A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

218 THE ABSOLUTE AND MANIFESTATION.there is no external change. What you call motion andcausation cannot exist where there is only one. We haveto understand this, and impressit on our minds,that whatwe call causation begins after, if we may be permitted iosay so, the degeneration of the Absolute into the phenomenal, and not before, that our will, our desire, and all thesethings always come after that. I always thought Schopenhauer s philosophy makes a mistake in understanding theVedanta, for it wants to make this Will everything. Schopenhauer makes this Will stand in the place of the Absolute,But the Absolute cannot be represented as Will, for Willissomething changeable and phenomenal, and abovethe line (c) written above time, space and causation, thereis no change, no motion ;it isonly below the line thatmotion, or internal motion called thdtight, begins. Sothere can be no Will on the other side, and Will, therefore,cannot be the cause of this universe. Coming nearer,we see in our own bodies that Will is not the cause of everymovement. I move this chair ;Will was the cause of thatmovement, and that Will became manifested as muscularmotion at the other end. That was all right. But thesame power that moves the chair ismoving the heart, thelungs, and so on, but not through Will. Given that thepower is the same, it becomes Will when it rises on to theplane of consciousness, and to call it Will before it hasrisen to this plane will be a misnomer. That makes a gooddeal of confusion in Schopenhauer s philosophy. There isa Sanskrit word called prajna and another called samvit.They are the best words to be used in this connection,because they include all the states of the mind ; they arethe common name for the states of the mind. Everythingisexpressed by them. I do not know an equivalent for themin English.They are neither consciousness, nor the state