In plain words
Embodiments of the divine Ātma!
The flowers you offer today are not something you created. You take flowers created by God's will on some tree or some plant, and you offer those same flowers back to God. What is so special in offering to God Himself the flowers that God created? Many people, while bathing in the Gaṅgā, take up Gaṅgā water and, saying ‘offered to the Gaṅgā’, offer it back to the Gaṅgā herself. This is not your grandfather's property. It is not something you created. There is an inner meaning in offering to God the good qualities you have laboured for in many ways in the tree of your life, nurtured in many ways, earned and guarded.
We have to take great pains to develop good qualities. That is why even our divine citta can come to one-pointedness through these good qualities alone. Without them our mind cannot stay steady at all, not even for a moment.
Without good qualities, without good thoughts, can the mind hold fast in dhyāna? To build a house, if bricks and lime are not there, how can the house be built?
So, if the mind is to be absorbed in dhyāna, we must first and foremost gain good qualities and good thoughts.
‘Ahiṃsā prathamaṃ puṣpaṃ.’ This is the very first flower. We think Ahiṃsā means merely not harming others, not hurting other living beings. That is not the right meaning. Ahiṃsā means causing no pain to any living being at all, by body, by speech or by deeds; that alone is Ahiṃsā. In spirituality they devised a special name, ‘tripuṭi’, for this very effort to make the actions of Manas, speech and body pure. Such a flower, Ahiṃsā:
Of three guṇas, three-leaved in form, three-eyed and three-weaponed, destroying the sins of three births: one bilva leaf offered to Śiva.
Such a heart we must offer to Śiva.
Next, the second: control of the senses. Our senses keep running wherever they please. When we let running horses or cattle loose to roam at will, they run into many dangers. We must hold that in check to some extent and strive to lead it onto the right path, into holy divinity. Weighing what is lasting and what is passing, we must hold those senses in check to some extent through discerning knowledge and wise conduct.
Embodiments of the divine Ātma!
The body, the senses, the Manas and the Buddhi are upādhis we have put on. ‘Dahyatīti dehaḥ’: the body is that which burns. When? Is this body something that burns only after death? No. It is burnt by worries while it is still alive. The śarīra is that which wears away. To want to gain what is eternal through this body that wears away, this body that burns: that is only a petty desire. God has appointed each sense for one particular task. Only when we use the function He created in the proper way is there room for God's grace. We must use these senses for the very purpose for which He gave them. That is why we must hold these senses in check in the proper way. God gave us a nose. We must take it in the proper way and make a fitting effort to sustain our life with the breath going in and out. If we use that nose to take snuff, what it is there for is lost to some extent. In the same way He gave us a tongue. This tongue is for eating. He gave this mouth for eating sāttvic food. By taking impure things and drinks such as liquor through this mouth, we can, to some extent, no longer show its purity.