PRINCIPLES OF RAMAKRISHNA --- TAKA MATI, MATI TAKA (MONEY IS MUD, MUD MONEY) 1

This unique aphorism of Ramakrishna was the seer's uncluttered response to the material culture of the day and of the age to come, a spontaneous utterance as he came to even terms with matter, spirit that he was. This equivalence of mud and money sought by the sage of Dakshineshwar in his discriminating mind on the bank of the Ganga during his days of spiritual practice is a classic illustration of the poet soul's articulate austerity when handling a few coins and a bit of mud and interchanging their location in his two palms repeatedly before casting them into the waters of the Ganga, he lost all sense of their distinctive value and attained to supreme sameness of perception. And with it he attained to supreme sanity as well, going beyond the duality of material evaluation and so crossing the threshold into the domain of pure spirit where core and crust are one, the circumference is the centre and the substance of matter the soul of its essence. Ramakrishna's experimentation led him to experience the surface hollowness of things and their depth-substantiveness. A stranger and perhaps more mystifying behaviour in the sage was to ensue subsequent to the interplay of mud and money in the manner aforesaid and this is unique in the spiritual annals of the world. From now on Ramakrishna developed such an abhorrence for money that his inner nature veritably recoiled from even the faintest touch of a metal coin or anything metallic for that matter. He felt excruciating pain in his body if even accidentally he had touched anything metallic, much less a coin. His fingers would get bent and his breathing would stop as he passed out of physical consciousness into the realm of the spirit. Such renunciation of money was unheard of in his days and in the days to come and is quite simply a phenomenal happening in the history of the world. Ramakrishna had formally renounced wealth, not merely psychologically but even physiologically, a fact of supreme importance in the movement he lived on to initiate through his direct disciples in the years ahead.