For nearly a decade Swami Bhuteshananda, the 12th President of the Ramakrishna Order, devoted his weekly Bengali religious classes to discussions on Sri Ramakrishna and to the unique book, 'The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna'. His illuminating discussions brought out the thought-provoking deeper dimensions of the simple, homely utterances of the great prophet, and they helped the audience comprehend these simple sayings of the Great Master in the light of the ancient scriptures of India, specially the Vedanta, as well as modern thought. Not unoften, many abstruse concepts, many knotty philosophical questions and doubts of Vedanta metaphysics, were lucidly explained and resolved. These were later transcribed and eventually published in a seven-volume Bengali work, 'Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kath?mrita Prasanga'. The present work is an English translation of the first three volumes of the original Bengali book.
They alone live whose lives are in the whole universe, and the more we concentrate our lives on limited things, the faster we go towards death. Those moments alone we live when our lives are in the universe, in others; and living this little life is death, simply death, and that is why the fear of death comes.
-Swami Vivekananda