THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS JNANAM - 4. SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

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28/02/2020.
[A Jnana-Yogam class delivered in New York, Wednesday, December 11, 1895, and recorded by Swami Kripananda]
Post-4.
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1.

#A simply hereditary transmission theory will only touch the physical man and would be perfectly insufficient for the internal soul of man.

##Even when looking upon the matter from the purest materialistic standpoint — viz. that there is no such thing as a soul in man, and man is nothing but a bundle of atoms acted upon by certain physical forces and works like an automaton — even taking that for granted, the mere transmission theory would be quite insufficient.
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2.

#The greatest difficulties regarding the simple hypothesis of mere physical transmission will be here : 

##If there be no such thing as a soul in man, if he be nothing more than a bundle of atoms acted upon by certain forces, then, in the case of transmission, the soul of the father would decrease in ratio to the number of his children; and the man who has five, six or eight children must, in the end, become an idiot. India and China — where men breed like rats — would then be full of idiots. But, on the contrary, we find that the least amount of lunacy is in India and China.
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3.

#The question is, What do we mean by the word transmission? 

##It is a big word, but, like so many other impossible and nonsensical terms of the same kind, it has come into use without people understanding it. If I were to ask you what transmission is, you would find that you have no real conception of its meaning because there is no idea attached to it.
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4.

*Let us look a little closer into the matter. Say, for instance, here is a father. 

*A child is born to him. 

*We see that the same qualities [which the father possesses] have entered into his child. 

*Very good. Now how did the qualities of the father come to be in the child? 

*Nobody knows. 

#So this gap the modern physicists want to fill with the big word transmission. 

##And what does this transmission mean? 

**Nobody knows.
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To be continued ....

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