A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

THE ABSOLUTE AND MANIFESTATION. 221is unknowable. But God is neither known nor unknowable in this sense. It is something still higher than known,that is what is meant by God being unknown and unknowable, not in the sense in which some people say some questions are unknowable or unknown. It is more than known.This chair is known ;it is a certain degree of that knowledge but God is ;intensely more than that, because in andthrough Him we have to know this chair itself. He is thewitness, the eternal witness of all knowledge. Whateverwe know we have to know in and through Him. He isthe essence of our own Self. He, the I, is the essence ofthis ego ;we cannot know anything excepting in andthrough that I, and you have to know everythingin andthrough the Brahman. To know the chair, therefore, youhave to know it in and through God. Thus God is infinitely nearer to us than the chair, but yet He issomethinghigher. Neither known, nor unknown, but somethinginfinitely higher than either. He is your Self. Who wouldlive a second, who would breathe a second in this Universeif that Blessed One were not filling it, because in andthrough Him we breathe, in and through Him we exist ?Not that He is standing somewhere and making my bloodcirculate. What is meant is that He is the essence of allthis, the Soul of my soul. You cannot by any possibilitysay you know Him : it would be too much of a degradation.You cannot jump out of yourself, so you cannotknow Him. Knowledge is objectification. For instance,in memory you are objectifying many things, projectingthem out of yourself. All memory, all things I haveseen and which I know are in my mind. The pictures orimpressions of all these things, as it were, are in my mind,and when I would try to think of them, to know them, thefirst act of knowledge would be projecting them outside.