Talks Excerpt 416. Swamiji says that only knowledge about God is true knowledge.

From Mother Radha’s notes, written at Swamiji’s feet.

If you are preoccupied with God there is no time to hate, only to glorify God in thought, word and deed. This, the simplest of teachings, leads to the highest abode.

God has given us one thing – His name. Call Him anything, provided you grow in His image. You cannot worship the all-compassionate One and then hate someone. We must have love, compassion, self-sacrifice. Realise that each one is a fellow traveller on the path that leads to God, and it must be travelled without pride and hatred. There is only one message – do not hurt others.

May Sri Ramakrishna, by whatever name you call Him, bless us.

How many of you sincerely ask God to reveal Himself to you? Put your hands up. [Very few hands go up.] Therefore God has become dead, a senseless statue, because we do not ask Him to reveal Himself to us. Only a few ask Him to reveal Himself.

Master has told us where we are wrong. In his life he refused to ask the Divine Mother for anything else except that he must realise Her. He would not give his body any comfort, he would rub his face on the ground. Yet we think we understand him.

A sensitive man begins to think of his man-made blunders. Who made the blunders? Yet we call ourselves intelligent.

Once M [Mahendranath Gupta, Master Mahashay, the recorder of the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna] got a scolding from Master. M’s wife was illiterate and he was a school teacher. Master asked him, ‘How is your wife?’ He said, ‘She is alright but she is illiterate.’ M was speaking to an apparently illiterate man about illiteracy – but he did it absent-mindedly – he gave a worldly answer to a spiritual man. This was the first time it struck him: All this while I thought I am literate. Now I understand that having knowledge about God is true knowledge. 

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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