Ramakrishna was a village Brahmin with almost no formal education who took a job as priest at a new Kali temple on the Ganges outside Calcutta, built by a wealthy widow whose caste made the appointment controversial. What followed was not a career.
He could not treat the image as an image. He wept, refused food, argued with the goddess, and by his own account reached a point of such desperation at her silence that he seized a sword from the wall intending to kill himself, at which the vision came. Afterwards he was for years in a condition his family and employers found alarming and which he described as god-madness: unable to keep to the ritual timetable, weeping and laughing without cause, losing external consciousness for long periods.
Two teachers came to him at Dakshineswar and both were unusual. A woman ascetic known as the Bhairavi Brahmani took him through a course of tantric disciplines and pronounced his condition to be a recognised spiritual state rather than illness. Later a naked wandering Advaitin called Totapuri taught him the non-dual path and, according to the accounts, was startled at how quickly he attained the formless absorption it aims at. His marriage, arranged when his wife Sarada Devi was a child, was never consummated; when she came to him as an adult he formally worshipped her as the Divine Mother, and she became a teacher in her own right after his death.