Part 1
Excerpts from - Sages of India
Swami Vivekananda
The Shrutis are enough; for spiritual life, nothing more can be said, nothing more can be known. All that is necessary has been known, all the advice that is necessary to lead the soul to perfection has been completed in the Shrutis; the details alone were left out, and these the Smritis have supplied from time to time…
Our first principle is that all that is necessary for the perfection of man and for attaining unto freedom is there in the Vedas. You cannot find anything new. You cannot go beyond a perfect unity, which is the goal of all knowledge; this has been already reached there, and it is impossible to go beyond the unity. Religious knowledge became complete when Tat Twam Asi (Thou art That) was discovered, and that was in the Vedas. What remained was the guidance of people from time to time according to different times and places, according to different circumstances and environments; people had to be guided along the old, old path, and for this these great teachers came, these great sages.
Concept
Agni, who has encompassed everything - all gods, is like the felly encompassing the spokes of a wheel.
Rig Veda: 5th Mandala: 13.6
A Complete conceptual framework is forwarded in the form of a TREE. Trees are complete archetypes of life cycles. The sequence in the cycle begins with the seed and its germination; the cause (the previous seed) and effect (the future seed) of the growth of the tree. By virtue of the cycles of its life, its turns, the crests and the troughs and the matching points between the tow, the Trees in the Forest (Aranyaka) forward the same plan, which is also the pattern of the universe – the external reality and the inner universe – the reality within us. The concept of induction of older cycles (involution) into the making of new cycles (evolution) is forwarded in 10 steps, with returns to scale in the form of renewal, sustainable life cycles and passage to higher evolutionary possibilities.
Excerpts from - Microcosm & Macrocosm
Swami Vivekananda
- 1. Parable of the seed and the cyclic process: What does man see around him? Take a little plant. He puts a seed in the ground, and later, he finds a plant peep out, lift itself slowly above the ground, and grows and grows, till it becomes a gigantic TREE. Then it dies, leaving only the seed. It completes a circle – it comes out of the seed, becomes the tree, and ends in the seed again.
- 2. Cycles of cause and effect: The universe with its stars and planets has come out of a nebulous state and must go back to it. What do we learn from this? That the manifested or the grosser state is the effect, and the finer state, the cause.
- 3. The rise and fall of waves: The TREE produces the seed, which again comes up as another TREE, and on and on; there is no end to it. Water drops roll down the mountains into the ocean, and rise again as vapor, go back to the mountains and again come down to the ocean. So, rising and falling, the cycle goes on. So with all lives, so with all existence that we can see, feel, hear or imagine. Everything that is within the bounds of our knowledge is proceeding in the same way, like breathing in and breathing out in the human body. Everything in creation goes on in this form, one wave rising, another falling, rising again and falling again. Each wave has its hollow; each hollow has its wave. The same law must apply to the universe taken as a whole, because of its uniformity.
- 4. The periodic nodes of turning or tropics: There is one more fact about this rising and falling. The seed comes out of the TREE, but has a period of inactivity or rather a period of very fine unmanifest action. The seed has to work for some time beneath the soil. It breaks into pieces, degenerates (dies) as it were, and regeneration (resurrects) comes out of that degeneration.
- 5. Out of what has the TREE been produced? Out of the seed; the whole of the TREE was there in the seed. It comes out and becomes manifest. So, the whole of this universe has been created out of this very universe existing in a minute form. It has been made manifest now. It will go back to that minute form, and again will be made manifest. This coming out of the fine and becoming gross, simply changing the arrangements of its parts, as it were, is what in modern times called evolution.
- 6. Involution precedes evolution: We have to go one step further, and what is that? That every evolution is preceded by an involution. The seed is the mother of the TREE, but another TREE was itself the mother of the seed. The seed is the fine form out of which the big TREE comes, and another big TREE was the form, which is involved in that seed. The whole of this universe was present in the cosmic fine universe.
- 7. A priori - Recognition of the involutionary principle in an evolutionary process: This involution and evolution is going on throughout the whole of nature. The whole series of evolution beginning with the lowest manifestation of life and reaching up to the highest, the most perfect man (Anthropic Principle), must have been the involution of something else. The question is: The involution of what? What was involved?
- 8. Unfolding of involved a priori universal intelligence as evolving individual and social intelligence: The TREE comes out of the seed, goes back to the seed; the beginning and the end are the same….applying the same reason to the whole of the universe, we see that intelligence must be the lord of creation, the cause. At the beginning that intelligence becomes involved, and in the end that intelligence gets evolved. The sum total of the intelligence displayed in the universe must, therefore, be the involved universal intelligence unfolding itself.
- 9. Complete or perfect anthropic principle: This cosmic intelligence gets involved, and it manifests, evolves itself, until it becomes the perfect man.
- 10. Macrocosm and microcosm are built on the same plan: Applying the law we dwelt upon under macrocosm, that each involution presupposes an evolution, and each evolution an involution, we see that instinct – of the personal ego-animal level is involved or down turned reason. In this manner, each lower level is an evolution of a preceding involvement of a higher level. The latest scientific man admits that each man and each animal is born with a fund of experience, and all these actions in the mind are the result of past experience.
