Talks Excerpt 612. Swamiji suggests asking a profound question about ‘friendship’.
Image borrowed with gratitude from HERE.
From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.
Late one night at Dakshineswar, when the kitchen was closed, a group of Sri Ramakrishna’s devotees arrived. Whilst others were running hither and thither saying, ‘What will we cook?’ Holy Mother [Sri Sarada Devi] said, ‘Go to the kitchen. Pick up all the cabbage that I have cleaned today plus the leavings that I put there, and bring them to me.’ They brought it all to her and she prepared such a delicious curry out of it that the disciples were completely contented. What a mother she was. How simple she was; and how she provided for her children.
[Remember that Mother’s ‘kitchen’ was simply a very limited space underneath the staircase leading from her teeny room to the next floor of the Nahabat music tower in the Dakshineswar temple complex.]
[At a Spiritual Retreat/Yoga Camp]:
Do not make any friends in this Yoga Camp (Spiritual Retreat). Push aside your friends. They are all full of mayas. Out with them. If you want friends go to social gatherings. If you want to gossip about the newspaper, go and sit in a park. If you want to smile and joke, you have enough time at home. But here at the Yoga Camp you have to be serious about getting mad about God.
I do not say: ‘Don’t make friends; create enemies.’ I would never say that. I mean: do not crave for that friendship now. Do not crave for company. Your only friend in a Camp, in spiritual sadhana, is God and God alone. Look for Him. Spend your time in Japa, meditation and reading from the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, or any holy book.
Of course you may utter a kind word to your fellow sadhakas. Utter it not because you want him to do you a favour, not because you want him to like you, but utter it because that is the nature of God and you are trying to express the nature of God. And perchance if he likes you, do not think he likes you, rather think, ‘He is liking God.’ And when you are attracted to another person here and you inwardly say, ‘I want to make friends with him,’ rather say to your mind, ‘No, not the man, but inside him is God with whom I want to make friends; and that God is not absent in me, so why not find It in me first?’
NEW! For our gurubhai Atmaprakash Kramer’s beautiful pictorial ‘memoir’ of the Ramakrishna Centre of South Africa, Avoca Ashram, please click HERE.
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.