The love of God, conceived of as the Divine Mother, is the purest love we can imagine. Love may be found in everyday life, but it is often mixed with self-consideration. When one's own limited self becomes a prime consideration, love has the power to bind us. This same love has to be purified. Since we can only conceive of divine love based on the analogy of human love, we try to emulate the mother's love for the child. In order to free our love from all other associations and limitations, we turn to the mother's love, since this is the purest form of love we find amidst all human relationships. The love that the mother has for her child is virtually motiveless. When a mother loves her child, she has no selfish considerations. In other forms of love there is always some element of expectation – the love of a husband, wife or relative. But the love of a mother is to a very high degree, a pure love. In human terms, it is the purest form of love we know. Sri Ramakrishna used to say that one should call on God as Mother because the love one feels from one's own mother enables him to understand the true meaning of pure love.

Swami Swahananda

Sri Ramakrishna had been, as Swami Vivekananda said once of him, “like a flower”, living apart in the garden of a temple, simple, half-naked, orthodox, the ideal of the old time in India, suddenly burst into bloom in a world that had thought to dismiss its very memory.

It was at once the greatness and the tragedy of Swami Vivekananda’s life that he was not of this type.  His was the modern mind in its completeness.  I see him the heir to the spiritual discoveries and religious struggles of innumerable teachers and saints in the past of India and the world, and at the same time the pioneer and prophet of a new and future order of development. 

Sister Nivedita

The fact is that Sri Ramakrishna is not exactly what the ordinary followers have comprehended him to be.  He had infinite moods and phases.  Even if you might form an idea of the limits of Brahmajnana, the knowledge of the Absolute, you could not have any idea of the unfathomable depths of his mind!  Thousands of Vivekanandas may spring forward through one gracious glance of his eyes! …  Time and again, have I received in this life marks of his grace.  He stands behind and gets all work done by me.  When lying helpless under a tree in an agony of hunger, when I had not even a scrap of cloth for Kaupina, when I was resolved to travel penniless round the world, even then help came in all ways by the grace of Sri Ramakrishna.  And again when crowds jostled with one another in the streets of Chicago to have a sight of this Vivekananda, then also, just because I had his grace, I could digest without difficulty all that honor – a hundredth part of which would have been enough to turn mad any ordinary man – because I had his grace; and by his will, victory followed everywhere.

Swami Vivekananda

Only the great can achieve the great.  Only the deep can achieve the deep…Try to be deep and profound and see if you cannot find deep and profound truth within yourself.  You have to practice those things.  If you become superficial, you will become like dust that is being scattered by the wind.  You won’t be anything better than that.

So I say if you want great things you must be very thoughtful about those things and should go deep where they are.  The fact is that when you go deeper and deeper you are not far from the Oneness of which I have spoken.  The many disappears and becomes One.  Do you know what word we use for the perception of the One?  We call it Samadhi.  Samadhi means profound meditation.  You get into a state, which is a profound meditative state.  You talk a lot about meditation nowadays, but you do not know what meditation is.  Meditation is very profound in its true nature.  When you reach that state, there comes a profound sense of oneness within you.  You feel one with everybody.

 Swami Ashokananda

PEACE INVOCATION

Om.  Let my limbs and speech, Prana, eyes, ears, vitality and all the senses grow in strength. All existence is the Brahman of the Upanishads. May I never deny Brahman, nor Brahman deny me. Let there be no denial at all; let there be no denial at least from me. May the virtues that are proclaimed in the Upanishads be in me, who am devoted to the Atman; may they reside in me.

 Om Peace! Peace! Peace! 

Chandogya Upanishad

I invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwells in the Heavens.

Everything, husband, wife, or even the body, is only illusory.  These are all shackles of illusion.  Unless you can free yourself from all these bondages, you will never be able to go to the other shore of the world.  Even this attachment to the body, the identification of the self with the body, must go.  That is this body?  It is nothing but three pounds of ashes when cremated.  Why so much vanity about it?  However strong or beautiful this body may be, its culmination is in those three pounds of ashes.  And still people are so attached to it.  Glory be to God!

I spent a couple of months at Kailwar, a very healthy place.  The country abounded in Deer.  No sooner had we seen them than they fled away like birds.  I had never before seen anything running so swiftly.  Sri Ramakrishna would say, ‘Musk forms in the navel of the deer.  Being fascinated with its smell, the deer run hither and thither.  They do not know where the fragrance comes from.  Likewise, God resides in the human body, and man does not know it.  Therefore, he searches everywhere for bliss, not knowing that it is already in him.’  God alone is real.  All else is false.  What do you say, my child?

Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi