In plain words
Students! Some insects are getting badly in the way of our talk. Because of these insects, people keep making their hands dance. This is causing some inconvenience; and so, what we must above all know and learn today, within the principle of Bhaja Govindam, is to restrain the tongue; in the hope that you will hold it as our chief aim to give fitting purity to the tongue, the chief seat of the senses, and that from today you will not give your life over to needless words or to certain tasty foods and so lose your purity, and blessing you, I bring My talk to a close.
All Desires Are Nothing but Diseases
From the moment day breaks for us until night, every single act we do, think or look at is just like a disease. Our drinking and eating are nothing but a disease. For the disease called hunger we give the medicine called food. For the disease called thirst we give water. In the same way, all our desires are diseases of one kind and another, and that is precisely why we keep setting about tasks to suit those desires. Say we have come down with malaria fever: a doctor gives a quinine mixture. It is very bitter. But we try to get rid of the fever; we do not expect the medicine to be sweet. Even if, for once, you want a sweet medicine, the doctor looks to curing the illness; he does not give you the taste you ask for. In the same way, for our disease called hunger we ought to take in food to satisfy that hunger; but, looking to see whether the salt, the sour and the hot are just right, we feed the disease, take in many kinds of things, and make the disease called desire grow still more. Suppose the tongue, for whatever reason, wishes, ‘Today I must eat a laddu.’ Sit tight, and for two months give it no taste of the laddu it wanted. Surely, after that, the tongue will not want this laddu. In the same way, has your tongue wanted to revile someone? Then for a month, two months, do not let those words of reviling near your tongue.