Talk Excerpts 748 and 749. Swamiji speaks in praise of the vital and wonderful householder contribution to spirituality.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Excerpt 748: [To a devoted householder]: God has favoured you with many things, my son. Come on. Make haste in sadhana, so your wife too can follow up. Many years ago, they believed that the husband is the teacher, the wife is the mother. The wife serves the husband – she gives him enough nourishment. The husband, on the other hand, teaches spirituality.

Take Sri Ramakrishna’s case: [Holy] Mother Sarada [Devi] cooked good curry, lovely delicacies; she became the mother of Sri Ramakrishna. Sri Ramakrishna on the other hand became the guru of Mother Sarada. He always directed her mind towards godly ideas, not pleasurable things. So the husbands should be like that. Slowly, without hurting anyone’s mind. It’s tender.

A householder’s life, if lived correctly, if enough fertiliser in the form of righteousness is provided, becomes a fertile land for spiritual growth. It becomes the fertile soil for the crowning jewel to be born: saints and sages. No saints were born from parents in the Sannyasa Ashram – all came from the householder’s [grihastha ashram] life. [Lord] Rama had a mother and father who were householders. So did Sri Ramakrishna; Lord Jesus and Lord Buddha. So did all the sannyasins. Till your soil. Apply the fertiliser in such a way that it will bear good fruit. Beautiful. The householder’s life can never be dispensed with.

The other day I was thinking of a little joke of the Creator [Lord] Brahma. Brahma created beings. And then he told his mind-born sons to go and multiply. But they couldn’t do it. Lord Brahma said, ‘Go and look after the world,’ but they couldn’t do it. So he created another couple of sets; and they became us today. The meaning of this is that he decided to create householders so that householders can bear, in turn, the sannyasins – like Brahma himself.

Excerpt 749: All householders are avatars of Lord Brahma. They should create the first mind-born son – which is sattvic mind. The householders are creators. Lord Vishnu is only a preserver.

[Lord] Shiva is the last, he is the son – not interested in anything else, only interested in one thing: God. He brings up his wife like that too. Shiva is very naughty now and then; he leaves her and runs away to the forest; then comes back again and we have a [Lord] Ganesha – wisdom. Then he finds: ‘Wisdom alone won’t pay.’ Then he creates physical strength in the form of [Lord] Kartikeya. So Kartika and Ganesha carry on Shiva’s work.

The wife should have the wisdom. Ganesha was created by Mother. A great honor is thus given to women. They are the creators of great wisdom. And wisdom, to a pure woman, is like the dust of her feet, dust of her body – Ganesha. It is the highest. And that wisdom is used by a yogi called Shiva.

That crown of all yogis (Lord Shiva) creates Kartika. Not alone. He had to have wisdom first, to create physical strength. In that physical strength is hidden wisdom, divine wisdom. In all physicalities are hidden spirituality. Don’t look at the physical, look deep within. Out of Mother’s dust, she created Ganesha: wisdom, divine wisdom.

So you mothers are the wisdom. You can create wisdom because you can please the gods and yet allow the gods to practise self-discipline – just as Sri Sarada Devi allowed a God on Earth, Sri Ramakrishna, to do.

Ganesha is like Sri Ramakrishna, and Sri Sarada Devi is like Mother. Swami Vivekananda was the Shiva that went to preach to all the jivas. So worship Ganesha. Vivek: discrimination is the guru. [Swami] Vivekananda: have bliss always in discriminating. Sit at the feet of discrimination.

The free-to-read or download, 396-page Flipbook version of Swamiji’s biography, ‘A Life Lived For Others‘, is available by clicking HERE. If you’d prefer the PDF version, please click HERE.

For our gurubhai Atmaprakash Kramer’s beautiful pictorial booklet, ‘Memories of my ashram days‘ at the Ramakrishna Centre of South Africa, Avoca Ashram, please click HERE.

There’s also a Facebook site for Swamiji’s posts now. They’re for newer readings published much more recently. Click HERE to view.

Audio 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 Radha Ma’s 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.