The Man Who Ran the Experiment
Between roughly 1861 and 1874, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa did something no theologian had proposed and no institution had sanctioned. He practiced, in sequence and with full commitment, the sadhana of traditions that were supposed to be mutually exclusive. He spent months in Tantric discipline under the teacher Bhairavi Brahmani. He sat in deep Vedanta practice with the Advaita monk Totapuri, who had to physically press his finger to Ramakrishna's forehead to help him cross into nirvikalpa samadhi.
