A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

MY MASTER.,5senses of an Occidental.Just as you are brave to jump atthe mouth of a cannon with a hurrah ; just as you are bravein the name of patriotismto stand up and give up yourlives for your country, so are they brave in the name ofGod. There it is that when a man declares that this is aworld of ideas, that it is all a dream, he casts off clothesand property to demonstrate that what he believes andthinks is true. There it is that a man sits on the banksof a river, when he has known that life is eternal, andwants to give up his body just as nothing, just as youcan give up a bit of straw. Therein lies their heroism,^ready to face death as a brother, because they are convincedthat there is no death for them. Therein lies the strengththat has made them invincible throughhundreds ofyears of oppression and foreign invasions, and foreigntyranny. The nation lives to-day, and in that nation,even in the days of the direst disaster, spiritual giantshave never failed to arise. Asia produces giants inspirituality just as the Occident produces giants inpolitics, giants in science. In the beginning of the presentcentury, when Western influence began to pour into India,wh$n Western conquerors, with sword in hand, came todemonstrate to the children of the sages that they weremere; b.lrbarians, a race of dreamers, that their religion wasbut mythology, and God and soul and everything they hadbeen struggling for were mere words without meaning,that the thousands of years of struggle, the thousandsof years of endless renunciation, had all been in vain, thequestion began to be agitated among young men at theuniversities whether the whole national existence up tothis date had been a failure, ifthey must begin anew onthe Occidental plan, tear up their old books, burn, their