As a young seeker Narendranath was very
curious not just to know about God, but also to see him. With this keen
interest he went to many great saints whether they could help him see God. But
to his dismay none could give him the answer which he expected. Disappointed
and desperate the young man one day, along with his friends, went to meet Sri
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a somewhat eccentric priest of the Kali temple at
Dakshineswar in Calcutta. At the first opportunity Narendranath asked him the
same question - "Sir, have you seen God?"
But Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, unlike the
erudite saints whom Narendranath met before, replied in rural dialect without
mincing words - "Yes, I have seen God. I have seen Him more tangibly than
I see you. I have talked with him more intimately than I am talking to you. But
my child, who wants to see God! People shed jugs of tears for money, wife and
children. But if they weep for God for only one day they would surely see
Him."
Narendranath was astounded. For the first
time, he was face to face with a man who asserted that he had seen God. For the
first time, in fact, he was hearing that God could be seen. He could feel that
Ramakrishna's words were uttered from the depths of an inner experience. But on
encountering Ramakrishna, Narendranath’s skeptical mind could not understand
Ramakrishna’s ecstatic devotion to goddess Kali. He viewed Ramakrishna’s
ecstasies and visions as mere imagination and hallucinations. He placed
many questions and arguments before Ramakrishna, who patiently prodded him
to “try to see the truth from all angles”.
He intuitively
knew that here was a genuine man to whom God was a living reality and not at
all a philosophical concept or an intellectual pastime. It was under the
tutelage of Sri Ramakrishna that Narendra Nath Dutta evolved into a
full-blossomed spiritual soul, later to be known as Swami Vivekananda.
The spiritual initiation given by Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa evolved Swami Vivekananda as an Advaitic, who can see the existence
of God in the things that exist. From his guru Ramakrishna, Vivekananda learnt
that all living beings were an embodiment of the Divine; therefore, service to
God could be rendered by serving mankind.
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