Talks Excerpt 485. Swamiji says Sri Ramakrishna didn’t renounce Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi but took her to the same dizzying spiritual heights.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Don’t you see that when you sit for meditation post-nasal drip starts? [Swamiji imitates a cough]. All that is just an excuse. A fiction of the fictitious mind.

In spiritual life you find most people give up wife and wealth for the sake of God. You find that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu did that in later years and Buddha also. The only one who never did that was Sri Ramakrishna. He took [Holy Mother] Sri Sarada Devi with him to the same dizzy heights of spirituality.

Swami Vivekananda says that we are not travelling from error to truth but from lower truth to higher truth, to the highest truth, until we reach the Absolute truth.

An example of this is given to us: When a photograph of the sun is taken from many miles away it shows the sun as a ball of fire but if you go close to the sun there will be no picture of the sun at all – just light – the Absolute. Like this we are travelling from the relative truth to the Absolute truth.

[Adi] Shankaracharya realised that Absolute truth is supra-personal. Later on Swami Vivekananda explained that this was indeed the highest philosophy, the highest realisation; yet it was only good for a few people because it needed qualification. To realise this we have to give up the idea of the body.

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.