HAVEN’T I SEEN YOU BEFORE?

One day, by seeming chance, Abanindra, destined  to become Swami Prabhavananda, met Sarada Devi. She was Sri Ramakrishna's wife who, following his death, was regarded by his disciples as their spiritual mother--"Holy Mother," they called her.

One of her attendants told Abanindra who she was; otherwise, he would have taken her for an ordinary countrywoman, sitting barefooted, without the slightest air of self-importance, outside a village inn. When he approached and bowed down to touch her feet in reverence, she said, "Son, haven't I seen you before?"

When Abanindra was eighteen and a student in Calcutta, he visited the Belur Math, the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna Order, which is beside the Ganges, on the outskirts of the city. He wanted to see the room in which Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s chief apostle, used to stay.  Since Vivekananda’s death in 1902, it had been maintained as a public shrine.

When Abanindra left the Vivekananda Room, he found himself for the first time face to face with Brahmananda, another principal apostle of Ramakrishna whom Ramakrishna regarded as his spiritual son. And Brahmananda said to him, "Haven't I seen you before?"

Could it be that everybody has known everybody else over countless past lifetimes, the memory of which we lose when we pass from one incarnation to another, the exception being illumined souls who carry memories of everyone they’ve ever met for all time?

Subsequent to his meeting Brahmananda, Abanindra became a monk, and Brahmananda, or Maharaj as he was known at Belur Math, accepted him as his disciple.

All of us have encountered everybody else in the world many times over, when all of us were other people. However, not all of us went on to meet an illumined soul, which altered the course of our lives forever.

Incidentally, all beings insentient and sentient chance upon all other insentient and sentient beings over the millennia in their journey to spiritual awakening.  It is the  way in which the universe itself is awakening.