For Elocution Class: Swami Vivekananada's Speech

HOW TO GET RID OF PROBLEMS

Part of the Paper on Hinduism (Part VII) at Chicago’s World Parliament of Religions 

Date: Sept 27, 1893

Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and from at the mercy of good and bad actions – a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect – a little moth placed under the wheel of causation, which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears or the orphans cry?

The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape? – was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings:

“Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! Even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the ‘Ancient One’, who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again.

‘Children of immortal bliss’ – what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you  bretheren, by that sweet name – heirs of immortal bliss – yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. We are the children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on Earth – sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One, ‘by whose command, the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain and death stalks upon the Earth’