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Let
Ramakrishna Dance His Rapturous Dance
Swami Atmapriyananda
Swami
Brahmananda, a most intimate disciple of Sri Ramakrishna,
once went into an ecstatic mood at the sight of an image of
Lord Nataraja (dancing Shiva) at the Madurai temple in South
India. Nataraja literally means the King of Dancers. Shiva
is portrayed as a majestic dancer who dances his dazzling
dance poised wonderfully on one foot in an act of supreme
balancing. Usually, it is the left foot that He raises in
the air, keeping the right foot on the ground, and thus he
does his balancing act standing on one foot. The story goes
that the Pandya king ruling over Madurai empathetically felt
the Lord’s pain in the right foot and fervently pleaded with
Nataraja to change His posture: to dance, for a change, with
the left foot on the ground and the right one in the air.
The compassionate Lord at once obliged and started dancing
as requested! This image of Nataraja dancing the reverse way
is seen only in Madurai and is considered a unique posture
of the dancing Shiva. When Swami Brahmananda saw it, he at
once went into ecstasy and exclaimed that he had seen Sri
Ramakrishna dance exactly in the same posture!
The
Two Divine Dances
Nataraja
dances are of two kinds: one, in the overflowing divine joy
of absorption in his higher Self; and the other, in a state
of feeling great compassion for the world, which needs to
be absorbed, with all its creatures, into Himself whence they
sprang. Shiva means the Auspicious, the Blessed, the Good.
But this auspiciousness, blessedness or goodness comes through
a divine Power that destroys all evil, selfishness and smallness
in one single sweep; hence the dance imagery. The first kind
of dance is greatly enjoyable, adorable and soothing, while
the second kind is terrible, too powerful to be calmly adored,
and oftentimes, too devastating in its effect to be admired.
Nevertheless, both of them conduce to the welfare of humanity.
Nataraja is said to dance both kinds of dances in the chidambara,
the space of Consciousness, or Awareness, also known as daharakasha,
hridaya-guha and so on. While these concepts are too profound
for ordinary mortals like us who have not yet discovered the
existence or reality of a vast inner space, we could at least
reverentially contemplate the goodness and auspiciousness
flowing out of the Self-contented and Self-absorbed Shiva
as Nataraja and pour our hearts’ devotion in a prayer for
the destruction of our selfishness and egocentricity.
The
Destructive Power of Incarnations
We
do not really know how Shiva looks in his ecstatic divine
dancing mood of Nataraja. Saints and sages who have had His
darshan in the depths of their being have left some portraits.
But in the case of Sri Ramakrishna, the picture is right there
before us in the form of authentic photographs. If only video
pictures were possible during Ramakrishna’s lifetime, we would
have had the great benefit of seeing live motion pictures
of his ecstasies, dances and rapturous discourses with the
devotees. Nonetheless, the still pictures and photographs,
animated by the vivid descriptions of Mahendranath Gupta (who
styled himself ‘M’), invade our being with such power that
our vulnerable inner structure of the self begins to crumble
at once. Christian mystics speak of Christ, the outwardly
meek and humble Son of God, as the ‘Hound of Heaven’. Swami
Vijnanananda, a mystic disciple of Sri Ramakrishna into whom
the Master infused great spiritual power by a mere touch,
used to described the Master as ‘kancha kheko devata;
the deity that devours raw flesh’. Whereas the other deities
are offered cooked meat and fish, Sri Ramakrishna, the outwardly
meek and humble devotee of Kali, swallows up a person alive,
flesh, blood and all, to transform him or her into a true
divine being transcending the body, mind and the senses. Herein
lies the power of the avatara, the divine Incarnation. While
a Ramakrishna or a Krishna or a Buddha may look the picture
of peace and calmness and overflowing inner joy, they are,
in fact, powerful dynamos of spiritual power. They are a Power
that destroys and devastates, rather than soothe or comfort.
This Power destroys all smallness, littleness, self-centredness
and egocentricity in one’s personality. It would therefore
be wise on the part of those who would like to fondly cling
to their little individuality not to venture too near these
Divine Incarnations!
The
Power That Was Sri Ramakrishna
How
quietly a Ramakrishna invades one’s personality is a matter
of experience and perception for any sincere spiritual aspirant.
This illiterate priest of Bhavatarini Kali at Dakshineswar,
clad for most part of the day merely in the apparel of bhakti
(projjvala-bhakti-patavrita) rather than earthly clothes;
with the almost contagious innocence of a five-year-old but
ripe nevertheless with an ageless wisdom; with a disarming
Krishna-like smile playing on his lips, his countenance beaming
with the bliss of God-absorption (samadhi) and his ecstatic
movements radiating the soothing splendour of a million moons;
with a sweet stammer that is the very antithesis of shrill
oratory, but with divine discourses pouring spontaneously
from the very recesses of his being as in a torrential outpour
of ambrosial waterfall; with an unparalleled compassion for
the human being in bondage - how could one even conceive that
this humble child of Kali was such a storehouse of spiritual
power that devastated even a Vivekananda so proud of his mental
strength and intellectual accomplishments! Swami Shivananda,
one of Sri Ramakrishna’s intimate disciples, once observed,
‘We knew and thought of him as a very holy man, pure and innocent
like a child. But how could we ever know that this little
man contained within him millions of universes!’
To
say the least, all this would naturally sound funny to most
people. It would appear to be rhetoric and verbal jugglery
at best, or downright oriental hyperbole (unsubstantiated,
unverified and unverifiable panegyric) at worst. That is how
it sometimes appeared to Sri Ramakrishna’s own disciples -
from the highly intellectual, agnostic Naren, who alone knew
the Master most intimately, to the highly unsophisticated,
illiterate Latu, who felt a spontaneous attraction for the
Master but knew not why. In fact, Sri Ramakrishna himself
did not care to understand much of himself and his uniqueness
in the realm of spiritual tradition: he was just content with
getting more and more absorbed in Truth in Its multifarious
manifestations, from the apparently lowest so-called idolatry
to the highest flights of Advaitic awareness of Oneness.
Speaking
about himself, he said that he was a glutton in the spiritual
realm, the insatiable hunger of his soul driving him to savour
the spiritual essence in ever so many ways. He was an adventurous
mountaineer of the Spirit who tirelessly set out to scale
newer and higher peaks of spiritual sublimity in a mad pursuit
of an irrepressible inner urge. He was an expert diver into
the ocean of the inner Spirit who joyously delved into the
depths of that ocean of both the formless Reality as well
as that with form, and brought out the gems of spiritual wisdom
to be shared with the entire humankind in a rapturous rapport
of universal kinship.
Nevertheless,
Sri Ramakrishna was intensely human, simple and unsophisticated,
freely accessible to all without distinction and so overwhelmingly
compassionate. We could feel free to talk to him - yes, to
him who is now dead and gone for more than a hundred years,
in gross physical terms, but very palpably alive in his subtle
spiritual Ramakrishna form, a fact vouchsafed by his disciples;
we could feel the vibrations of his assuring response in the
depths of our hearts. When our minds become boggled and we
stand dumbfounded by the sheer profundity of his amazing spiritual
sadhanas followed by the unending procession of his breathtaking
realizations, his trances and ecstasies and samadhis and rapturous
sports in the spiritual field; when we tend to feel ashamed
of our own littleness, impurities of heart, lack of spiritual
fervour - it is then that his voice of compassion speaks to
us, as it did to Arjuna: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you,
whosoever contemplates my form and my teachings shall inherit
my wealth, even as a son does inherit his father’s wealth.
All that ye need to do therefore is to strive to get absorbed
in such a contemplation; as to the rest, I shall take care
of everything.’ Sri Ramakrishna repeatedly gave this assurance
to M, Sri Mahendranath Gupta, the recorder of the Gospel.
M mentioned it to his intimate circle of devotees and disciples,
and one among the latter, Swami Nityatmananda, records this
Great Assurance, this Divine Command, this Singular Promise
of the Lord in his immortal books of M’s conversations.1 M
himself seems to have couched this Great Assurance in biblical
language and style to add grandeur and gravity. M then adds,
very significantly and touchingly: ‘And what does his wealth
consist of? Jnana-bhakti, viveka-vairagya, shanti-sukha,
prema-samadhi (Knowledge and devotion; discrimination
and dispassion; peace and bliss; divine love and God-absorption).’
What a promise and how very assuring for us present-day humans
caught in the rat race of what Sri Ramakrishna used to call
kama-kanchana (lust and gold)!
The
Real Dharma-glani
An
avatara manifests Himself whenever there is dharma-glani
(virtue getting overpowered by vice). (2) At the inner
(microcosmic) level, it is only when an aspirant’s heart is
overpowered by a deep anguish and enveloped, as it were, by
an anirvacaniya glani (indescribable sorrow) that the
divine Lord chooses to manifest in his heart. And this too,
when the aspirant has come to the end of his tether, having
tried and tried and tried, but just finding it unable to penetrate
into the realm of Light; helplessly attempting but unable
to deliver that last punch, that final blow, that would make
the unconscious explode and get annihilated at one stroke
- the final stroke that would ignite and illumine the whole
inner being. When the aspirant is at the brink of such a psychological
and spiritual crisis (this being the real dharma-glani),
the Divine Lord chooses to manifest in his heart. The joy
and rapture of a Ramakrishna then become the property, the
inherited wealth, of the aspirant. Describing such a coming
of the Divine into one’s heart, Swamiji wrote in his famous
poem ‘Kali the Mother’: ‘Who dares misery love,/ And hug the
form of Death,/ Dance in Destruction’s dance,/ To him the
Mother comes. (3)
The
dance of destruction is the annihilation of the self - of
all smallness, littleness, self-seeking, egocentricity. When
all these get burnt up in jnanagni, the fire of divine
Wisdom, then, and only then, does the Mother come. Swamiji
ends his famous Bengali poem ‘Nachuk Tahate Shyama’, translated
into English under the title, ‘Let Shyama Dance There’ with
the following immortal lines: ‘Shattered be little self, hope,
name, and fame;/ Set up a pyre of them and make thy heart/
A burning-ground./ And let Shyama dance there. (4)
Ramakrishna’s
Rapturous Dance
If
we want Ramakrishna to come into our hearts, we need to burn
away all desires, vasanas, without the least trace and in
that cremation ground of the heart that then becomes the seat
of nirvasana upasana, Ramakrishna would come and dance
his joyous dance - the dance of Nataraja in the chidambara,
the cave of our Heart (hridaya-guha). And may it be
our great good fortune that in this very life we shall witness
in our Heart of hearts this divine dance of Ramakrishna!
With
the darkness of ignorance dispelled and all vasanas burnt
in the divine Fire of jnana in the secret chamber of the Heart
irradiated by the Light supreme - in that divine Illumination
of the daharakasha let Ramakrishna dance his rapturous
dance!
References
1.
Swami Nityatmananda, M, the Apostle and the Evangelist
(Chandigarh: Sri Ma Trust, 1967), 1.400-1.
2.
Bhagavadgita, 4.7.
3.
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 vols. (Calcutta:
Advaita Ashrama, 1-8, 1989; 9, 1997), 4.384.
4.
Ibid., 4.510.
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