Tag Archives: opposition

Swami Vivekenanda on Universal Truth

This quote from Swami Vivekenanda seems very fresh today, over 100 years after he stated it. It’s a good example of how the opposition aspect works constructively in astrology:

Any attempt to bring all humanity to one method of thinking in spiritual things has been a failure and always will be a failure. You cannot make all conform to the same ideas. If you and I were to think exactly the same thoughts, there would be no thoughts for us to think. We know that two or more forces must come into collision in order to produce motion. It is the clash of thought, the differentiation of thought, that awakens thought. Whirls and eddies occur only in a rushing, living stream. There are no whirlpools in stagnant, dead water.

Every religion has a soul behind it, and that soul may differ from the soul of another religion; but are they contradictory? Do they contradict or supplement each other?

I took up this question when I was quite a boy, and have been studying it all my life. I believe that they are not contradictory; they are supplementary. Each religion takes up one part of the great universal truth and spreads its whole force in embodying and typifying that part of the great truth. It is therefore addition, not exclusion. System after system arises, each one embodying a great ideal; ideals must be added to ideals. And this is how humanity marches on.

– from a lecture at the Universalist Church, Pasadena, California, January 28, 1900