'It is a mistake,' the Swami said, 'to hold that with all men pleasure is the motive. Quite
as many are born to seek pain. There can be bliss in torture, too. Let us worship terror
for its own sake.
'Learn to recognize the Mother as instinctively in evil, terror, sorrow, and annihilation
as in that which makes for sweetness and joy!
'Only by the worship of the Terrible can the Terrible itself be overcome, and
immortality gained. Meditate on death! Meditate on death! Worship the Terrible, the
Terrible, the Terrible! And the Mother Herself is Brahman! Even Her curse is a
blessing. The heart must become a cremation ground — pride, selfishness, and desire
all burnt to ashes. Then, and then alone, will the Mother come.'
The Western disciples, brought up in a Western faith which taught them to see good,
order, comfort, and beauty alone in the creation of a wise Providence, were shaken by
the typhoon of a Cosmic Reality invoked by the Hindu visionary. Sister Nivedita
writes:
And as he spoke, the underlying egoism of worship that is devoted to the kind God, to
Providence, the consoling Deity, without a heart for God in the earthquake or God in
the volcano, overwhelmed the listener. One saw that such worship was at bottom, as
the Hindu calls it, merely 'shopkeeping,' and one realized the infinitely greater boldness
and truth of teaching that God manifests through evil as well as through good. One saw
that the true attitude for the mind and will that are not to be baffled by the personal
self, was in fact that determination, in the stern words of Swami Vivekananda, 'to seek
death, not life, to hurl oneself upon the sword's point, to become one with the Terrible
for evermore.'
Heroism, to Vivekananda, was the soul of action. He wanted to see Ultimate Truth in
all its terrible nakedness, and refused to soften it in any shape or manner. His love of
Truth expected nothing in return; he scorned the bargain of 'giving to get in return' and
all its promise of paradise.
But the gentle Ramakrishna, though aware of the Godhead in all its aspects, had
emphasized Its benign side. One day several men had been arguing before him about
the attributes of God, attempting to find out, by reason, their meaning. Sri Ramakrishna
stopped them, saying: 'Enough, enough! What is the use of disputing whether the
divine attributes are reasonable or not?...You say that God is good: can you convince
me of His goodness by this reasoning? Look at the flood that has just caused the death
of thousands. How can you prove that a benevolent God ordered it? You will perhaps
reply that the same flood swept away uncleanliness and watered the earth, and so on.
But could not a good God do that without drowning thousands of innocent men,
women, and children?'
Thereupon one of the disputants said, 'Then ought we to believe that God is cruel?'