In his religiosity, Ramakrishna
(1836-1885), a Hindu mystic and priest at a temple of the goddess Kali, the
goddess of death, drew on the Bhakti (devotee), (Advaita) Vedanta, and Tantra
aspects of Hinduism, as well as on Islam and Christianity to a much lesser
extent, toward his goal of realizing God, which can also be put in terms of
achieving self-knowledge of one’s true nature (atman). In the Bhavagad-Gita,
Arjuna demands to see the god Krishna as he really is, but Krishna has to hold himself
back, showing himself in (human) bodily form, albeit with a myriad of heads. Even
a distended form such as this is too much for Arjuna. Moreover, ignorance
cannot take in reality or awareness itself without it being adorned in
anthropomorphic (i.e., having human characteristics) ornaments that Hume
discusses in his Natural History of Religion. Krishna’s promise in the
Gita is relevant, in “that, through His Maya, He will assume a human body and
manifest His powers whenever religion declines, and will help [people] to
obtain peace.”[1] It
is through illusion that a deity assumes the likeness of a human form because
seeing a deity’s essence in Brahman is simply too much for mere mortals.
Being corporeal, the human body
resonates with the selfish, greed-instigating materialism that Swami
Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s closest disciple, claims, albeit with more than a
tinge of resentment, is associated with modern (i.e., twentieth-century)
Western civilization. The secularity in the West, especially with the
epistemological reduction to empiricism further narrowed to natural science,
“could not lead [people] to the knowledge of Atman,” or, I might add, to
Brahman (and that Atman is really of Brahman).[2]
In other words, “knowledge obtained through the senses will not enable [people
in the West] to discover the reality beyond time and space,” especially in a
decadent culture “founded on self-love, desire for worldly possessions and
absence of faith in religion.”[3]
Instead, knowledge of a person's own soul "is through self-control [of the mind as by meditation or renunciation], selflessness, and introspection."[4]
Seeing the “face” of the divine
as embodied in personified forms only gets a person so far if the goal of
realizing the divine lies inherently beyond the limits of human resemblance,
or, as Dionysius wrote, beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and
sensibility (i.e., emotions). Because Ramakrishna went beyond empirical
representations of Kali in worshipping the divine “Mother,” such transcendence
was very much a part of his mature religious belief-structure and practice.
For example, Tantric ritual
centers around the worship of shakti, which literally means “energy,
ability, strength, effort, power, might, and capability.”[5]
In Hinduism, shakti is the universal power that underlies and sustains
everything that exists. Shakti connotes femininity, and is synonymous
with Devi, the goddess consort of Shiva, who furnishes the power (or energy) of
the male deity. In Tantric Shaktism, Shakti is the principal deity, hence being
akin to Brahman.[6]
The goal of tantric practice is to transcend the tall hedge that separates the
holy and unholy and thus achieve moksha, or liberation by seeing everything in
the world as manifestations of shakti.[7]
In Christian terms, Gertrud of
Helfta’s visions of Jesus as her divine spouse included one vision of Jesus
lifting over the divide between the sacred and the profane, where she sees the
wounds on his resurrected body, but this empirical representation may belie
Gertrud’s claim of being transported to the divine side. To be sure, Gertrud’s
goal of being in God, whose essence is (agape) love, which
Calvin, unlike Augustine, thought people could have in this world, transcends
being married to Jesus, and thus marital union, but her worship and visions did
not go so far. Her image of Christ, as a “mask of eternity,”[8]
became her final obstruction to even deeper, immersive union with God
qua divine rather than erotic love. From his Confessions, it can be
concluded that Augustine may have been held back in from achieving further transcendence
by the same obstacle.
In contrast, Ramakrishna’s
worship in nineteenth-century India went beyond the bodily representation of
Kali to the goddess being essentially Brahman, which transcends the very notion
of a deity (i.e., an entity that encapsulates the divine as personified). When
asked about Kali worship, Ramakrishna said, “I do not worship Kali made of clay
and straw. My Mother is the conscious principle. My Mother is pure Satchidananda—Existence-Knowledge-Bliss-Absolute.
That which is infinite and deep is always dark-coloured. The extensive sky is
dark-coloured and so it the deep sea. My Kali is infinite, all-pervading, and
consciousness itself.”[9]
Darkness represents mystery, as in being ineffable (i.e., the unknown). In
Hinduism, Brahman, and any god or goddess deemed to be supreme and thus sharing
Brahman-qualities, is the darkness within the stone idol of Kali that, being
inside the statue, knows no form.
Regarding his vision of Kali,
Ramakrishna said, “in my heart of hearts, there was flowing a current of
intense bliss, never experienced before, and I had the immediate knowledge of
the Light that was Mother.”[10]
On another occasion, Ramakrishna described the vision as follows: “(I)n
whatever direction I looked, I found a continuous succession of effulgent waves
coming forward, raging and storming from all sides with a great speed. Very
soon they fell on me and made me sink to the unknown bottom.”[11]
He “saw a conscious sea of light. But what about the divine Mother’s form
consisting of pure consciousness only”?[12]
Did Ramakrishna see that form? Saradananda assumes so because Ramakrishna
“uttered repeatedly the word ‘Mother’ in a plaintive voice.”[13]
I find it spurious reasoning to conclude that such an utterance means that
Ramakrishna’s vision was limited Kali’s female form—such a form would detract
from seeing pure consciousness as a sea of light. Saradananda’s notion that the
divine Mother’s form consists “of consciousness only” suggests that form is
not being used here to refer to that of the human body. Indeed, immediately
after the vision, Ramakrishna was still begging the goddess to show herself to
him.[14]
But, then, as Ramakrishna would later report, after he lost consciousness under
the weight of such “unbearable anguish,” he “saw that form of the Mother with
hands that give boons and freedom from fear—the form that smiled, spoke and
consoled and taught me in endless ways!”[15]
I contend that the vision of a “conscious sea - light”—consisting of “pure
consciousness”—can be distinguished as more transcendent, and more
wholly other (than us), than the female form of the Goddess that he saw while
he was unconscious. His vision went beyond the goddess as an embodied entity to
grasp the goddess’s essence as Brahman.
The shift in transcendence can be
seen in Ramakrishna’s realization when he was “having the divine vision of the
child Rama constantly,” being “(a)bsorbed in the meditation of that divine form
in the mood of maternal affection towards Him, that, as Ramakrishna put it, “’Rama,
who is the son of Dasaratha, is in every being; the same Rama is immanent in
the universe and yet transcends it.’”[16]
The “divine form” of the child Rama cannot hold Rama “entering the universe and
eternally manifesting Himself as it” and being “ever existent in His own
attributeless nature devoid of Maya [illusion] and beyond everything in the
universe.”[17] Once
Ramakrishna had reached the point of his life when he was engaged in his
religious exercises, he would stay in a mood until “it experienced its ultimate
limit, getting at last a glimpse of the non-dual consciousness beyond.”[18]
To put it plainly, “seeing” the face of God in such rawness blows away not just
the form of a child, whether in Hinduism or Christianity, but form itself.
As Dionysius points out in his text, even the notion of an entity is taken from
our experience of the world in which we live, rather than being necessarily
applicable to a deity’s essence as Brahman, or, in Christianity, divine love (agape).
Such transcendence would translate
into Gertrud of Helfta, a Medieval Christian nun, transcending her experience and
vision of loving marital union with Christ to go on to experience indwelling in
divine love itself, being in God rather than merely in relation to God.
Similarly, such transcendence goes beyond Ramakrishna’s own practice of the
Madhura-bhava, the “sweet mood as of the spouse of God.”[19]
With Ramakrishna being “ever desirous to have the love of Krishna,” as Gertrud
was in regard to the love of Jesus, that Ramakrishna “was a male person
disappeared altogether and every thought, word or movement of his became
womanly”—even wearing women’s dresses for six months—“in the faith that he was
the spiritual consort of God.”[20]
Gertrud didn’t have to change genders mentally and spiritually because she was
a woman and Jesus is incarnated as a man, but she too viewed herself as a
spiritual consort of a deity. But unlike Gertrud’s spiritual transcendence to
spiritual matrimonial love, Ramakrishna’s religious experience and vision of
the goddess being a “wonderful state of complete absorption in” the goddess transcends
marital union and even a vision of the goddess’s hands and smile.[21]
Put another way, Ramakrishna’s practice wherein his will perfectly
reflects that of Kali as though being in the goddess compares to
Gertrud’s unrealized goal of being in God, which is a more
perfect union than is her liturgical marital union with Jesus and Ramakrishna’s
“unbounded yearning for the complete”—only it is not complete even as an ideal!—"union
for all times without a break with one’s darling of the heart.”[22]
Even though “cruelly obstructed by manifold barriers,” the marital union sought
may seem to be complete without such barriers, but this is not so relative to the
deeper union as is evinced in dwelling in the divine.[23]
In short, Ramakrishna went
further—transcended deeper—than Gertrud had because he surpassed even Kali manifesting
as a deity ironically through intense devotion to that goddess. Gertrud had achieved
only so much in her marital visions and experience of Jesus as her spiritual
spouse, just as Ramakrishna could not hope to achieve a complete union as
Krishna’s consort even if there were not a hedge between us and the gods.
That Ramakrishna went deeper in
experiencing Kali than he could as Krishna’s consort, even with the efficacy of
the method-acting bringing forth genuine female spirituality, is not to say
that Ramakrishna ceased to have visions of the goddess in anthropomorphic
terms. Before his vision, while worshipping and meditating, he “used to see a
hand of the divine Mother or a foot, bright and delicate, or Her sweet,
affectionate and smiling face, supremely beautiful. Now he saw, even at times
other than those of worship and meditation, the full figure of the effulgent
Mother, smiling and speaking, guiding and accompanying him and saying, ‘Do
this, don’t do that.’”[24]
In the years when Ramakrishna was practicing Tantric rituals (Sadhana),
he had visions of “the divine Mother Herself dwelling in the female form.”[25]
Although used by one of
Ramakrishna’s disciples to argue that Ramakrishna’s love as a devotee for the
divine Mother and as a woman-attired consort of Lord Krishna was qualitatively
different than the love that we mere humans who are not incarnations of a god (i.e.,
avatars) have, differentiations of kinds of love having differing relations to
body can be used to understand how seeing the face of divinity beyond the
particular deity’s form is more transcendent, and thus richer in terms of
religious experience and insight, than devotional love that is oriented to an
embodied deity. Swami Saradananda distinguishes love as “the attraction of one
body for another” from “the attraction towards the aggregate of the noble
qualities manifested in a particular body”—the latter being “so-called transcendental
love” rather than love whose reference point is “free from the consciousness of
the gross body and subtle desires for enjoyment.”[26]
Both of these degrees or kinds of love are less than the best from a religious
standpoint because they can be had by people who identify with their body “and
conscious of being that alone.”[27]
Ramakrishna did not identify with his embodied form, and certainly not with
that alone, so he was able to have “true transcendental love.”[28]
Because such love is greater than love of abstract qualities of an embodied person,
I contend that the truly transcendent love transcends that of devotion or
matrimony to a deity that is viewed as having a body, and thus a form. Even subjecting
the divine to a form lessens it, as, for instance in Christianity God voluntarily
lowers itself in selfless, or self-emptying love (agape) by becoming
incarnated in a human body (i.e., Jesus).
David Hume’s theory of the human
mind that it cannot hold onto or envision divine simplicity for long without
retreating back to imagery that is familiar can explain the human preference
for embodied gods (i.e., subjecting divinity to form). To be sure, Hume overlooked
how the experience of transcending the divine clothed in familiar garb can
transform the ornaments. Ramakrishna, for example, could “see an extraordinary
ray of light coming out beaming from Her eyes, touching all the offered
articles, taking their essential parts and withdrawing itself into Her eyes.”[29]
The light transforms Her eyes, such that they become less familiar and more “other.”
Similarly, as if the stone image of Kali were but training wheels on a small
child’s bicycle, Ramakrishna reached the point of no longer needing to see the
idol to see “the living Mother Herself, all consciousness, and with hands that
offered boons and freedom from fear.”[30]
When he was practicing Tantric rituals (Sadhana) from 1861-1863, “there
was no limit to the number of the [goddess’] forms, ranging from the two-armed
to the ten-armed.”[31]
Ramakrishna’s visions of the goddess’ presence came to no longer reflect the engraved
stone renditions of Kali, and that enabled the arms to differ from the two that
human bodies have.
Ramakrishna could even transcend
even the dichotomy that I have used as paradigm of sorts of the divine in a
familiar form versus love (the Christian God) or pure consciousness (Brahman). Ramakrishna
had a vision, for instance, of “the divine mother’s form, consisting of consciousness
only.” The transformation of form itself by having transcended it can be
regarded as the epitome of how transcending deified form can transform how a
devotee sees form.
The implications should not be
ignored, for from reflecting on them our own perspective of liturgy and worship
itself can be radically changed. Even the scripture as guidelines for
Ramakrishna’s liturgy could be seen as training wheels, for Ramakrishna’s
worship as the priest of a Kali temple “passed beyond the prescribed limit of
the devotion enjoined by the scriptures and took a speedy course along the
exalted path of pure devotional love.”[32]
Imagine a Roman Catholic priest putting the written Eucharistic prayer aside to
speak spontaneously in devotional love for Jesus even in consecrating the bread
and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and the superordinate bishop
telling the laity to let the priest be led so by the love. Imagine Gertrud of
Helfta taking off her wedding band and dress to walk naked into a sea of divine
love that transcends even the Incarnation, and thus marital union with Christ.
The established rituals in religious liturgies can be seen from this mature
religiosity as but firm guardrails for spiritual that to spiritual adults no
longer look solid. The examples of Ramakrishna and mystics of other religions
are worth our study lest it be only garden-variety eros and ego rather than
spiritual maturity that relegate the hedges that spiritual children need.
Fortunately, Mathur at Janbazar had the spiritual insight to recognize that
Ramakrishna’s intense devotional love for the goddess had filled the temple
“with an intense manifestation of palpable divine presence,” which certainly
justified him having taken off the liturgical training wheels to act by the
faith of his devotional love.
It can be argued antithetically,
however, that transcending the goddess as a deity-entity to be engulfed in pure
consciousness, or Brahman (i.e., Kali is essentially Brahman), may be considered
to be devoid of distinctly religious content. Losing even the
anthropomorphic garb of the goddess could mean leaving the religious domain for
the tautology of consciousness of the whole. If this is a valid argument, then
Ramakrishna’s holding onto to some visually-human attributes, such as having a
hand and a smile, after ironically seeing (i.e., transcending) Kali’s “face” as
pure consciousness itself, is necessary. That is to say, transcending a familiar
mask of eternity to dwell in an absolute union with the divine may not obviate
human (or familiar) images of a beloved deity. In this case, that such images
are transformed, as, for example, Christ’s resurrected body is
transformed and not the same as his earthly body, is crucial.
1. Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna: The
Great Master, Jagadananda, trans. (Madras, IN: Sri Ramakrishna Math
Mylapore, 1952), p. 16.
2. Ibid. p. 13.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Monier Williams, Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary.
6. Vanamali,
Shakti: Realm of the Divine Mother (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
7. Carl T. Jackson, Vedanta for the West (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1994).
8. This term was coined by Joseph Campbell, a mid-twentieth century scholar of
religion who, like Ramakrishna, emphasized what religions have in common, as
per his “gracious message: As many faiths, so many paths and You will
realize the divine Lord through any spiritual practice performed with a sincere
heart.” Saradananda, The Great Master, p. 16.
9. Swami Chetanananda, Ramakrishna as We Saw Him (St. Louis: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1990), p. 404.
10. Saradananda, The Great Master, p. 140.
11. Ibid.,
p. 141.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.,
p. 215.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.,
p. 231.
19. Ibid.,
p. 149, 143.
20. Ibid.,
p. 233.
21. Ibid.,
p. 149, 143.
22. Ibid.,
p. 235.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 143.
25. Ibid.
p. 201.
26. Ibid.,
p. 235.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.,
p. 143.
30. Ibid.,
p. 144.
31. Ibid.,
p. 202.
32. Ibid.,
p. 147. See also p. 149: “The Master had then gone beyond the limits of
devotion enjoined by the scriptures and became engaged in the worship and other
services of the divine Mother with Ragatmika devotion.” The use of the word,
“enjoined,” can, I submit, be taken as a euphemism for what in more practical
terms is more akin to “prescribed” or even “mandated.” That love in devotion to
an entity that is but stone or wood in form within the boundaries of our
earthly domain can be sufficient for a devotee to walk through the wall of
encrusted requirements backed
up by religious authorities tells us something about the sheer intensity that such love can reach in the human mind/soul (animus).
