n a moment.
Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the effulgent, the
resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one whom you see. I
wish that every one of us had come to such a state that even when we
see the vilest of human beings we can see the God within, and instead
of condemning, say, 'Rise, thou effulgent One, rise thou who art always
pure, rise thou birthless and deathless, rise almighty, and manifest
your nature.' ... This is the highest prayer that the Advaita teaches.
This is the one prayer: remembering our nature."... "Why does man go
out to look for a God? ... It is your own heart beating, and you did
not know, you were mistaking it for something external. He, nearest of
the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body and my
soul.--I am Thee and Thou art Me. That is your own nature. Assert it,
manifest it. Not to become pure, you are pure already. You are not to
be perfect, you are that already. Every good thought which you think
or act upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the
Infinity, the God behind, manifests itself--the eternal Subject of
everything, the eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self.
Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation. We are It
already; how to know It?" Swami Viverananda: Addresses, No. XII.,
Practical Vedanta, part iv. pp. 172, 174, London, 1897; and Lectures,
The Real and the Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged.

Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific
revelations must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present
at least, decide that, since they corroborate incompatible theological
doctrines, they neutralize one another and leave no fixed results. If
we follow any one of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and
embrace monistic pantheism on non-mystical grounds, we do so in the
exercise of our individual freedom, and build out our religion in the
way most congruous with our personal susceptibilities. Among these
susceptibilities intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the
religious question is primarily a question of life, of living or not
living in the higher union which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the
spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will often
fail to be aroused in an individual until certain particular
intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come home to him, are
touched.[358] These ideas will thus be essential