While cleaning out my closet this weekend, I came across a book I hadn't seen for a long time: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Tucked inside the worn pages was a receipt dated July 18, 1997. I had just graduated high school and was searching for something. Apparently, browsing the bookstore sometime in July, I thought maybe I had found it in Sri Ramakrishna. Reading this classic text was one of my first trips into the fascinating world of religion and spirituality, and seeing this book in my closet brought back memories of some of the first spiritual lessons I learned.

I couldn't have accidentally selected a more perfect introduction to spirituality. Very few other great thinkers have had a more enlightened, comprehensive, positive and useful world view as Ramakrishna. How lucky I was to pick up that book that day - and what an affect it would have on me!

The spiritual lessons of Sri Ramakrisna are universal and applicable to most all of us. Even Gandhi praised the insights he gained from Ramakrishna.

Ramakrishna saw the truths in all religions, yet was not a relativist. All seekers will eventually find what they seek, he taught (what a wonderfully encouraging thought, no?), as God can be found through all religions. Using the parable of the elephant, Ramakrishna helps us see that we are all blind. Each religion, he says, is a blind man feeling an elephant. Those who feel an elephant's leg believe God is tall and strong, while those who feel her ear believe God is thin and flat. Truly, as we are all blind, we cannot know God.

Our goal then, is to open our eyes and see God in order to truly understand the elephant that is Ultimate Reality. Ramakrishna, in anthropological terms, was a mystic, who sought a direct experience of the divine, and often entered into communiion with God through a trance-like state, called samadhi.

But how can a blind man see an elephant? One step on the path towards this goal is Bhakti Yoga, that is, the development of a selfless love-devotion relationship towards the Divine. The Divinity, for Ramakrishna, is not something to be known or understood through the traditional senses, but something to be felt and experienced. Through the cultivation of selfless love, the seeker becomes engrossed with the experience of love and becomes not only a devotee, but devoted.

As this relationship develops, material cares seem inconsequential. Desires for traditional material gain are trumped by the desire for God. This is the definition of spirituality.