In plain words
Here is a small example of this. If you take one cup of water and say, ‘Sir! Will you take this cup of water for half a rupee?’, no one will take it. If you mix this cup of water into ten cups of milk, they give it the price of milk. These 10 cups of milk are quantity and quality. Because they hold the higher place in both, this water too gained worth. If, instead, you mix one cup of water and one cup of milk, even the worth of the milk is lost. So too, if, instead of bringing its worth down in an equal mixture, you put one cup of milk into many cups of water, the worth of the milk is lost entirely. In the same way, when we make room to develop fine feelings and noble feelings in our heart and outside, there is the chance for the faith within us to stay without dwindling or scattering. For this very point Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa gave a fine example. We light an incense stick. The incense sticks hold fire itself. Another man smokes a cigarette. That too holds fire itself. We cook our food. The cooking stove holds fire itself. But when a forest is blazing up in flames, that too is fire all the same. Even if you bring dry sticks of firewood onto this incense-stick fire and this cigarette fire, that fire goes out. Without burning these sticks, that fire goes out. Lacking the strength to burn them, it too goes out. If you throw a green plantain tree into the fire blazing in these hills, even that plantain tree is burnt to ashes. What is the reason? The quality and quantity of the fire here are small. The quantity and quality of the fire blazing in that forest are great. In such a state, when we join, with no feeling of difference at all, whether in citta or in conduct, our own feeling has the chance to bring that second one wholly under its sway.