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called him a great man he said, "I do not even deserve to be in the dust at the feet of that great man who is my master." But the fact remains that had Ramakrishna gone to America he would have been locked up in a lunatic asylum; he would have been put under psychiatric treatment. Nobody would have heard him; rather, he would definitely have been pronounced mad.
We have yet not been able to differentiate between mundane madness and divine madness, so in America both these types would be put in the asylum. Ramakrishna would have been kept under treatment, whereas Vivekananda would be given all the honor -- because what Vivekananda says is intelligible. He himself was not in the state of divine madness. He was simply a messenger, a postman who carried the letter of Ramakrishna and read it to the people abroad. But he could read it well.
Mulla Nasruddin was the only literate person in his village -- and you can imagine how literate he would be in that case -- so everyone in the village looked to him to write their letters. One man went to him to get his letter written. Nasruddin said he would not write as his foot hurt. The man said, "What has your foot got to do with writing a letter? Won't you write with your hand?"
Nasruddin said, "You don't know. When I write a letter, only then can I read it. So I have to travel to another village to read it. I will write the letter but who will read it? My foot is in deep pain. As long as I cannot walk I will not do any letter writing."
So if people like Ramakrishna write a letter, they alone can read it, because they have forgotten your language and the language they speak is meaningless to you. We would call such people mad. So such people have to look for and choose a messenger from among us who can write in our language. Such a man is no more than a postman. Therefore, beware of Vivekananda. He has no experience of his own. What he says is another's experience. He is proficient in his art, he is an expert in using words, but it is not his experience.
It is for this reason that we find an overconfidence in the talks of Vivekananda. He stresses his points more than is required, and this is
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