A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

""""34*individual spirits and the Father of allspirits,were therebefore their discovery and will remain even df we forgetthem.The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, andwe honor them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell thisaudience that some of the very best of them were women.Here itmay be said that these laws as laws may bewithout end, but they must have had a beginning. TheVedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end.Science has proved to us that the sum total of the cosmicenergy is the same throughout all time. Then, if therewas a time when nothing existed, where was all thismanifested energy? Some say it was in a potential formin God. But then God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make him mutable,and everything mutable is a compound, and everything compoundmust undergo that change which is called destruction.And thus God would die. Therefore, there never was atime when there was no creation.^ If I may be allowed to apply a simile,creation andcreator are two lines, without beginning and without end,running parallel to each other, and God is power, and everactive Providence, under Whose power, systems aftersystems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run fora time and again destroyed. This is what the Hindu boyrepeats every day with his Guru, The sun and the moonthe Lord created after other suns and moons." And thisagrees with science. DEFINES EXISTENCE.Here I stand ;and if I shut my eyes and try to conceive my existence,I," I,"I,"what is the idea beforeme ? The idea of a body. Am I, then nothing but acombination of matter and material substances ? The