In plain words
Through the influence of the Kali age, hatred of Dharma, hatred of God and hatred of the ruler have grown; the Bhāratīyas take wrong for right and right for wrong, pursue their journey along the wrong road, and believe their own aims alone to be sacred. This is the might of Kali itself, and nothing else.
Joy and sorrow are made of the three guṇas: the sāttvic guṇa is of the nature of light; the rājasic guṇa, of the nature of action; the tāmasic guṇa holds those two guṇas down and makes darkness and sloth grow. When the nature of light shows itself in greater measure and the nature of action is less, that state is called joy; when the nature of action grows greater and the light is less, sorrow comes to show itself. When sattva and rajas are both held down and moha alone envelops man, then he falls prey to nothing but a long chain of sorrows.
The guṇas have two faces: the face of bhoga and the face of apavarga. On the face of bhoga, they plunge man into the pairs of opposites called joy and sorrow and bind him to the wheel called birth and death. On the face of apavarga, they grant Mukti. But man now, caught between bhoga and apavarga, is suffering hardship. Grown far from humanness itself, he is wasting away in wretchedness. He does not become worthy of God's Grace, and he is wasting his life.
Today even in deciding for themselves what God is, people follow some strange ways. Can God be decided by reasoning and by the proofs of Buddhi? When conditions favourable to a man arise, Īśvara is all-pervading. He is all-powerful, all-knowing; when adverse conditions close in, people commonly argue that Īśvara is not all-pervading, that there is no Īśvara at all. When victory came in the Bhārata war, Kṛṣṇa, in Arjuna's eyes, was all-powerful. “Swami! It is through You that victory has come to us!” But when Abhimanyu died, that same Kṛṣṇa, in the eyes of that same Arjuna, was not all-knowing, not all-powerful! The cause of this is nothing but a distortion of Buddhi, is it not?
But these changes, this fickleness, are the distorting nature of Manas alone, and not the nature of Buddhi. Manas makes even Buddhi appear full of faults. The wavering Manas sets about making Buddhi too waver this way and that. But by arguing with sound reasons and with proofs, you can set Buddhi in firm resolve and keep it from wavering. Once Buddhi has accepted faith in Īśvara as a firm decision, it stands fast in the seat of the heart, whatever anyone may say; only those who lack a resolute Buddhi are in doubt all the time.