Teachings to Rupa Goswami 23

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 Chaitan-
yadeva 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,o00th part of the tip
of a hair is the length and breadth of the individual soul. This is also con-
firmed 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
