One Truth in All Religions

I was deeply sceptical of religions until I came across a book lying around my house as a teenager. It was called Raja Yoga by a famous Bengali sage called Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). Here are some excerpts that captivated me and stirred up my interest in Eastern Spirituality.

‘In the first place I will ask you to analyse all the various religions of the world… in all of them we find one consensus of opinion, that the truths they teach are the results of the experiences of particular persons… if you go to the fountain head of Christianity you will find that it is based upon experience. Christ said He saw God; the disciples said they felt God; and so forth. Similarly, in Buddhism, it is Buddha’s experience—He experienced certain truths, saw them, came in contact with them, and preached them to the world. So with the Hindus—in their book the writers, who are called Rishis, or sages, declare that they have experienced certain truths, and these they preach. Thus it is clear that all the religions of the world have been built upon that one universal and adamantine foundation of all our knowledge—direct experience. The teachers all saw God; they all saw their own souls, they saw their eternity, they saw their future, and they saw what they preached.

‘Only there is this difference, that in most of these religions, especially in modern times, a peculiar claim is put before us, and that claim is that these experiences are impossible at the present day; they were only possible with a few men, who were the first founders of the religions that subsequently bore their names. At the present time these experiences have become obsolete, and therefore we have now to take religion on belief. This I entirely deny.’

‘What right has a man to say he has a soul if he does not feel it, or that there is a God if he does not see Him? If there is a God we must see Him, if there is a soul we must perceive it; otherwise it is better not to believe.’

‘…we see that in the study of this Raja Yoga no faith or belief is necessary. Believe nothing, until you find it out for yourself; that is what it teaches us. Truth requires no prop to make it stand. Do you mean to say that the facts of our awakened state require any dreams or imaginings to prove them? Certainly not.’