Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

SRI Ramakrishna represents spirituality at its absolute, its pristine fount and power. In him we find the pure gold of spirituality at a time when duplicity, perplexity, deceit and falsehood on the one hand and atheism, disbelief and irreverence on the other reigned supreme.

When spirituality had almost disappeared from the world and even in India it existed, as it were, merely in name, there was the advent of Sri Ramakrishna bringing with him spirituality in its sheer plenitude and investing it with eternal certitude and infallibility.

He proclaimed the quintessence of spirituality casting aside all husk and rejecting all that was irrelevant. Sri Ramakrishna is the very embodiment of this true and unadulterated spirituality.

The first word about spirituality is this that it is a clear realisation, an unveiled intuition of truth, God-attainment. It is not a mere concept or a doctrine or an intellectual conclusion, but a living experience, a concrete realisation. Philosophers and scholars are at pains to prove the existence of God and the Self with the help of reason, argumentation and syllogism. But it is ridiculous to try that way. You stand before me face to face. Yet should I try to prove your presence? Or to prove my own? Truth is self-existent. It is rear since it exists. The existence of God, the Self, is the truth of all truths and is axiomatic. It is a matter of experience, insight and intuition.

The spiritual world is as real as this physical world –

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even more real, Ramakrishna says. It is a different sphere of consciousness. One has to come up to this level to know of it and one has to settle here for good, leaving behind one's earthly dwelling. Not merely the field of action in life and not just one part of the being but the whole life and being have to be consecrated to the attainment of that only Goal. To know the Truth, the Self or God, one has first to realise them, one has to merge in them, one has to become these – as the Upanishad says, "Verily the knower of the Brahman becomes the Brahman Itself." The essential truth of spirituality consists not even in "doing" something but in this 'becoming'. Man manifests his inner soul through his actions. His external conduct reflects his inner becoming. In the words of Sri Ramakrishna, a man breathes out what he eats.

Perhaps we have a mission in the world, but before that we have to realise God. He alone has the right to act, and his deeds alone achieve fulfilment, who has been chosen and authorised by God. The spiritual practice of Sri Ramakrishna laid great stress on Yogic trance. It signifies that the outer mind should be withdrawn from all sense-attraction, not going out in all directions but focussed on the pure spiritual truth, like an arrow shot into its target.

What absurd ideas do we not cherish in the name of spirituality? Firstly, according to the common notion a spiritual figure, a Yogi, a sadhu is he who is endowed with some miraculous powers - as for instance, walking over water, flying in the sky, living without food or eating an enormous quantity, healing diseases at a puff of breath, telling the ins and outs of a man at sight or at the mere mention of his name. Any accomplishment of this kind commands our humble devotion. The eightfold occult powers are considered the very acme of spirituality. In Europe too the measure and the proof of a saint lie in miracles. Sri Ramakrishna's advent demonstrated the simple truth that miracles have nothing to do with spirituality; performing miracles.

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becomes rather an obstacle to spirituality, and it is a proof of the want of true spirituality. Such powers lead the aspirants astray from the straight path into blind alleys. The measure of spirituality is not the display of occult power but the attainment of discrimination, dispassion, devotion and love of God and such other well-known but eternal qualities.

On the other hand, spirituality does not consist in any doctrine whatsoever. Spirituality is not based on a credo or a mental deduction or a dogma. Real spirituality is not a rational conclusion, but a realisation in the heart and a direct intuition. A spiritual man may not express his realisations through a new doctrine or relate it to some already existing doctrines, but that will not in any way diminish his spirituality. Again many people hold that the observance of ceremonials and rites comprises spirituality; this too is far from the truth. The truth does not lie in any of these things. A spiritual aspirant may take their help if necessary, but the spiritual realisation is far above them and quite a different thing.

One thing is ever associated with the name of Sri Ramakrishna – it is the synthesis of all religions. He has synthesised all religions within him. By synthesis we usually mean finding out the essential principles of different religions and harmonising them. But Sri Ramakrishna's work was not of this type. Every religion leads to the same goal. However different and contradictory may appear the outer forms of spiritual disciplines, fundamentally each derives from the same source and culminates in the same Truth. Sri Ramakrishna has proved this unity and has brought about, so to say, a unification, not merely a union, of all religions.

Religions are at variance, not on the conception of God or spirituality, but when something else is adored in their name or in their stead. When we take some physical miracle or vital power or mental dogma as the object of our devotion, then we deviate from the true spiritual path and become worshippers of inferior gods or spirits of the lower

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order. The spiritual world, or God as He verily is, is beyond the domains of the body, life and mind. Further, transcending these there is a fourth realm and its truth and dharma alone constitute God-realisation and true spirituality.

Another very important characteristic distinguishing Ramakrishna is that he has taken spirituality in a simple, straight, common-sense view and has attained it in a very matter-of-fact way. He is generally depicted to a great extent as one who was rapt in a state of inwardness and devoid of external and worldly knowledge. Whatever his behaviour in the conduct of daily life, he was marvellously pragmatic in his inner consciousness and in the practice of his spiritual sadhana. Dogmatism, nebulous fantasy and sophistry eclipse the truth, the thing in itself, and in the place of truth a semblance of truth or something quite non-essential is interpolated. The amount of common sense that is needed for success in ordinary life is also equally required for victory in the domain of consciousness. Sri Ramakrishna was endowed with an inborn, alert, practical sense. So nothing could delude him in the name of spirituality and nothing could entrap him in any way. Moreover, by virtue of this quality he has brought about an immense reconciliation between the physical and the spiritual worlds. In a good many cases men, devoted too much to spirituality, are found to be inept in keeping up with the physical world or to respond to it adequately. Sri Ramakrishna is not to be classed among them. The ideal of Sri Ramakrishna would not admit stupidity as a qualification for saintliness.

Sri Ramakrishna's advent took place in a scientific age, in the world of modern civilisation, amid a deluge of atheism, when the physical consciousness was the dominating principle everywhere. He appeared before such a world in all his rusticity, for he was to demonstrate by the very example of his own life that the highest aim of human life is to find God, to find him dwelling in the heart. "Know Him alone and give up all thought and speech and act that are of no

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value." However great may be the external education and culture, there is something still higher before which all these dwindle into insignificance and even their complete absence does not matter at all if one gets at the one heart of all things.

So we see that an ultra-modern youth born and brought up in the atmosphere of modernism had to offer all the accomplishments of modern life at the feet of an artless, rustic soul, with the prayer, "I am thy disciple, deign to teach me." Further, inspired by his Master's unique power he, Vivekananda, threw himself, like a thunderbolt, upon that very country where modern civilisation had reached its acme. In Vivekananda modernism received the initiation of the supreme spirituality to become its instrument and servitor.

Sri Ramakrishna, at the very outset, proved in his own life the conquest of the inner over the outer, of Consciousness over Matter, of the spiritual over the mundane. And then he sought to impress that high truth on the life-plane of humanity. He sowed the seed of a new future creation. That is why he is the confluence of two epochs. The past ceases and the new future is ushered in him. He seems to have assimilated the essence of all the different spiritual practices of the past and discarded as husk and skin all the non-essentials which vary according to the variations of time and place and person. He brought forward and revived for the future the real truth, the quintessence of spirituality, which means also the supreme felicity. The fundamental nature of the spiritual perfection of Sri Ramakrishna consists in the realisation of God in his Absoluteness. He exemplified, philosophically speaking, the unity and synthesis of the Self and Nature, existence and power, the immutable and its dynamis. He used to say that the Eternal and its manifestation .always go together. The Transcendent is inherent in the manifest; again, the manifest is inherent in the Transcendent. Ascend to the Eternal through the stages of the manifestation and come down from the Eternal into its manifestation – its creation which should not be looked

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upon as an illusion but only as a form of the Eternal. Therefore Sri Ramakrishna was the worshipper of the Divine Power, the child of the Mother. The Mother herself is the Power of the Brahman.

The dynamic Vedanta of Vivekananda, its application in life, is based on this foundation. Spirituality and life are not two separate things – spirituality should be established and made to flower and bloom in life itself. This great truth always inspired Vivekananda in all his activities. Before the advent of Sri Ramakrishna the word "religion" or "spirituality" used to convey an otherworldly pursuit to the aspirant and to the public as well. Wherever there was some real spiritual practice, the aim and the impulse naturally tended to illustrate the dictum that Brahman alone is the truth and the world an illusion. Sri Ramakrishna shook to its roots the then prevailing conception of illusionism when he made the great Vedantin Totapuri give up the negative path, "Brahman is not this, not this", and accept all this too as Brahman. He further showed Totapuri the glory of the Mother of the universe. Vivekananda seized upon this fundamental realisation of Sri Ramakrishna to turn the tide of religion. His endeavour was to bring down religion or spirituality on the surface of the earth, into normal society and into the ordinary ways of life-activities. Sri Ramakrishna was a genuine Sannyasin at heart but he had never appeared in the garb of a Sannyasin. Vivekananda in spite of his hoisting up the banner of a Sannyasin was a mighty worker in his heart and conduct. He was a worker, but inwardly in communion with the spirit. No doubt, Sri Ramakrishna laid great stress on Samadhi, trance, for the achievement of the unalloyed, pure spiritual truth, but he never accepted the Nirvikalpa Samadhi as the sole self-sufficing goal for all or even for the many. He did not want, personally, to melt away as a salt-doll in the ocean. Like Ramprasad he would rather not become a lump of sugar but taste it instead. The aim of his dynamic personality

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was to purify and transform the egoistic 'I' into the real ‘I’, and take part in the play of the Divine Mother in her creation.

The future spiritual realisation will follow this line of development; all efforts will seek to make this great realisation still more manifest, widely established and universally practised. Sri Ramakrishna opened this immortalising fount of true spirituality and Vivekananda spread it abroad to create a living spiritual atmosphere. The spiritual leader of the future will fix for ever its concrete and permanent form.

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