EPISTLES TO DISCIPLES: SHARMISTHA CHATTERJEE ... 1

EPISTLES TO DISCIPLES: 

SHARMISTHA CHATTERJEE ... 1

LETTER 1:

Dear Sharmistha,                         13.10.2025

                                                              Kolkata

       This body is in Swamiji's words the Taj Mahal of all temples. Such is the beauty of the Taj that Swamiji may have been thus inspired to call a mausoleum a temple. Nonetheless, beauty being an attribute of God, and the Taj being of exquisite beauty, Swamiji's words make sublime sense. But to call this physical form of perishable organic matter the Taj of measureless marvel in marble, does that make sense too? It does. Our scriptures say that three things are obtained by the grace of the gods---a human body, the desire for liberation from the karmic cycle of birth and death, and the association of a great soul. When these three are attained, freedom is at hand. As the human body is the first requisite among these three, verily has it been called the Taj Mahal of all temples, the temple where resides the Lord in the sanctum sanctorum of the spiritual heart. That you have been blessed with such a body and a discriminating, discerning mind aa befits a brāhmani, you should concentrate on realising God in this very life. That much for now. More later.

With blessings on you and yours,

Gurudev

LETTER 2: 

Dear Sharmistha,                        14.10.2025 

     In Vrindāvan monks do Chaurāsi Kos Vrindāvan Parikramā. I have introduced Vivekananda Parikramā which I will do and others, if they choose, may follow suit.

The Vivekananda Parikramā includes reading thoroughly the following:

1) The four yogas 

2) Inspired Talks

3) Swami-Shishya Samvād

4) Lectures from Colombo to Almora 

5) Chicago Lectures

6) The Life of Swami Vivekananda by His Eastern and Western Disciples 

7) The Master As I Saw Him

8) Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda 

9) Monastic Disciples of Swami Vivekananda 

10) Romain Rolland's biographical study of Vivekananda 

This is quite a tall order but reaching the spiritual height that is the aspired end of all spirituality is also a tall climb. Hence, you see. I will be at it. Let me see who else does. The Sanātanis are in peril today from proselytising Abrahamic religions and multiplying Muslims. To combat this civilisational threat I will lay down my life as Swamiji has exhorted us all to do. The rest rests with the God of India's destiny (Bhāratabhāgyavidhātā).

With blessings of valour and virtue on you and yours, 

Gurudev

LETTER 3: 

Dear Sharmistha,                          15.10.2025 

    Time is short, the task is big, the load is heavy and the labour is large. Let us not tarry anymore but hurry on home. Life is a fleeting dream of the senses in somnoloscence with time ticking by inexorably towards the deadly end. It must not be lost thus. Buck up and practise spirituality so that you may smash the dream here and now. No nonsense of negativity but all affirmation of things holy, so dear to the beloved Lord of beings whose mercy knows no end. Ramakrishna is God and greater than God. There is no end to his being nor no beginning. He is as anādi and as ananta as srishty itself [Anādi srishty ananta srishty]. And He must be endlessly worshipped, adored as one's nearest and dearest, as one's very Self, as oneself. May these lines come as benediction unto you before whom the gateway to God is wide open, waiting only to be walked across into the realm of infinite freedom and light. 🕉 

With everlasting blessing being showered on you and light of the heavens radiated unto your luminous self,

Gurudev

LETTER 4:

Dear Sharmistha,                          15.10.2025 

     Communication is the key to effective social functioning. In its absence social inefficiency sets in. What is true of collective living is true of individual living as well, for the collective is but the individual multiplied with all its complexes of combination in greater or lesser harmonic integration. All said and done, communication is the key to gregarious living. Even the hermit in isolation self-communicates either with his introspective mind or in self-brooding with his transcendental Self. Where communication fails, there selfishness has crept in as obstruction. Such obstructions are best removed effectively, efficiently and fast. Else, it becomes the primitive man's living in his undeveloped state of insufficient cohesion with its corresponding consequences. Social development has been ever since geared towards harmonious grouping which has led to human progress, prosperity and greater human longevity but also tribal warfare and in later times imperial wars whose more modern derivative are international wars, the bloodiest being the two world wars of the twentieth century. Now all this conflict despite better modes of communication has been owing to selfishness and a refusal to send across the right message at the right time. Not that simplistic of course but an element of diplomacy is due dialogue rather than brooding in silent suspicion over the enemy's intent which leads to misapprehension, misgivings and even otherwise avoidable conflict. The same with the individual. Interpersonal relations prosper when communication is kept up, flounder and fail when it is disrupted and discontinued. That is why, perhaps, individual minds are all apparently separate for maintenance of individual identity and linked in the cosmic mind for possibility of communication. Otherwise, each individual would never have known that others exist and the principle of 'Eko'ham bahushyām' ['I am One, I wish to be many'] would have failed. The summum bonum then is that we must all maintain good communication if we deem ourselves to be good social beings. Selfishness must not dampen human relations nor be allowed to dilute them, for that must be deemed utterly unspiritual.

This much for today. Ideas flow and they seek utterance. Hence the poet composes, the artist paints, the philosopher writes and the commoner laughs in joy, weeps in pain and lives his life in shared bonds and suffered ends. But there is bliss at the end of it all. It is eventually by no means a tragedy. It is tragedy, perhaps, from start to a long long way up but comedy at the end of it all. The prize awaits for all. So, there is nothing to be despondent about.

With blessings on you unending,

Gurudev

LETTER 5: 

Dear Sharmistha,                         18.10.2025

     The One is there and none else. The inscrutable hand of Māyā makes it appear as the Many. Māyā is the Power of Brahman which is at once inscrutable as it is inexplicable. Which is why Shankarāchārya calls Her 'anirvachaniya' (beyond explication). This One Brahman you are in the Absolute and this manifold Māyā you are in the relative. And like Jacob's ladder the outward current or the expanding sphere (pravritti) and the inward current or the contracting sphere (nivritti) are in reverse order continuously operating, the Biblical lore talking of people going up and down along the ladder between heaven and earth, much like our gods and men in the Puranas traversing likewise between heaven (svarga), earth (martya) and hell narak). But all that is representative of the real phenomenon of the complex apparent disintegration of the Ablsolute Consciousness into multifarious thoughts and the apparent integration of these thoughts back to the Absolute Consciousness. All this is apparent, though, and not real. In reality the Absolute abideth unchanging and ever unchanged as the One Existence-Consciousness without partition or even its remotest possibility for being so broken. The immortal Self has been abiding above phenomena, above the triune of space-time-causality eternally in the absolute sense. It becomes rather dry to dwell on these topics for long which is why the juicy tales of the Puranas were written to impregnate the masses with the grand ideas of the highest Vedas in a more humanly palatable way. Even the Upanishads fall short of the actual realisation in one's Being of the glory of the Ātman. Life is this shadow of the Self in all its variegated beauty, pleasure and pain but the Being is like the sun beyond aught of earth on which its rays are incident and help illumine objects. It is a transcendent altitude that no spaceship may ever attain nor any submarine dive to reach the depths where the core of consciousness is. Either way externally it is unreachable although Ŕishis have discovered the route to the Root within this bodily mansion of six chakras (shadachakra) and seven planes (saptabhūmi). The universe and countless such (anantakoti brahmānda) are floating like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. 

Is the world unreal then? It cannot be said so. It is Brahman in the relative mode and as such relatively real. Are there two realities then, Brahman and Jagat (universe)? No, it is the same reality either in the Absolute state when the relative vanishes or in the state of relativity when the Absolute cannot be perceived, substance and form alternating roles in our cognition. When Brahman is perceived, Māyā is not, and when Māyā is perceived, Brahman is not. The two are the obverse and reverse of a single Reality which you could call the One-Many, Brahman-Māyā, Shiva-Shakti, the essence and the extension. These are deep philosophical matters which need mediate realisation (parokshānubhūti) and immediate realisation (aparokshānubhūti) for clear conception. Intensify austerity and scriptural study, and by the grace of the Guru things will become apparent, for divine you are and divinity is your birthright as also inheritance. 

With blessings,

Gurudev

LETTER 6: 

Dear Sharmistha,                          19.10.2025

Humanity is not under the control of some weird bābās but is ruled by the Law if Karma. It is completely decentralised in that sense. Do not be credulous. All these Mahāvatār Bābāji and others of their ilk are so much hoax concocted and propagated across generations by interested parties among the superstitious people of the world. Their day is not yet done, though, because the human mind is as yet only too susceptible to these paralysing, hypnotic influences. Such is the current state of human evolution en masse. Remember, man has barely a few centuries back, in places merely a few millennia back, emerged from the dense dark of the forests. His technological advancement has barely touched the hem of his inner mental apparel and he remains the same old brute with quaint ideas, queer conceptions, irrational and unbalanced, his interpretation of reality barely better than a toddler of little understanding. Read all but reflect and reject the trash elements. The Upanishads are the mine of knowledge and strength, and they speak a different language altogether which is utterly impersonal. This Jnāngunj business is of Purānic mould, of Purānic origin in terms of ideas derived and fit for people with slave mentality who need a big brother to boss over them. It is true that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of the philosophy of Horatio but it is equally true that such paranormal phenomena are not the governing principles of earthly life but are perceptions of the mind in certain subtle states. Therefore, cast aside all superstition and take refuge in the Lord who is beyond all such idle ideas but is the repository of all knowledge, all peace and all blessedness, pure and holy, strong and free. Free you are, free you were, free you shall ever be. No Jnāngunj Bābā has ever bound you nor can ever do so. Remain blissfully independent. 🕉 

With blessings and light forever showering on you and yours,

Gurudev

LETTER 7: 

Dear Sharmistha,                          20.10.2025

     "Kāli worked up the body of Ramakrishna," said Swamiji to Nivedita. Traditionally, though, the Yugāvatār is the incarnation of Vishnu. But that may be only a post-Buddhist Purānic ideological thrust when Vaishnavism replaced Buddhism and became the dominant religious sect of the Sanātan Dharma. Moreover, Brahmā creates, Vishnu preserves and Maheshvar destroys. Hence, the Yugāvatār, whose descent is for the preservation of the Sanātan Dharma in temporal terms, may have been considered as being representative of Vishnu. And Sri Ramakrishna did show up the forms of Shree Rāma and Shree Krishna in Kāshipur to dispel the lingering doubt as to his divinity in the mind of his protégé. He had earlier shown himself to be Shiva and Kāli to Mathur Babu in Dakshinesvar. But Swamiji insisted that Thakur was Kāli's Avatār. And Thakur lifelong remained the veritable instrument in the hands of the Divine Mother as he went about his terrestrial sport (jagat leela). At Shyāmpukur finally on the night of Kāli Puja in 1885 he emerged as the Barābhayā Herself at the inspirational instance of being worshipped as such by Girish Chandra Ghosh which was then followed by others. The divine drama was drawing to its climactic close and this was one of the high points reached. Another Kāli Pujā Thakur was not in his earthly form to witness as he passed away on 16 August, 1886 (15 August by the Hindu almanac which determines the beginning of the day at sunrise). So, on his last earthly Kāli Pujā night he revealed his Kāli identity. He used to in his Dakshineshvar days sometimes say that within him there were two personalities. One was He/She (God/Goddess) and the other was His/Her devotee. Probably, we should discount the 'He'-part here and emphasise the 'She'-part as Thakur was predominantly a Kāli bhakta, that, though, not meaning that he was exclusively so. But the dominant deity in his life was Mā Kāli and Swamiji must have definitely envisioned what he affirmed thus about Thakur to Nivedita. Even when Thakur entered into mahāsamādhi on 16 August, 1886, Sri Sri Mā Thakurāni wailed over her departed husband's form saying, "Mā Kāli, where have you gone?" From all these occurrences, observations and even self-admission of Thakur it is clear that Swamiji's understanding of his Guru was correct. Which also means that this time it has been a departure from the passive Bhakti Movement of medieval times to the Vedic virile culture in all its comprehensiveness, given fresh impetus by Shankarāchārya. No wonder Mā called Thakur 'all Advaita' and his movement Advaitic when dispute arose over the Advaita Ashrama's departure, at Swamiji's injunction, from the devotional adherence to worship of Thakur in the shrine at Māyāvati. In summation, thus, it may be said that Sri Ramakrishna's descent this time has been to combine all that was strong in the pre-Buddhist Vedic period with all that was glorious in the post-Buddhist Bhakti period which is also the reason why Thakur called his brand of devotion as jnānmishra bhakti. Was the Buddhist period left out then from the Avatār's consideration? Not at all. The Ramakrishna Sangha, the travel to foreign lands to propagate the message of the Vedas, the philanthropy and service were all in line with the Buddha and his movement. The Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement has been the catholic culmination of the spiritual history of Bhāratvarsha and its unfolding in the centuries ahead will prove to be the great harmoniser of the diverse streams of world thought. As for Thakur, he remains the embodiment of Kalikrishna about whom Rāmprasād sang a century before the Paramahamsa's advent, in the court of Mahārāj Krishna Chandra Sen. 

It, therefore, is incumbent upon all to imbibe this true Ramakrishna Kālikrishna spirit and worship the Mother not just on Kāli Pūjā night but on all days of the year, the worship of the Terrible with one's heart's blood, as Swamiji put it. Kāli is Death and She must claim our skulls to bedeck her form. And Ramakrishna is Kāli.

With eternal blessings and forever being the beacon in this turbulent sea of Māyā,

Gurudev

LETTER 8:

Dear Sharmistha,                        20.10.2025

    This is also the homecoming of Shree Rāmachandra after banishment of fourteen long years by human treachery which he, being the highest embodiment of virtue (Maryādā Purushottam), gracefully accepted and through austere living, forging dhārmic alliances and destroying the evildoers set up the standard for humanity forever. His victory over Rāvana and his rescuing of his beloved divine consort Seeta lit up humanity with hope, the devas with delight and Ayodhyā with a million lamps both on the streets, the courtyards and the sanctum of the human heart. This is Deepāvali in essence when light streams through after the dispelling of dark, the destruction of the demonic forces, the resurrection of religion. 

May your heart be likewise filled with the light that will be abounding everywhere this Deepāvali night! May Mā Kāli see fulfilment in your own empowerment as Her incarnation with all its promise!

With blessings unending and flowing in torrents,

Gurudev