Talks Excerpt 536. Swamiji asks: Can you put Holy Mother’s forbearance into practice in your daily life when temptation comes?

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother, does not care about our praises, our offerings and our intelligence. She gives us all of this and all she wants from us is to give her love, love, love, in every part of her creation. I try to put this into practice in my own life.

Nevertheless, the hope I have is that I have accepted her as one of the greatest manifestations of all the deities. She is the manifestation of the motherhood of God, men and creatures, whom she herself came to protect in the form of Sri Ramakrishna. If she did not provide the cradle of purity, the cradle of selflessness, the cradle of love, then we would not have a Ramakrishna today to worship.

If Sri Ramakrishna is praised, she is the praise. If Sri Ramakrishna is glorified then she is the glorification. If Sri Ramakrishna is being worshipped today then she is the worshipped. To show this to us, the Master, who was supposed to have guarded his spiritual treasures [in a] miserly [way], went to the Holy Mother and said to her, ‘O Sarada, you have the rights over me. On my side I am duty bound to satisfy you in any way you say, unconditionally.’

But it was her awareness and consciousness of Sri Ramakrishna’s greatest treasure, his extraordinary spiritual achievement, that prompted Sri Sarada Devi to spare it for us. Sri Ramakrishna was so great that he offered it to the Mother herself. He said, ‘Take away this spirituality if you like, it is your right and my duty to satisfy you.’ But Holy Mother said, ‘I have come to help you in your spiritual mission. I will not drag you down.’

But how many of us feel like that Sarada Devi? How many of us feel like that Ramakrishna? How many of us lure people into temptation? How many of us, wives, husbands and sons, are the victims of these great temptations of lust, greed, anger and gold? Can you put Holy Mother’s forbearance into practice in your daily life when the temptation comes?

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.