my master

\SWAMIJI'S TIME                              J K  SIVAN

RAMAKISHNA PARAMAHAMSA                          ''MY MASTER''

There are different natures born into this  world and  they  require different applications of the same religious truths.  So we are bound to have forbearance with each other. Just as nature is unity in variety, an infinite variation in the phenomenal, and behind all these variations,  the Infinite, the Unchangeable, the

Absolute, so it is with every man; the microcosm is but a miniature repetition of the macrocosm; in spite of all these variations, in and through  them all runs this eternal harmony, and we have to recognize this.

This idea, above all other ideas, I find to be the crying necessity of the day. Coming from a country which is a 'hotbed of religious sects—through good fortune or ill fortune, everyone who has a religious idea wants to send an advance guard there.

From my childhood I have been acquainted with the various sects of the world; even  the Mormons came to preach in India.  Welcome them all! That is the soil on which to preach religion. There it takes root more than in any other country. If you come and teach politics to the Hindus they do not understand, but if you come to preach religion, however curious it may be, you will have hundreds and thousands of followers in no time, and you have every chance of becoming a living god in your  life time. I am glad it is so, it is the one thing we want in India. The sects among the Hindus are various, almost infinite in number, and some of them apparently hopelessly contradictory. Yet they all tell you they are but different manifestations of   Religion. " As diflferent rivers, taking their  start from different mountains, running crooked or straight, all come and mingle their waters in the ocean, so the different sects, with their different points of view, at last all come unto Thee."

This is not a theory, it has to be recognized, but not in that patronizing way which we see with some.

''Oh, yes, there are some very good things." (Some even have the most wonderfully liberal idea that other religions are all little bits of a prehistoric evolution, but " ours is the fulfilment of things.")

One man says because his is the oldest religion it is the best ; another makes the same claim because his is the latest.We have to recognize that each one of them has the same saving power as every other.

It is a mass of superstition that you have heard everywhere, either in the temple or the church, that there is any difference. The same God answers all, and it is not you, nor I, nor any body of men, that is responsible for the safety and salvation of the least little bit of the soul; the same Almighty God is responsible for all of them.