Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are taking
one of the most towering and frankly mysterious
figures in modern spiritual history, Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa, and we're just going to lay all
the sources out on the table. And our mission
here is to get a really deep immersion into the
life of this 19th century Hindu mystic. This
is a man, born Ramakrishna Chattopadhyay, who
many to this day still revere as an avatar, as
a divine incarnation. Right. And we're not just
doing a simple biography. We're really dissecting
the life of a man who somehow synthesized the
world's spiritual paths. And not through, you
know, academic study, but through direct, personal
and often incredibly demanding experiments. The
sources cover everything. I mean, from his childhood
in a poor village all the way up to him becoming
the central figure in what we call the Bengali
Renaissance. What's so fascinating to me right
from the start is how the source material frames
him. He's not just a holy man. No, not at all.
They call him a spiritual scientist. And his
core teaching, the hypothesis he spent his whole
life testing, was this idea of the essential
unity of all religions. And it's so much more
than just tolerance, isn't it? He wasn't just
saying, you know, let's all get along. Exactly.
He was demonstrating that if you follow any of
these paths with absolute rigor, they lead to
the exact same destination. Okay, let's unpack
that right now because that is such a radical
claim. It's a claim of universal validity based
on his own, you know, lived experience. It is.
And the most famous way he explained it was with
his analogy of the lake. He said, God is one,
but we have all these different names. Krishna,
Shiva, Jesus, Allah. The lake with the multiple
ghats. The very same. A ghat, for anyone who
doesn't know, is just a set of steps leading
down to the water. So Ramakrishna paints this
picture of a huge cosmic lake with many of these
ghats. Okay. At one ghat, he says, the Hindus
come down with their pots, and they draw water
and call it Jal. At another, the Muslims come,
maybe with their leather bags, and they call
it Tani. And Christians call it water. Precisely.
And he asks this incredibly simple, powerful
question. Can we imagine that it's not Jal, but
only Pani or water? How ridiculous. The substance
is one. The substance is one. The paths, the
names, the cultures are all different. But what
you're seeking, that spiritual substance, is
identical. So the goal for you, our listener,
as we dive in, is to really get to the bottom
of how. How could one man genuinely realize God,
not just through Hinduism, but through Islam
and through Christianity? And what does that
tell us about spiritual seeking itself? We're
going beyond the metaphor and right into his
method. Yeah. All right. So to begin, we have
to go back to his very foundations. Kamar Pukor,
Bengal, 1836. The sources paint this picture
of a very poor but deeply, deeply pious Brahmin
family. And that background is absolutely essential.
Ramakrishna or Gadara, that was his childhood
nickname, was the youngest of four. His father
was Kudiram Chhatpatthaya. His mother turned
Ramani Devi. And their whole life revolved around
their family deity, Suragubir, which is a form
of Rama. The piety was baked in, but so was the
poverty. And right from the very beginning, the
sources suggest something unusual about his birth.
There are these supernatural visions woven into
the story. Oh, absolutely. The biographies say
his father, Kudiram, had a dream that... Hagavan
Gadahara, a foam of Vishnu, told him he would
be born as his son. Okay, wow. And even more
dramatically, his mother reported having a vision
at a Shiva temple. She saw a light emerge from
a sacred lingam and enter her womb. So from day
one, his family and his community saw him as
someone with a profound spiritual destiny. Let's
talk about his education or I guess his lack
of it, because this is where we see his early,
almost radical rejection of the way things were
done. He had practically no formal schooling.
He spoke a rustic, ungrammatical Bengali. He
did learn to read and write, but he absolutely
hated arithmetic, just detested it. So his intelligence
wasn't, you know. Not at all. It was aesthetic.
It was perceptive. He was brilliant at making
clay images, at acting in village plays, at painting.
And he just soaked up the great epics, the Ramayana
and the Mahabharata. And he saw that formal education
as being corrupting. He did. He looked at the
learned scholars who were all chasing wealth.
And then he looked at his own father, who was
so righteous and detached. For Ramakrishna, breadwinning
education, as he called it, was just a trap.
It was about ego, about getting ahead. And he
saw it as a complete detour from the real purpose
of life. And that defiance comes out in some
amazing stories, like the one about the weaver
woman. Oh, that's a perfect example. There was
this local trader, Durgadas Pine, who enforced
strict... Berta, you know, the seclusion of women.
And he was very critical of women coming to hear
Ramakrishna recite the Puranas. And Ramakrishna's
argument was that real protection comes from
devotion, not from locking people up. Exactly.
So when this traitor boasted that no one could
get into his inner apartments, Ramakrishna took
it as a challenge. He disguised himself so perfectly
as a weaver woman that he fooled the entire household,
including the traitor himself. And he got inside.
He got inside. And he used the opportunity to
give the confined women access to his recitals.
It just shows you his sharp mind, his flair for
the dramatic, and this willingness to break any
social rule. for a higher spiritual goal. Which
sets the stage perfectly for his first big mystical
experience. This happened when he was about 10
or 11. It's an incredible story. He's just walking
through a paddy field, eating some puffed rice
from a basket. He looks up at the sky. And he
sees this flock of pure white cranes flying against
this backdrop of a dark, heavy rain cloud. Such
a simple image. A simple image that just... detonated
something inside him he said he was completely
overwhelmed he lost all external awareness and
he just collapsed the rice went everywhere he
was just consumed by this vision of light and
pure joy and his followers they immediately called
this samadhi they did samadhi this state of deep
meditative consciousness but this is also where
that tension begins the one that follows him
his whole life the spiritual versus the clinical
interpretation Exactly. Later on, more naturalistic
scholars would look at this and say, well, maybe
it was a dissociative trance or even a form of
epilepsy. And we have to hold both those possibilities
as we go through the sources. Is this divine
grace or is it a unique neurology? Right. Either
way, that experience marked him for life. After
his father died, things got worse financially,
which is what brings him to Calcutta in 1852.
And this leads him to the single most important
place in his entire life, the Dakshinswar Kali
Temple. A temple founded by Rani Razmani. She
was this incredibly powerful, wealthy widow and
a passionate devotee of the goddess Kali. But
crucially, she was not a Brahmin. And in the
rigid caste system of the time, that was a huge
problem. A massive problem. The Orthodox Brahmins
refused to serve as priests or even accept offerings
at a temple consecrated by a non -Brahmin. It
would have made the whole project invalid. So
Ramakrishna's older brother, Ramkumar, finds
a workaround. A clever one. He finds a scriptural
loophole. That says the Rani can gift the temple
property to a Brahmin who can then install the
deity. And that's what they did. Ramkumar became
the priest. And then Ramkumar dies in 1856 and
the role falls to Ramakrishna. And ironically,
he initially refused. He was a Brahmin and he
felt this deep conflict about working for a patron
of a lower caste. So he has this ingrained caste
pride, but then he does the most radical thing
imaginable to destroy it. He performs the ultimate
act of ego annihilation. To conquer his own pride,
he would go into the quarters of the untouchables,
the temple scavengers, and he would clean their
latrines. With his hands. With his hands and
famously with his long hair. Using his own hair,
the symbol of his bromenical status. Yes. It
was a shocking, profound act designed to shatter
the internal walls of shame, pride, and ego.
He believed you couldn't even begin to seek God
if you were still trapped by those ideas of pure
and impure. This was his preparation for the
fire that was coming. That act of cleansing his
ego seems like it was the necessary first step
for what came next. This incredibly intense,
almost agonizing devotion to Kali. After seeing
some deaths in his family, he became obsessed
with life's impermanence. And his longing for
a direct vision of Kali just consumed him. It
went way beyond simple prayer. He would cry at
sunset. Openly, yes. He'd cry out, Mother, another
day is gone, and still I have not seen you. He
was in this constant state of questioning, Are
you real, mother? Or am I just mad? Is this all
just poetry? The internal pressure must have
been enormous. And in his quest, he literally
had to cast off his social identity. He did.
When he went to meditate, he would take off his
clothes and his sacred thread, the Yajna Pavita.
That thread is the ultimate symbol of being a
Brahmin. Why did he do that? He said that to
call on the mother, You have to be free from
the eight servitudes, things like hatred, fear,
shame, ego, vanity, and especially pride in your
noble birth. Taking off the thread was a physical
act of shedding that pride. This all builds to
what is probably the most dramatic moment of
his early life, the near suicide in the temple.
The pain just became too much, a physical agony.
He felt he had failed. So in total despair, he
grabs the ceremonial sword hanging in the shrine,
determined to end his life. But instead of death,
he has this cosmic vision. An unbelievable vision.
He said just before he fainted, he saw not a
statue, but a boundless, infinite, conscious
sea of light. He described these brilliant waves
rushing towards him, crashing over him and pulling
him down into the unknown bottom. So he wasn't
seeing a person. He was merging with an ocean
of consciousness. That's it, exactly. He lost
all awareness of the outside world, and all he
felt was this current of intense unknown bliss.
When he came to, the only word he could say over
and over was ma, mother. And from that moment
on, he was utterly convinced. Utterly convinced
that Kali was not a clay statue, but was pure
conscious reality itself. And he was always careful
to clarify that, right? That he wasn't just worshiping
an idol. Meticulous about it. He said, I do not
worship Kali made of clay and straw. My mother
is the conscious principle. Pure Satchitananda,
existence, knowledge, bliss, absolute. And he
called this ultimate reality mother. Yes, because
he said a child is most free with its mother.
It's a relationship of pure, unconditional love.
Now, in the middle of all this spiritual intensity,
his family tries to ground him. They arrange
a marriage. They do. In 1859, he's married to
Sarada Devi. He was 23. And she was only five
years old. The whole idea was to steady him,
you know, give him some worldly responsibility.
But it didn't quite work out that way. Not at
all. By the time she joined him at Dakshinswar
when she was 18, he had fully embraced the life
of a sannyasi, a total renouncer. The marriage
was never consummated. Instead, he performed
a ritual where he worshipped her as the divine
mother. The Shodashi Puja. It's a profound, radical
act. He saw her not as a wife, but as the living
embodiment of the divine mother he'd been seeking.
She became known as the Holy Mother and was absolutely
central to the movement after his death. So the
marriage failed to contain him. And what followed
was this period the sources call a spiritual
tempest. It sounds less like peace and more like
a total physical breakdown. It was. He claimed
he didn't sleep for six straight years. His eyes,
he said, literally lost the power of winking.
He'd look in a mirror and his eyelids just wouldn't
close. And he lost all sense of his own body.
To an extreme degree. His hair got matted, and
birds would literally perch on his head to pick
at rice grains caught in it. Snakes would crawl
over his motionless body. He said at first he
was terrified. He thought he had some terrible
disease. But the mother comforted him. Yes. She
assured him this was all part of the process.
And again, you see that tension. For his followers,
this was the necessary purification of the body
to hold God consciousness. For a critic, it could
look like a prolonged state of extreme mental
illness. But it's clear that he had to go through
that fire, that complete detachment from his
physical self, to be ready for what he was about
to do next. His body and mind were being forged
into an instrument for universal exploration.
And this next section is really what defines
his entire legacy. These methodical, intense
experiments in other religious disciplines. It
started with Tantra in 1861. Yes. And his guide
was a woman, an itinerant aesthetic, named Haravi
Brahmani. Her arrival was so important because
Ramakrishna was so far out on a limb, he was
worried he was going mad. His ecstatic states
were so extreme. And she told him they were authentic.
She did. She was an expert in tantric and Vaishnava
texts. And she confirmed that his experiences,
like Mahaprabha, this supreme loving devotion,
were all described in the scriptures. He wasn't
crazy. He was an advanced soul. So under her
guidance, he dives into tantra. Head first. The
goal of Tantra is to transcend the idea of holy
and unholy, to see the divine feminine power,
Shakti, in everything. And he went through the
practices at an incredible speed. An astonishing
speed. He reportedly completed 64 major tantric
sadhanas, or disciplines, in just three days
each. which just shows how advanced he already
was. This includes the really controversial stuff,
the Vamachara, the left -hand path. It does.
Vamachara uses things that are normally taboo,
eating meat, fish, drinking wine, even sexual
intercourse, to shock the practitioner out of
their dualistic thinking of good and bad. But
Ramakrishna himself warned his disciples away
from that path. He did. He called it a valid
road, but a dirty and dangerous one. And the
biographies are very clear on this point. He
himself did not need to perform the most extreme
acts. His consciousness was so elevated that
merely the suggestion or the intention of the
act was enough to give him the spiritual result.
He didn't need to physically drink wine or engage
in sex to transcend the mental barrier associated
with them. After Tantra, he moved on to Vaishnava
Bhakti, which is all about loving devotion to
Vishnu and his avatars like Rama and Krishna.
And he explored it through different emotional
attitudes, or bhavas. First, he took on the attitude
of a servant, Dasya Bhava, worshipping Rama as
if he were the great devotee Hanuman. That ended
with a vision of Sita, Rama's wife, merging into
his own body. Then he tried being a parent. Vatsalya
Bhava, yes. He had a small metal statue of the
child Rama, Ramla, and he worshipped it as a
mother would. He cared for it, fed it, played
with it, until he felt the living presence of
the child god in the statue. He said it came
alive for him. And then the most radical of all,
the lover's attitude, Madhura Bhava. This is
where he emulated Radha and the gopis in their
passionate love for Krishna. And to do this,
he felt he had to completely eliminate the idea
of male identity from his mind. So for several
days, he dressed and lived as a woman. He lived
as a woman. Completely. It was a radical method
to root out what he saw as a major spiritual
obstacle, the idea of sex. And that practice
culminated in a vision and union with Krishna
Savikalpa Samadhi. So having explored the major
Hindu paths, he then does the truly unthinkable
for the time. He steps outside of Hinduism entirely.
In 1866, he decides to practice Islam. He just
said this also is a path to the realization of
God. And he was initiated into Sufism by a man
named Govinda Roy. And this wasn't just a casual
study. No, it was total immersion. For three
days, he lived as a devout Muslim. He repeated
the name of Allah. He prayed five times a day.
He wore Muslim clothes. And he said he felt a
complete disinclination to even look at the Hindu
deities in the temple. And what was the result?
After three days, he had a vision of a radiant
personage with a grayed countenance and a white
beard, who he identified with the prophet, merging
into his body. And that experience, fascinatingly,
culminated in him merging into the formless,
absolute Brahman. The same goal. He reached the
exact same goal. The exact same goal. And then
he did it again with Christianity a few years
later in 1873. He had the Bible read to him.
But he had a problem with a core Christian doctrine.
He did. The doctrine of sin. He couldn't stand
it. He refused to listen to parts that constantly
talked about humans being sinners. He argued
that constantly thinking I am a sinner is the
greatest sin of all because it drags the mind
down. He said, you should think I've taken the
name of God, therefore I am sinless. It's a focus
on inherent divinity over inherent brokenness.
Perfectly put. And once again, his deep engagement
led to a vision. He was looking at a painting
of the Madonna and Child, and he saw it come
to life, the light from it entering his heart.
And then a vision of Jesus himself. A few days
later, yes, he saw Jesus walking towards him.
Jesus embraced him and merged into his body.
And once again, the result was a trance state
where he identified with the absolute. He had
proven his thesis three times over. So having
climbed the peaks of devotional and dualistic
paths, Ramakrishna turns to the final summit.
the stark, non -dual path of Advaita Vedanta.
And this meant a final, almost brutal confrontation
with his own deepest attachment, guided by the
most formidable teacher he ever met. Todopuri.
He arrived at Dakshineswar in late 1864, and
the sources describe him as the complete opposite
of Ramakrishna. He was a tall, naked Nagasanyasi,
a wandering monk who knew only Brahman. And he
had no time for deities. None. He saw Ramakrishna's
beloved Kali as just a delusion, a trick of Maya,
the cosmic illusion. Which creates this amazing
tension. Ramakrishna, the ultimate devotee of
the mother, has to ask her for permission to
learn from a man who says she doesn't exist.
It's an incredible moment. Ramakrishna goes into
the temple, asks Kali, and comes out in ecstasy,
telling Toda Puri, the mother has commanded me
to learn from you. So Toda agrees to initiate
him into sannyasa. Full renunciation. Yes, at
the Panchavati, the grove of trees. It's a total
stripping away. Ramakrishna has to offer his
sacred thread and a tuft of his hair into the
fire, renouncing everything. Teta's instruction
was simple and absolute. Brahma alone is real.
Shatter the cage of name and form. Dive deep
into the self. Ramakrishna sits to meditate,
aiming for Nirvikalpa Samadhi, the state beyond
all thought and form. but his years of devotion
create one last barrier. The form of his Divine
Mother Kali appears in his mind, and he can't
get past it. It's too familiar, too beloved.
He tries, but he can't make his mind go blank.
He cries out to Toda, It cannot be done. I can't
stop my mind from functioning. And Toda's response
is, Not gentle. It's pure, cold fury. He's enraged
that this illusion still has such a hold. He
looks around and finds a sharp piece of glass
on the ground. Wait, a piece of glass? A piece
of glass. And he forcibly pierces Ramakrishna's
forehead right between the eyebrows, shouting,
collect the mind here to this point. Wow. That's
extreme. It was the shock he needed. Ramakrishna,
with this new determination, visualizes a sword
of knowledge and mentally cuts the form of the
mother in two. He destroys his own most cherished
vision. He does. And the second that form is
split, his mind rushes up and merges completely
into the formless absolute. Your Vikalpa Samadhi.
And Totapuri, the master who had strived for
40 years, is just left in shock. Total astonishment.
He finds Ramakrishna sitting motionless, completely
absorbed, for three full days. He'd never seen
anyone achieve it so quickly or sustain it so
effortlessly. But it didn't just last for three
days. The sources say it lasted for six months.
Which is supposed to be physiologically impossible.
The belief is that the body can't survive in
that state for more than 21 days. But he stayed
there. Apparently, another monk found him and
understood what was happening. This monk would
literally beat him with a stick to bring a flicker
of consciousness back so he could force feed
him. Just to keep his body alive. Exactly. Until
Ramakrishna finally received a command from the
mother to return. to stay in a state called Bhava
Mukha, on the border between the absolute and
the relative worlds, for the good of humanity.
And that return led to his greatest philosophical
breakthrough, the reconciliation of the formless
Brahman and the personal active power of Kali,
or Maya. This is where he really transforms traditional
Advaita. Instead of seeing Maya as just an illusion
to be rejected, he realized that Maya is Shakti,
the creative power of Brahman itself. They aren't
two different things. The power that creates
the universe is not separate from the ultimate
reality. Precisely. His great unifying statement
was, the personal and the impersonal are the
same thing, like milk in its whiteness. The Divine
Mother and Brahman are one. You can't have one
without the other. He also made Maya more practical
by splitting it into two types. Avidya Maya and
Vidya Maya. A vidya is the negative, stuffed
greed, ego, lust that binds you. Vidya is the
positive, stuffed devotion, kindness, wisdom
that liberates you. The idea is to use the good
maya to conquer the bad maya, and then you become
free of maya's grip altogether. And in the end...
Even the rigid Advaitin, Toda Puri, was humbled
by this vision. Completely humbled. First, he
flew into a rage when a servant used some charcoal
from his sacred fire. And Ramakrishna just laughed
and laughed, pointing out how the great non -dualist
was caught by attachment to a fire pit. But the
real breaking point was when Toda got sick. He
got severe dysentery, terrible pain. In his mind,
trained to escape the body, couldn't do it. The
pain was too strong. In agony, he decides to
commit suicide by drowning himself in the Ganga.
But he couldn't. The river wouldn't get deep
enough. He just kept wading and wading. And in
that moment of total frustration, he has this
blinding vision of the divine mother, Kali, filling
all in space. He realizes the Brahmin he worshipped
and the mother he disdained were one and the
same. He left the next day a changed man. So
once he's had these incredible internal experiences
and synthesized them, the question becomes, how
does this get out into the world? How does it
become a movement? The key was his connection
to the English -educated elite of Calcutta. And
the turning point was his meeting with Kishab
Chandrasen in 1875. Kishab was the leader of
the Brahmo Samaj, a huge religious reform movement.
He was an intellectual heavyweight. So when Kishab
accepted Ramakrishna's teachings, it gave him
massive credibility. Huge credibility. Kishab
founded a new movement, the New Dispensation,
or Navavidhan, and he incorporated Ramakrishna's
core ideas directly into it. Which ideas specifically?
The worship of God as mother, and most radically,
the idea that all religions are true. Kishab
started publicizing Ramakrishna's life and teachings
in his journals, which is how he became known
to the Hadraluk, the educated middle class, and
eventually to Europeans. And that's how he first
gets noticed in the West. That's the beginning.
Later, the great Indologist Max Mueller wrote
an essay about him. And that really cemented
his place as a world figure. But of course, the
single most important person for his global legacy
was his star disciple, Narendra Nath Dutta. Who
we now know as Swami Vivekananda. Right. And
their first meeting is a great story. It is.
Vivekananda was a young, skeptical college kid
at the time. His English principal, a Dr. William
Hastie, was trying to explain the meaning of
the word trance in a Wordsworth poem. And he
couldn't explain it. He said, if you want to
understand the real meaning of trance, you have
to go see Ramakrishna at the Kshinsor. So Vivekananda
goes looking for the definition of a word and
finds his entire life's purpose. Pretty much.
He was skeptical at first, but he was completely
captivated by Ramakrishna. And he became the
one who synthesized his master's ecstatic realizations
into a cohesive modern philosophy. He created
what's called Neo Vedanta. And in Ramakrishna's
final days, there's this dramatic transfer of
power. Yes. As he was dying of throat cancer,
he formally transferred his spiritual powers
to Vivekananda. He told him, keep my boys together
and teach them. That small group of young monks
became the seed of the Ramakrishna order. For
someone who wants to get to the source of his
teachings, it's the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.
What's the core message for the everyday person?
The absolute core is that to realize God is the
one goal in life. That's it. But he tailored
the path. For his monks, he pushed them toward
non -dual Advaita. But for householders? People
with families and jobs, he recommended the bhakti
path. The path of devotion. Yes. See God as your
master and yourself as a servant. He had this
great analogy for it. The sugar analogy. Exactly.
The devotee of God wants to eat sugar and not
to become sugar. Meaning they enjoy the sweetness
of the relationship with God rather than completely
merging and disappearing into the absolute. That's
it. And the most practical, world -changing application
of his teaching is what fuels the Ramakrishna
mission to this day. Service as worship. which
means not kindness or pity to living beings,
but serving the living being as Shiva himself.
Vivekananda took that and built a global philanthropic
mission on it. Before we get to the critiques,
I want to touch on his specific view of the modern
work life that was emerging in Bengal under the
British. He had a name for it, Chakri. low -paying
clerical servitude. He saw it as profoundly corrupting
and a huge roadblock to spirituality. Why? What
was so bad about an office job? It was the clock,
this rigid, impersonal European system of time.
It forced people into this unnatural mechanical
rhythm that he felt was completely at odds with
the organic flow of spiritual life. So now we
have to turn to the more controversial side of
things, the psychoanalytic interpretations of
his life. This really started when the writer
Romaine Rowland described Ramakrishna's mystical
states to Sigmund Freud as an oceanic sentiment.
But later scholars took it much further. Yes.
People like Sudhakar and, most famously, Jeffrey
Kripal in his book Kali's Child, argued that
Ramakrishna's intense visions and his famous
aversion to women could be seen through a clinical
lens. As symptoms of repressed homoeroticism.
That was the core of Kripal's argument. It focused
heavily on his teaching against Kamini Kanchana,
which literally means women in gold. And Kripal's
translation was key to his argument. It was.
He translated it as lover in gold, suggesting
it was a very personal psychological aversion
to physical intimacy with women rather than a
universal teaching against lust. And what was
the response from the Ramakrishna order and other
scholars? A very strong rebuttal. They argued
it was a linguistic misconstruction. They said
Ramakrishna used the word Kamini. woman, as a
stand -in for lust in general, for attachment
in the mind. And the sources show he taught this
to women as well. They do. He warned his female
disciples against Purusa Kanchana man in gold.
So the argument is that the teaching was always
universal, conquer lust and greed, whoever you
are. And that tension remains. Is this divine
grace or is it a unique and complex psychology?
His legacy is big enough to contain both questions.
So as we wrap up, we've traced this incredible
journey of a man who was a true spiritual scientist.
He validated the world's great spiritual paths,
not in a library, but in the laboratory of his
own body and mind. And that central synthesis,
that's what we keep coming back to. His ability
to just transcend the normal barriers of caste,
of creed, of religious dogma, by actually living
them. Intensely. It was a physical demonstration.
He proved that the core experience, that God
realization, was the same, whether he was approaching
it as a Hindu, a Muslim, or a Christian. He gave
experiential proof to that ancient Vedic saying,
truth is one. The wise call it by many names.
And yet, and this is so important, his universalism
wasn't an invitation to just dabble. He was incredibly
strict about focus. Absolutely. He told his followers,
you must stick to one path with all your strength.
He said you can get to the roof with stairs,
a ladder, or a rope, but you can't get there
if you're constantly jumping from one to the
other. It's a balance between this incredibly
broad vision and the need for deep, dedicated
practice. And his whole life was this series
of radical acts to conquer the internal self.
The pride, the shame, cleaning toilets with his
hair to kill his caste ego, living as a woman
to kill his sexual identity. He sought the complete
dissolution of the personal prideful self. Because
he taught that the identity we build for ourselves,
that's the biggest wall between us and that boundless
sea of light he experienced. Which leaves us
with the final provocative thought for you to
take away. Ramakrishna's path of self -annihilation
required him to break the social boundaries of
his time. He performed these extreme self -effacing
acts to dissolve his ego's attachments. So how
does that principle translate into our modern
secular world? If the goal is to dissolve the
prideful personal identity, what scavenger tasks
could one undertake today? What self -effacing
acts could dissolve the identity ties that bind
the modern self? Think about the pride we have
in our social media profiles, our job titles,
our political affairs. affiliations. If those
are the things that separate us from a greater
reality, what would it take to actually truly
set them aside?