Talks Excerpt 213. Swamiji says we must set good examples.
From Mother Radha’s notes, written at Swamiji’s feet.
For six months at a stretch Sri Ramakrishna did not sleep at night. We know this because he would awaken his disciples in the middle of the night (especially Naren – later Swami Vivekananda) and tell them, ‘Wake up. Let us sit and meditate now.’
The real brahmacharis do not sleep, they are sleepless but they are not suffering from insomnia.
I only ask you to look at yourselves and not at the faults of others. Become self-critical, analyse your own mind, your own self. To the extent you find fault in yourself, to that extent you should make the effort to correct those faults. Even if you do not reach perfection, your greatness is in trying. You must try; but never turn tail (never retreat).
Sri Krishna advises Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, that if he fights in the battlefield he will win glory here and will get heaven hereafter. But if he happens to die on the battlefield, he will go to heaven.
How beautiful those words are. By ‘glory’ the Lord did not mean you must say how wonderful Arjuna was. His glory would be to leave a perfect path for another man to follow. That is the glory of the whole idea. Glory is not, as we understand it, that someone must praise you and say how good you are, and what wonderful sadhana [spiritual practise] you did, and what a God-realised man you are . . .
They have a little saying that ‘Sri Ramakrishna has finished all the sadhanas and tapasyas [austerities]. You just set a good example.’ We must set such a good example that we become a fruit dangling in front of the world, so that they will long to eat that fruit of sadhana and march that spiritual path.
If you did not get Christ, how wonderful to project that image of Christ through you, so that others can become followers, and see the example that you lived, to worship the Lord Jesus Christ.
I have said all this to you without any hesitation, I tell it to you joyfully. Follow it if you may, or if you do not want to, then follow the natural impulses of the mind and become a mosquito (something insignificant, which cannot make progress).
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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.