Once, Sri Ramakrishna asked his householder disciple Bhavanath: "Why do you come here so seldom?" Bhavanath replied with a smile, "Sir, I visit you once in a fortnight. I saw you in the street the other day, so I didn't come here." The Master answered, "What do you mean? What can you gain by mere seeing?
"Touch and talk are also necessary."
The scriptures tell us that great souls can direct the minds of others to a higher realm by imparting their spiritual powers through a touch or merely by willing it to be so. These beings use that power to change the lives of their close disciples and even to affect the lives of prostitutes and profligates. The manifestation of that power is visible in varying degrees in the lives of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Chaitanya and others who are adored even now as incarnations of God. Although the activities of great souls are recorded in the scriptures, people have had no direct contact with such divine activities for a long time and have lost faith in their power. Nowadays many people consider faith in God to be a kind of mental weakness deriving from superstition and think even less of faith in a divine incarnation. It was an absolute necessity in this modern age for an extraordinary person like Sri Ramakrishna to be born for the purpose of removing doubt from people's minds and making them spiritual. Now that we have seen the manifestation of that power in the Master, we can believe in the similar power of great souls in the past.
Sri Ramakrishna used to advise, "Have faith in the divine play of God as a human being." The previous incarnations up to Krishna were Sajjana palaka, durjana ghataka. From Buddha onwards the incarnations refrained from physically obliterating the evil doers. In Sri Ramakrishna we see a fulfillment of the incarnation's role of obliterating evil and not evil doers - he was Sajjana palaka durjana taraka. He had his own way of gently bringing about the transformations.
Again and again we find Sri Ramakrishna change the mentality of misguided people and lead them towards the path of spirituality. Often by a touch or act of will, he would obliterate any undesirable tendency he found in them, and bestow on them the highest experiences of spiritual life. His contact imparted strength and steadiness to their aspiration for the divine life.
By an act of will he drove away the cloud of skepticism from Swamiji's mind. A talented Bohemian, Girish Chandra Ghosh, was changed by him into a dedicated soul completely resigned to the Divine. A rowdy, Manmatha, was in an instant converted by him into an enlightened man who spent the rest of his life uttering the divine name, 'Priyanath'. At one time or other, most of his disciples had the downward pulls in their nature erased by the Master and were thus helped to attain high states of spiritual consciousness.
Here in this booklet we will try to discuss how Sri Ramakrishna achieved this.
The Hindus believe that God incarnates as an avatar. By adopting faith in the avatar, ancient Indians developed the capacity to understand the eternal play of the saguna Brahman. They realized that God, the cause of the universe, was their only guide in the spiritual world. They were convinced that the compassionate Lord would not let them be eternally doomed. Rather he would incarnate in every age, discover a new path suitable to the age and make God-realization easier.
In the 19th century, once again India was blessed to witness the advent of the Supreme One to establish Sanatan Dharma. He who was born long ago as Rama and as Krishna has come again as Ramakrishna.
Sri Ramakrishna used to experience two distinctly different moods. He himself said that within him, there were two personalities: "One is She and the other is Her devotee....the Lord takes on the body for the sake of the devotees." When in normal state, he used to adopt the servant attitude and consider himself to be humbler than the humblest. When he was under the influence of the extraordinary divine power, the Master by a mere touch could put someone into samadhi, or into deep meditation, or make a person intoxicated with divine bliss. By means of a mysterious spiritual power, he could remove the impurities from a person's mind so completely that the latter would immediately achieve deep concentration, purity and bliss to an extent that he or she had not experienced before. Such a devotee would then consider himself or herself to be blessed and would surrender to the Master forever. When the devotees saw the Master at such a time, they felt that he was no longer the humble human being; but that he had been possessed by a divine power that willfully or playfully manifested itself within him and made him perform those actions. He was then indeed a guru, a savior, and a guide to the path of God for those helpless human beings who were blinded by ignorance, afflicted by miseries, and sickened by worldly disease.
Swami Saradananda writes:
It is difficult to describe the wonderfully enchanting power of the Master's touch. We have seen that sometimes a man who held an opposite view would argue with him and refuse to accept his conclusion. The Master would somehow tactfully touch that man's body and immediately his thought current would change. He would accept the Master's words and cease to argue.
Regarding this the Master told some of us, "Do you know why I touch that person while talking to him? My touch reduces the power of his obstinacy and he understands the truth correctly." Moreover, we have seen and heard many instances of how the Master, with a mere touch, would draw within himself the occult powers that kept others from realizing the truth, thereby reducing their intensity or permanently destroying those powers.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy
Vedas (1279)
Upanishads (477)
Puranas (740)
Ramayana (892)
Mahabharata (329)
Dharmasastras (162)
Goddess (475)
Bhakti (243)
Saints (1292)
Gods (1284)
Shiva (334)
Journal (132)
Fiction (46)
Vedanta (324)
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist