Talks Excerpt 528. Swamiji speaks about religious fanaticism.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Sri Ramakrishna is a unique manifestation of God. No Master was born like him in this Yuga [epoch or cycle]. Swami Vivekananda said that Satya yuga started from the day Sri Ramakrishna was born.

Just as there is no peer to Hanumanji, there is no peer to Sri Ramakrishna. Why I stress this is because when other people worshipped personalities, they emphasised only personalities, and they became fanatics. Instead of having absolute love they had part love and part hatred. But universality does not mean that. Universality means giving absolute love to the absolute world.

What Swami Vivekananda meant when he spoke about not stressing the personality was that you must preach the principles of Sri Ramakrishna, whether you accept the personality of Sri Ramakrishna or not. You can accept him as God, as a sadhu or as a devotee. Whichever one you accept, we will accept him as that. There may be others who do not accept him in any of these categories, but if I hate these others and divorce myself from them and their lives, then I am the fanatic. It makes me a fanatic because I did not understand the real Deity called Sri Ramakrishna; I did not become as universal as the universality of Sri Ramakrishna.

It does not matter whether a man accepts the personality of Sri Ramakrishna or not – providing I tell him the principles that Sri Ramakrishna stood for. If I do good to him, whether he criticises Sri Ramakrishna or praises him, I am then worshipping the principle. In personality worship people often say, ‘If you do not worship this deity you are doomed to hell.’ Though I am emphatically not saying that.

No religion in the world can be practised without emphasising the personality to some degree. If people of a particular religion do not stress the personality, they will stress their scriptures. In a sense they are a little worse than us, because they are preaching a dead thing – a book. We may be better off preaching a personality – it is a living thing.

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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.