Home / Complete-Works / Volume 9 / Newspaper Reports / American Newspaper Reports /
[Los Angeles Herald, December 13, 1899]
———
Swami Vivekananda’s lecture before the Academy of
Sciences
———
Unity church was filled last evening with a large audience to hear the Swami Vivekananda, a native of India, lecture on the kosmos, or the Veda conception of the universe (This was Swami Vivekananda’s second lecture in California, entitled “The Cosmos, or the Veda Conception of the Universe”, of which there is no verbatim transcript available. Cf. the Swami’s two New York lectures on the Cosmos delivered in 1896 in Complete Works, II (“The Cosmos: The Macrocosm” and “The Cosmos: The Microcosm” ).) under the auspices of the Southern California Academy of Sciences. . . .
In introducing his subject the speaker reviewed the mythology of the flood, which among the Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians and other races is similar to the story of the Hebrew scriptures, showing that all held a similar belief concerning the creation of the universe.
In the worship of the sun and the forces of nature, we see the attempts
of ancient peoples to explain the mysteries surrounding them. Man’s
first idea of force was himself. When a stone fell he saw no force in it
but the will behind it, and he conceived the idea that the whole
universe was moved by force of wills. Gradually these wills became one,
and science begins to rise. Gods begin to vanish, and in their place
comes oneness, and now God is in danger of being dethroned by modern
science. Science wants to explain things by their own nature and make
the universe self-sufficient.
Wills gradually began to disappear, and in their place comes will. This
was the process of development in all the nations of the world, and so
it was in India. Their ideas and gods were pretty much the same as those
of other lands, only in India they did not stop there. They learned that
life alone can produce life, and that death can never produce life. In
our speculations about God we have got to monotheism. Everywhere else
speculation stops there; we make it the be all and end all of
everything, but in India it does not stop there. A gigantic will can not
explain all this phenomena we see around us. Even in man there is
something back of the will. In so common sense a thing as the
circulation of the blood, we find will is not the motive power.
We have conceived God as a person like ourselves, only infinitely
greater, and because there is goodness and mercy and happiness in the
world there must be a being possessing these attributes, but there is
also evil. The Hindu mind is too philosophical to admit the existence of
two gods, one good and one bad. India remained true to the idea of
unity. What is evil to me may be good to someone else; what is good to
me may be evil to others. We are all links in a chain. Hence comes the
speculation of the Upanishads, the religion of 300,000,000 of the human
race. Nature is a unit; unity is in all existence, and God is the same
as nature. This is one of the Indian speculations known to all the world
outside of India.
There is not a system of religion or philosophy in the world that does
not show the influence of India’s speculation, even to the Catholic
church. The conservation of energy, considered a new discovery, has been
known there by the name of father [Prāna?]. Whatever is comes from the
father. Brahma [Prana?] must energize on something, and that they say
is an invisible ether. Brahma [Prana?] vibrating on ether, the solid,
the liquid, the luminous, it is all the same ether. The potentiality of
everything is there. In the beginning of the next period Brahma
[Prana?] will begin to vibrate more and more.
Thus this speculation of India’s scriptures is very similar to modern
science. The same idea is taken up by modern evolution. Even our bodies,
different only in dignity, are links in the same chain. In one
individual the possibilities of every other individual are there. The
living entity contains the possibility of all life, but can only express
that which environment demands. The most wonderful speculations are
formed in modern science. The one that interests me as a preacher of
religion is the oneness of all religions [life?]. When Herbert
Spencer’s voice says that the same life welling up in the plant is the
life welling up in the individual, the Indian religion has found a voice
in the nineteenth century.