Talks Excerpt 727. Swamiji speaks on the exceptional role of women.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Devotee: Did Master [Sri Ramakrishna] initiate any women?

Swamiji: Yes, Master did. First of all he initiated his own wife, [Holy] Mother Sarada [Devi].

Devotee: Oh yes, I read about when he was worshipping her . .

Swamiji: He initiated her before that. When he surrendered to her, that was one of the aspects. He did not do it for Mother’s sake, he did it for his sake. Master taught the modern world how to treat a woman. It is important for the woman and the man to have complete control over their senses.

Gauri Ma is another living example of Master’s initiating of a woman.

One of the methods that was good for Hindu society was that the wife must become a ‘pati bhakta’ [pativrata] instead of a deva bhakta. Deva bhakta means the worshipping of God in images or the worshipping of Lord Shiva in abstract. Pati bhakta means you take your husband as God Himself, and serve him as a symbol to realise God. One may think that the woman is inferior and therefore she is worshipping the man. It is not so. It is one of the symbols. If the husbands went for tapasya (austerity), then half of the fruit [merit] of the austerity naturally went to the wife.

Maitreyi and Gargi were great women teachers. There are many great women in our scriptures – Mother Sita for example. Swami Vivekananda revered Mother Sita so much that he rightly said, ‘You can find many [Lord] Ramas but not another Sita.’

Devotee: Master [Sri Ramakrishna] said that the world is a mansion of mirth?

Swamiji: Yes. Make hay while the sun shines; take every opportunity to think of God and be in holy company. One who has inner peace, sees the world as ‘a mansion of mirth’.

The free-to-read or download, 396-page Flipbook version of Swamiji’s biography, ‘A Life Lived For Others‘, is available by clicking HERE. If you’d prefer the PDF version, please click HERE.

For our gurubhai Atmaprakash Kramer’s beautiful pictorial booklet, ‘Memories of my ashram days‘ at 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.