Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa seldom used the words ‘I’ and ‘mine’. In the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Ramakrishna and His Divine Play, we find that he used the words ‘this’, ‘in this’, ‘here’, and ‘in this place’ to indicate himself. ‘I’ and ‘mine’ are the warp and woof of maya. This net of maya could not catch Ramakrishna; he had full control over it. While explaining the word ‘bhavamukha’, Swami Saradananda tried to unveil the mystery of Ramakrishna’s ‘I’. Saradananda describes four stages of the ego:
When the Master was absorbed in nirvikalpa samadhi, his ‘I’ or ego was dissolved in Nirguna Brahman.
When the Master came down one step from that exalted state, his feeling ‘I am a part of God’ would gradually disappear and the Cosmic I or the Divine Mother’s ‘I’ would become manifest through him, and he would act as a guru. At that time the Master would not appear to be humbler than the humblest: his demeanour, and his behaviour with others and other actions took a different form. Becoming like the mythical wish-fulfilling tree, he would ask a devotee, ‘What do you want?’ as if he were ready to use his superhuman power to fulfil the devotee’s desire immediately.
After coming one step down from that state, the Master would say, ‘I am a child of the Mother’, ‘I am a devotee’, ‘I am a servant’. Thus he would become humbler than the humblest and teach people by becoming an instrument of the Divine Mother. He used to call this ‘ripe I’, the last stage of ‘knowledge I’.
The lowest state is the ‘unripe I’, or ‘ignorant I’. The Master gave examples of this ego: ‘I am a brahmin, I am a son of such and such, I am a pandit, I am rich’, and so on. This ‘I’ is the cause of bondage.
Swami Saradananda writes, ‘After the Master (Sri Ramakrishna) attained nirvikalpa samadhi, his little, or unripe, “I” completely disappeared.’