In plain words
If you let your faith waver, your very life will fall apart. So, only in setting out to keep your citta from wavering can you become greatly blessed. Whether for having taken human birth, or for having been created in this world at all, you can be one who has carried out your worthwhile duty.
So, students! Above all, how much you are listening, through the days of this month, to what the experienced elders give you, and how many kinds of feeling you are changing in your hearts: all this is just one part; but control of the senses is another part. Without control of the senses, however much listening you do, in however many ways the experienced elders take pains, their teachings will go to waste. The time you have spent here this month, listening, will go to waste. I hope too that you will make a firm effort not to let these two go to waste, but to make them fruitful. If, with an outward eye, thinking ‘We gathered here for a month’ and ‘All these great elders taught us’, you take all this merely as so much book matter, write it down only in your notebooks and merely keep them by you, that does not at all mean that you have listened. Only what you keep safely set in the seat of your heart will stay with you as safe property and possessions. In a washerman's house there are some hundreds of bush coats. There are hundreds of pants. There are hundreds of dhotis. In that way every kind of clothing anyone could want may be in a washerman's house. How long do they stay in his house? They stay only two or three days; then he irons them neatly and gives each person back his own clothes. Only the clothes he has had stitched for himself stay for good in the washerman's house. In the same way, our head is like a washerman's house. Everyone's teachings, the many kinds of śāstras, the Upaniṣads and other such things are in our heads. But how long do they stay? Only what we put into practice stays firm; the rest flies off on the wind. A ladle goes about in all the pots.