Talks Excerpt 448. Swamiji says man should not use God to do the wrong things.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

In the Ramayana we read:

Raghukul reet sada chali aayi, pran jaye par vachan na jayi.

In the lineage of Sri Rama the Raghus will give up their lives for the sake of the principle of dharma. Thus it’s better to die for the sake of dharma than dying for adharma.

Man has a free will. Man is an intelligent being. Man should not use God to do the wrong things. You should use God to do the right things.

Ravana came as a holy man [sadhu] into the forest and took Sita away – he was dressed as a sannyasi, as a holy man. But Ravana took advantage. He made use of dharma to do adharma. In the cloak of a holy man he stole her. But the end result was that his kingdom of Lanka was destroyed – even though he had moksha at Sri Rama’s hands.

So this one fact you must remember: God has given us free will – even though that free will is limited by our past karma. [Cross reference with Talks Excerpt 447, HERE, for background.] Our conscience tells us whether we are doing something right or wrong.

We must even give up our lives to do the right thing.

Sri Ramakrishna always stood for truth. It is written in the scriptures that to make ourselves perfect we must have the same idea in thought, speech and action.

Master [Sri Ramakrishna] said it so beautifully: Thought, word and deed will all be the same for a truthful, great man.

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