A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"428 THE MISSION OF THE VEDANTA.hoary antiquity of the wisdom that our ancestors havediscovered for us here in India to tell them inplainwords, Children, you are slaves of the sense : there isonly finiteness in the senses there is; only ruination inthe senses ;the three short days of luxury here bring onlyruin at last. Give it all up, renounce the love of thesenses and of the world ;that is the way of religion."through renunciation is the way to the goal and notthrough enjoyment. Therefore, ours is the only truereligion. Aye, it is a curious fact that, while nations afternations have come upon the stage of the world, played theirparts vigorously for a few moments, and died almostwithout leaving a mark or a ripple on the ocean of time,here we are, living, as it were, an eternal life.They talk agreat deal of the new theories about the survival of thefittest, and they think that it is the strength of themuscles which is the fittest to survive. If that were true,any one of the aggressively known old-world nationswould have lived in glory to-day, and we, the weak Hindus an English lady once told me, what have the Hindusdone ; they never even conquered one single race ;eventhis race, which never conquered even one other race ornation, lives here three hundred million strong. And itis not at all true that all its energies are spent, thatatavism has seized upon evei y bit of its body ;that is nottrue. There is vitality enough,and it comes out intorrents and deluges when the time is ripe and requiresit. We have, as it were, thrown a challenge to the wholeworld from the most ancient times. In the West, theyare trying to solve the problem how much a man canpossess, and we are trying here to solve the problem on howlittle a man can live. This struggle and this differencehas to go on still for some centuries. But if history has