Sri Ramakrishna (was Re: The dvaita...)

[Sankar Jayanarayanan]

Ramakrishnan wrote :

> While I have great respect for
> Ramakrishna, I have found some of Ramakrishna's statements on samadhi

First of all, Sri Ramakrishna revealed _nothing_ about the state of Samadhi.
I remember one incident in the biography:

Someone asks Sri Ramakrishna,"Please describe the state of Samadhi to us."

Sri Ramakrishna assents and goes into Samadhi saying,"Now I'm in the domain of
ideas...(and so on)" But suddenly, he's silent. Later, he retains
body-consciousness and says with tears in his eyes,"I cannot describe it to you.
As soon as I want to, Mother presses my mouth as it were and prevents me from
uttering a word."

If at all, he once said,"It's like a salt doll going to measure the depth of
the ocean..." (laughter from the audience)

As for Sri Ramakrishna's bhakti, I'm no person to comment on that. But I doubt
if anyone else could have even had half the Bhakti that he did. If I remember
right, there was a belief during his time that he was the *only* person to have
mastered and experienced ALL the different kinds of Bhakti (relationship of
Father, Mother, Sweetheart etc. with God). And of course, Sri Ramakrishna
*did* resort to self-enquiry in the end, with the help of his Guru, Tota Puri.

> totally
> contradicting shaMkara and ramaNa.

Then Shamkara and RamaNa are wrong ;-)

-Kartik