In plain words
We must understand that this bird sādhana is an intense sādhana. So because this bird sādhana comes to such intensity, we fail to gain the fruit that should have been ours. So in these sādhanas, very gently: “slow and steady wins the race,” they say. In our life, slow and steady is very much needed on this path. Then the ant path is a very excellent path. Many of you may well know this. Wherever there is food, the very thing they have to eat, the ants go slowly towards that food without losing the way, all of them following the very path one ant took; they reach the food, and the ant does not eat it there, like Kumbhakarṇa, merely because food has turned up here; as much load as it can carry, as much as it can eat, so much it breaks into bits and pieces, takes to its own home, and sets about eating there without fear. It is because such a good quality, such power of discernment is in the ant that the ant is able to carry a load a thousand times its own weight. Having broken it into such pieces, it comes back to its own home and sets about eating without fear. In the same way, on this ant path we gain the strength to develop a gaze that does not wander and a mind that does not waver, so that we do not break the order of whatever goal we have set our eyes on, do not leave that path, and do not let that goal shift in the least. So when we want to attain the Brahman principle, we must not leave this path; letting no obstacle at all come to our discipline, keeping the nature of our mind within bounds, we must hold, in every single karma we do, only the thought of That.
Fill Your Heart with Prema
Students! At this age, fill your hearts with sacred feelings. Why? Here is a small example. Why? A Vedāntin and an Advaitin, the two of them, came to Me.