Begin in Truth, and roam about in the world || Acharya Prashant, on Ramkrishna Paramhans (2015)
“Do your duties in the world and also fix your mind on the Lotus feet of the Lord”
“You are like ‘Elder, the pumpkin cutter’. You are neither a man of the world nor a devotee of God”
~The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
Acharya Prashant: We are referring to a man. A man is, flesh and blood. And a man is consciousness. You could say that on one end of man’s consciousness, lies flesh and blood, and on the other end, lies real living, realization, understanding, ecstasy, love. And man is both, rolled into one. On the end where man is flesh and blood, there is a primitive spell of conditioning. At the end, where man is realization and understanding, there is complete freedom – Freedom from conditioning and Freedom Absolute.
Man will always think and feel that he is one of these two ends and the other end will be a function of what he thinks and feels about himself. For example, if you deeply feel that you are flesh and blood, then you would still experience a void in your life. A general sense of dissatisfaction will be there. There would be something, that the mind would ask for, would chase. This, that the mind would ask for, this that the mind would chase, would be the God of this flesh and blood man. But because he has already thought of himself as flesh and blood, so this God too will be just flesh and blood. And sometimes, this, that he is chasing, he won’t even call it God.
