A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

""jVEDANTA. 385is this universe, and even admitting that it is Brahman,call we know it? No ! No ! You must understand this onethmg again very clearly. Again and again this doubt willcome to you, if this is Brahman how can we know it ?Vijnataramare kena vijaniyat, By what, Maitreyi, theknower can be known; how can the knower be known ?The eyes see everything can they see themselves ? They;cannot, because the very fact of knowledge is a degradation.Children of Aryas, you must remember this, for herein liesa big story, All the Western temptations that come toyou have their metaphysical basis on that one thing, thereisnothing higher than sense knowledge. In the East, wesay in our Vedas that this knowledgeis lower than thething itself, because it isalways a limitation, when youwant to know a thing, itimmydiately becomes limited byyour mind. They say, refer back to that instance of theoyster making pearls and see how knowledge is limitation,gathering a thing, bringing it into consciousness, and notknowing it as a whole. This is true about all knowledge,and can you do that to the infinite? Can you do that toHim who is the substance of all knowledge, Him who is theSakshi, the witness, without which you cannot have anyknowledge, Him who has no qualities, who is the witnessof the whole universe, the witness in our own souls ? Howcan you know Him ?By what means can you bind Himup ? Everything, the whole universe,is such a falseattempt. As it were this infinite Atman is tryingto seehis own face, and all the animals, from the lowest to thehighest of gods, are like so many mirrors toreflect himselfin, and he is taking up others, finding them insufficient,and so on, until in the human body he gets to know it isfinite of the finite, all is finite, there cannot be any expression of the infinite in the finite,25Then comes the retrograde