Who Am I?’ In his famous paper on Hinduism presented at the
World Parliament of Religions in 1893, Swami Vivekananda raised this issue thus:
Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my
existence, ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’, what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I,
then, nothing but a combination of material substances?
The Vedas declare, ‘No’. I am a spirit living in a body. I
am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this
body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was
not created, for creation means a combination which means a certain future
dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. . . . [which is
absurd].
The Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot
pierce—him the fire cannot burn —him the water cannot melt—him the air cannot
dry.
The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose
circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that
death means the change of this centre from body to body. Nor is the soul bound
by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free, unbounded, holy,
pure, and perfect.
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