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204 main text, 216 total pages
ISBN13: 978-1-931816-00-7
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11     On Charisma and Powers

WITH ONE EXCEPTION, RAMAKRISHNA tended to discourage the embracing of his feet by female devotees. The close physical contact he had experienced with women during the unique Tantric practices had been part of a discipline not meant to be perpetuated. Hypersensitive to influences around him, he felt that a woman holding his feet was not in his best spiritual interests—or in hers. The single exception was his wife, Sarada, who massaged his limbs, often at his own request, every day of their years together—her character pure, her mind flawlessly reverent toward him, all potentially inauspicious vibrations rendered inactive.

Upon reflection, this was essentially true of Mary of Bethany and, in a special sense, of Magdalene also, whose earlier sins had been washed away by the grace of her immortal lover and by the power of her sacrificial urge to immolate herself in the flame of his glory: a consecrated craving which brought her to purity and perfection.

Jesus’ extraordinary psychophysical sensitivity was strikingly demonstrated in the scene (Luke 8: 46) where, pressed by various people in a dense crowd gathered about him, he asks, “Who touched me?”—and then explains to his puzzled disciples: “For I felt virtue go out of me.” The touch of what turned out to be a diseased woman—steeped in negativity of mind as well—had burned him, causing actual physical pain and a sense of power lost, an experience Ramakrishna had on a number of occasions, even when a rupee coin (symbol of Caesar’s realm) was covertly placed against his skin, which he compared to being bitten by a scorpion.

The avatar’s body, including his transformed nervous system, becomes delicately susceptible to others’ influence—spiritual and sensual, healthy and diseased, acutely vulnerable to the nature of everyone who touches him, to a degree utterly beyond ordinary conception. During times of emotional distress, such as often afflicted Ramakrishna when the omnivorous flame of his spiritual hungers threatened to consume him, and as afflicted Jesus, for example, in Gethsemane, their bodies, passive to the imprint of every current of thought carried through the nerves, will sweat blood, the flesh at these times having become a transparent outer covering of the mind.

In the light of such wondrous sensitivity, it is notable that Jesus was able to absorb the stately salutations of Mary of Bethany, not to speak of the more prolonged caresses of Mary Magdalene, whose hands would have conveyed to him all her soul’s ardor as few women can ever have conveyed it. He would have had to place himself, during their embraces, in a yogic state of Tantric sublimation, whereby their ministrations became—as Ramakrishna had discovered them actually to be—the chaste and loving touch of a mother, and he the child of each. Given the pronounced likeness of their temperaments, Ramakrishna’s self-conquest would have been won by Jesus following similar psychological methods.*

Had either possessed the more austere nature of a Buddha the challenge would have been mastered by refusing to see the woman as a female at all, as in fact anything different from oneself; by denying any significant difference—nay, any difference whatever—between her touch and his own body.

About this time, perhaps a little earlier, as a result of the intense and prolonged Tantric sadhana, there emanated from Ramakrishna an unearthly beauty that hypnotized those who saw him—spirit radiating through the thin envelope of flesh, which, mortified by the severe temptations of the Tantric regimen, superadded to the years of ascetic devastation prior to it, yielded up all resistance to the divine presence within. The gospel evangelists allude to a similar charismatic power in Jesus, who, by a mere glance, could draw to him those who, with his preternatural insight, he saw were fated to be his disciples.**

The eight supernatural powers, by-products of his all-consuming disciplines, began to appear about the same time. Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras describes these but warns they are to be shunned by anyone committed to the ideal of divine realization: indulging or exploiting them will inexorably block further progress and will indeed regress the individual who succumbs. Ramakrishna, now and in years following, made scant use of these powers, such as reading the minds and comprehending the past lives of his disciples, foreseeing those destined to come to him, and the like. In answer to a prayer as to what they signified he had received a vision of falling excrement, and for the rest of his life acted as though the powers were not his.

Not every Hindu has acted thus but the greatest―like Gautama Buddha―have. Their self- restraint reflects a view of man profoundly at variance with that maintained in the West, where body-consciousness dominates religious as well as social life. In the metaphysics of the Western world the self to be saved includes, as signs of the divine favor, a body to be healed and a physical life to palpably thrive. Hence our blazoning of miracles, powers, psychic phenomena, and material prosperity: the latter an obsession with the Christian Science, Unity and New Thought schools.

The view in the East is that man’s powers are really the Supreme’s, which, at a certain point, he finds himself in possession of; therefore he must have little or nothing to do with them. Thine is the Power....

Christ, a master yogi, evinces yoga prowess, it is true. Had he not, no one would have noticed him except even fewer disciples than he gained, and doubtless the anchorites with whom he studied during the unknown years. Throughout the Bible the Jews manifest traits immediately recognizable as Western: the outer-directedness, the materialism (Job equating a life of virtue with an abundance of the world’s goods), the egotism, the contentiousness. Consequently a pure gospel of nonviolence, humility, and the love of God would fall on psychological soil almost as barren as it would have been in Muhammad’s Arabia. Some feats of healing, raisings from the dead, thaumaturgic bedazzlement generally, were essential, for to the Western mentality already crystallized in the Jewish environment these things were identified with spiritual greatness—especially with someone reputed to have a mandate from God. In short, all the people around him, including his simpleminded followers, believed that if you came from God you had to perform miracles to prove it. A pure life, a lofty teaching, a radiant character, a mission utterly selfless—these were not enough, as they have been in the East. Wonder-working had to be part of it.

Yet he is often reluctant to gratify those who keep asking him for a “sign” and in the total context of his activities the miracles play but a modest role. In key moments—at the Last Supper, Gethsemane, Calvary—they are absent. In the historic utterances the psychic is ignored. In the Sermon on the Mount there is no promise that one will heal the sick or raise the dead if one follows the path prescribed: only regeneration and the new life is offered.

In essentials he resembles the supreme figures of India. All his miracles—though Christians are blissfully ignorant of this—are reproducible among advanced yogis in the ancient land and have never made a deep impression on the Hindu soul; they have been gently laid aside, allowance being made for the people with whom he had to deal, the age, and the culture. In his profoundest characteristic he has been adopted as one of India’s own, one of the reigning stars in a pantheon of gods that includes, among the greatest, the other subject of our study.

* In the devotional saint, strongly oriented to states of feeling as he is, there remains, in an esthetic and emotional sense, an awareness of the opposite sex-principle. So with Jesus and the women who
worshipped him by prostrations as well as by prayer. So with Ramakrishna (as we shall see) and his adoration of Sarada, his fascination with the female saint Gangamata. By virtue of their devotional
natures they had not extirpated the root of sex-awareness, nor tried to: though of course this awareness was radically free from purely carnal elements.

Buddha, on the other hand, after an excruciating struggle, succeeded in transcending all differences of sex. Hence his characteristic mood of serenity and detachment. Yet he had had great ardor at the beginning—transmuting it into great peace. By dint of his ardor, indeed, he had slain its root—for his feeling was grounded to some degree, inevitably, in a sense of separateness. By uprooting this he also killed its branches and limbs of personal emotion. It was then that his compassion became like a waveless sea.

** When Ramakrishna’s own disciples actually came to him, however, years later, it was not because of his hypnotic beauty, which by then had largely faded. Distressed that increasing numbers were attracted to him only by his appearance, he prayed constantly that his beauty be removed. “Make it go in,” he is reported to have entreated the ever-attentive Kali, who in time answered his singular request.