A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"THE ABSOLUTE AND MANIFESTATION. 231verse, somewhere in heaven, and the other that the God ofthe Universe is his own soul, and that it will be a blasphemyto call Him anything more distant. How dare you call Hima^God in heaven, or a God anywhere else? Any idea ofseparation would be terrible. We can only be the nearestof the near. Words there are not in any language to express that nearness, except this one word, this oneness.With any other idea the Advaitist is frightened, just as theDualist is frightened with the idea of the Advaita, andthinks it is blasphemy. So the latter is frightened at theidea of the Dualist. How dare man objectify Him ! Atthe same time he knows what it is, and has no quarrelwith the Dualist ;the latter is all right. From his standpoint, as soon as he looks from the part, he will have to seemany. Any view* of God looked at from a part of thisUniverse can only be that projecting outside. It is a constitutional necessity, almost, of their standpoint. Let themhave it. At the same time the Advaitist knows that whatever may be their defects or theories, they are all going tothe same goal. There he differs entirely from the Dualist.The Dualists believe, all the world over, naturally, in aPersonal God, who is only a bigger man, and just as a bigman here is pleased with some and displeased with others,so, of course,the Dualist.the same idea attaches to the Personal God ofHe is arbitrarily pleased with somebody anddispleased with somebody else. Naturally the Dualist comesto the conclusion that He has some as favourites, and notothers. You will always see, in every nation, that we arethe favourites of our God, and nobody else ;ifyou crawlwithin our circle, repentant, then you will be taken intofavour with our God and some Dualists are so hard;"thatthey will insist that only the few that have been predestinedto the favour of that God can be saved, the rest may crawl