A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"*IMMORTALITY. 1 1 3-*the seed becomes the plant again ;the plant grows intoftie tree, completes the circle, and comes back to the seed.The animal comes, lives a certain time, dies, and completesthe circle. So does man. The mountains slowly butsurely crumble away, the rivers slowly but surely dry up,rains come out of the sea, and go back to the sea.Everywhere it is circles being completed, birth, growth, development and decay following each other with mathematicalprecision. This is our every-day experience. Inside of itall, behind all this vast mass of what we call life, of millionsof forms and shapes, millions upon millions of varieties,beginning from the lower atom to the highest spiritualisedman, we find existing a certain unity. Every day we findthat the wall that was thought to be dividing one substanceand another is being broken down, and all matter iscomingto be recognised by modern science as one substance, manifesting in different ways and in various forms the one lifethat runs like a continuous chain throughout, of which allthese various forms represent the links, link after link,extending almost infinitely, but of the same one chain. Thisis what is called evolution. It is an old, old idea, as old ashuman society, only it is getting fresher and fresher ashuman knowledgeisgoing on. There is one thing more,which the ancients perceived, and that is involution ;but inmodern times, this is not yet so clearly perceived. The seedis becoming the plant ; a grain of sand never becomes aplant. It is the father that becomes the child. A lumpof clay never becomes the child. Out of what thisevolution comes is the question. What was the seed ?It was the same as the tree. All the possibilities of afuture tree are in that seed ;all the possibilities of a futureman are in the littlebaby ;all the possibilities of anyfuture life are in the germ. What is this ? The ancient8