Shri Rama Krishna’s Unique Spiritual Practices

999 Words4 Pages
Sri Ramakrishna, the God-intoxicated, God-realised being of nineteenth century India, exercised a profound spiritual influence on the peoples of the world over his fifty-years period. That influence remains and continues today, becoming more and more pronounced as the effects of his God-centered life manifest in our contemporary human culture. Born in 1836, in Kamarpukur, Ramakrishna was from early days disinclined towards formal education and worldly affairs and thereby experienced his first spiritual ecstasy at the age of six. His father’s death when he was seven years old served only to deepen his introspection and increase his detachment from the world. In 1856 Rāmkumār, Shri Ramakrishna’s brother breathed his last. Sri Ramakrishna had already witnessed more than one death in the family and had come to realize how impermanent is life on earth. The more he was convinced of the transitory nature of worldly things, the more eager he became to realize God, the Fountain of Immortality. This distinguishes his view from that of others. Replacing his brother as priest at the age of sixteen, Ramakrishna, unlike others, developed intense devotion to Mother Kali and spent hours in loving adoration of her strange image of destruction, forgetting the rituals of priestly duties. The worship in the temple intensified Sri Ramakrishna's yearning for a living vision of the Mother of the Universe. He began to spend in meditation the time not actually employed in the temple service; and for this purpose he selected a deep jungle, an extremely solitary place. While meditating, he would lay aside his cloth and his brāhminical thread to be freed from all ties and he eight fetters of hatred, shame, lineage, pride of good conduct, fear, secretiveness, caste, and grief. As his love for God deepened, he began either to forget or to drop the formalities of worship. Rhapsodical
Open Document