A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

292 REALIZATION.heaven full of gardens, where rivers run below. I livedin a country much of mylife where there is too muchwater ;some villages and a few thousand lives are sacrificedto it every year. So my heaven would not have gardensbeneath which rivers flow ;I would have dry land wherevery little rain falls. So with life, our pleasures are always changing. If a young man dreams of heaven, hedreams of a heaven where he will have a beautiful wife.Let that very man become old, and he does not want a wife.It is our necessities which make our heaven ;and theheaven changes with the change of our necessities. If wehad a heaven where all these things were intensified weshould not progress, the heaven desired by those to whomthis sense enjoyment is the very end of being and the endof existence. That would be the most terrible curse wecould pronounce on the soul. Is this all we can come to ?A littleweeping and dancing, and then die like a dog.What a curse you will pronounce on the head of humanity when you long for these things That is what you do!when you cry after the joys of this world, for you do notknow what joyis. What philosophy insists on is not tois. Thegive up joys, but to know what joy reallyNorwegian heaven is a tremendous fighting place, wherethey all sit before Wodin, and then comes a wild boarhunt, and then go to war and slash each other to pieces.But somehow or other, after a few hours of such fightingthe wounds are all healed up, and they go into a hall,where the boar has been roasted, and have a carousal.And then the wild boar is made up again to be huntedthe next day. That is quite the same thing, not a whitworse than our ideas ; only our ideas are a little morerefined. We want to hunt all these wild boars, and getto a place where all the enjoyments will continue, just