your bridge home
True Valor
He tells the holy man's followers that their master's visions are hallucinations, and says it to their faces.
He was not, when he first met the man who would define his life, remotely impressed.
Narendranath Datta was born in Calcutta on the 12th of January, 1863. A Bengali Kayastha of an aristocratic family.
His father was an attorney of the Calcutta High Court. His mother was deeply religious. He was educated at Presidency College, and he read the whole apparatus of nineteenth-century Western philosophy: Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Darwin. His principal, William Hastie, thought him a genius outright.
He joined the Brahmo Samaj, which was rational, reformed and monotheistic, and which regarded image worship as superstition.
Then in 1881 he went to Dakshineswar, and met Ramakrishna.
It came through Hastie, of all people. He had mentioned a holy man who could actually enter the states Wordsworth wrote about.
Ramakrishna was an ecstatic priest of Kali who fell regularly into trance, worshipped an image, and taught in village Bengali by parable.
Narendra's first verdict on all of this was blunt.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.