Sri Ramakrishna Math : The Vedanta Kesari, January 2003

Merely about a hundred and fifty years ago, on the 22nd December 1853, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother, was born in a very remote village of West Bengal, India, called Jairambati. Steeped in rigid rural traditions and religious customs, the village offered a ready ground for the revival of 'humanism' stripped of all its limiting attributes. She was a born mother; she never acquired motherhood in the biological sense! Outlandish indeed! If motherhood must presuppose a birth of a child, she fulfilled this mandatory prerequisite by giving birth to what is scholastically called 'humanism'.

There are two words in Sanskrit which will explain the truth in this enigmatic statement of ours. Janani is the word that explains the ordinary sense of motherhood, she who gives birth to offspring. In this sense all living things have their mothers. There is another word that explains a special type of motherhood: it is Mâtâ. To be Mâtâ one does not require begetting offspring. It is a mental attitude (Sri Krishna terms 'attitude' as Buddhi in the Gita 2.39.). It is called Mâtritva. This attitude includes even birds, animals etc. in its scope. Once a disciple asked Sri Sarada Devi (hereafter 'Mother'): 'Are you the Mother of everybody?' Mother replied, 'Yes!' 'Are you the Mother of the birds and insects?' 'Yes, of them also!' Even males can acquire and be endowed with this kind of mental attitude. Sri Sarada Devi said that Sri Ramakrishna had a motherly attitude towards this world. When Sri Ramakrishna passed away, she wept addressing him as Mother Kali: 'O Mother Kali, where have you gone?' Sri Krishna in the Gita (9.17) says that to this creation he is the Mother (aham asya jagatah Mâtâ). Mother's life presents a unique saga of this second type of motherhood. She says, 'When one attains true knowledge, God Himself does not exist. One calls upon the Eternal Mother, and in the end finds Her in all creation. Everything then becomes One.'

Nowadays 'fatherhood' itself has come under challenge by the birth of the cloned ewe, Dolly. Sri Krishna, and in fact the Vedic tradition, did not speak about God as gender-specific. Sri Ramakrishna's realization takes us to this truth: The Supreme God or God of gods (Parameshwara) can be both masculine and feminine depending upon His/Her states of manifestation. Beyond this, there is the Reality which is called Brahman having no specification; It is Neuter. This clarifies the misconception about Hindu Pantheism.

Be that as it may, Mother once said, 'If my children smear their bodies with mud and dirt, is it not my duty to wipe off the dirt and take them on my lap?' What a great statement! An uneducated village woman finds easy solution to complicated problems that the educated create. We may recall how the simplicity of a child could point out: the king is in birthday suit! While all others' eyes were so blurred with the dirt of decency that they stretched it beyond decency's limit. Mother cleanses all sorts of dirt and dust of all names and forms from our persons and washes us so clean that we can go out into the world manifesting an other-worldly beauty.

Once Nalinididi, one of Mother's nieces--a fastidious girl and a Brahmin at that, saw that Mother was cleaning the place where one guest of a lower caste had taken food. Shuddering in horror, Nalinididi exclaimed, 'Good Heavens! Aunt (Sri Sarada Devi) is cleaning the place defiled by know-not-how-many castes!' Mother protested, 'Where do you find 'many'? All are mine.' Nalinididi did not know that the dirt of counting, which required a thorough cleaning by the gracious Aunt, already defiled her own mind. As counting is an art; it can also be dirt if the misuse of it escapes our detection. The scriptures say, 'Counting befits mean-minded persons.' Sri Ramakrishna did not learn Arithmetic for the peculiar reason that it teaches 'subtraction'.

The much-hyped seminars, discourses etc. that we hold to promote communal harmony and universal brotherhood do not bring about any tangible result. It seems, nowadays it has become an urgency to hold such meetings. Much rhetoric with loaded words is heard in these seminars to no effect. The participants hardly understand the meaning of the word 'universal'. Each look at the word through his/her own broken lens. Sri Ramakrishna used to say, 'If one eats radish one belches the same smell.' On the 11th September 1893 Swami Vivekananda addressed the religious world from the pulpit of the Parliament of Religions at Chicago, America. In his paper on Hinduism he narrated the famous story of the 'Frog in the Well':

'A frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time. It was born there and brought up there, and yet was a little, small frog. Of course the evolutionists were not there then to tell us whether the frog lost its eyes or not, but, for our story's sake, we must take it for granted that it had its eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms and bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our modern bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little sleek and fat. Well, one day another frog that lived in the sea came and fell into the well.

"The sea! How big is that? Is it as big as my well?" and he took a leap from one side of the well to the other.

"My friend," said the frog of the sea, "how do you compare the sea with your little well?"

"Well, then," said the frog of the well, "nothing can be bigger than my well; there can be nothing bigger than this; this fellow is a liar, so turn him out."

I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world.

I have to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you to accomplish your purpose. '

After exactly 108 years of Swami Vivekananda's call on the American soil at Chicago for harmony, the world has awakened to the underlying urgency of the call with the 11th September 2001. One hundred eight is one of the holiest, perhaps the holiest, of numbers in Hindu religious tradition. It can prove to be holy if we follow a holy path and use it for holy purposes. It is the same distance from hell to heaven, and heaven to hell. However, Christ says that the road and the gate to hell are wider than those leading to heaven. One should be extra-ordinarily careful indeed.

One has, of course, the right to be proud of the greatness of one's own religion, one's own root and pedigree. But that should not inspire one to belittle those of others'. The moment we say that ours is the only God or prophet, we emit the stench of an inner stuff called 'hatred' and sow the seed of discord. Again, as soon as we try to show the greatness of our God or prophet over others' Gods, we start the publicity for a product, which befits a businessman advertising for saleable goods. This type of superiority complex is reminiscent of the old story of a king. The king felt the need to raise a protective wall around his capital. He called experts to suggest the name of a strong material with which he could construct the protective wall. Each praised the goods of which he was the dealer. The last expert was a cobbler. He not only praised his leather, but also did not forget to repeatedly affirm, 'Nothing like leather.'

Varieties like Hindu, Muslim etc, Indian, American etc, Protestant, Catholic etc, black Negro, white European, yellow Mongoloid etc, will be there, should be there. They do not depend on anybody's sweet will for their existence. The world has to accept it as the reality about the world, or else die. Swami Vivekananda says: 'The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his/her individuality and grow according to his/her own law of growth.' The truth in these words, if imbibed, will help us to get rid of a repulsive attitude towards others, and of taking advantage of others' tolerance. Hatred cannot be claimed to have been taught by spiritual people. It is as old as Lucifer. Lucifer does not get a chance to strangulate one's rationality with his poisonous tentacles. So it catches hold of one's emotion--unbridled emotion. It does irreparable harm to the possessors themselves. Swami Vivekananda warned us, 'When principles are entirely lost sight of and emotions prevail, religions degenerate into fanaticism and sectarianism.'

Peace is not unilateral; nor is hatred. Let us practise peace if we want to preach peace unto our brethren. Colton wrote: 'Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; die for it; anything but live it.' Let us not sermonize from the podiums our universal ideas about peace and harmony to be followed by others. Let us hold conferences to give accounts of what we have done to promote harmony during the period since we met last. Things will certainly change provided we have properly understood the seriousness of accountability or transparency in this respect. In today's world there is no harm in washing dirty linen even in public. Because there remains no opacity about the partition between the private and the public--the eyes, aided by technology, have become all-penetrating. Moreover, this kind of accountability in the form of displaying 'washed and dazzlingly colourful linen in public' is the demand.

Nowadays we use the word 'tolerance' as the requirement of the day to promote brotherhood. This is not in keeping with the spirit of brotherhood. It is not by tolerance, but by acceptance, that we have brotherhood. In our families, we do not tolerate our brothers or sisters, but accept them through love. Mother once told one of her disciples: 'Love can achieve anything. You can never make one obey you by force or by adopting a roundabout way.' The word 'tolerance' smacks of discrimination or a sense of superiority, or arrogance. Even otherwise, who are we to tolerate? Who has allowed this privilege to us over others? It is for this reason that Sri Ramakrishna did not appreciate the covert arrogance in the phrase 'compassion to living beings (jive dayâ)'. The creation is God's. Let Him show compassion to His children. Moreover, absence of Universal Brotherhood shows how irresponsible we have been. Either we have been approving of the acts of discord, and promoting the acts that irritate or provoke others, or we do not sufficiently disapprove them.

Let us stop counting differences, and start highlighting similarities. Differences should be there. Yet we can highlight similarities. Defects are not the exclusive possession of any particular person or group. They are the ingredients of life. Mother advised us to stop finding fault with others. Then she said, 'Make this world your own.' It is only by highlighting the similarities that we can find affinity and can make the world our own. Relation/friendship in any field is always established on similarities in spite of huge differences. Our desperation or frustration in achieving peace is proof enough that we do not try for it honestly. It is not a riddle as to how we will get peace, but why we fail to get it.

Let us define ourselves first as humans (No other choice in this respect.), then Indians 'etc', then Hindus 'etc', etc. The notable thing about the above sentence is that we cannot add the word 'et cetera' after the word 'humans'! Because it represents the whole species called 'human'. This is the meeting point at the physical or even psychological level, the point of similarity; none has exclusive right over it. Mother addresses us as her children. In her parting message she said to a lady devotee, 'My daughter! Tell all my children--those who have already come, those who have not, and those who will be coming in the future--that my love and blessings are there for all of them to share.' Is it called 'humanism'? Maybe so, if not 'spiritualized humanism'.

Unfortunately, we have quantified our relation with God. We use God to earn the world, while we should use the world to earn His confidence in us. If we approach God directly, it is called spirituality. If we do it through an agent and/or accessories, it is called religion. Let us understand that God has sufficient power and wisdom to directly communicate with His children. He does not need agents. Doctrines are open, and they easily undergo changes. But dogmas die a painful death--so do the dogmatic, the bigoted, the fundamentalist. Prophets do disown such hateful persons, what to speak of God's reactions. Christ says in the Bible that on the Last Day of Judgment he would say unto these people, 'I never knew you.' We believe, the word 'non-believers' should mean 'those who do not believe in gods', i.e., the atheists, and not those who believe in other gods. Let us convince an atheist, and convert him/her to prove the sincerity of our purpose!