Him by whose power we and all the worlds are fulfilled, Ramakrishna, I ever salute: Sharva, the free Īśvara.
“The Lord, Destiny, prevails,” say the men of theory, who have no skill in practice; and those skilled in practice set great store by pauruṣa. Knowing that the quarrel between these two, the one leaning on pauruṣa as its strength to set things right and the other on what is apauruṣeya, springs from a failure of viveka, strive, long-lived Sharatchandra, to climb the loftiest peak of the great mountain of jñāna.
The saying “Adversity is the touchstone of tattva” may be said a hundred times over of the tattva “Tat tvam asi.” This is the very cause of the sickness called vairāgya. Blessed is the life of anyone who is seized by its symptoms. Though you may not like it, I point you to an old saying: “Wait a while.” You have toiled and toiled at the oar; now rest, and trust to this: the momentum already given will carry the boat to the far shore. That is just what is said: “He who is yoga-saṁsiddha in time finds it for himself, within himself.” And where it says, “Not by wealth, not by offspring; by tyāga some attained amṛtatva,” tyāga means vairāgya and nothing else. That vairāgya is either empty of substance or full of substance. If it is the first, no one would strive after it but a man whose brain the worms have eaten. If it is the second, then this follows: tyāga is the drawing in of the mind from everything else and the gathering of it into one upon Īśvara or upon the Ātman. Sarveśvara cannot be some particular individual; He must be taken as the samaṣṭi. For the man of vairāgya, Ātman does not mean the jīvātman; what is meant is Sarveśvara Himself, all-pervading, the antaryāmin of all, abiding as the Ātman of all. And He, as the samaṣṭi, is pratyakṣa to everyone. This being so, since the jīva and Īśvara are not different in svarūpa, sevā and prema are not two different karmas. There is only this distinction: sevā offered to a jīva with jīva-buddhi is dayā, not prema; when sevā is given to the jīva with ātma-buddhi, that is prema. For it is through the Ātman that anything is an object of prema; śruti, Smṛti and pratyakṣa all make this plain. So Bhagavān Chaitanya was quite right when he said, “Prema for Īśvara, dayā for the jīva.” Being a dvaitavādin, that holy one reached a conclusion that marks the difference between the jīva and Īśvara, and for him it was proper. But for us, who are devoted to Advaita, jīva-buddhi is bondage. So our śaraṇa is prema, not dayā. Even the word dayā, applied to the jīva, we hold to be rash talk. We do not show dayā; we offer sevā. Ours is not the feeling of pity but the experience of prema, the experience of ourselves in all.
May that very experience of prema, which is vairāgya itself, which levels every inequality, which cures the sickness of bhava, which takes away the tritāpa that this prapañca cannot escape, which reveals the svarūpa of all things, which shatters the darkness of Māyā, which makes one's own Ātman shine forth in everything from Brahma down to a blade of grass, be your blessing, O Sharman.
So prays, day after day,
Vivekananda, held to you by a lasting bond of prema.