Those that come here thinking of the Master will certainly see their chosen Ideal. If this does not take place at any other time. It will at least come just before their death. Who is able to renounce all for His Sake? Even the injunctions of Destiny are cancelled if one takes refuge in God. Destiny strikes off with her own hand what she has written about such a person. If one is steady in meditation, one will clearly see the Lord in one’s heart and hear His voice. The moment an idea flashes in the mind of such a one, it will be fulfilled then and there. You will bath in peace. Repeat the name of God in the innermost core of your heart, and in all sincerity take refuge in the Master. Do not bother to know how your mind is reacting to things around. And do not waste time in calculating and worrying whether or not you are progressing in the path of spirituality. It is Ego to judge progress for oneself. Have faith in the grace of your Guru and Ishta. In the course of time one does not feel even the existence of God. After attaining enlightenment one sees that gods and deities are all Maya. Everything comes into existence in time and disappears in time. Deities and such things really disappear at the dawn of enlightenment. The aspirant then realizes that the Mother alone pervades the entire universe. All then become one. This is the simple truth.

See how many are born out of one person, and how his attention and energy are dissipated! Is it possible for a person to attain spiritual greatness under such conditions? Have you not seen crabs? The mother crab peeps out from her hole every so often, and then goes back. She struggles hard to be free, but fails. Why is this so? Because of her attraction to her numerous young one living in the hole. This attraction draws her back in spite of her efforts. So it is with those who are immersed in worldly life.” The Mother gave a monastic disciple a stern warning about money: “Such is the fascination of money that if you are too much involved in it, you will not be able to resist its attraction. You may think that any moment you may leave your money behind. No, my child, never harbor any such foolish thought. Through a tiny loophole the attachment to money will enter into your mind and then strangle you gradually, without your knowing about it. Always remember Sri Ramakrishna’s saying that money is at the root of all the disasters you see in the world. Money can lure one’s mind into other temptations. Beware.” The Mother admired a genuine monk who was endowed with scholarship. She compared him to an elephant’s tusk adorned with gold. Holy Mother urged her devotees, whether monks or house-holders, to lead an active life. She herself never spent an idle moment.

Only Through self- effort does one come to know that God cannot be realized through self-effort, Then God reveals Himself to a man in His own good time Neither meditation nor spiritual effort can compel this revelation. God’s grace is showered when a seeker is completely free from desire or ego. Yet when the revelation comes, the seeker will not recognize God unless he has made himself ready through prior self-effort. Spiritual unfoldment may be compared to the transformation of a larva into a butterfly or a seed into a plant. The larva goes on eating leaves, with the help of air and sunlight, changes into a chrysalis and then silently into a beautiful butterfly. So, too, a seed draws nourishment from earth, water, and air, till finally a sprout emerges and from it a large tree. Likewise the spirituality transmitted even by a competent guru becomes fully unfolded only with such extraneous help as meditation, japa, prayer and other practices. That grace and self- effort are complementary in spiritual realization will become clear from Holy Mother’s teachings. Holy Mother said; “The aim of life is to God alone is real and everything else is false. God is one’s very own, and this is the eternal relationship between God and creatures. One realizes God in proportion to the intensity of one’s feeling for Him. He who is really eager to cross the ocean of the world will somehow break his bonds. No one can entangle him.”

“The Master is the embodiment of all deities and of all mantras, she said. “one can worship through him all gods and goddesses.” “Sri Ramakrishna assumed this human body to remove the sorrow s and sufferings of others. He moved about in disguise, as a king walks through his capital. The moment he became known he disappeared.” ‘He who has prayed to the Master even once has nothing to fear. By praying to him constantly one obtains ecstatic love, through his grace. This love is the essence of spiritual life.’ The Master used to say to his devotees: ‘I have made the mold; now you may cast the image.’ To ‘cast the image’ means to meditate on the Master, think of the various incidents of his life. Contemplate the great suffering the Master had to undergo because of taking upon himself the results of the bad karma done by other, and then you will find that your body and mind have been purified. Your grief and misery will disappear if you only remember how the Master, though Divinity Itself, suffered for the sake of others and yet did not miss even for one moment the ecstatic joy he experienced from contemplation of the Divine Mother.Thus meditate on Sri Ramakrishna and repeat his name; through his grace every desire of the seeker would be fulfilled. Those who pray to him, will never suffer from want of food or other physical privations, and will also easily gain love and knowledge of Brahman.

It is the body that changes. Atman always remains the same. Lust and gold must be renounced. The Master used to say: “I can cover the whole village of Kamarpukur with gold; but what good will that does? Those alone who belong to a high plane of existence can take to monastic life, and free themselves from all bondage. Again, there are those who are born to enjoy a little taste of worldly pleasure. I say that such persons should see it through. Otherwise, there is no knowing when they may fall victims to unfulfilled desires.’ “Everything is illusory- husband, wife even this body. These are the great shackle of maya. Unless you can free yourself from these shackles you will never be able to cross to the other shore of the world. Attachment to the body, this identification of the self with the body, must go. What is this body, after all, my child? It is nothing but three pounds of ashes when it is cremated. However strong or beautiful this body may be, it ends up in those three pounds of ashes. Yet people are attached to it. she stressed the value of discrimination between the real and unreal, between God and the world. Whatever she taught came from her heart and her inner experience, “Why argue about something which you clearly see to exist?” She said to a devotee: “Give up dry discussion, this hotchpotch of philosophy. Who has been able to know God by reasoning?”

there may be different kinds of food-stuffs in the storeroom, but one must cook them. Whoever cooks earlier gets his meal earlier. Some can eat in the morning, some in the evening, and some may have to fast because they have been too lazy to cook. The more intensely a person practices spiritual discipline, the more quickly he attains God. Even If a devotee does not precise spiritual discipline, he will attain God in the end- surely he will. If he spends his time idly, without practicing prayer and meditation, he will take a long time to realize God.” Man has separated himself from the Universal self because of ignorance. And this separation is the cause of desire, selfishness, greed, anger, passion, fear, suspicion, and all the other evil propensities which cause his suffering. They all spring from a narrow view of the self. The aim of spiritual disciplines is to realize the oneness of the individual soul and the Universal soul, which is its true nature. This realization is finally achieved by means of self-surrender. True self-surrender means the complete effacement of illusory individuality; it makes a man channel for the expression of the power, wisdom, and majesty of the Godhead. It removes all his weakness caused by the idea of separateness.

Without acquiring mental purity one cannot properly meditate. Japa should be combined with meditation. There is saying that as the plant is hidden in the tiny seed, so also is the Lord hidden in His name. “When a pure soul performs japa.” The Mother said,” he feels as if the holy name bubbles up spontaneously from within himself. He does not have to make an effort to repeat the name.” “As wind remove a cloud, so does the name of God disperse the cloud of worldliness.” “The mind will be steadied of itself if aspirants repeat God’s name fifteen or twenty thousand times a day. I myself have experience it. Let them first practices; if they fail, then let them complain. One should practice japa with devotion, but this they do not do. They will not do anything; they only complain, saying: ‘Why don’t I succeed?” “No doubt you must do your duties. This keeps your mind in good condition. But it is also necessary to practice japa, meditation, and prayer. One must practice these at least in the morning and evening. Such practice acts like the rudder of a boat. When a man sits in the evening for prayer, he can reflect on the good and bad things he has done in the course of the day. Then he should compare his present mental state with that of the previous day. Next, while performing japa, he should meditate on his Chosen Ideal, in meditation he should first think of the face of his Ideal, and then meditate on the entire body from the feet upward.

“Everything, no doubt, happens by God’s will, yet man must work because God expresses His will through man’s action. Do not relax your spiritual practices.” Grace directly follows self-surrender and brings about the fulfillment of man’s spiritual aspiration. A profound mystery surrounds the concept of grace; it cannot be solved by reasoning. ‘Do you know,” Holy Mother said, “What God’s grace is like? It is a like piece of candy in a child’s hand. Someone begs the child to part with it. But he does not care to give it to him. Yet he easily gives it to another whom he likes. A man performs severe austerities throughout his whole like but he does not succeed, and yet another obtains realization with practically no effort. It all depends on God’s grace. He bestows His grace upon anyone he likes. The man who receives God’s grace perhaps has done many meritorious deeds in a past life. Therefore God’s grace descends upon him.” Grace, no doubt, is the essential element in the attainment of liberation. But this does not mean that the seeker should neglect the practice of meditation, prayer and other discipline. Holy Mother constantly reminded her disciples not to slacken their efforts. While living with the Master at Dakshineswar, she herself repeated the Lord’s name daily a hundred thousand times, in spite of her preoccupation with many household duties) A man must not try to fit grace into the framework of his own understanding.