RAMAKRISHNA IS THE WAY

RAMAKRISHNA IS THE WAY

Sri Ramakrishna has through his spiritual realisations laid the practical foundation for future human harmony whose theoretical basis was founded in India ages ago in Vedic times. He came as the fulfilment of the ages of spiritual unfoldment in India, as the starting point for a harmonic world civilisation. Henceforth, his advent will gain significance as that junction point in world history when India showed the world a new way of coexistence, cooperative survival and peace.

Indian thought has long permeated the ancient and the medieval world, India having been the civiliser of Asia. Europe and America also lie in debt to Indian thought in their development as civilisations where unobtrusively Indian thought in its manifold modes has influenced them. But the time has now come for a flooding of the world with the thought brooding in the Soul of India for humanity to live to see a brighter day.

The times are dark with the clouds of conflict and chaos threatening to shower the acid rain of doom. Humanity today is at the crossroads of its advancing course where it will have to decide between alternatives -- to live or to die. Sri Ramakrishna here stands as the beacon for the ship carrying Man to navigate this tempestuous sea of evolution safe and sound.

The clash of civilisations we hear from Samuel P. Huntington is now a reality. The West, China, Russia and the Islamic Ummah -- all four civilisations are contradisposed and violently so. At a time when global environment is degrading precipitously, threatening humanity itself with extinction, this fourfold political and cultural wrangling can spell the doom of humankind. Ramakrishna here seems the only way out. His message must be preached worldwide, his life propagated wholesale as the model for human harmony.

Vivekananda must be extensively preached as well for he was the Messenger of the Master, his best interpreter and commentator. Himself a Prophet, Vivekananda was the Master's anointed One who would regenerate humanity when he would preach aloud the Gospel of the Vedas to the world at home and abroad. 

Ramakrishna-Vivekananda, in Sister Nivedita's view, are an integral being, the observe and the reverse of the same coin according to Nag Mahashay (Durgacharan Nag, an enlightened devotee and lay disciple of Ramakrishna). Hence, the divine duo must be preached worldwide for the survival of humanity itself. Else, death lurks in the corner for us all. Such a state must never come to pass.

Written by Sugata Bose