— Swami Vivekananda, lectures on Vedanta, Complete Works
About this quote
हिन्दी में
अमरत्व उसी ने पा लिया है जिसे कोई भौतिक वस्तु विचलित नहीं कर पाती।
What it means
The exclusion is narrower than it first looks. He says disturbed by nothing material — not disturbed by nothing at all. Grief, or being moved by another person’s suffering, is not what the sentence rules out; what it rules out is being shaken by the arrival and departure of things.
Read carelessly it becomes a recommendation of numbness, and that is the common misuse. But the grammar is diagnostic, not aspirational: has reached is a test applied to a person already, in the past tense. It gives you a way to check a claim about someone — including one you are making about yourself — rather than a state to aim at.
What it teaches you
Use it as a measurement instead of a target for one week. Write down each material thing that actually moved your mood — a figure in an account, a delayed parcel, a neighbour’s new car, a phone that cracked. The list comes back short and repetitive, and its repetitiveness is the useful finding: you are not disturbed by the material world in general, you are disturbed by about four things in it.
अर्थ और सीख
ध्यान दीजिए कि निषेध सीमित है — कहा गया है भौतिक से विचलित न होना, हर बात से नहीं; किसी के दुख से द्रवित होना इसमें मना नहीं है, चीज़ों के आने-जाने से हिल जाना मना है। वाक्य की बनावट लक्ष्य की नहीं, जाँच की है — यह बताता है कि किसी के बारे में कैसे परखें, अपने बारे में भी। सीख यह है कि एक हफ़्ते नोट कीजिए कि किन भौतिक बातों ने सचमुच मन हिलाया — सूची छोटी और बार-बार दोहराई जाने वाली निकलेगी, और यही असली जानकारी है।
Where it comes from
Immortality redefined as imperturbability. Vivekananda is not describing a person who lives forever but one whom material events can no longer disturb — the Gita’s sthitaprajna, the one of steady wisdom, in plain English.
From his lectures on Vedanta in the Complete Works. The Gita’s own treatment is collected under The Gita on Meditation and the Mind.
