On The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna – Swami Yatiswarananda

Image Worship

“When should I attend to my morning, noon and evening service? The sun is shining in the sky of my heart. It does not rise. It does not set.” - (Upanishads)
When the necessary mental purification has been attained by the aspirant, rituals are no longer of any use. There are people who renounce rituals before they are sufficiently developed. This is very wrong, just as renouncing image worship before having outgrown it, is very wrong and very harmful. Never decry people who worship images. There is a great truth in image-worship and the Protestants are quite wrong in denying it. They do not know anything of spiritual traditions and spiritual life. There is not only subjective but also objective manifestation in the holy image. This, too, is the idea standing at the back of the Roman Catholic forms of worship, however distorted they may have become in course of time. For most of us, worship of some image, physical or mental, is absolutely necessary if we really wish to grow, and not merely to theorize. The idea of the formless etc.,

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