Sri Ramakrishna was a great saint from the 19th century whose primary teachings were that God can be experienced as palpably as we experience the day to day world, only more intensely, and that all religions are so many paths to God. He is unique in that he actually practiced many of the world's major religions in order to verify that they were all indeed valid means to the attainment of God.

Sri Ramakrishna was born on February 18, 1836 in a small village about 60 miles north of Calcutta. His father and mother were a simple pious couple. Gadadhar, as he was known as a child, had high religious experiences from a young age. In 1852 he moved to Calcutta to work with his borther so that they could help to support the family in the village.

In Calcutta he became a priest in the Kali Temple at Dakeshineswar, which was a village a few miles north of Calcutta. Here he began his spiritual practices in earnest. After a short time he was having spiritual visions of Kali. His family thought that he had become deranged and so brought him back to the village and married him to a young girl from a neighboring village named Sarada. Then he returned to the Kali Temple and hurled himself again into spiritual practices. In 1861 a tantric nun came to Dakeshineswar and he did tantric practices under her direction, quickly acheiving the results that most people take a lifetime perfecting. He then followed several other Hindu spiritual disciplines culminating finally in the study and practice of pure Advaita Vedanta under the tutelage of an itinerant monk named Tota Puri. Under this monks able teaching, he had the experience of Nirvikalpa Samadhi, the highest of all spiritual experiences. Next he practiced Islam under a Sufi adept named Govinda Roy. Then there followed a period when he experienced visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. After having had the highest spiritual experiences according to each of these paths, he was fully fit to proclaim with complete authority the basic spiritual law: As many faiths so many paths.

One by one, between 1879 and 1885, a dedicated group of serious students came to Sri Ramakrishna. He trained them to carry on his mission and made Swami Vivekananda their leader. Finally, on August 16, 1886, due to the tremendous physical strain of teaching, sometimes as much as twenty hours a day, he passed away of throat cancer.

His message to mankind in the modern world was: "Do not care for doctrines; do not care for dogmas or sects or churches or temples. The count for little compared with the essence of existence in each man, which is spirituality; and the more a man develops it, the more power he has for good. Earn that first, acquire that, and criticize no one; for all the doctrines and creeds have some good in them. Show by your lives that religion does not mean words or names or sects, but that it means spiritual realization."