The centre of the Ramakrishna Movement is the Master himself. His unprecedented austerity, matchless renunciation and catholicity of spiritual experience is the cornerstone of the great mission he came to represent whose manifestation is transforming the consciousness of the wide world, uplifting the thought-currents and value-systems of humanity almost imperceptibly but with a slow certitude.
The mission of Ramakrishna was to set aright the lost balance of the world, redirect humanity along the spiritual path from which it had strayed and to fine-tune the terrestrial evolutionary programme at a time when mankind was sinking in the quagmire of materialism that threatened an eventual destruction of civilization. And the beauty of the entire movement is that its initiator did not wait for others to come to his aid before he began the salvage work but rather manfully set himself to the stupendous task of the resuscitation of sinking humanity, alone and single-handedly. It is a tribute to our inertia that we, the inheritors of this divine legacy of the Master, find it so convenient to evade responsibility of the rapid furtherance of his work under the pretext of this or that limitation of ours, man-power or material-power, and yet seek superficial solace in pious prostrations at his hallowed feet oblivious of the hypocrisy so indulged in and reducing piety to an exercise in futility and our manhood to a sham. No wonder the Master ever brings forth from his ethereal abode his entourage to carry forward his mission for he is fully conversant with human sloth and its unwillingness to look beyond the close confines of its conditioned self. Also, how convenient is our escape of duty as a collective anthropic entity towards our own well-being and what an utter sense of irresponsibility towards the furtherance of our own terrestrial evolution when we devise so-called spiritual modes of deification of these seminal beings in the unconscious bid to avoid bearing the cross ourselves in a bold and manful way that befits our claims to pre-eminence in the domain of terrestrial existence. If a Ramakrishna alone can achieve so much, how much more ought we to collectively achieve in his name as his followers and how little space there is for us to cite inadequacies of circumstance or means to defer his mission of the rapid transformation of the human condition indefinitely. Such inertia is unspiritual, such lethargy of approach by no means the steadiness vouched by the Swami Vivekananda who, for all intents and purposes, was, nonetheless, in the then immensely more rigid human environment, the cyclonic monk who shook the world to its foundations and expected his followers to be a hundred times more potent than he ever was. Therefore, no shirking of responsibility please in the holy name of this heroic duo Ramakrishna-Vivekananda unless, of course, it is an open submission by the concerned parties that they have failed them after all. Then cease from citing the scripture and taking cover under the umbrella of these luminous beings when the world goes to pieces and Ramakrishna stirs uneasy in his ethereal abode but his devotees happily do the devotional rounds for the fire as yet does not singe them.
Awake, my friends, awake. It is not yet too late to deluge the land with the Spirit of the Master for he leads us yet out of his infinite mercy and will not tarry awhile any more for his children suffer and the Mother cannot bear their misery. Can you bear the misery of your dear ones my friends? Then delay no longer. Set yourselves to the task of nation-building and carry the Ramakrishna flame to distant lands where our sisters and brothers, children of our Mother, expectantly await us for ages. Slake this great thirst of the world and then proudly proclaim, "We are the children of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda, we are the children of our beloved Mother."
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