Indian saint and mystic, renowned as the founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, better know in the west as the Vedanta Society. An assistant in the temple of the goddess Kali from 1855 he devoted his life to his religious ideals. He was a pantheist, believing that all religious paths lead to God-consciousness. To many Hindus he represented a “supremely realized self” and an incarnation of the divine.
Born into a Brahman family, Ramakrishna’s striking characteristic in childhood was his emotional and aesthetic sensitivity and power. When overwhelmed by beauty and emotion, he would lose consciousness in an ecstatic trance. His early spiritual experiences included going into a state of rapture while watching the flight of a cranes, and loosing consciousness of the outer world while playing the role of the god Shiva in a school play.
The death of his father in 1843 increased his dependency on his mother, while his older brother Ramakuma took on the paternal role. Ramakuma traveled to Calcutta in 1850 and became the adviser of a wealthy widow who was building a temple to the Divine Mother Kali, and Ramakrishna joined him there two years later. His brother was appointed the temple’s chief priest, and Ramakrishna became priest to Radha Krishna. When Ramakumar’s health failed and he died in 1856, Ramakrishna became a priest to the Divine Mother. Bereft and desolate by his loss, Ramakrishna developed an insatiable longing for the Divine Mother to comfort him. At one point an “intolerable anguish” drove him to the edge of suicide, after which he experienced his first “God intoxicated state,” losing consciousness in a vision of the Divine Mother and submerged in waves of bliss and light. When he regained consciousness, he craved more of the experience. Years later, he would attest that he became “positively insane,” spending several years in a state of “divine madness or inebriation” during which visions of various deities appeared repeatedly.
His parents found him a wife in 1859, hoping his mental instability was a result of his celibacy. She was Sarada Devi, born 22 December 1853.
In 1861 a renunciant mendicant woman named Yogesvari arrived at the temple. A master of Tantric discipline, she became Krishna’s first guru and guided him through a remarkable transformation over a four-year period that overcame his sense of separation from the world. Altering his continuous visionary state to instead make it his “mansion of mirth,” Krishna again returned to the Hindu practices of his childhood.
Four years later another renunciant named Totapuri came to the temple, giving Krishna instruction in the state of the Absolute, a state of consciousness devoid of all conceptual forms. The result was another trance-like state which allegedly lasted nearly a year, almost causing Krishna’s physical death.
After recovering from this experience, Krishna returned to his “mansion of mirth” and began to expand his religious awareness by studying Islam and Christianity. Both teachings brought visionary realizations which he realized were similar to those he experienced of his own Hindu deities. These brief but no less intense visions became the experiential basis for his claim that all religions can lead to the same realization of the divine.
By 1879 he was attracting disciples among the intellectual circles in Calcutta, many of whom had been previously adopting European and Christian customs. He spent his last years teaching these disciples and streams of visitors. One of these disciples, Vivekenanda, recorded his instruction from 1882 to 1886 and spread Krishna’s message to the world.
He died of throat cancer in Calcutta, India on 16 August 1886 between 1:00 and 2:00 AM at age 50.
Link to Wikipedia biography