In plain words
So whatever we wish for, we must make ourselves fit for it.
Students! Since we put before you, every day, teachings on detachment and on what is wholesome, you may feel somewhat weary. But in your present circumstances, they may seem to you somewhat hard and tiresome. But in daily life, at this age, what is needed is to know by what path you are to rein this in. So if at this age you give no room to distaste for what you have heard, or to weariness with it, and live it now with great earnestness, these things will stand by your life in future as its helpers, in a sacred way. You must not grow weary, thinking, ‘Every day they tell us the very same things; we keep hearing the very same things we have heard.’ Yet in daily life you keep feeding the very stomach you have fed and washing the very face you have washed; why should you eat, why should you wash? So just as feeding the very stomach you have fed, and washing the very face you have washed, bring so much cleanness and so much strength, in the same way, by hearing the very things we have heard and telling again the very things that were told, there is a chance for them to take root securely in our heart too. Liking and disliking rest purely on our own wishes. For twenty years, thirty years now, we have been drinking coffee without tiring of it. If it is just five minutes late, we get a headache. We feel no weariness at all in drinking, over and over, the very coffee we have drunk. If a fever does come and we drink quinine mixture for three days, by the fourth day we are weary of it. Why is that? We have no liking for the quinine mixture; we have a liking for coffee. However unwillingly we take the quinine mixture, it is that quinine mixture itself that cures our illness. The state of the world today is just like this. Whatever spoils us, whatever leads us into wicked ways, whatever brings us a bad name, towards that we keep moving on and on with liking. Whatever brings a good name, whatever upholds humanness, whatever fosters good qualities, towards such things our craving does not move forward even a little; why is that? Our very karmas from past births are the root cause of this.