In plain words
However holy the time may be, however blessed the place where you live, it is worthwhile only when you change the feelings of the heart and make them pure; if you call Uttarāyaṇa a good season while there is no noble mind in you and a base mind grows instead, it is of no use. Though you smear the outside of a toddy pot all over with fragrant ghee, the smell of the toddy inside it does not go. In just the same way, though a mean man stands in a high position, his bad qualities do not leave him. For just this reason, if you keep the festival of Uttarāyaṇa only on the surface and keep the heart a toddy pot, how will the sweet smell of ghee be yours! If evil feelings do not go, purity of heart and the grace of God will never be yours.
In the old days in Bhārata, in the villages and in the towns alike, people used to hold the fair called the chariot festival. They would make a great chariot, decorate it beautifully and install God in the middle of it, and thousands of people would gather and take it in festive procession through the streets. But do all who gather there look only at the God in the chariot? There will be some wondering who has come, some wondering where people have come from, some looking at the decorations on the chariot, and some looking at the dancers and the singers. Only a few true devotees set everything aside, gaze on God alone and rejoice. In just the same way, when you go to good and holy people, if you do not yearn for their darśan, their touch and their words, if you do not recognise why you have come and act on it, but simply wander about calling it pilgrimage to holy waters and holy places, what do you gain? Without noticing what it is they ought to receive, people waste their time and their money. Only a few reach the goal by that means. But if sādhakas, for their part, go about with so divided a gaze, it will throw them onto a wrong path. We do not stop to think why we have come to Prasanthi Nilayam, and we do not set about the work we came for. We do not test ourselves, asking: are we reaching the goal, are we striving to accomplish the task we came for? Had we done so, our Bhārata would not have come to so wretched a state. Just as sons, grandsons and great-grandsons squander the wealth their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers earned and piled up for them, in that very way we are squandering the treasure of nectar that the very great maharṣis, the great souls, those born of a portion of the Divine and the Avatāras churned out and handed down to us. The essence of all the śāstras, the root of all paths, the goal of all: that is the spiritual principle. Not recognising this, we are misusing time, body and deeds on worldly, unholy pleasures. The body bound by time, the deeds done with that body, the five elements that are the limbs of the Paramātma, and the senses that take them in: if we misuse these, that Paramātma stays beyond our reach and beyond our sight. But if we put sound, touch, form, taste, smell and the rest to good use, as an offering to God, with our eyes on God and with reverent care, the Paramātma stands right beside us. With the ears longing to hear of God alone and the eyes longing to behold the divine form alone, life itself must turn into a worship of God.
Our Hislop too pointed out just now that each one must come to know his own Satya. To the question ‘Who am I?’ the answer is ‘I am I.’ Rather than ‘I am God’, the supreme goal is just this: to prove in life the truth ‘I am I.’ I am not this body. Not the senses. Not the mind. Not the intellect. Not the citta. I am that very ‘I’ which knows all these and has them do its work. Not only the people of Bhārata but all the philosophers of the whole world have searched into this fact, weighed the proofs and the evidence, and are coming to know that this itself is true.
Long ago there was a man of Greece named Socrates. The people there tormented him in many ways. The good have never once been spared this. Just as they made Jesus suffer, in the very same way they made this Socrates suffer too. One day he sat all his disciples down close beside him. ‘My dear ones! Give me a little poison. I have decided to bring this life to a close. From now on I shall be free of care,’ he said. Then one disciple asked, ‘Master! After you die, how are we to perform your last rites?’ Socrates' answer to that: ‘When you come to know who you are, how you are to perform the rites for me will become clear to you. I am not a thing that dies. As for this body? Perform its rites in whatever way the people of this region perform them. I have no wishes of my own at all,’ he said.
Knowing ‘Who am I?’ is the very target of sādhanas. Reach that target, and you can know what God is. Today arguments and counter-arguments have grown that the spiritual path of old is weak, that it is a path of blind belief, and people are following the ways of other countries.