Talks Excerpt 684. Swamiji stresses the need for a Guru.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

There are very few people who can reach the state of God-realisation without a guru. In school you need a teacher to teach you any subject. So if you need a teacher for ordinary things, do you think in spiritual matters you can reach God without a guru? Through ignorance we may think that we can reach the goal without a Guru, but it is not possible for us to do so.

In the beginning Girish [Chandra Ghosh] also wondered why he should have a physical guru, a human guru, and why he should prostrate [pranam]. When wisdom dawned on him, he realised that he needed the guru, and he was blessed to have Sri Ramakrishna as his guru.

Ganesha was born in many different yugas. In certain yugas his wives were Siddhi and Buddhi [sometimes interchanged with Riddhi]. Siddhi means all the siddhis – the eight yoga siddhis [powers]. And buddhi means he had a clear intellect that discriminates right from wrong.

Ganesha Bhagavan is the son of my Mother Parvati and he gives siddhi and buddhi.

One day I asked Gurudev [Swamii’s beloved Guru, and our Gurudev, Swami Nischalananda Puri], ‘Tell me Gurudev, truly, do you really love Sri Ramakrishna?’ He looked at me and put his head down, he did not answer. Truth does not need any verbal answer. Others may have thought, ‘Oh, he wasn’t sure therefore he didn’t answer.’ But I knew exactly in my mind, through his grace, that the truth does not need any answer.

He could have told me ‘Yes’, but if I did not believe it, what could he do about it? So he kept quiet, he just put his head down.

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.

For our gurubhai Atmaprakash Kramer’s beautiful pictorial ‘memoir’ of the Ramakrishna Centre of South Africa, Avoca Ashram, 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.