YIC - Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Pramahansha and Sarada Mayi

Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa:

Sri Ramakrishna is a living embodiment of godliness. His sayings are not those of a mere learnt man, but they are pages from the book of life. They are revelation from his own life experience. In the age of skepticism, he has given a ray of faith to the humanity.  His father Kshudiram had a vision of Lord Gadadhar(One form of Lord Vishnu in Gayadham) that he’ll appear as his son.

Sri Ramakrishna has done all kind of penance available at that time. He followed Bhakti, Vedanta, Islam, Christianity, Tantra and many others and achieved the ultimate fruit in a very short (usually 3 days) time span. He represents the very core of the spiritual realizations of the seers and sages of India. His whole life was literally an uninterrupted contemplation of God. He reached a depth of God-consciousness that transcends all time and place and has a universal appeal. Seekers of God of all religions feel irresistibly drawn to his life and teachings. Sri Ramakrishna, as a silent force, influences the spiritual thought currents of our time.

To Sri Ramakrishna all religions are the revelation of God in His diverse aspects to satisfy the manifold demands of human minds. Like different photographs of a building taken from different angles, different religions give us the pictures of one truth from different standpoints. They are not contradictory but complementary. Sri Ramakrishna faithfully practiced the spiritual disciplines of different religions and came to the realization that all of them lead to the same goal. Thus he declared, "As many faiths, so many paths." The paths vary, but the goal remains the same. Harmony of religions is not uniformity; it is unity in diversity. It is not a fusion of religions, but a fellowship of religions based on their common goal -- communion with God. This harmony is to be realized by deepening our individual God-consciousness. In the present-day world, threatened by nuclear war and torn by religious intolerance, Sri Ramakrishna's message of harmony gives us hope and shows the way.

 His one of the Guru Bhairavi Brahmani has arranged a meeting of scholars from all over India to prove that Ramakrishna is an incarnation of God and everybody has accepted him as God unanimously. Many Sadhaka(like Golap Maa, Mathur Babu) has found their Ishtadevta in him. They have the vision of their God in Ramakrishna. His life is his ultimate sacrifices which is incomparable & impossible for an ordinary person.

Sharada Maa:

Sarada Devi, was the avatar of the Divine Mother of the Universe.  Sarada Devi lived from December 22, 1853  till  July 20, 1920, born Saradamani Mukhopadhyaya, was the wife and spiritual counterpart of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the nineteenth century mystic of Bengal. Sarada Devi is also reverentially addressed as the Holy Mother (Sri Maa) by the followers of the Ramakrishna monastic order. Sarada Devi played an important role in the growth of the Ramakrishna Movement. Though uneducated herself, Sarada Devi advocated education for women. She entrusted her close friend Devamata with the implementation of her dream— a girl’s school on the Ganges, where Eastern and Western pupils could study together.

From a very early age she prayed God to have purity in abundance. Looking at the full moon, she would say: “O God, there are dark spots even on the moon. But make my character spotless.”

At the age of five she was betrothed to Ramakrishna (as was the cultural tradition of the time), whom she joined at Dakshineswar when she was eighteen. Even though married, both lived lives of unbroken celibacy, showing the ideals of a householder and of the monastic ways of life. Ramakrishna’s frequent spiritual ecstacies and unorthodox ways of worship led some onlookers to doubt his mental stability, while others regarded him as a great saint. Sarada found Ramakrishna to be a kind and caring person. As a priest, Ramakrishna performed the ritual ceremony—the Shodashi Puja where Sarada Devi was made to sit in the seat of goddess Kali. Ramakrishna regarded Sarada as the incarnation of Divine Mother, addressing her as Sri Maa (Holy Mother) and it was by this name that she was known to Ramakrishna’s disciples.

It is reported that after Ramakrishna’s passing away in August 1886, when Sarada Devi tried to remove her bracelets as the customs dictated for a widow, she had a vision of Ramakrishna in which he said, “I have not passed away, I have gone from one room to another.” According to her, whenever she thought of dressing like a widow, she had a vision of Ramakrishna asking her not to do so

Before Mother Sarada’s death, she gave this last bit of long-remembered advice to her grief-stricken devotees, “But I tell you one thing—if you want peace of mind, do not find fault with others. Rather see your own faults. Learn to make the whole world your own. No one is a stranger my child: this whole world is your own! ”.

Swami Vivekananda:

Swami Vivekananda, known in his pre-monastic life as Narendra Nath Datta, was born in an affluent family in Kolkata on 12 January 1863. His father, Vishwanath Datta, was a successful attorney with interests in a wide range of subjects, and his mother, Bhuvaneshwari Devi, was endowed with deep devotion, strong character and other qualities.

At the threshold of youth Narendra had to pass through a period of spiritual crisis when he was assailed by doubts about the existence of God. It was at that time he first heard about Sri Ramakrishna from one of his English professors at college. One day in November 1881, Narendra went to meet Sri Ramakrishna who was staying at the Kali Temple in Dakshineshwar. He straightaway asked the Master a question which he had put to several others but had received no satisfactory answer: “Sir, have you seen God?” Without a moment’s hesitation, Sri Ramakrishna replied: “Yes, I have. I see Him as clearly as I see you, only in a much intense sense.”

His speeches at the World’s Parliament of Religions held in September 1893 made him famous as an ‘orator by divine right’ and as a ‘Messenger of Indian wisdom to the Western world’. After the Parliament, Swamiji spent nearly three and a half years spreading Vedanta as lived and taught by Sri Ramakrishna, mostly in the eastern parts of USA and also in London.

 It was Swami Vivekananda who gave to Hinduism as a whole a clear-cut identity, a distinct profile. Before Swamiji came Hinduism was a loose confederation of many different sects. Swamiji was the first religious leader to speak about the common bases of Hinduism and the common ground of all sects. He was the first person, as guided by his Master Sri Ramakrishna, to accept all Hindu doctrines and the views of all Hindu philosophers and sects as different aspects of one total view of Reality and way of life known as Hinduism. Speaking about Swamiji’s role in giving Hinduism its distinct identity, Sister Nivedita wrote: “… it may be said that when he began to speak it was of ‘the religious ideas of the Hindus’, but when he ended, Hinduism had been created.”

Before Swamiji came, there was a lot of quarrel and competition among the various sects of Hinduism. Similarly, the protagonists of different systems and schools of philosophy were claiming their views to be the only true and valid ones. By applying Sri Ramakrishna’s doctrine of Harmony (Samanvaya) Swamiji brought about an overall unification of Hinduism on the basis of the principle of unity in diversity. Speaking about Swamiji’s role in this field K M Pannikar, the eminent historian and diplomat, wrote: “This new Shankaracharya may well be claimed to be a unifier of Hindu ideology.”