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I have been delving into the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna quite a lot lately. This book is a landmark tome in spiritual history; it is a series of diary reminiscences of the last five years in the life of the great spiritual Master, Sri Ramakrishna, as noted down by one of his foremost disciples, Mahendranath Gupta, who wrote under the nom de plume of M. As such, it is perhaps the first truly first-hand account of the life and times of a spiritual Master. In addition, reading the book reminds me of how the way the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna pulled together and intensified their spiritual practice after Sri Ramakrishna’s passing mirrors what has been happening to many of us disciples of Sri Chinmoy ever since the sad news of our own teacher’s departure from this world.

Sri Ramakrishna spent the majority of his life in the temple grounds of Dakshineswar, about four miles northeast of Calcutta. It was here he underwent the spiritual practices in many different traditions and realised they were all different paths to the same goal, and it was here people flocked from far and wide to hear him tirelessly giving of his love and wisdom. In the introduction to the Gospel, the translator gives a description of the grounds which inspired me to try and piece together a map, hunting down bits of information on various websites and putting things together like a detective novel.

It turns out I was merely reinventing the wheel, thanks to a fantastic map and gallery provided by Alan Perry, who went on a pilgrimage to Dakshineswar in 2002. Looking at these photos, one can really orient one’s bearings inside Dakshineswar, and image oneself travelling to the panchavati, the grove of trees which Sri Ramakrishna planted himself and where he underwent much of his spiritual awakening, the room where he spent time with his closest disciples talking for hours on end from his first-hand experience of God, and the temple hosting the statue of his beloved Mother Kali, who for him was a living reality at every second.

I hope that sometime in the future I might be able to take the reader on a similar tour of Aspiration-Ground in New York, my own Dakineshwar, and show him all the places where my Master Sri Chinmoy weaved his earthly play of love and wisdom until his passing in October 2007.

In India, there have been a few select spiritual figures who have come to be known by the title paramhansa, among them for example, Sri Ramakrishna and Paramhansa Yogananda. Many translations of this Sanskrit word give it as ‘heavenly swan‘ or ‘transcendent swan‘.

As well as the obvious connotations of grace and beauty, the swan also evokes other spiritual qualities. It can live equally on land or water, a metaphor for the paramhansa’s ability to be at home both in the inner and outer worlds. According to Indian legend, the swan also is able to separate milk from water, and so the paramhansa is similarly supposed to be able to separate the Real from the unreal on the strength of his meditative awareness.

However, there is a school of thought that says that the literal translation of paramhansa is not ‘heavenly swan‘, but rather ‘heavenly goose‘. The goose, being mainly a farmyard bird in the west, is commonly ridiculed as having characteristics of foolishness and woollyheadedness (which is why the translators probably elected to to choose the swan instead!). But in India the goose carries those exact same attributes of grace and beauty as the swan, in particular the bar-headed goose (photo on right), which twice a year makes the arduous crossing over the Himalayas from Central Asia to India. During these migration, the geese have been observed flying at heights of 9150m, higher than any other bird; yet another analogy with the paramhansa, who flies to sublime meditative heights that the rest of us long to reach for.