Teachings to Rupa Goswami
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cribed this incident in the first verse of  Bhakti Rasamrita Sindhu  which speaks about the causeless mercy of the Lord upon him. The Supreme Personality of Godhead is cognizant, All-Powerful, and, by His causeless mercy, He empowers a living entity to receive His mercy. People in general, being under the spell of conditional life, are averse to devotional service and Krishna Consciousness. They are unaware of the principles of Krishna Consciousness: namely, one's eternal relationship with the Supreme Personality of Godhead; the ultimate goal of life, which is to return back to Home, back to Godhead; and the process of returning to the spiritual world. These things are unknown to the conditioned soul. Lord Chaitanya, out of His causeless mercy, instructed Rupa Goswami on the principles of devotional service, and later on Rupa Goswami distributed to the people in general the science of devotional service.
Srila Rupa Goswami has described Lord Chaitanya in the Prologue to  Bhakti Rasamrita Sindhu  as follows: "I am offering my respectful obeisances unto the Lotus Feet of the Personality of Godhead, known as Lord Chaitanyadeva because, inspired by Him, I am feeling it within my heart to write something about devotional service. Therefore, I am engaged in writing this great book on the science of devotion, known as Bhakti Rasamrita Sindhu."
Lord Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu instructed Rupa Goswami continually for ten days, and He began His teaching as follows: "My Dear Rupa, the science of devotional service is just like a great ocean, and it is not possible to show you all the length and breadth of the great ocean. But I shall simply try to explain about the nature of the ocean by just taking a drop out of it; and you can thus taste it and understand what is that ocean of devotional service."
Within this  Brahmanda , or Universe, there are innumerable living entities, and according to their own fruitive activities they are transmigrating from one species of life to another, and from one planet to another. In this way their encagement in material existence is being continued since time immemorial. The living entities are atomic parts and parcels of the Supreme Spirit. There is, however, a measurement for the length and breadth of the atomic spiritual spark. It is said in the  Srimad Bhagwatam , Tenth Canto, Eighty-seventh Chapter, 36th verse, that if you divide the tip of a hair into 100 parts, and again if you divide one part of that into another 100 parts, such  1/10,000  part of the tip of a hair is the length and breadth of the individual soul. This is also confirmed in the Vedas, in the  Svetasvataro Upanishad .
This atomic magnitude of the individual living entity is again described in the  Srimad Bhagwatam , Eleventh Canto, Sixteenth Chapter, 11th verse, as