In plain words
Then, when he asked, ‘What is the wonder of this world?’: ‘Svāmī! Those who live see those who have passed away, and, under the delusion that they themselves somehow stand in this world for ever, those who live go on weeping; this is the wonder of the world. But this is not right. “For those who have taken refuge in the One who is Time to Time itself, what can Time do?” When time swallows the body, and You are the One who swallows time itself, the world that grieves over the body is steeped in Ajñāna,’ he answered. By time alone everything changes, everything dissolves, everything is created. So, once we recognise the truth that creation, sustenance and dissolution come about through time, it can never be right for us in the least to neglect time and defile it. Now, a spring that has gone by may come back again. The light of the waning moon may shine again. But the water of a river and the youth of a man cannot come back. So it is most urgent that we set about, with deliberate effort, making this youth that will not return, this life whose nature is water that never flows back, worthwhile on the sacred path.
Time Itself Is Foremost in All, and the Measure of All
In the principle by which humanness shows forth divine godliness, our country Bhārata today has forgotten godliness itself; precisely because it defiles time on the path of worldly objects alone, and because we have forgotten Bhārata as a beginningless time laid down by the Vedas, or the state of the beginningless, we too have become orphans, have fallen into many kinds of hardship, and the country stands as a kind of example of suffering pains no one should have to suffer. What we would not have come to us will come all the same. We cannot hold on to what we have. Through time alone hardship or comfort, gain or loss, good or bad come to us.
‘The body will not fail to go, however you nourish and protect it; loss and gain will not fail to come, though you hide in a great forest!