Thursday 10 March 2011

Romain Rolland on Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa



 But I shall not remain leaning at the edge of the river. I shall continue my march with the stream right to the sea. Leaving behind at each winding of the river where death has cried ‘Halt!’ to one of our leaders the kneeling company of the faithful, I shall go with the stream and pay homage to it from the source to the estuary. Holy is the source, holy is the course, holy is the estuary. And we shall embrace within the river and its tributaries, small and great, and in the Ocean itself-the whole moving mass of the LIVING GOD. The force of his joyously flowing stream communicated itself to all souls. He was the power, he was the slope, he was the current; and the other streams and brooks ran towards his river. He was the GANGA itself.


'When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive, neither creating, nor preserving, nor destroying. I call Him Brahman or Purusha, the impersonal God. When I think of Him as active, creating, preserving, destroying, I call Him Shakti or Maya or Prakriti, the personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The personal and impersonal are the same Being, in the same way as milk and its whiteness, or the diamond and its lustre, or the serpent and its undulations. It is impossible to conceive of the one without the other. The Divine Mother and Brahman are one.

His conception of God, then, was one which grew by degrees, from the idea of the God who is omnipresent and in whom everything is absorbed, like a sun fusing everything in itself, to the warm feeling that all things are God, like so many little suns, in each of which He is present and active. Both, it is true, contain the same idea, but the second reverses the first, so that not only from the highest to the lowest, but from the lowest to the highest, there is a twofold chain joining without a break the one Being to all living being. Thus man becomes sacred.

'The Absolute is without attachment to the good as well as to the evil. It is like the light of a lamp. You can with its help read the Holy Scriptures, but you can commit forgery by the same light...Whatever the sin, the evil or the misery we find in the world, they are only misery, evil, or sin in relation to us. The Absolute is above and beyond. Its sun lights the evil as well as the good. I am afraid that you must accept the facts of the universe as they are. It is not given to man to penetrate clearly the ways of the Lord.' 'I see and I realize that all three are of the same substance-the victim of the sacrifice, the block, and the executioner...Ah, what a vision!'

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