Love manifests through action, manner, and feelings. A real lover always takes the position of a giver; the lover enjoys giving everything — body, mind, possessions, wealth — to the beloved. Like his cousin Sharat, Shashi was not well-to-do. He knew that the Master was very fond of ice, so he bought a big piece and carefully wrapped it with paper and then with a towel so that it would not melt. He walked over six miles from Calcutta to Dakshineswar. It was a hot summer day and the scorching sun blistered his body. When the Master saw him, he began to say, “Ah! Ah!” as if he were in pain. When Shashi asked him what was the matter, the Master said that as he looked at Shashi’s body, his own began to burn. The Master was overwhelmed by Shashi’s sincerity and love. Strange to say, the ice did not melt at all on the way.
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One night the Swami Ramakrishnananda could not sleep because he was shivering from cold. He thought perhaps he had forgotten to put the quilt over the Master’s picture. He immediately opened the shrine and found that his guess was correct.
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Love cannot be defined. A real lover gets joy and finds fulfillment in life by serving and giving his everything to the beloved. Ramakrishnananda kept the Master alive in his mind through his intense love. One day he was resting when all of a sudden he had a desire to feed Ramakrishna hot luchis, which was his favourite dish. Immediately Ramakrishnananda got up and made the dough, then he fried luchis. He placed a plate in front of the Master and carried hot, crispy luchis to him one after another, as if the Master were eating and enjoying his favourite dish.
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The first building of the Madras Monastery cracked in several places within a couple of years of its construction. When it rained, water would come down through the fissures in the roof. At such times Ramakrishnananda would go into the shrine to see whether water was leaking through the ceiling. One night it began to drip inside the shrine too, right on Sri Ramakrishna’s picture. The swami stood there holding an umbrella till the night passed and the rain stopped. He did not remove the picture to a safer side because that would wake his Master from sleep at an untimely hour, which would be wrong.
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Swami Sharvananda recounted this incident: One sultry evening after supper Shashi Maharaj laid himself down on the cot and I was massaging him as usual. It must have been 11:00 p.m. and the heat was oppressive. He suddenly got up, tied his cloth round his waist and went into the shrine. He bade me also to follow. He stood with a fan near the cot on which Sri Ramakrishna’s picture was laid for the night’s rest and began to fan him. He asked me to fan Swamiji’s picture which was kept on a pedestal. He went on fanning for nearly an hour, and then gently walked out of the shrine. His whole behaviour could not fail to engender the feeling in my heart that Sri Ramakrishna was actually present there, sleeping there on the cot, and we were serving him.
Then he went out of the room and stood on the veranda outside the building. I brought a chair for him and he sat on it. I started fanning him. Shashi Maharaj did not speak a word, as if his mind were soaring high to some transcendental region. He suddenly turned towards me and exclaimed: “You see, my mind is soaring in the heights. If I sit now, I can fall into samadhi immediately.” I kept quiet and wondered at the sublimity of the situation. It must have been about 2:00 a.m. when he got up and said, “Now let us go and retire.” It was a memorable night for me to witness such a sublime spectacle.
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A real lover always thinks of the beloved, and would never do anything to displease the beloved. The stories of Ramakrishnananda’s love for Sri Ramakrishna are now legends in the Order. Once he told Sister Devamata: “The true devotee never thinks of himself. He is so full of the thought of God that his own self is forgotten. This body is only an instrument, a passive instrument, and an instrument really has no existence of its own, for it is wholly dependent on the one who uses it. Suppose a pen were conscious, it could say, ‘I have written hundreds of letters,’ but actually it has done nothing, for the one who holds it has written the letters. So because we are conscious we think we are doing all these things, whereas, in reality we are as much an instrument in the hand of a Higher Power as the pen in our hands, and He makes all things possible.”
Extract from “Sister Nivedita: Notes of Some Wanderings with the Swami Vivekananda”
(August 12th and 13th)
The Swami had now taken a Brahmin cook. Very touching had been the arguments of the Amarnath sadhus against his willingness to let even a Mussalman cook for him. “Not in the land of Sikhs, at least Swamiji:” they had said, and he had at last consented. But for the present he was worshipping his little Mohammedan boat-child as Uma. Her whole idea of love was service, and the day he left Kashmir, she, tiny one, was fain to carry a tray of apples for him all the way to the tonga herself.
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