"He now began to look upon the image of the goddess Kālī as his Mother and the Mother of the universe. He believed it to be living and breathing and taking food out of his hand. After the regular forms of worship he would sit there for hours and hours, singing hymns and talking and praying to her as a child to his mother, till he lost all consciousness of the outward world. Sometimes he would weep for hours, and would not be comforted, because he could not see his Mother as perfectly as he wished. People became divided in their opinions regarding him. Some held the young priest to be mad, and some took him to be a great lover of God, and all this outward madness as the manifestation of that love."
"If Ramakrishna had only left humanity the vision of the all-unifying Motherhood of God and the direct path to her, he would have permanently changed the religious history.
But through the divine agency of his disciple M he did something even more astonishing: he left us, in M’s pages, a permanent and excruciatingly beautiful image of the life that abandon to the Mother brings. The ecstatic and lucid being that haunts the pages of M’s Gospel is someone who has fused at ever-increasing depths of sacred truth, and passion, all possible human and divine opposites, masculine and feminine, to birth in himself the sacred Divine Child, and to manifest the miraculous powers of clarity and rapture that dance and keep dancing from such a birth. M’s Ramakrishna is at once intensely human and divine, at once childlike and innocent and wise-majestic. No realm of vision is closed to him; no secret does not stand open to his gaze, and no tenderness is beneath him. He is as much his divine self laughing with his heart-friends on a boat or at a supper party as he is drowned in silence or speaking with divinely inspired clarity the essential truths of the path.
There is a description of Ramakrishna dancing by Swami Saradananda that perfectly captures the mystery of his infinitely subtle negotiation and marriage of all levels of reality: “An extraordinary tenderness, sweetness and leonine strength were visible in every limb of the Master’s body. That superb dance! In it there was no artificiality or affectation, no bumping, no unnatural gestures and acrobatics; nor was there to be noticed any absence of control. On the other hand, one noticed in it a succession of natural poses and movements of limbs as a gushing overflow of grace, bliss and sweetness surging from within, the like of which may be noticed in the movements of a large fish, long confined in a mud puddle when it is suddenly let loose in a vast sheet of water—swimming in all directions, now slowly, now rapidly, and expressing its joy in diverse ways. It appeared as if the dance was the dynamically bodily expression of the surge of bliss, the reality of Brahman, which the Master was experiencing within”( 2: 801).
If we do not embody this dance of the Mother, with “extraordinary tenderness, sweetness and leonine strength”at all levels and in all institutions, the world will die out. In the sublime interconnected dance of Ramakrishna’s teachings, life and vision, we are given the music we need to move to, a vision of the divine choreography that we need to reimagine for our own lives, and an eternal sign of the power of her love in us that can transform, endure, and transfigure all things.
In the unabridged version of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Master describes the passion that grew in him after his experience of the Mother was complete and he could share its wonders with others: “When, during the evening service, the temples rang with the sound of bells and conch shells, I would climb to the roof of the kuthi [the bungalow] of the garden and, writhing in anguish of heart, cry at the top of my voice ‘Come my children! Oh, where are you? I cannot bear to live without you!’A mother never longed so intensely for the sight of her child, nor a friend for his companions, nor a lover for his sweetheart, as I longed for them.”
Ramakrishna is still crying out to us from the heart of the Mother. On how many of us, and how deeply we respond to him and his example, will depend a good part of our survival..."
-- Andrew Harvey
Photos - Ramakrishna in Samadhi
- Kali Goddess in Dakshineswar
- Mahendra Nath Gupta, devotee of Sri Ramakrishna
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