Talk Excerpt 252. Swamiji expands on who Sri Ramakrishna is.
From Mother Radha’s notes, written at Swamiji’s feet.
Shankara came and gave you the secret of Advaita [non-dualism or Monism]. Ramanuja came and gave you the secret of Vishishtadvaita [qualified non-dualism]. Madhavacharya came and gave you Dvaita [Dualism].
But when Sri Ramakrishna came, he put all these in one. And he said that only the person who has travelled these paths, realised these paths, knows that path and knows all.
The others only spoke about the path they knew, and the other paths were unknown to them. To Master, everything about God-realisation was natural.
Master’s going into and coming out of samadhi [superconsciousness] means he is both relative [non-Absolute], he is Absolute: and even more than that.
Sri Ramakrishna never believed in minus [subtraction], he believed in addition. Sri Ramakrishna believed that minus is not yoga, but joining together is yoga. [The root of the word ‘yoga’ is ‘yuk‘ in Sanskrit.]
When asked about the validity of different religions Sri Ramakrishna said, ‘All of these are the different paths to God.’
What Master is, he himself knows. One must be him to know what he knows.
So please do not think that Master is only telling us about God. Yes, he is telling us about the highest, but he can also know about the relative.
The free-to-read or download, 396 page Flipbook version of Swamiji’s biography is available by clicking HERE.
These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.