In plain words
So if we fail to know these two things, where we have come from and where we will go, what use is our life? Just like this, the story goes, a man went and sat in a train. He had not taken a ticket. The man beside him asked, ‘Where are you going, sir?’ ‘I don't know,’ he said. When asked, ‘Where have you come from?’ he said, ‘Who knows? I don't know.’ ‘This fellow should be put in a lunatic asylum,’ said the man in the next seat, so the story goes. We are in this very state, so there is no escaping it: we must enter some mental hospital or other called satsaṅga. Here is another example of this, from everyday experience.
Suppose you write a letter from here, to your father, or your parents-in-law, or your brother: when we write, we write the to address. Some others write the from address on the back. This postal department hands it over at the to address. If the people at the to address are not there, it is redirected to the from address. But if, today, you write long letters without writing the to address or the from address, put them in an envelope and drop it in the post box, where will it go? There is no from address, there is no to address. They simply put it in the waste paper basket or the dead letter basket and burn it. In the same way, we have no from address with us, of where we have come from. There is no to address, of where we will go. We can only be burned in some cremation ground or other. Is it for this alone that we take on so big a body, bear the name of humanity, a name full of meaning, and come into this world? Having come, what fruit is there? When you write a long letter and put it in an envelope, and it reaches neither of the two, neither the place it should reach nor the place it should come to, how much time is wasted in writing the letter, how much ink is wasted, the paper is wasted, and in the very end life itself turns to waste. So, for our having been here this month, since you have heard in so many ways these elders, the Upaniṣads, the Veda, the itihāsa, the purāṇas and the experiences of the elders too, only when you know through experience the truth that, keeping in view the one abode of the Ātma from which you came, we are going back to the Ātma itself, and you stand firm in that strength, will you have won the fruit of what you heard here this month, of what you experienced.