A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"""What"THE ABSOLUTE AND MANIFESTATION.before consciousness, but a sort of essence of change.A stone falls andThus we see why J we ask this question.vrp ask why. This question is possible on the suppositionthat everything that happens, every motion, has beenpreceded by something else. I request youto make itvery clear in your minds, for, whenever we ask why anything happens, we are standing 011 the supposition thateverything that happens must have a why, that is to say,must have been preceded by something else. This precedence and succeedence are what we call the law of causation,that everything that we can see, or feel, or hear, aroundus, everything in the Universe, isby turn a cause andeffect. It is the cause of certain other things that comeafter it, and it itself, is the effect of something whichhas precededit. This is called the law of causation,and this is our settled belief. We believe that every particlein the Universe is in relation to everything else, whatever itbe. It has been a great discussion how this idea came. InEurope there have been intuitive philosophers who believedit was constitutional in humanity, others have believed itcame from experience, but it has never been settled. Wewill see what Yedanta makes of this solution later on. Sofirst we have to understand this, that the very asking of thewhyquestionstands on the supposition that everythinground us has been preceded by certain things, and will besucceeded by certain other things. The other beliefinvolved in this question is that nothing in the Universe isindependent, everything can be acted upon by somethingoutside itself. It is inter- dependence in the whole Universe. In saying,caused the Absolute ? whaterror are we making? We are standing on the samesupposition there. To ask this question we have tosuppose that the Absolute also isdependent on something