Monthly Readings

One must have the inner conviction that whatever happens in this world happens by His will. Success and failure come by His will. The achievements of so many clever people in this world have come to naught! Everything is His will! Do you think the Ramakrishna Mission will last forever? It will degenerate in time, and the Lord will have to incarnate again.

At one period of my life I used to live continually in an ecstatic state. Then the Lord suppressed this mood.

The ego and the Self stand at two opposite ends of our spiritual journey. Our inquiry begins with the ego and culminates in the realization of the Self.

We are now living an age of slogans. One of the much-repeated slogans is that religion is the opiate of the people and is therefore to be avoided as poison. As a result of hearing this constantly, some of us, who are not prepared to use our God-given power of reasoning, come to believe in it and lose our faith even in the true religion, which in the words of Swami Vivekananda, is really “the manifestation of the divinity already in man.” There is religion and religion.

In spiritual life, we use the word “obstacles” with reference to both the inner and the outer world, to physical and subtle objects, and to conditions and situations which stand in the way of our spiritual progress.