GOSPEL OF RAMAKRISHNA
have a quiet place near your house where you can occasionally be alone for hours at a time and yet go home for your meals. Keshab Sen, Mozoomdar, and others have told me that they are like Raja Janaka, who lived in the world and yet attained to the highest realization. I replied: "It is not an easy thing to be like Raja Janaka. Raja Janaka was at first a great ascetic and practised extreme asceticism for many years. You could be like him if you practised a little. A man who writes English very fluently has not acquired that facility all at once; he has had to practise for a long time." I also said to Keshab Sen: "Without going into solitude, how can one cure so acute a disease as worldliness? It is like the worst form of typhoid fever. If you keep bottles of chutney and jars of water where a patient is suffering from this fever, he will surely be tempted to eat the one and drink the other and then it will be im-possible for the best physicians to cure him. Objects of lust are like the bottles of chutney, and desire to enjoy is like the thirst after water. Worldly thirst has no end. And so long as the object of thirst is kept within reach of the patient, how can he be cured? Therefore I say, withdraw from the place where those ob-
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