THE SELF-DELUDED VEDANTIST ... 3
God exists. Of this there can be no doubt. The Vedanta in the minds of men innocent of the subtleties of reasoning leads them into its pitfalls and, armed to aggression by incorrect interpretation of the Vedantic texts, these arrogant ones come to grief in their spiritual life. This is true not only of householders who are mired in material desires and are enmeshed in fleshly cravings but is true of monks as well who seek the limelight, that glitter of name and fame that comes to the erudite ochre-clad one endowed with wit and charm to captivate audiences. Swami Vivekananda has said that ninety percent of the monastics are slaves to name and fame. This is the pitfall in the spiritual life of men who have renounced hearth and home but need an inch of ground to stand on thereon. Sri Ramakrishna and all the Avaatars offer them that divine space to securely station themselves but all-enchanting Maya charms ninety percent of the monks into that illusive realm of the unreal, the hankering for that ephemeral glory called fame, 'that last infirmity of noble mind' (Milton).
The Vedanta is loaded with references of the divinity of the human soul that is subservient to none, the absolute godhead of the Self that is the resident royal in all, from the insect to the atom (Vivekananda), and Maya plays on these with Her irresistible charm to delude half-baked souls into thinking that they are the sovereign monarchs of their phenomenal selves whereupon these vainglorious ones in exaggerated notion about themselves deem themselves to be 'monarch of all' they 'survey' (William Cowper). This is a human frailty born out of a queer complex, a faint sense of inner freedom affirming itself through the cloud of egotistic flawed understanding of the reality of the Self and its textual representation in the scriptures. It is on account of this that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had so gone against the Mayavaadis who were preaching the Vedanta erroneously to all while not quite living up to the standards of austerity which such philosophic negation of the universe and its Lord would require. The proponents of the Vedanta during Sri Ramakrishna's times also preached principles which they did not practise, especially householders whose word and deed were at variance very much in relation to the Vedantic texts. Thakur often witnessed their gradual downfall and came to the conclusion that in this polluted age of lust and lucre statements such as 'Aham Brahmaasmi' were inappropriate for the householder enmeshed in desire. He repeatedly warned the householder against adopting this climactic philosophical path in word only while remaining absolutely engrossed in finite fleshly life. He said that considering oneself the Lord was tantamount to stating 'the wave of the Ganga' as 'the Ganga of the wave' which was absurd and false utterly.
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