Raja Yoga (the Yoga Sūtras with commentary) — trans. Swami Vivekananda (1896)

INTRODUCTION.

hate anybody, because that force, that hatred, which comes out from you, must, in the long run, come back to you. If you love, that love will come back to you, completing the circuit. It is as certain as can be, that every bit of hatred that goes out of the heart of man comes back to him in full force ; nothing can stop it, and every impulse of love comes back to him. On other and practical grounds we see that the theory of eternal progression is untenable, for destruction is the goal of everything earthly. All our struggles and hopes and fears and joys, what will they lead to ? We will all end in death. Nothing is so certain as this. Where, then, is this motion in a straight line ? This infinite progression ? It is only going out to a distance, and again coming back to the centre from which it started. See how, from nebulae, the sun, moon, and stars, are produced ; then they dissolve, and go back to nebulae. The same is being done everywhere. The plant takes material from the earth, dissolves, and gives it back. Every form in this world is taken out of surrounding atoms and goes back to these atoms.

It cannot be that the same law acts differently in different places. Law is uniform. Nothing is more certain than that. If this is the law of nature, so it is with thought ; it will dissolve and come back to its origin ; whether we will it or not we shall have to return to the origin, which is called God or Absolute. We all came from God, and we are all bound to go to God, call that God by any name you like ; call Him God, or

G

g8 RAJA YOGA.

Absolute or Nature, or by any hundred names you like, the fact remains the same. " From whom all this universe comes out, in whom all that is born lives, and to whom all returns." This is one fact that is certain. Nature works on the same plan ; what is being worked out in one sphere is being worked out in millions of spheres. What you see with the planets, the same will it be with this earth, with men and with the stars. The huge wave is a mighty compound of small waves, it may be of millions ; the life of the whole world is a compound of millions of little lives, and the death of the whole world is the compound of the deaths of these millions of little beings.

Now the question arises, is going back to God the higher state, or is it not ? The philosophers of the Yoga school emphatically answer that it is. They say that man's present state is a degeneration ; there is no one religion on the face of the earth which says that man is an improvement. The idea is that his beginning is perfect and pure, that he degenerates until he cannot degenerate further, and that there must come a time when he shoots upward again to complete the circle ; the circle must be there. However low he goes, he must ultimately take the upward bend again, and go back to the original source, which is God. Man comes from God in the beginning, in the middle he becomes man, and in the end he goes back to God. This is the method of putting it in the Dualistic form. In the Monistic form you say that man is God, and goes back

INTRODUCTION.