At Dakshineswar
Table of Contents
Sunday, September 7, 1884
It was around 11am. The Master was sitting in his room at Dakshineswar.
He had not yet taken his midday meal.
Arrangements had been made with the musician Shyamdas to entertain the Master and the devotees with his kirtan.
Baburam, M., Manomohan, Bhavanath, Kishori, Chunilal, Haripada, the Mukherji brothers, Ram, Surendra, Tārak, Niranjan, and others arrived at the temple garden.
Lātu, Harish, and Hazra were staying with the Master.
When M. saluted Sri Ramakrishna, the Master asked:
“Where is Narendra? Isn’t he coming?”
Narendra could not come
A brahmin devotee was reading to the Master from a book of devotional songs by Ramprasad. Sri Ramakrishna asked him to continue. The brahmin read a song, the first line of which was: “O Mother, put on Thy clothes.”
MASTER: “Stop, please! These ideas are outlandish and bizarre. Read something that will awaken bhakti.”
The brahmin read:
Who is there that can understand what Mother Kāli is?
Even the six darsanas are powerless to reveal Her. . . .
MASTER (to M.): “I got a pain because I lay too long on one side while in samādhi yesterday at Adhar’s house; so now I’ll take Baburam with me when I visit the houses of the devotees. He is a sympathetic soul”
With these words the Master sang: How shall I open my heart,O friend? It is forbidden me to speak.
I am about to die, for lack of a kindred soul
To understand my misery. Simply by looking in his eyes, I find the beloved of my heart; But rare is such a soul, who swims in ecstatic bliss On the high tide of heavenly love.
MASTER: “The Bauls sing songs like that. They also sing another kind of song:
Stay your steps, O wandering monk! Stand there with begging-bowl in hand, And let me behold your radiant face. Signs of a perfect soul
“According to the Śakti cult the siddha is called a koul, and according to the Vedānta, a paramahamsa. The Bauls call him a sai. They say, ‘No one is greater than a sai.’ The sai is a man of supreme perfection. He doesn’t see any differentiation in the world. He wears a necklace, one half made of cow bones and the other of the sacred tulsi-plant. He calls the Ultimate Truth ‘Ālekh’, the ‘Incomprehensible One’. The Vedas call It ‘Brahman’.
About the jivas the Bauls say, ‘They come from Ālekh and they go unto Ālekh.’
That is to say, the individual soul has come from the Unmanifest and goes back to the Unmanifest. The Bauls will ask you, ‘Do you know about the wind?’ The ‘wind’ means the great currrent that one feels in the subtle nerves, Ida, Pingala, and Sushumna, when the Kundalini is awakened. They will ask you further, ‘In which station are you dwelling?’ According to them there are six ‘stations’, corresponding to the six psychic centres of Yoga. If they say that a man dwells in the ‘fifth station’, it means that his mind has climbed to the fifth centre, known as the Viśuddha chakra. (To M.) At that time he sees the Formless.”
Saying this the Master sang:
Within the petals of this flower there lies concealed a subtle space, Transcending which, one sees at length the universe in Space dissolve.
Description of the Bauls
Once a Baul came here. I asked him, ‘Have you finished the task of “refining the syrup”?
Have you taken the pot off the stove?’ The more you boil the juice of sugar-cane, the more it is refined. In the first stage of boiling it is simply the juice of the sugar-cane. Next it is molasses, then sugar, then sugar candy, and so on. As it goes on boiling, the substances you get are more and more refined.
“When does a man take the pot off the stove? That is, when does a man come to the end of his sadhana? He comes to the end when he has acquired complete mastery over his sense-organs. His sense-organs become loosened and powerless, as the leech is loosened from the body when you put lime on its mouth. In that state a man may live with a woman, but he does not feel any lust for her.
“Many of the Bauls follow a ‘dirty’ method of spiritual discipline. It is like entering a house through the back door by which the scavengers come.
“One day I was taking my meal when a Bāul devotee arrived. He asked me, ‘Are you yourself eating, or are you feeding someone else?’ The meaning of his words was that the siddha sees God dwelling within a man. The siddhas among the Bauls will not talk to persons of another sect; they call them ‘strangers’.
“The Bauls designate the state of perfection as the ‘sahaja’, the ’natural’ state. There are two signs of this state. First, a perfect man will not ‘smell of Krishna’. Second, he is like the bee that lights on the lotus but does not sip the honey. The first means, that he keeps all his spiritual feelings within himself. He doesn’t show outwardly any sign of spirituality. He doesn’t even utter the name of Hari. The second means that he is not attached to woman. He has completely mastered his senses.
“The Bauls do not like the worship of an image. They want a living man. That is why one of their sects is called the Kartabhaja. They worship the karta, that is to say, the guru, as God.
There are innumerable opinions and innumerable paths leading to God.”
BHAVANATH: “Then what should we do?”
MASTER: “You must stick to one path with all your strength. A man can reach the roof of a house by stone stairs or a ladder or a rope-ladder or a rope or even by a bamboo pole.
But he cannot reach the roof if he sets foot now on one and now on another. He should firmly follow one path. Likewise, in order to realize God a man must follow one path with all his strength.
But you must regard other views as so many paths leading to God. You should not feel that your path is the only right path and that other paths are wrong. You mustn’t bear malice toward others.
Well, to what path do I belong? Keshab Sen used to say to me: ‘You belong to our path.
You are gradually accepting the ideal of the formless God.’ Shashadhar says that I belong to his path. Vijay, too, says that I belong to his―Vijay’s― path.”