BACK TO RAMAKRISHNA ... 5
A healthy harmony between rest and work creates the energetic balance that, aided by purified concentration and material detachment, leads to spiritual freedom. Such a freedom is the sole purpose of the ascetic's life and is the highest goal of terrestrial evolution. Ramakrishna came to emphasise this endpoint of human evolution which amidst the material accretion of the age had become hidden from human view. His discovery of the Spirit was not a new thing but the reaffirmation of an ancient discovery and its reestablishment in modern terms. When we study Ramakrishna, we seek to go back to this fundamental feature of the human reality, the discovery of the imperishable being amidst the perishable plurality of life.
The descent of the Divine is a mysterious feature to most but if we simplify its connotation, we can arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of it. Instead of divorcing the Divine from the human, let us conceive of reality as an integrated whole where such breaches are non-existent and consciousness seamlessly flows in from one strata to another like fluid owing to hydro-static pressure difference. Thus, it becomes easy to understand why in the seventh verse of the fourth chapter of the Bhagavad Geeta the prophetic declaration is as to the period descent of the Divine. This rise and fall of civilisation is caused by the incessant flow of the terrestrial mind or the collective consciousness of humanity in its complex resolution of innumerable individual forces in alignment and in collision, and it is in its period sinking to near critical levels of a possible drainage unto extinction that a periodic adjustment of forces becomes necessary, a feature that is built into the system and comes into periodic play thus. Ramakrishna was its latest outcome.
What then is meant by going back to Ramakrishna? It has multiple aspects one of which is to heed his essential message, for he is a being of another world, so to say, who brings in a light not quite of this world but of a higher order of existence altogether. As such, to lend him our ears is our first step towards going back to him, or, shall we say, going into our own deeper selves where a Ramakrishna hides at its very core as its very essence. It is this laying ourselves open to his message then that is our first attribute in playing audience to this divine conductor of the 'symphony of the Soul'.
Why is it so important to even mention this utterly obvious proposition of being receptive to his divine message? It is because his message is getting lost amidst the din of our humdrum daily existence, in the commercial contamination of life and in organisational representative decline. Here the individual aspirant must rediscover Ramakrishna and his message afresh and give it substance by creatively affirming it in life in purified terms even as the message essentially is. There is no necessity of adhering merely to the message from the pulpit, so to say, but the message will ring loud and clear from the pages of 'The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna' which as yet holds the Master in his perpetual presence, vibrant and living and never quite dated and dead, for he embodies the aspirations and vivifying harmonic force for an entire age. But this discovery must be a personal one, for the Lord ever speaks to one solely even in a crowd and can never be brought to become organisational entity to be featured as per the will of the higher council. Hence, each devotee, each aspirant, each individual must return to roots and this constitutes the going back to Ramakrishna.
End of Part 5
To be continued...
Written by
Sugata Bose
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