See God with Open Eyes : Meditation on Ramakrishna by Swami Chetanananda
May 2019
Published by Vedanta Society of St. Louis, 205 S. Skinker Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63105, U.S.A. 2018, Hard bound, pp.480. $29.95
The Vedanta Kesari
40
Book Reviews
(Available at Advaita Ashrama, 5 Dehi Entally Road, Kolkata - 700 014. `500.) ‘Sir, have you seen God?’ asked an English-educated young man from 19th century Bengal to a priest of Kali at Dakshineswar temple, a question he had already asked many spiritual luminaries of that time. But unlike the other answers which skirted round the issue with vague generalisations, this time the reply from the priest was definitive: ‘Yes, I have seen God. I see God with open eyes as clearly as I see you. And I can also show God to you.’ This cameo forms the foundation of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda tradition extant in various pockets of the globe today. From this scene Vivekananda formulated his Practical Vedanta: ‘The same Brahman pervades all beings; this knowledge is the culmination of Vedantic experience.’ These words make it evident that we see God in everyone and everything around us—obviously with our eyes open. As an heir to this vibrant tradition, Swami Chetanananda has wielded his prolific pen to tell us in the present volume how each one of us can ‘See God with Open Eyes’ (an assurance given by Sri Ramakrishna to Narendranath Datta (later Vivekananda) in the initial days of their acquaintance), if we follow the procedure detailed by this book. As a process of natural transition, the inexhaustible creative fount of Chetanananda has moved from his earlier books—a series of interesting life-stories of people associated with the tradition—to the inward realm of human experience. In this book See God with Open Eyes, he has given a remarkable treatise on the art of
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meditation using Sri Ramakrishna as the centre. One can visualise how he himself must have deeply meditated on Sri Ramakrishna and others he wrote about for each of the excellent volumes he has earlier presented to the interested reader with such disciplined regularity. This present volume can therefore be taken as a roadmap to seeing God with open eyes through the process of meditation based on the felt and lived experiences of the author. After the science-religion conflicts and controversies which clouded the human mind for a long stretch of time, the present century seems to be veering towards a resolution. And in the process, spirituality is being foregrounded by thinkers and practitioners of various disciplines. In this global pursuit, ancient Indian spiritual experiments are gaining ground. See God with Open Eyes is a timely effort by Swami Chetanananda to contribute to the move towards spiritualising the contemporary times, using Sri Ramakrishna who has been variously hailed as the culmination of the thousands of years of wisdom of India. As the subtitle suggests, meditation on Sri Ramakrishna is the path to follow for ‘seeing
