Two Saints: Speculations Around and About Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Ramana Maharishi

483 Pages·2017·2.46 MB·English

by  Arun Shourie

Two Saints
Speculations Around and About
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Ramana Maharshi
ARUN SHOURIE
For my mother and father, for Malti Shukla,
who gave up so much for us For Anita, who has borne so much with
unimaginable fortitude For our Adit, who bears his travails with Ramana-like
equanimity Karti hai gauhar ko ashkbaari paida Tamkeen ko mauj-e-bekaraari
paida
Sau baar chaman mein jab tadapti hai naseem Hoti hai kali pe ek dhaari paida
Contents
1. Their mesmeric power
Ramakrishna’s touch, Ramana’s gaze. How they transformed lives,
influenced the course of our country. Why Gandhiji sent individuals
2. in distress to Ramana but never met him The real miracle
Their lives, their peak attainment vs the peripherals we take as
marks of divinity. Natural explanations before supernatural ones.
Confidence vs nervous defensiveness. Reductionism vs open-minded
3. inquiry ‘O, the state in which I was…’
Austerities they put themselves through. Effects these would have
4. had—illustrated by those of sleep deprivation A brief diversion
Cautionary tales about relying on memory, wishful reading,
eyewitness accounts—especially when these are written to a purpose
5. Deities, celestial beings, ghosts
Visions. Triggers. A telltale cure. A clue in music-as-a-trigger?
6. ‘The collyrium of love’
Seeing what one longs for. Is longing so intense self-hypnosis?
7. Concerns as explanations. Illusions and delusions ‘A young
sanyasin looking like me would emerge from my body and instruct
me in all matters…’
The guide who emerges. Visions of devotees—especially after the
Master passes away. Parallels from the bereaved. From
8. mountaineers and explorers ‘I suddenly felt my body carried up
higher and higher…’
Experience recreated by electrical stimulation and without. The
9. sensed presence again: indisputable and disputable recreations
Sangat and suggestibility
Seeing patterns, experiencing ghosts. How fellow believers,
10. majorities, authority figures influence what we perceive, believe, do
Mind>Brain>Body>Mind>Brain>…
As mind, brain, body influence each other so deeply and swiftly,
how much would their austerities, longings and beliefs have
predisposed them to experience what they did? What heals us—
their power to heal or our belief that they have that power?
11. ‘A God-realised man behaves sometimes like a mad man…’
Could the sudden withdrawals and trances be absence or partial or
ecstatic seizures? Ramana’s testimony. How this makes their
12. attainments all the greater The self in the heart
‘Self’, ‘self’, ego. It just is? Or is it active? ‘Evidence’ fails scrutiny.
The mundane self accounted for by this-worldly explanations.
13. Ramana’s surprising reason for what he taught But what about
consciousness?
Cosmic and mundane. Confirmations of mystics’ view. Awareness
14. —nature and origins. Brain as its own witness The penultimate
proof?
Near-death experiences. Ramana’s. Cultural variability. Doubtful
accounts. This-worldly explanations for accounts: anaesthetic
15. awareness, awareness in vegetative state, brain under extreme stress
Is everything really unreal?
If world is unreal, why did they eat, teach, circumambulate a non-
existent hill? Senses in which world is not what it seems.
Inconsequential or unreal? Ramana’s surprising reason for
16. maintaining that it is wholly unreal Their pristine example
Contrasted with what we encounter today. Need to scrutinize
modern-day godmen, and ourselves. The next project?
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Copyright
1
Their mesmeric power
The Master has been praying to the Devi, and weeping and wailing before
her to send him disciples who will carry forth the work. He has visions in
which he has seen some of the young men who will come to him; in
particular he has seen and come to know facts about one young boy,
Narendra, who is rebellious, independent-minded, agnostic. By a series of
happenstances, along with some friends, he starts visiting the Master at
Dakshineswar. On seeing them, in particular Narendra, the Master is
joyous as can be.
Narendra visits Dakshineswar with a friend. He concludes that the
Master is a ‘monomaniac’. Yet, a few days later he decides to trudge from
Calcutta to Dakshineswar again. He is exhausted by the time he gets there
—he had never thought the place was that far. He goes directly to the
room of the Master. The latter is sitting on a small bedstead near his bed.
I saw him sitting alone, merged in himself … There was no one with him. No sooner had
he seen me than he called me joyfully to him and made me sit at one end of the bedstead. I
sat down but found him in a strange mood. He spoke indistinctly something to himself,
looked steadfastly at me and was slowly coming towards me. I thought another scene of
lunacy was going to be enacted. Scarcely had I thought so when he came to me and placed
his right foot on my body, and immediately I had a wonderful experience. I saw with my
eyes open that all the things of the room together with the walls were rapidly swirling and
receding into an unknown region and my I-ness together with the whole universe was, as it
were, going to vanish in the all-devouring great void. I was then overwhelmed with a
terrible fear; I had known that the destruction of I-ness was death and that death was
before me, very near at hand. Unable to control myself, I cried out loudly and said, ‘Ah!
What is it that you have done to me? I have my parents, you know.’ Giving out a loud
laugh to hear those words of mine and touching my chest with his hand, he said, ‘Let it
then cease now; it need not be done all at once; it will come to pass in course of time.’ I
was amazed to see that extraordinary experience of mine vanish, as quickly as it had come
when he touched me in that manner and said those words. I came to my normal state and
saw inside and outside the room standing still as before.
The experience causes what Narendra is to later describe ‘a revolution’ in
his mind.
Narendra comes a third time. There is a crowd at the temple. The
Master asks him to accompany him for a walk in the garden and a house
that abuts the temple. They enter a room of the house and sit down. The
Master enters into ecstasy. Narendra is observing the change in the Master.
Suddenly, the Master approaches and touches him. Narendra becomes
‘completely overwhelmed at that powerful touch. He lost consciousness
completely that day, not partially as had happened on the previous
occasion.’ When he regains awareness after some time, he finds the Master
passing his hand on his chest…
Weeks pass. One day, standing in the veranda outside the Master’s
room, smoking, Narendra and a friend are mocking what they have heard
from the Master about everything in the world being God. ‘Hearing
Narendra laugh, he [the Master] came out of his room like a boy with his
cloth in his arm-pit, and coming to them smiling, said affectionately,
“What are you talking about?”’ He goes into ecstasy, and touches
Narendra. Narendra experiences ‘a complete revolution’—‘I was aghast to
see actually that there was nothing in the whole universe except God.’ He
remains silent, to see how long the experience would last. ‘But that
inebriation did not at all diminish that day…’ Indeed, it lasts for days.
When he comes back to his normal state, he feels that he has experienced
non-duality: ‘Since then I could never doubt the truth of non-duality.’
Narendra is drawn more and more into the circle. But he remains
sceptical, argumentative, questioning.
His father dies. The family is thrown into penury. There is not enough
to eat. At mealtimes, Narendra often makes out that he has to go to a
friend’s house for the meal. It is just pretence—he does not want to eat the
little that there is at home so that his mother and siblings have a little more
to eat. Those well-to-do friends who used to flock around him shun him.
He goes from pillar to post looking for a job. He finds none … Hunger,
helplessness, anger, disillusionment follow one after the other…
The summer has passed. Rains are upon the province. As on so many
days, Narendra has been roaming the whole day looking for a job. He is
utterly exhausted, so exhausted, he tells his associates later, that he could
not place a single step further. Drenched, ‘I lay like a log of wood on the
open veranda of a nearby house. I cannot say whether I lost consciousness
altogether for some time; but I remember that thoughts and pictures of
various colours, one after another, arose and vanished of themselves in my
mind…’ And questions that have been assailing him erupt again: ‘Why are
there malign forces in the creation of the Benign? Where is the harmony
between stern justice and the infinite mercy of God?’ ‘I was beside myself
with joy,’ he said later. ‘Afterwards, when I resumed my walk home, I
found there was not an iota of fatigue in my body and that my mind was
filled with infinite strength and peace. The day was then about to break.’
He becomes ‘absolutely indifferent’ to praise and blame. And he
becomes ‘firmly convinced’ that he has not been born to earn money, to
serve his family, to live a life of the world. He starts getting ready ‘secretly’
to renounce the world—as his grandfather had done.
Let us follow in his own words what happens:
When the day for starting on my itinerary was fixed, I heard the news that the Master
would come to a devotee’s house at Calcutta that day. I thought this was very good; I
would see the Guru before I renounced home forever. As soon as I met the Master, he
importunately said to me, ‘You must come to Dakshineswar with me today.’ I offered
various excuses, but he was inexorable. I had to drive with him. There was not much talk
in the carriage. After reaching Dakshineswar I sat with others in his room for some time,
when the Master entered into ecstasy. In a moment he came suddenly to me and, taking
my hand in his, began singing as tears flowed:
Katha koite dorai, na koileo dorai…
I am afraid to tell you, and equally afraid not to tell you
I fear I might lose you forever…
I long kept back the surge of the strong emotions of my mind but could