There came a great change in him. The boy became the devotee; the devotee became the ascetic; the ascetic became the saint; the saint became the man of realization; the man of realization became the prophet; the prophet often became merged in the Divine Nature which is God. And all this happened in the course of twelve years. It is impossible to give an idea of Ramakrishna's passionate yearning for realization, his utter renunciation of worldly enjoyments, his sincerity, his single-minded devotion, and the ecstasies of soul, which characterized the early period of his spiritual life. He was innocent of scriptures and the intricacies of religious practices. He hardly received any help from spiritual guides at this stage. All he possessed was the extreme eagerness of the child to see his mother, and a strong dispassion for worldly enjoyments. The day was spent in worship, prayer and song; in the twilight of the early morning and dusk he would stroll along the bank of the Ganga absorbed in the contemplation of the Divine Mother; the nights were spent in meditation. Thus while those about him were wasting time in all sorts of frivolity, he was burning day and night with this consuming thirst for God. The vision of the Divine Mother became the one passion of Ramakrishna; but he had not, as yet, realized Her. Days and months passed in this way, with no abatement of his zeal. The agony of longing for his Divine Mother was gradually increasing. In the evening on the bank of the Ganga he would cry aloud, "Another day is gone in vain, Mother, for I have not seen Thee. Another day of this short life has passed, and I have not realized the Truth." Then doubts would cross his mind, and he would say, "Art Thou real, Mother, or is it all fiction, mere poetry without any truth? If Thou dost exist, why can I not see Thee? Is religion just a phantasy, a mere castle in the air?" But this scepticism was only momentary; in a flash he would recall the lives and the struggles of those who had been blessed with the vision of God, and he would redouble his efforts.