Talks Excerpt 531. Swamiji stresses that every word from the guru is a mantra.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

You must take it very seriously when I tell you anything. Every word from the guru is supposed to be a mantra. And please believe me it is a mantra. Every word that Sri Ramakrishna said then, even jokingly, has today become a spiritual exercise or spiritual advice.

Some people, out of prejudice, out of envy, go about trying to run other people down. They try to find fault with everyone. But you do not have to go about finding faults, they will automatically appear in front of you. If you are a guru for example, the student will make a fault and you will correct it. So there is no ‘fault finding’. If you as the guru know that a particular thing is going to bring the opposite of good to that student, you lovingly draw his notice to it and correct him.

If you look at the lives of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Sarada Devi you will find that they were the personification of their own teachings. The Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi, did not find fault with anyone. But when she saw that a particular thing would harm a person’s spiritual life, she would correct them. As a parent your duty will be the same. As a brother your duty will be the same. But you are not to find fault.

If I, as the guru, say to the student, ‘Look this is wrong, you should not do this,’ it does not mean that I am finding fault with him; I am only telling him what is good for him. Similarly, your duty will differ from person to person according to your relationship with each one.

Please do not think that when Sri Sarada Devi said, ‘O God, even the moon has a stain. May I not have a stain,’ that she was finding fault. Of course that is not fault finding. That is natural. She wanted to be natural from a human point of view.

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.