Talks Excerpt 464. Swamiji, quoting Sri Ramakrishna, says that when your hair stands on end when hearing God’s name, you have transcended ritual worship.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Master [Sri Ramakrishna] said that when taking the name of God, if your hair stands on end, then ritual worship has come to an end.

This only happens when you think about God alone, when you are drunk with God’s wine. Please do not take wine literally here. [laughter] I am talking about something that intoxicates not your mind but your soul. If the soul becomes drunk with God, who is going to worship? If your mind becomes drunk on alcohol you do not know the difference between your motor car and your bed. So can you imagine what happens when your soul is drunk with God?

Sri Ramakrishna was not an ordinary teacher. He said that his teachings would last for one thousand five hundred years and that he would then manifest again in a different body. If he comes, you had better be prepared. So become loving and cultivate love of God.

In the Bhagavad Gita chapter eleven – The Yoga of the Vision of the Cosmic Form – you find that Arjuna is on the battlefield – the battlefield of life. He is struggling to know the truth, the truth of the purpose of life on Earth and the truth of the purpose of life in this body. This happens to almost all of us at some time. We come to the crossroads and want to know what the purpose of all this is.

Arjuna asked himself this question and saw that there was nothing else but the purpose of [realising] God. Then he had a revelation and in this revelation Sri Krishna, the boy he had played with as a child, manifested in him; and showed him that this whole world, this whole universe, is not out of God, it is in God. It is part of God; and through God it all lives. This is called the Vishwaroopa.

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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.