As a young priest at the Dakshineswar temple, in longing so intense he later said he nearly took a sword to end it, he had a vision of the goddess Kali that left him weeping and unable to perform ordinary duties for months afterward.

Asking whether every religion truly led to the same God, he practiced Islam for several days in 1866 and Christianity in 1874, following each faith's discipline as closely as he could. He said each path brought him to the same overwhelming experience he'd had before Kali.

At the house of a Kolkata devotee in November 1881 he met an eighteen-year-old college student, Narendranath Dutta, and touched him — Narendranath later described losing all sense of his own body. He would take the name Vivekananda after Ramakrishna's death.

Throat cancer took his voice in his final months. He died at Cossipore, near Calcutta, in August 1886. His young disciples, Narendranath among them, took vows around his deathbed and later founded the Ramakrishna Mission to carry his teaching into hospitals and schools.