SRI RAMAKRISHNA THE UNKNOWN (EDITORIAL) The Timeless Adoration When the sun sinks behind the western, skyline, when shadows thicken and merge in the enveloping gloom, when from the horizon the carpet of stillness spreads across the twilit world, a simple ritual is performed in scores of Ashramas and in thousands of homes in adoration of a Being known to the world as Sri Ramakrishna. In a special room or corner of a room set apart for his unseen presence, incense is burnt and lights are waved, and often there is group singing of songs and hymns of praise and supplication. A religious ritual is a sacrament. Behind it there is a sacralizing agent whose power sustains it for centuries. Through the ritual past events are recreated in the minds of devotees and they encounter divine phenomena afresh. When the devotees of Sri Ramakrishna do puja or-arati in their dwelling places, each place of worship becomes in a mystic sense his room at Dakshineswar temple garden. Time, as it were, stands still and history is transcended when Sri Ramakrishna accepts, as his devotees believe, their worship day after day. For the time being, there then exists only an eternal now. Such is the miracle that faith works through religious rituals. A ritual, however, is only a temporal expression of the timeless aspiration of the human soul. Birth after birth, through trackless centuries, man has been knowingly or unknowingly adoring the Divine in some form or other. It is in response to this timeless aspiration of the human soul that the Divine incarnates himself again and again on earth. The God-hungry soul seizes upon these manifestations and tries to derive new meaning and direction regarding its own progress in life. Every word that an Incarnation utters becomes a message of light, every gesture of his a promise of hope, every action a sacrament, and every place of his visit a centre of pilgrimage. This is true of all the great Incarnations of the past, Rama and Krsna, Buddha and Christ, and has now come to be true in the case of Sri Ramakrishna. Kasmai devaya havisa vidhema Who is this Sri Ramakrishna to whom thousands of people now accord adoration? Who is Sri Ramakrishna whose deathless reality is now intimately connected with the lives and destinies of countless people all over the world? If this question is put to his devotees and followers, it is likely to embarrass a good number of them, while those who attempt to answer it soon find that they are failing to give clear expression to their deepest convictions about him. It is said that when, Girishchandra Ghosh once requested Swami Vivekananda to write a life of Sri Ramakrishna, the great Swami hastily shrank back and told him, 'Ask me to dry up the ocean, I shall do that; ask me to pulverize the mountains, I shall do that; but please do not ask me to write the life of Sri Ramakrishna.'