To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here.
Perfect equilibrium, or what the Christians call the peace that surpasses all understanding, cannot be had in this universe, not in heaven, nor in any place where our mind and thoughts can go, where the senses can feel, or which the imagination can conceive. No such place can give us that freedom, because all such places would be within our universe, and it is limited by space, time, and causation. There may be places that are more ethereal than this earth of ours, where enjoyments may be keener, but even those places must be in the universe, and therefore in bondage to law; so we have to go beyond, and real religion begins where this little universe ends. These little joys and sorrows and knowledge of things end there, and the reality begins. Until we give up the thirst after life, the strong attachment to this our transient, conditioned existence, we have no hope of catching even a glimpse of that infinite freedom beyond. It stands to reason, then, that there is only one way to attain that freedom which is the goal of all the noblest aspirations of mankind, and that is by giving up this little life, giving up this little universe, giving up this earth, giving up heaven, giving up the body, giving up the mind, giving up everything that is limited and conditioned. If we give up our attachment to this little universe of the senses, or of the mind, we shall be free immediately. The only way to come out of bondage is to go beyond the limitations of law, to go beyond causation.
Everyone must work in the universe. Only those who are perfectly satisfied with the self, whose desires do not go beyond the self, whose mind never strays out of the self, to whom the self is all in all, only those do not work. The rest must work. A current rushing down of its own nature falls into a hollow and makes a whirlpool, and after running a little in that whirlpool, it emerges again to go on unchecked. Each human life is like that current. It gets into the whirl, gets involved in this world of space, time, and causation, whirls around a little, crying out “my father, my brother, my name, my fame,” and so on, and at last emerges out of it and regains its original freedom. The whole universe is doing that. Whether we know it or not, whether we are conscious or unconscious of it, we are all working to get out of the dream of the world. Man’s experience in the world is to enable him to get out of its whirlpool.
We see that the whole universe is working. For what? For salvation, for liberty; from the atom to the highest being, working for the one end—liberty for the mind, for the body, for the spirit. All things are always trying to get freedom, flying away from bondage. The sun, the moon, the earth, the planets, all are trying to fly away from bondage.
From Karma Yoga. Born in 1863 to an upper-middle-class Bengali family, Vivekananda traveled to the United States in 1893 to participate in the World’s Parliament of Religions as a spokesperson for Hinduism. After arriving in the country, he met Katherine Sanborn, a poet and lecturer who, impressed by his “lordly, imposing stride, as if he ruled the universe,” invited him to her farmhouse in Massachusetts before the conference. “If anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart,” Vivekananda said at the conference.
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