From the “Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna” —
Sri Ramakrishna: You cannot get rid of an ailment without the help of a physician. But it is not enough to be in the company of religious people only for a day. You should constantly seek it, for the disease has become chronic. Again, you can’t understand the pulse rightly unless you live with a physician. Moving with him constantly, you learn to distinguish between the pulse of phlegm and the pulse of bile.
DEVOTEE: “What is the good of holy company?”
Sri Ramakrishna: “It begets yearning for God. It begets love of God. Nothing whatsoever is achieved in spiritual life without yearning. By constantly living in the company of holy men, the soul becomes restless for God.
“There is another benefit from holy company. It helps one cultivate discrimination between the Real and the unreal. God alone is the Real, that is to say, the Eternal Substance, and the world is unreal, that is to say, transitory.
Admin Notes:
- Most of the time we get some insights while practising spiritual disciplines but we are not sure whether they are genuine or not, as the same mind of ours deluded us many times in the past. The holy company helps us to verify the truth behind our own spiritual experiences and insights.
- Seeing and reading holy lives makes us believe in higher reality and helps us to make effort with greater conviction in realising it. We try to become doctors, lawyers, engineers…etc because we believe we can achieve that by making the same effort as others. Even an Avatara also helps devotees in developing this belief. Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile incident is helpful in understanding it.
- Swami Chetananda and Swami Prabhavananda