Practical Vedanta

Practical Vedantamoment of our lives, in every one of our actions, to discriminate between what isright and wrong, true and false, we shall have to know the test of truth, which ispurity, oneness. Everything that makes for oneness is truth. Love is truth, andhatred is false, because hatred makes for multiplicity. It is hatred that separatesman from man; therefore it is wrong and false. It is a disintegrating power; itseparates and destroys.Love binds, love makes for that oneness. You become one, the mother with thechild, families with the city, the whole world becomes one with the animals. Forlove is Existence, God Himself; and all this is the manifestation of that One Love,more or less expressed. The difference is only in degree, but it is the manifestationof that One Love throughout. Therefore in all our actions we have to judgewhether it is making for diversity or for oneness. If for diversity we have to give itup, but if it makes for oneness we are sure it is good. So with our thoughts; wehave to decide whether they make for disintegration, multiplicity, or for oneness,binding soul to soul and bringing one influence to bear. If they do this, we willtake them up, and if not, we will throw them off as criminal.The whole idea of ethics is that it does not depend on anything unknowable, itdoes not teach anything unknown, but in the language of the Upanishad, "The Godwhom you worship as an unknown God, the same I preach unto thee." It is throughthe Self that you know anything. I see the chair; but to see the chair, I have first toperceive myself and then the chair. It is in and through the Self that the chair isperceived. It is in and through the Self that you are known to me, that the wholeworld is known to me; and therefore to say this Self is unknown is sheer nonsense.Take off the Self and the whole universe vanishes. In and through the Self allknowledge comes. Therefore it is the best known of all. It is yourself, that whichyou call I. You may wonder how this I of me can be the I of you. You may wonderhow this limited I can be the unlimited Infinite, but it is so. The limited is a merefiction. The Infinite has been covered up, as it were, and a little of It is manifestingas the I. Limitation can never come upon the unlimited; it is a fiction. The Self isknown, therefore, to every one of us — man, woman, or child — and even toanimals. Without knowing Him we can neither live nor move, nor have our being;without knowing this Lord of all, we cannot breathe or live a second. The God ofthe Vedanta is the most known of all and is not the outcome of imagination.If this is not preaching a practical God, how else could you teach a practical God?Where is there a more practical God than He whom I see before me — a Godomnipresent, in every being, more real than our senses? For you are He, theOmnipresent God Almighty, the Soul of your souls, and if I say you are not, I tellan untruth. I know it, whether at all times I realise it or not. He is the Oneness, theUnity of all, the Reality of all life and all existence.These ideas of the ethics of Vedanta have to be worked out in detail, and,therefore, you must have patience. As I have told you, we want to take the subjectin detail and work it up thoroughly, to see how the ideas grow from very lowideals, and how the one great Ideal of oneness has developed and become shapedfile:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Chitra%20Selvar...ooksBySwami/PracticalVedanta/PracticalVedantaPDF.html (9 of 113)2/26/2007 12:24:33 AM