The rascal has found me out

A man dying of throat cancer in 1886 was told by a young disciple that he seemed to be in great bliss. He laughed.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 06 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

Somebody once described life as a disease with a hundred per cent fatality rate, and Swami Sarvapriyananda repeats it with the air of a man who finds it accurate rather than funny.

Put the standard objection to him. If everything is consciousness and its nature is supposed to be bliss, what about the sickness and the violence and the cruelty. How is any of that bliss. The swami does not soften it. Nature feeds on itself. Bodies are built so that pain is always available. Old age and death are guaranteed. Some suffering is inflicted by people on people and could be stopped, and most of it is simply the way things are.

What non-duality offers, he says, is not a cure. He uses the word transcendence and then defines it narrowly. The suffering does not end. Underneath it, all the time, there is something that is not touched by it, the screen under the film, and it is possible to stand there while the film goes badly.

Then the story. Sri Ramakrishna, the teacher whose disciple Vivekananda was, died of throat cancer in 1886. A few months before the end, already emaciated, he was visited in the morning by a young man who later became a monk. How are you today, sir. I cannot eat, this hurts. The young man looked at him and said, but sir, I see that you are in great bliss. A strange thing to say to a terminal patient. Stranger was the reaction. Ramakrishna laughed and said the rascal had found him out.

The swami's reading is that he was not pretending. The tumour was real and so was the pain. He was also seeing the other thing, and from there he could say, without contradiction, that he was in bliss. And then the plain corollary, which I appreciated. The bodies of the enlightened die like everyone else's. Their minds fluctuate like everyone else's, perhaps less chaotically, but they are still minds attached to failing bodies.

A funeral tent goes up on my road in Phnom Penh most months, traffic rerouted around it, monks chanting through a speaker from six in the morning. I have stood at enough of them now to have stopped finding death abstract. I would like this story to be true. I have no way of checking what a dying man felt in Bengal in 1886.

What I can check is that the people in the room wrote it down as though it were the most natural exchange in the world, and that the laugh is the detail that survives.