, is bound to recoil and ask, 'Is this real?' This question must 
be answered.....

"Two positions remain to mankind. One is to believe, with the nihilists, 
that all is nothing, that we know nothing, that we can never know 
anything about either the future, the past or even the present. For we 
must remember that he who denies the past and the future, and wants to 
stick to the present, is simply a madman. One may as well deny the 
father and mother and assert the child. It would be equally logical....

"Then there is the other position - to seek for an explanation, to seek 
for the real, to discover in the midst of this eternally changing and 
evanescent world whatever is real. In this body, which is an aggregate 
of molecules of matter, is there anything which is real? This has been 
the search throughout the history of the human mind. In the very oldest 
times we often find glimpses of light coming into men's minds. We find 
men even then going a step beyond this body, finding something which is 
not this external body, although very much like it, something much more 
complete, much more perfect, which remains even when this body is 
dissolved. We read in a hymn of the Rig-Veda addressed to the god of 
fire, who is burning a dead body: 'Carry him, Fire, in your arms gently; 
give him a perfect body, a bright body. Carry him where the fathers 
live, where there is not more sorrow, where there is no more death.'"

What a lunatic! What a hopeless romantic! Vivekananda must have been one 
of those congenital fools that Paul Bloom speaks of - you know, the ones 
who will believe absolutely anything without evidence. Or wait - now 
here's a thought: maybe, now I know this might sound crazy, but maybe 
Vivekananda was on to something. Perhaps Vivekananda didn't just 
"believe" this "without evidence". Kind of makes you think doesn't it? 
Well, maybe not some of you.

- Curt