Seek God in Man

Devotees would often express to Sri Ramakrishna their inability to know or recognize God. They would ask him how to seek God and where to seek Him. Of course, devotees do participate in rituals, worship, etc and also visit various places of pilgrimage. They also worship and adore various forms of Gods and Goddesses. But, all these efforts only seem to create a greater and greater, rather unbridgeable gap between God and man. Often the belief is based on such flimsy grounds that it is disturbed or destroyed very easily, more particularly in times of trials and tribulations while facing problems in this world. Further, devotees would often be baffled by the different philosophies or approaches to ultimate reality. While the dualistic idea of God projects a seemingly huge gap between the human and the divine, the monistic or the Advaitic idea of reality speaks about all pervading consciousness. The extension of this idea means that God is both immanent as well as transcendent and that He is present everywhere and in everything. Sri Ramakrishna would explain the idea clarifying the doubts of the devotees in a beautiful manner. All creation has come out of five elements namely, earth, water, fire, air and space (Aakasha). So, in that sense fire as an element is present everywhere. But, it is present more clearly in wood than in any other object. In ancient days the sacrificial fire used to be lit using two pieces of wood by rubbing them against each other in a particular fashion. Thus Sri Ramakrishna would say, “If you seek God, then seek Him in man; He manifests Himself more in man than in any other thing. If you see a man endowed with ecstatic love, overflowing with prema, mad after God, intoxicated with His love, then know for certain that God has incarnated Himself through that man.” Thus he would say that the best way to seek God is through his incarnation in a human form.