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130 pages

English

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In this award-winning exploration of the lives and teachings of Ramakrishna and Christ, Paul Hourihan guides us through Ramakrishna's extraordinary struggle along the various paths to God-realization and opens our minds to intriguing new interpretations of Christ's life.

The author covers Ramakrishna's life from his unique childhood to his remarkable marriage and beyond. Christ's life also is seen in a new way — from the standpoint of India's yoga traditions and Vedanta philosophy.

Hourihan was raised in a traditional Catholic family in Boston, Massachusetts. While inspired by Christ's teachings, the rigid dogma of the Church proved to be an obstacle that contributed to his gnawing dissatisfaction with life in general, and in particular with the faith he was brought up in.

In his search for meaning, Hourihan joined Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and other writers of his time who looked for answers to life's questions in the sage teachings of the ancient Vedantic scriptures of India.

Hourihan, studying Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Vedanta with respected swamis in New York and Boston, found a spiritual home that also brought him to a deeper, more intimate understanding of Christ, along with an expanded reverence and love for Ramakrishna and other great teachers and incarnations. "Ramakrishna and Christ, The Supermystics" opens our hearts and minds to the knowledge gained by these teachings.

Sujets

Comparative Religion

Philosophie et théologie

Religion

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Publié par	eBookIt.com
Date de parution	09 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781931816175
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Published by: Vedantic Shores Press P.O. Box 493100 Redding, CA 96049 info@vedanticshorespress.com http://www.VedanticShoresPress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact info@vedanticshorespress.com.
COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Estate of Paul Hourihan, ePub edition. COPYRIGHT © 2002 by Estate of Paul Hourihan, print edition.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
We gratefully acknowledge permission to use excerpts from the following:
Sri Ramakrishna The Great Master trans. Swami Jagadananda. Copyright © 1952 by the President, Sri Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, Madras.
The Upanishads, Breath of the Eternal, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester. Copyright © 1947, 1957 by the Vedanta Society of Southern California; The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, Vedanta Press, Copyright © 1944, 1951 by the Vedanta Society of Southern California.
Christian scriptural texts used in this work are taken from the King James version of the Holy Bible .
Our deep gratitude to Mahadevi for redesigning the cover from the original print-book cover. Original cover photos courtesy of and available from The Vedanta Society of Southern California: www.Vedanta.com .
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication for Print Edition
(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

Hourihan, Paul.
Ramakrishna and Christ : The Supermystics : new interpretations / by Paul Hourihan. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographic references and index.
LCCN 2001097125
ISBN 1-931816-00-X [Print edition]
ISBN 978-1-931816-17-5 [ePub edition]
1. Ramakrishna, 1836-1886. 2. Hindus–India–
Biography. 3. Jesus Christ–Hindu interpretations.
4. Jesus Christ–Biography. I. Title.
BL1280.292.R36H68 2002294.5’55’0922
QBI01-201384

DEDICATED
To the Memory of
SHIRLEY THÉRÈSE LEWIS (1936-1981)
A devotee of both the great souls treated here, who in life ceaselessly urged that this work be written.

_____________________________

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Editor’s Note
____________________________________
We are pleased to present this digital version of Ramakrishna and Christ, The Supermystics: New Interpretations with its profound insights into the lives of these two illumined masters . This eBook includes revisions of the print copy for easier reading and more accuracy in a few instances. Due to its speculative nature, a chapter that was mostly an imaginative rendering of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene has been removed, with more relevant parts of it incorporated in Chapter 14 “Jesus and Woman.” *
Since the publication of our original print edition, there’s a lot more literature and information available on Ramakrishna, much of it translated into English from the original Bengali. Yet, few books have been written by an American, with such deep understanding of the subject, who was also able to convey to other Westerners the true magnitude of Ramakrishna’s unheralded influence on our own times, as Paul Hourihan does.
By studying Ramakrishna and Christ together, the supreme figures in each of two vast religious traditions, we discover the uniqueness and universal character of each, and the vital message of the Truth that unites and forms the basis of all enduring faiths.

A.H.

* For those who are interested in reading the chapter “Jesus and Magdalene” from the original print book, it is available on our website here .

Contents
_______________________________
Editor’s Note
Prefatory Note
1 - Early Life: Kamarpukur
2 - The Phenomenon of the Family
3 - The Stage: Dakshineswar
4 - The Gold and Its Alloy
5 - First Vision
6 - End of Initial Phase
7 - The Brahmani
8 - Tantra
9 - Other Moods, Other Visions
10 - On Charisma and Powers
11 - Conquest of the Ultimate
12 - The Mysticism of Christ
13 - The Family Reassessed: The Two Compared
14 - Jesus and Woman
15 - Departure of Yogeswari
16 - Ramakrishna as Pilgrim
17 - Jesus the Jew
18 - The Marriage of Ramakrishna
Epilogue: The Later Years
Appendix: Psychological Considerations
Index
About the Author
Publisher Information

The dictum about power tending to corrupt applies to power per se, like what each of us habitually exercises over the soul, evident in the way we live, in our inability to sustain higher values: a power so rooted, so extensive, that it becomes identified as the source of our corruption, making it almost impossible for us to gain any comprehension of a personality as un -corrupted as Ramakrishna or his predecessor in Nazareth. But an attempt should be made before our slide back to something like unregeneration becomes irreversible. We must act quickly by applying to our heated brains the balm of understanding, even to the slightest degree, the life of an avatar .

A Prefatory Note
___________________________________________
Few ever recover from the reflex of awe that fixates the mind upon studying Ramakrishna, India’s nonpareil mystic. Skeptics aside, others, whether or not they become partisan, rarely recapture a sense of balance when appraising his life. His unprecedented spiritual career and unique personality leave the minds of the sympathetic in a prolonged state of arrest, which helps not at all large numbers of souls who might benefit from an introduction to his life but are estranged by hagiographical passion, the euphoria of the converted. Analyze everything was one of Ramakrishna’s characteristic sayings, although in the case of the man who spoke it there have been few studies that provide much interest for the Westerner who comes to the legend without benefit of faith, but who yet might sincerely wish to know where to lodge his spiritual hungers.
The present work attempts to remedy this lack and so differs from many of the biographical studies in existence. It also avowedly makes its appeal to the Western mind, and possibly to Hindus capable, with one of their own mystics, of that searching analysis of all things that not only Ramakrishna, but their other illustrious names from Buddha to Gandhi have enjoined upon them.
For biographical particulars it depends upon two massive works, the chief pillars of the extensive Ramakrishna literature: Sri Ramakrishna, the Great Master by a direct monastic disciple, Swami Saradananda; and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by M., a direct lay disciple, with the complete and literate translation by Swami Nikhilananda.
But a saint’s mind is so unlike every other that in hazarding a psychological study one is risking a great presumption. Perhaps the author can only reveal himself—his own psychology, not the mystic’s: the saint’s life a mirror in which are reflected the shadows of the author’s psyche. Fortunate, at least, if he is able to correlate them sufficiently with the reader’s to suggest something universally relevant in the picture he draws.
Although this work in its original intent was to be a concentrated analysis of Ramakrishna alone, there were so many cross-references to Christ in the early chapters that subliminal intuitions were plainly overruling the promptings of the conscious will. The result was a book about Ramakrishna and Christ, mystics supreme, who over the last twenty-five centuries—their last peer, Gautama Buddha—stand preeminent for spirituality. Just as a new Ramakrishna is presented here, so there is much that is unexpected in the portrayal of the Galilean; in both cases the orthodox devotee will doubtless suffer unavoidable chagrin not only from the nature of the material but from the realization that minds exist that approach the object of his reverence from standpoints that have never occurred to him. We are less offended by heretical sentiments than by the discovery that heretical minds, after the truth has been thoroughly revealed to us, go on existing.
If more of the book has been devoted to Ramakrishna it is because many pages had to be spent establishing the facts of his life before that life could be properly assessed—a condition obviously not applicable to the founder of Christianity.

Ramakrishna and Christ

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THE SUPERMYSTICS ______________________

1 - Early Life: Kamarpukur
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Both of Ramakrishna’s parents declared they had received messages from the gods Vishnu and Shiva, with a special communication from the household deity Rama (considered an early avatar by Hindus), to the effect that because of their virtuous lives they would become parents to a divine child—that, indeed, Rama himself, an incarnation of Vishnu, would be born as their son. At this birth, 1 in awe-struck gratitude, they named him after Rama—Gadadhar, or Gadai as he became known: affectionate epithets for the god.
Whether the supernal messages were received or imagined, in a very short time life in Gadai’s family proceeded in ordinary, mundane channels and the theophanies