In the early days of the Ramakrishna Movement, Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi was still living. At that time very little was written about her, and it was difficult to obtain her photograph. The emphasis was almost entirely on Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. This began to change with the observance of the Holy Mother Centenary in 1953-54.
Some readers were concerned about the growing number of ethnic Indian devotees at Centers in the West. There was lament about the changes this brought about — some crowding at events, a growing sense that aspects of Indian culture were displacing Western social attitudes and practices, and other, similar complaints.
Robert Samples in his book The Metaphoric Mind describes a radio talk show where an author, speaking about his intuitive sense of a larger wholeness, asked anyone in the listening audience who had such an experience to call in and share it.
Swami Ashokananda led the Vedanta Society of Northern California for more than 30 years, leaving behind a truly astonishing body of spiritual instruction. Using the prisms of their own internal quests, Marie Louise Burke (Sister Gargi) and Shelley Brown looked through notes taken over decades by the Swami’s disciples for particularly illuminating precepts and aphorisms.
Sri Ramakrishna states repeatedly that God alone is the Doer… Given the amount of evil in the world, this doctrine makes God a monster. It means that God, rather than man, committed genocide in the Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur.
In our Summer Edition 2008, readers were invited to answer this question:
The opening lines of “Breaker of this World’s Chain” by Swami Vivekananda read:
