A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

IMMORTALITY. 119of thought, but not thoughtit is the manufac;turer of the bady, but not the body. Why so ? Wese that the body cannot be the soul. Why? Because it is not intelligent. A dead man is not intelligent, or a piece of flesh in a butcher s shop. What dowe mean by intelligence ? That reactive power. Wewant to go a little more deeply into it. Here is a pitcher :1 see it. What happens?Rays of light from the pitcherenter my eyes ; they make a picture in my retina, and thatimpression comes to the brain. Yet there is no vision.What the physiologists call the sensory nerves carry thisimpression inward. But up to this there is no reaction.The nerve centre in the brain must carry the impression tothe mind, and the mind reacts, and as soon as this comes,the pitcher flashes before it. To make it more clear, andgive it rather a commonplace example ; suppose you arelistening to me intently, and a mosquito is sittingon thetip of your nose, and giving you that pleasant sensationwhich mosquitoes can give but ; you are so intent onat all. Whathearing me that you do not feel the mosquito has happened ? The mosquito has bitten a certain part ofyour skin, and certain nerves are there. They have carrieda certain sensation into the brain, and the impression isthere, but the mind, being otherwise occupied, does not react, so you are not aware of the presence of the mosquito.When a new impression comes in, if the mind does not react, we will not be conscious of it, but when comes the reaction, along with that will come the consciousness, and wefeel, we see, or we hear, and so forth. With this reaction comesillumination, as the Sankhya philosophers call it. We seethat the body cannot illuminate, because we see that in onecase I did not feel, my attention was not there, I did notfeel the sensation at all. Cases have been known where