Chapter (অধ্যায়): XXIII OUR MASTER'S RELATION TO PSYCHIC PHENOMENA SO-CALLED PAGE-288Page: 288 of 336
his hand on the heads of a row of persons, one after another, saying in one case, "Aj thak!" "To-day let be!" in another, "Chaitanya houk!" "Be awakened!" and so on. And after this, a different gift came to each one thus blessed. In one there awoke an infinite sorrow. To another, everything about him became symbolic, and suggested ideas. With a third, the benediction was realised as over-welling bliss. And one saw a great light, which never thereafter left him, but accompanied him always everywhere, so that never could he pass a temple, or a wayside shrine, without seeming to see there, seated in the midst of this effulgence, - smiling or sorrowful as he at the moment might deserve - a Form that he knew and talked of as "the Spirit that dwells in the images."
By such stimulating of each man to his own highest and best, or by such communication of experience as one and another could bear at the time, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa built up the rigorous integrity and strong discrimination that one sees in all who were made by his hand. "We believe nothing without testing it," says one - Ramakrishnananda by name "we have been trained to this." And when I enquired from another of the disciples what particular form this training took, he answered, after deep thought, that it lay in some experience given of the Reality, from which each gained a knowledge that could never be deceived. "By our own effort," says Vivekananda, in one of his earlier lectures, "or by the