A collection of teachings from Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
Remember that daya, compassion, and maya, attachment, are two different things. Attachment means the feeling of ‘my-ness’ toward one’s relatives. It is the love one feels for one’s parents, one’s brother, one’s sister, one’s wife and children. Compassion is the love one feels for all beings of the world. It is an attitude of equality.
Remember that daya, compassion, and maya, attachment, are two different things. Attachment means the feeling of ‘my-ness’ toward one’s relatives. It is the love one feels for one’s parents, one’s brother, one’s sister, one’s wife and children. Compassion is the love one feels for all beings of the world. It is an attitude of equality.
Is it possible to understand God’s action and His motive? He creates, He preserves, and He destroys. Can we ever understand why He destroys? I say to the Divine Mother: ‘O Mother, I do not need to understand. Please give me love for Thy Lotus Feet.’ The aim of human life is to attain bhakti. As for other things, the Mother knows best.
A man becomes liberated even in this life when he knows that God is the Doer of all things.
The caste-system can be removed by one means only, and that is the love of God. Lovers of God do not belong to any caste. The mind, body, and soul of a man become purified through divine love.
At the beginning there is much ado about work. As a man makes progress toward God, the outer display of his work becomes less and less — so much so that he cannot even sing the name and glories of God.
As water when congealed becomes ice, so the visible form of the almighty is the condensed manifestation of the all pervading formless Brahman. It may be called in fact, Sat-chit-ananda solidified. As ice is part and parcel of water, remains in water and afterwards melts in it; so the Personal god is part and parcel of the Impersonal. He rises from the impersonal, remains there, and ultimately merges into it and disappears.
God is formless and God is with form too, and He is that which transcends both form and formlessness. He alone can say what else He is.
How can the finite grasp the Infinite? Like a figure of salt trying to fathom the depths of the ocean. In doing so the salt doll is dissolved into the sea and lost. Similarly the jiva, in trying to measure God, loses his individual egoism and becomes one with him.