Passage 2

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In plain words

This is pratyakṣa pramāṇa. Through man's practices, his efforts and his resolves, shaping into another form the very next moment: that is pratyakṣa pramāṇa. This can also be called anubhava pramāṇa. Anumāna pramāṇa means seeing smoke on a far-off mountain and trying to establish that there is fire there. Even though we do not see the fire, when we see the smoke there may, by inference, be fire there. Saying so: this is anumāna pramāṇa. Then śabda pramāṇa. It is someone who has been to see Kāśī setting out, in words, a description of the holy place of Kāśī to someone who has not seen Kāśī. But within this śabda pramāṇa two more kinds of pramāṇa are also contained. 1. Laukika pramāṇa. 2. Vaidika pramāṇa. Laukika pramāṇa does not itself undertake to establish divinity. Vaidika pramāṇa, though, has the sacredness to establish divinity as a form directly seen. So, taking this vaidika pramāṇa as his guide, it is most necessary for every man to try to recognise, in some measure, God, who is the Maker. Only when, here, we take on a humanness that is divinity, accept the sacred Ātma, and so win by deliberate effort the path called divinity, do we become those who have made manifest the divinity that is in humanness too.

There is no lack of easy means, of many kinds, to manifest, to experience and to practise the divinity that is in humanness. Truly, among man's many kinds of longing there is one chief longing; that longing is the wish to have Ānanda that never fails. But for such Ānanda he toils night and day in many ways, and thereby falls prey to despair. With ceaseless toil, with the threefold affliction that never lets up, with endless hopes and with anguish he cannot understand, man, scrambling to gain what is still out of his reach, falls prey to unrest and comes to a standstill, in some measure, in hopelessness. What is the reason? Deluded into thinking that the Ānanda he longs for is to be found in the body and the senses, he runs after the body and the senses. But he cannot recognise the Satya, ‘I am the embodiment of Ānanda’.

By its nature flour cannot have sweetness. Whatever the flour may be, it gains sweetness only when jaggery is added. This whole world is like the flour. Only when the sweetness called divinity (the jaggery) is mixed into this flour called the world does the flour show sweetness all through. Truly, it is only because the all-pervading divinity is blended everywhere in this world that we are able today to feel the world's attraction. Wherever there is attraction, beauty and sacred Prema, there it is divinity alone that dances. Falling prey simply to the delusion of the body and the senses, man cannot recognise the divine Ānanda, the glorious Ānanda, that is within him.

For every moving thing in the world there is something steady that is its base. Here is a garland.