VEDANTIC SCIENCE IN THE EYES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

Swami Vivekananda, the renowned student of the spiritual master Sri Ramakrishna, was the first great Hindu teacher to bring the message of the East, Vedanta, to the western world. Vivekananda was a true renaissance figure, a spiritual and intellectual giant of his time. He embodied the best of East and West in his spiritual values and personal character.

One of the characteristic features of his lectures on religion and spirituality was a striking balance between Western science and Eastern philosophy. He created a synthesis between the emerging modern science of his time and eastern Vedantic philosophy. Religion was on the defensive in the face of reason and technological progress when Vivekananda started his spiritual career. Science and technology claimed that material prosperity was the only goal for humanity. To combat this onslaught of science and technology on religion and spirituality, Vivekananda entered the arena as the great disciple of the spiritual leader, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. He brilliantly emphasized the fact that science and spirituality are not contradictory to each other but complimentary, and both are but two sides of one and the same coin, Truth.

 In his attempt to reconcile western science and Vedanta he tried to show that the religious way of looking at the Universe was not unscientific.  He showed that the fundamental principles by which all scientific enquiries proceed are also satisfied by Advaita Vedanta. First the particular is explained by the general, the general by the more general, till the universal is reached. Second, the explanation of a thing must come from within the thing itself, and not from outside. Swami Vivekananda was also one of the first Eastern teachers to grapple with Darwin’s evolutionary theory. He formulated a Hindu philosophy that sought to embrace the emerging evolutionary world view of the Western scientific community. He vehemently argued that the effect is nothing but the cause in another form. “The seed is the form out of which the big tree comes and another big tree was the form which is involved in that seed. The little cell, which afterwards becomes the man, was simply the involved man and becomes evolved as a man”. He, through his brilliant logic and reasoning, showed that the creation is in effect the evolution, and not creation of something from nothing. Through evolution, the One becomes many.

The third principle or conclusion of science which tallies with Vedanta is the essential unity of things, the unity in diversity. Swami Vivekananda showed that we are all one, mentally, physically and spiritually, a conclusion the modern sub-atomic physicists arrived at almost half a century later. Through a brilliant exposition of ‘Sankhya Cosmology’ Swami Vivekananda emphasized the necessity of harmonising the internal and external experiences. He said that knowledge from the internal experiences (Microcosm) must bear testimony with the knowledge gained through external experiences (Macrocosm). He thundered...........”Physical truth must have its counterpart in the internal world and the internal world must have its verification in the outside.”  Swami Vivekananda showed that like any other science, religion also has its own methods and procedures, its own promises and conclusions based on reason and experience.

Swami Vivekananda was also critical of the physical and evolutionary sciences. According to him any system or philosophy based purely on materialistic and utilitarian ideas was inadequate to explain the whole of human existence. These sciences are inadequate to provide answers to all our problems. Vivekananda considered the theory of evolution incomplete. He believed that the process of evolution presupposed a process of involution. A machine gives only that much energy that is put into it.  He supposed that if a man is an evolution from a lower organism then the perfect man, the Buddha man, the Christ man, must be present in the lower organism. Of course, the science of Genetics was not there at the time of Swami Vivekananda, and the mechanism of inheritance and nature of hereditary material were unknown at that time. However, Swami Vivekananda saw the theory of evolution, which revolutionized the world, not as a threat to the spiritual world, but as an opportunity to enrich our understanding of the movement of spirit in all aspects of the material world.

Living just decades after Darwin published “The Origin of Species” Vivekananda was well versed in Western science and philosophy. He perceived no inherent contradiction between an evolutionary cosmos and the great tradition of Indian Vedanta. He was truly a Vedantic Scientist.