WHEN THE GODS CALL AND THE HEAVENS THUNDER, I COME MOTHER, I COME

Ramakrishna and Vivekananda have not given us something new at all. They have rather taken us back to our Vedic roots which are as diverse as they are universal in that they embrace within their fold the multiplicity of sectarian movement as so many streams leading unto the same ocean of truth and light and freedom infinite, beyond the senses and the mind. The Vedas have not been reinterpreted by them. Rather, they have reemphasised its cardinal points, its catholic principles in the light of the Upanishads and given utterance to them in language modern and in context contemporary, never failing in such exercise, though, to retain their Vedic roots whence spring the apparent divergences of faiths and beliefs as manifest in the post-Vedic Puranic Age and thereafter in the wide world. Their singular contribution to the world of spiritual endeavour has been, though, Ramakrishna's experimental validation of the major world religions including Islam and Christianity, and in its wake the co-validation of all spiritual paths, and even more, in the case of Vivekananda, of all secular paths as well, as being avenues to perfection so long as the essential principles of renunciation and obliteration of the ego are given primacy in such disciplines.

Ramakrishna had lived the gamut of human spiritual experience of the last two thousand years, so said Romain Rolland, and this I state by way of mere reference to a savant's estimation of the spiritual genius of the genial Indian pilgrim and not by way of imposition of authority to validate a point for it is an exercise in futility, being a positing of personality to prove a principle or a proposition. However, the fact remains that neither Ramakrishna nor his volcanic apostle, Vivekananda, strayed a bit beyond the bounds of boundless Hinduism, or to put it right, the Sanatan Dharma or the Perennial Philosophy in the words of Aldous Huxley. They were neither reformists nor revisionists nor revivalists in the narrow sense of the term but included these all in their broadest connotation as their wings spanned the limits of human consciousness and flew beyond to the terrain transcendental whence they brought tidings of the Divine to slake the thirst of parched humanity.

Ramakrishna often said, "Ekhaankaar bhaab Ved Vedanter paar." (The moods of this personality of Ramakrishna have transcended the bounds of the Vedas and the Vedanta.) It is then puerile to limit the illimitable personality of Ramakrishna about whom Vivekananda went into raptures when he said, "Ramakrishna is the embodiment of infinite spiritual ideas capable of development in infinite ways. Even if one can find a limit to the knowledge of Brahman, one cannot measure the unfathomable depths of our Master's mind." To pigeon-hole Ramakrishna-Vivekananda within the bounds of terms intellectual is an attempt to contain human hope within the confines of Pandora's Box. But alas! can such an endeavour ever come to fruition? I rest my case here.

If digressions have happened in the course of this defence and I have strayed from the reference point of discussion, I lay the blame wholly on myself and I have a due reason for such departure. I must confess that Ramakrishna sends me to raptures as well and Vivekananda to a vehemence that opens vision. And it is this overpowering emotion sweeping through that supplants dry reason with the sublimity of ecstatic expression whence digressions ensue but ever within the bounds of my boundless love for the master and his disciple.

And one more have I given my love to. It is their spiritual protege, Subhas, our Netaji, our beloved leader who has left us, never to return, but who held the divine duo, through the turbulence and the tranquillity of his battle-scarred life, as his sole guiding star, for he, like Nivedita, perceived Ramakrishna-Vivekananda to be the complementary aspects of a single divine personality. And with these words let me draw the curtain on my dissertation, lest I be charged of meandering beyond measure on a matter long modified. Jai Ramakrishna! Jai Vivekananda! Jai Netaji! Jai Hind!