Raja Yoga

A chemist does not ask you to take her results on faith. She tells you what she did, and anyone with the same substances and the same patience can do it again and see. That is why, Vivekananda says, the exact sciences can settle their arguments: they rest on an experience common to everyone.

He opens his New York lectures by putting religion to the same test. Does it have a basis like that, something any human being could check? Or is it only a set of claims you accept because someone asserted them?

His answer is deliberately awkward: both yes and no. The rest of the book hangs on why it is both.

The no first. Religion as most people meet it is a bundle of theories held on belief. One man says a great Being sits above the clouds and asks you to accept it on his word alone. Ask for a reason and there is none to give. That, Vivekananda says, is exactly why the religions quarrel: there is no standard to judge between them.

Now the yes. Go back to the fountain head of any religion and the belief turns into something else. Christ said he saw God. The Buddha experienced certain truths and preached what he had seen. The Hindu sages declare they perceived what they wrote down.

So every religion was built on the same foundation as chemistry: direct experience. Somebody saw. The believing came later, among the people who had not.

What does Vivekananda say lies at the source of every religion?

• A theory about God the founders reasoned their way to
• A moral code meant to turn people into good citizens
• A revelation given once, which later believers must simply accept
• The direct experience of the teachers who founded it✓Correct answer

He points to Christ, the Buddha and the Hindu sages: each claimed to have seen or felt what they taught. Belief belongs to the followers; the founders were reporting experience, not handing down a theory or a code.

Here is the move most modern religions make, and the one Vivekananda refuses. Yes, the argument goes, the founders had those experiences, but such things were possible only for them. Today they are obsolete, so the rest of us must take religion on belief.

"This I entirely deny," he says. If a thing has been experienced once, it has been possible before and will be possible again, because what once happened can happen always. Uniformity, he says, is the rigorous law of nature, and it makes no exception for prophets.

That turns religion from an inheritance into a standing invitation. By the yogis' standard, no one is religious until he has the same perceptions himself, and yoga is simply the name for the method of getting them. Not a creed, then, but a procedure.

He pushes this further than his audience probably expected. "What right has a man to say he has a soul if he does not feel it?" If you have not perceived it, he says, it is better not to believe: better an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite.

He is just as unimpressed by the polite middle position, that religion has no real basis but is useful, because people who believe in God tend to behave. To him that is asking people to live on words, and he says he would think less of human nature if they could.

What a person actually wants is truth she has grasped and felt in her own heart. Anything less leaves the doubts exactly where they were.

Vivekananda says a person who has never perceived God does better to say so openly than to profess belief in Him.

True✓Correct answer

He puts it bluntly: it is better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite. Belief without perception is exactly what the method is meant to replace, so honest doubt is a better starting point than borrowed conviction.