A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

MAYA AND FREEDOM. 185.can hurl a thunderbolt to any distance and of any magnitude. If a man can do one little bit of it we praise him,Why should we praise.laud him up to the skies, and why ?him for imitating Nature, imitating death, imitating dullness, imitating insentience ?The force of gravitation can pull to pieces thebiggestmass that ever existed ; yet it is insentient. What gloryis in imitating the insentient ? Yet we are all strugglingafter that, and this isMaya.The senses drag the human soul out. Man is askingfor pleasure, for happiness where it can never be found ;for countless ages every one of us is taught that this isfutile and vain, there is no happiness here. But wecannot learn;it is impossible for us to learn, exceptthrough our ov,*i experiences. We must try them, anda blow will come ;will we learn then ? Not even then.Like moths hurling themselves against the fire we arehurling ourselves again and again on to the senses, tofind some pleasure there. We return again and againwith freshened energy thus we; go on till crippled,cheated, we die, and this is Maya.So with our intellect, trying to solve the mysteriesof the Universe, we cannot stop the questioning, wemust know that there is no knowledge to be gained.A few steps, and there is the wall of beginninglessand endless time which we cannot surmount. A fewsteps and there is a wall of boundless space whichcannot be surmounted, and the whole is irrevocably boundin by the walls of cause and effect. We cannot go beyond them. Yet we struggle ;we have to struggle ;and this isMaya.With every breath, with every pulsation of the heart,with every one of our movements, we think we are