In plain words
Reading books, setting out to tell them to others, while practice goes missing in us: we may think of this merely as a kind of trade. By this age you may have read a great many books. You may have come to know a great many things. But the understanding of all you have learned, the learning you have read, the power of grasping you have grasped: none of it shows in your practice.
Students, embodiments of the divine Ātma! You need not read many books. Whatever subject you have come to recognise to some extent and believe in, and hope to develop, if you put at least that one subject into practice and set about developing at least that along the right path, there is every fulfilment in that. But this age falls into many kinds of confusion and sways within a kind of fickleness; and because feelings that would show a steadiness are stirred into agitation in us, the mind turns into a great monkey and sets about shaping us too into a monkey. We must follow some kinds of sādhana in the effort to bring under our control this mind that has turned out like a monkey. The mind is a great shrew. It sets about doing everything except what it is told. We must make the effort so that such a shrewish mind comes round to our way to some extent, along some sāttvic paths. In the Bhagavad Gītā this very thing is called śanaiḥ: ‘Bring it very slowly onto one road; do not press it too hard,’ the Bhagavad Gītā taught too. Suppose there is a thieving cow in our house. The very moment such a cow is let off its rope, it goes into some field of crops or other and sets about eating up the whole crop. What do we try to do so that such a cow comes onto the right path? When we tie it inside our house and set about giving it food better than the crop it is longing for, little by little it tries to come onto the right path, without leaving our house for the fields.