Word: ramakrishna
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This dispassionate ceremony is the ritual of a mystical order of which slight, agreeable, cigaret-smoking Swami Prabhavananda is the Los Angeles leader. It is an outgrowth of a small monastic community founded in India late last century in the name of Sri Ramakrishna, one of the great teachers of Indian Vedanta, the underlying philosophy of Indian religion...
From 1879 until his death from cancer of the throat in 1886 crowds of all classes and castes thronged to see Ramakrishna. He answered visitors' questions for 20 hours out of every 24, steadily undermined his health while doing so. Faced with the same problem, Gandhi solved it by one day of silence every week...
Woman & Gold. Gist of Ramakrishna's gospel: 1) Every religion is true, and a possible path to God. 2) For most men, who are slaves of their senses, a dualistic religion with ceremonies, music and symbols is necessary. Men of purer intellect can attain modified monism; they know there is a further range of experience but are not able fully to realize it. Monism, the realization of oneness of all things with differences merely in form, can be achieved only by those who reach ecstasy. 3) For each ladder of thought there is a corresponding series of duties...
Chief stumbling blocks in the path of spiritual progress, Ramakrishna told his followers in an oft-repeated phrase, is kaminikanchan (literally "Woman & Gold," meaning "lust & greed"). " 'Woman & Gold' alone is the obstacle to yoga," said he. "What is there in the body of a woman? Only such things as blood, flesh, fat, entrails, and the life. Why should one love such a body?" In some of his ecstasies, Ramakrishna regarded himself as a woman and worshipped Kali as her handmaid. Said his woman devotees: "We seldom looked on Sri Ramakrishna as a member of the male...
Says Gandhi: "Ramakrishna was a living embodiment of godliness. His sayings are not those of a mere learned man but they are pages from the Book of Life...