competent teachers, and they came to him one by one, nobody knew from where. One
was a woman, under whom he practised the disciplines of Tantra and of the Vaishnava
faith and achieved the highest result in an incredibly short time. It was she who
diagnosed his physical malady as the manifestation of deep spiritual emotions and
described his apparent insanity as the result of an agonizing love for God; he was
immediately relieved. It was she, moreover, who first declared him to be an
Incarnation of God, and she proved her statement before an assembly of theologians by
scriptural evidence. Under another teacher, the monk Jatadhari, Ramakrishna delved
into the mysteries of Rama worship and experienced Rama's visible presence. Further,
he communed with God through the divine relationships of Father, Mother, Friend, and
Beloved. By an austere sannyasin named Totapuri, he was initiated into the monastic
life, and in three days he realized his complete oneness with Brahman, the
undifferentiated Absolute, which is the culmination of man's spiritual endeavour.
Totapuri himself had had to struggle for forty years to realize this identity.
Ramakrishna turned next to Christianity and Islam, to practise their respective
disciplines, and he attained the same result that he had attained through Hinduism. He
was thereby convinced that these, too, were ways to the realization of God-
consciousness. Finally, he worshipped his own wife — who in the meantime had
grown into a young woman of nineteen — as the manifestation of the Divine Mother of
the universe and surrendered at her feet the fruit of his past spiritual practices. After
this he left behind all his disciplines and struggles. For according to Hindu tradition,
when the normal relationship between husband and wife, which is the strongest
foundation of the worldly life, has been transcended and a man sees in his wife the
divine presence, he then sees God everywhere in the universe. This is the culmination
of the spiritual life.
Ramakrishna himself was now convinced of his divine mission on earth and came to
know that through him the Divine Mother would found a new religious order
comprising those who would accept the doctrine of the Universal Religion which he
had experienced. It was further revealed to him that anyone who had prayed to God
sincerely, even once, as well as those who were passing through their final birth on
earth, would accept him as their spiritual ideal and mould their lives according to his
universal teaching.
The people around him were bewildered to see this transformation of a man whom
they had ridiculed only a short while ago as insane. The young priest had become
God's devotee; the devotee, an ascetic; the ascetic, a saint; the saint, a man of
realization; and the man of realization, a new Prophet. Like the full-blown blossom
attracting bees, Ramakrishna drew to him men and women of differing faith,
intelligence, and social position. He gave generously to all from the inexhaustible store
house of divine wisdom, and everyone felt uplifted in his presence. But the Master
himself was not completely satisfied. He longed for young souls yet untouched by the
world, who would renounce everything for the realization of God and the service of
humanity. He was literally consumed with this longing. The talk of worldly people was
tasteless to him. He often compared such people to mixture of milk and water with the
latter preponderating, and said that he had become weary of trying to prepare thick