Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna taught God’s Consciousness is in every grain of matter.

Ramakrishna grew up in the heart of the rural village of Kamarpukur in India. He was born Gadadhar on February 18, 1836. He was a very intelligent child and had a prodigious memory. Growing up, he was more interested in spiritual wisdom and knowledge rather than “breadwinning” education. Yet, he was a learner all his life and a pragmatic investigator for spiritual truths in various religions.

Ramakrishna grew up in a devout Hindu home. He loved to hear stories about gods and goddesses, but most of all was his intense love for God. At the young age of six or seven, he had his first experience of divine ecstasy. While walking home in between the rice-paddy fields, he saw against the backdrop of a beautiful dark thunder-cloud, a flight of snow-white cranes. This beauty overwhelmed him and he fell on the ground, unconscious. When he revived, he stated the indescribable joy he experienced. Thereafter, his whole life was an empirical search to see God.

Through his spiritual learning with various teachers including a woman, Ramakrishna experienced seeing God in both a personal way, that is, by praying to the image of the Divine Mother, Kali, as well as the non-dual method which is through the mind. In this inquiry, Ramakrishna remained for six months in a state of absolute identity with Brahman, God. Were it not for a wandering monk, who forcefully fed him, Ramakrishna may have died. when Ramakrishna returned to the plane of relativity, the normal world, he began to explore Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Sikhism. In each inquiry, Ramakrishna experience the same one God. Upon the conclusion of his spiritual discipline, the students that Ramakrishna longed for began to come to him. Among those was Swami Vivekananda who went to the United States.

Ramakrishna believed that the religions of the world are not contradictory nor antagonistic for they all lead to the same God. His famous aphorism was “as many faiths, so many paths.” Ramakrishna experienced the highest truth that each religion offered. He taught that God’s Consciousness permeated every single grain of matter in the world. He was intoxicated with God which made his body luminous as if there was a light within him. Everyone who came to him felt an amazing uplifting influence in his presence. Ramakrishna firmly believed that even as we live in this world, we can quiet the mind by repeating or singing any name of God and also experience the divine.

Ramakrishna lived a humble and uneducated village life yet he instructed from a profound wisdom that are described in the ancient Hindu Vedas. Ramakrishna’s spiritual life and experiences reflected him as an Incarnation of God. After suffering for one year and a half with throat cancer, Ramakrishna passed away on Sunday August 15, 1886. He was 50 years old.