– Sri Ramakrishna
The following discourse by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa has been taken from the book, Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by ‘M’.
Sri Ramakrishna: The bound creatures, entangled in worldliness, will not come to their senses at all. They suffer so much misery and agony, they face so many dangers, and yet they will not wake up.
The camel loves to eat thorny bushes. The more it eats the thorns, the more the blood gushes from its mouth. Still it must eat thorny plants and will never give them up. The man of worldly nature suffers so much sorrow and affliction, but he forgets it all in a few days and begins his old life over again.
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Suppose a man has lost his wife or she has turned unfaithful. Lo! He marries again. Or take the instance of a mother: her son dies and she suffers bitter grief; but after a few days she forgets all about it. The mother, so overwhelmed with sorrow a few days before, now attends to her toilet and puts on her jewellery.
A father becomes bankrupt through the marriage of his daughters, yet he goes on having children year after year. There are men who cannot feed the children they have, who cannot clothe them or provide decent shelter for them; yet they have more children every year.
The worldly man is like a snake trying to swallow a mole. The snake can neither swallow the mole nor give it up. The bound soul may have realized that there is no substance to the world, that the world is like a hog plum, only stone and skin, but still he cannot give it up and turn his mind to God.
I once met a relative of Keshab Sen, fifty years old. He was playing cards. As if the time had not yet come for him to think of God!
There is another characteristic of the bound soul. If you remove him from his worldly surroundings to a spiritual environment, he will pine away. The worm that grows in filth feels very happy there. It thrives in filth. It will die if you put it in a pot of rice.
How Can a Person BREAK Attraction of Material World & Focus on God? (2/2) – Sri Ramakrishna answers this question with the story of two farmers who were trying to irrigate their field. One succeeded while the other failed. The difference lay in their degree of determination.
