Talks Excerpt 589. Swamiji speaks about when it’s time to transcend ritual worship.
From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.
Sri Ramakrishna said that we must not pay too much attention to ritual. He said, ‘You must remove the tail and the head.’ This does not mean that you should scoff at orthodox worship. He said that if you want to teach it, teach it to a particular person – because there are people in this world who will be able to take to it. The majority of people have to practise sadhana according to Narada’s bhakti yoga. Master [Sri Ramakrishna] said, ‘These days I do not worry about anything, I only give the people the Gayatri.’
Now when you check the ritual book you will understand why Master said ‘remove the tail and head’. There we find that the Gayatri has a very long ritual, where you must face this side and face that side, pour water in the north, pour water in the south, and so on. That is why he said, ‘I do not worry about all that, I give them the essential part.’
Master said that ‘Ritual worship comes to an end when on repeating or hearing God’s name, your eyes are full of tears and your hair stands on end.’ This means you are not doing it with I-consciousness; the ‘I’ automatically drops off; you cannot do anything further. It itself has brought ritual worship to an end because the fruit of that ritual worship is devotion and love. And on getting the love are you still going to go on doing the ritual worship?
If you are in the habit of reciting the full Gayatri mantra (Om blur bhvah swaha . . .) there will come a time when, just by saying Om, you will get the same feeling that you get when you recite the whole Gayatri. When this happens, you will not be able to recite the other syllables any longer. The next stage is when, just by thinking about Om, or by uttering Om, you lose all outward consciousness and get into samadhi. This is not easy but it is the ultimate realisation.
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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.