A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"162 MAYA AND ILLUSION.tions.Everything here, therefore, must be limited, everything that conies out of the senses, or through the mind,or through the intellect, must of necessity be limited, andthe limited to be the unlimited issimply absurd, and cannever be.The Yedanta, onthe other hand, says that it is truethat the Absolute or the Infinite is trying to express itselfin the Finite, but there willcome a time when it will findthat it is impossible, and that it will have to beat a retreat,and this beating a retreat is the real beginning of religion.Renunciation is the beginning of religion. It is very hardfor modern people to talk of renunciation. I stand, as itwere, as it was said of me in America, as a man who hascome out of a world that has been dead and buried andgone these five thousand years, and talks of renunciation.So says, perhaps, the English philosopher. Yet it is truethat that is the only fact in life, renounce and give up.Struggle hard and try your best to find any other way.Then comes a time when the mind awakes, awakes fromthis long and dreary dream the child;gives up its play andwants to go back to mother.It findsNajatukamah kamanam upabhogena samyati,Havisha krishnavartmeva bhuya evabhi vardhate.Desires are never satisfied by the enjoyment ofdesires, they only increase the more, as butter poureduponfire increases the flame all the time." So are allsense enjoyments, all intellectual enjoyments. So are allthe enjoyments of which the human soul is capable.They are all for nothing, they are within maya, withinthis net-work beyond which we cannot go. We may runthrough it, through infinite time and find no end, and whenever we struggle to get a little bit of enjoyment, a mass ofmisery will be on our back. How awful will be the state of