In plain words
For this there are three kinds of sādhana. The monkey sādhana, the bird sādhana. The cat sādhana, as they are called: of the ant path, the monkey path and the bird path, when we inquire what differences there are between the monkey, the ant and the bird, the monkey plucks just one fruit from a tree and, without eating it, turns its eyes towards another fruit and sets about leaping from this branch onto that branch to reach that fruit. Then it drops even the fruit that was in its hand. That is, in our sādhanas, greed, that is, a certain anxious haste to have the darśan of God very quickly, or to experience the attainment of realisation, or to receive grace: we do not keep what we have caught, we do not eat it, and wanting to reach for yet another, we keep changing our sādhanas every day, one after another, changing and changing, and so we fail to achieve steadiness in any of them. So we must not set about changing our sādhanas from day to day. We must make the fitting effort to develop one and the same sādhana, at one and the same time, in one and the same place. Next, the bird sādhana. When it sees a fruit, it sets about striking that fruit hard with its pointed beak. At that moment the fruit falls down from the tree. That is, wanting to enjoy the fruit called Ānanda, we long to develop our sādhana intensely, all at once. You may have some experience of this from the time when children do exercise. Suppose today you have lifted twenty pounds easily. You must not try at once to lift fifty pounds. When you lift even these twenty pounds easily for a week, lifting them and lifting them, practise with them, and then set about raising it step by step to twenty-five pounds, thirty pounds, thirty-five pounds, the limbs of your body will be safe too, and give you well-being. In the same way with sādhana too: today we have sat in dhyāna for twenty minutes. When you go on practising these very twenty minutes step by step, a kind of steadiness may come about in those twenty minutes, and no other way: if you sit for two or three hours on the very day he handed you the Name, the very day he handed you the japamālā, this can never be right sādhana.