In plain words
From today our organisations must not spend anything at all on flowers.
What God asks for is one flower alone. ‘Ahiṃsā is the first flower.’ There are more flowers still. The flower of Śānti, the flower of compassion, the flower of tapas, the flower of dhyāna, the flower of Dharma, the flower of Satya: such flowers we must take. A flower that opens today withers tomorrow. It drops. But the flower of the heart never withers, never drops, never rots. Offer such a flower to God. ‘A leaf, a flower, a fruit, water I offer,’ it has been said. But what kind of leaf? The leaf does not mean merely a calotropis leaf, a bilva leaf, a tulasī leaf and the like. The leaf must be one that does not wither whatever season comes. It must not drop. That leaf is your body itself. There is no saying when it will drop, when it will collapse, when it will burn. So dedicating this leaf, the body, to God's work is the true ‘I offer a leaf’. This is just what ‘This body is for the good of others’ means. This body has come only to do good to others. It is not for filling up, loading, unloading, loading, unloading. There must be some food to protect the body. But what is this food for? What is this body for? We must serve, we must serve. We must dedicate this life to service itself. We must give laziness no chance at all. We must share the principle ‘I am He’. It is only through laziness that we fall into hardships of many kinds. In fact, we think people are suffering, with no food to eat. This strikes Me as very sad. For what we were given is two hands, and what we have is one belly. If the two hands work, will the one belly not be filled! We are not working. That is why the belly is not filled. We must work. We must work. We must work. We are workers. We must live by toil. So the one who has lived by labour is the one who has made true life fulfil its purpose. So we must think of this thing called the body as the leaf and put it to God's work. Next, the flower. Which flower? Flowers like these? They keep withering. Someone grows it, someone tends it, someone strings it into a garland, someone sells it; the fruit of it goes to the one who grew it, and does not come to us. It is as though we stole someone's property and sold it to someone else. No, no. How should this flower of the heart be? We do not offer a flower to God just as it is. We wash it well, take out whatever worms or dirt are in it, and then offer it to God. Only then do we feel it is fit to please God. From the flower of our heart we must remove all these worms called kāma, krodha, lobha, mada and mātsarya. We must offer this flower of the heart, pure, steady and selfless. This is the true flower. The fruit. The fruit is not some fruit in the bazaar; it is our own fruit. When this Manas comes to ripeness, it is sweet. This, so sweet, we must dedicate to the Paramātma. Then, water. This water is not to be given by fetching some tap water, some water of the Kṛṣṇā, some well water, some pond water. Through this offering, the Ānanda that wells up in you flows out through the eyes.