Talks Excerpt 476. Swamiji asks: What will you sacrifice for the Guru?

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

[Swamiji concludes the learning from the story of Ekalavya. For the first part, click HERE.]

Imagine if God came to you and asked you, ‘What do you really want?’ You would say, ‘God I want to realise You.’ But what if your guru came and said, ‘Here you are, take it [the realisation], but for Guru dakshina I want to make you ignorant’? Think about it. You would say, ‘No, no, no, I want God-realisation, that is why I did all this hard work.’ Do you see the point?

But Ekalavya was blissful that his guru’s grace was on him. What is merely shooting an arrow? He had shot Arjuna’s heart through, he had shot his guru’s heart through. He still reigns supreme – more supreme even than Arjuna, his gurubhai.

This is why I say that God can teach you even through nature. You do not have to turn to a guru if you have intense yearning for God. But you do not have this intense yearning, so you have to learn how to increase it. This is where satsang comes in, and for satsang your guru is the best. You may know five thousand realised souls but the best satsang is still your guru.

Sri Ramakrishna cried and cried to God and had the realisation of the Divine Mother. She Herself became the first guru of Sri Ramakrishna. She taught him many things, even to learning about other religions and proving that they also are paths to God; that all religions are true; that all religions will take you to the Supreme Goal.

However all religions are not the same. That is what Swami Vivekananda learned. When he was in America he said that religions are like rivers that start high up in the mountains and, flowing crooked or straight, sooner or later enter the ocean called God.

He said ‘rivers’, he did not say ‘the same river’. Look at the subtlety of that. Here, Swami Vivekananda is the Rishi. If you want to understand Sri Ramakrishna, I beg you to study Swami Vivekananda’s life, and through Swami Vivekananda’s eyes, you will see what Sri Ramakrishna is.

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.