Sri Ramakrishna now devoted himself to scaling the most
inaccessible and
dizzy heights of dualistic worship, namely, the complete union with Sri
Krishna as the Beloved of the heart. He regarded himself as one of the
gopis of Vrindavan, mad with longing for her divine Sweetheart. At his
request Mathur provided him with woman's dress and jewelry. In this
love-pursuit, food and drink were forgotten. Day and night he wept
bitterly.
The yearning turned into a mad frenzy; for the divine Krishna began to
play
with him the old tricks He had played with the gopis. He would tease
and
taunt, now and then revealing Himself, but always keeping at a
distance.
Sri Ramakrishna's anguish brought on a return of the old physical
symptoms:
the burning sensation, an oozing of blood through the pores, a
loosening of
the joints, and the stopping of physiological functions.
The Vaishnava scriptures advise one to propitiate Radha and obtain her
grace in order to realize Sri Krishna. So the tortured devotee now
turned his
prayer to her. Within a short time he enjoyed her blessed vision. He
saw
and felt the figure of Radha disappearing into his own body.
He said later on: "It is impossible to describe the heavenly beauty and
sweetness of Radha. Her very appearance showed that she had completely
forgotten herself in her passionate attachment to Krishna. Her
complexion
was a light yellow."
Now one with Radha, he manifested the great ecstatic love, the
mahabhava,
which had found in her its fullest expression. Later Sri Ramakrishna
said: "The manifestation in the same individual of the nineteen
different
kinds of emotion for God is called, in the books on bhakti, mahabhava.
An
ordinary man takes a whole lifetime to express even a single one of
these.
But in this body [meaning himself] there has been a complete
manifestation
of all nineteen."
The love of Radha is the precursor of the resplendent vision of Sri
Krishna, and Sri Ramakrishna soon experienced that vision. The
enchanting form of Krishna appeared to him and merged in his person. He became
Krishna; he totally forgot his own individuality and the world; he saw
Krishna in himself and in the universe. Thus he attained to the
fulfilment
of the worship of the Personal God. He drank from the fountain of
Immortal
Bliss. The agony of his heart vanished forever. He realized Amrita,
Immortality, beyond the shadow of death.
One day, listening to a recitation of the Bhagavata
on the verandah of the
Radhakanta temple, he fell into a divine mood and saw the enchanting
form of Krishna. He perceived the luminous rays issuing from Krishna's
Lotus Feet in the form of a stout rope, which touched first the Bhagavata
and then his own chest, connecting all three — God, the scripture, and
the
devotee. "After this vision", he used to say, "I came to realize that
Bhagavan,
Bhakta, and Bhagavata — God, Devotee, and Scripture
— are in reality one
and the same."