Sri Ramakrishna and His Divine Play - III

The Puranas mentions many wonderful stories regarding the great teachers. Although those stories are supported by reason, the human mind still does not believe them completely. The human mind relies above all on its own experience, so without direct experience it cannot unequivocally believe in the reality of Atman, God, liberation, the afterlife, and so on. Although this is true, a person with an impartial and discriminating intellect does not reject anything simply because it is uncommon or supernatural. Rather, such a person acts as witness and calmly collects all the data for and against a particular subject. At the right time, the subject is either rejected as false or accepted as true.

Then there should not be an Iota of doubt in accepting the fact that Sri Ramakrishna’s Parents that THEY WERE HIGHLY EVOLVED PARENTS.

With the exception of Buddha and Chaitanya, there are no detailed accounts of the avatars’ spiritual practices in the religious history of the world. In all there life stories we cannot find any detailed descriptions of their exuberant passion, or of the zeal with which they must have struggled to attain the Truth, or of how they were carried away in their spiritual journeys by hope and hopelessness, fear and awe, and joy and longing. Surely they were sometimes elated and other times depressed, but they never let their focus waver from the goal. In addition, it is difficult to trace the natural cause-and-effect relationship between the amazing actions performed in the latter part of their lives and the education, enthusiasm, and actions of their earlier years.

For example, it is not clear how Krishna, the darling of gopis of Vrindaban, was transformed into the Krishna of Dwarka, the reviver of religion. Moreover, only a few episodes are known about the great life of Jesus before he reached the age of thirty; and only the stories of Shankara’s conquest of other philosophical schools are recorded in detail. So it is with all the other avatars.

Devotees always want to see their masters as perfect. Even though their masters have assumed human bodies, devotees do like to admit that they have ever experienced any human weakness or lack of insight or power. Devotees are always eager to hear of something miraculous, such as Lord Krishna’s beholding the whole universe in His mouth for mother Yashoda. They not only expect to find mature intelligence and vast experience in their masters’ irrelevant childhood activities, but they are also eager to see them as perfect embodiments of omniscience, omnipotence, universal love, and kindness. It is therefore no wonder that devotees conclude that avatars do like to reveal their divine natures to the masses, and that mental efforts such as spiritual practices, as well as physical activities such as eating and sleeping, and conditions such as fatigue, disease, and death, all are mere show. Even during His own lifetime we have witnessed how some prominent devotees of Sri Ramakrishna were convinced that His Throat Cancer was feigned.