In plain words
At that time this lawyer was sitting in the pūjā room. He was doing pūjā, saying Om Namaḥ Śivāya. A little before that, he had called his daughter-in-law and told her something. Meanwhile the clients came and asked, “Amma, where is your father-in-law?” This daughter-in-law was a very sharp daughter-in-law. So that her father-in-law would hear, what did she say? “My father-in-law is sitting in the house of the Mālas,” she said. The father-in-law inside heard these words and came running. “Woman, have you any sense or not? When I am sitting in the pūjā room, you answer that I am sitting in the house of the man who stitches sandals!” he scolded her loudly. He, doing pūjā, saying Namaḥ Śivāya, Namaḥ Śivāya: “It is six days since I gave the sandals to the Māla. He has not stitched them yet. Why has he not brought them yet? Let him come this time, I'll break his back,” he was thinking, and saying Namaḥ Śivāya, Namaḥ Śivāya. That very matter he had told the daughter-in-law earlier. “If he brings the sandals, tell him to wait. I'll come and beat him.” The daughter-in-law knew this; thinking, “Why go into the pūjā room and fret about sandals?”, she said it exactly: “He sits in the pūjā room, but his mind is in the Māla's house.” That is, when what we are doing is one task, we must concentrate on that task. But leaving it and going off into needless matters: this is the power of vikṣepa. So vikṣepa means that whenever you look, the mind and the body keep moving, moving. It turns into a breed lower than the monkey.
Next, āvaraṇa. Āvaraṇa means that which covers us. I am a student, I am a teacher, I am a brāhmaṇa, I am a kṣatriya, I am a woman, I am a man. Just this: certain kinds of feelings covering us in this way. Only out of the ignorance that says, “This body is I,” does he go on making divisions like these. Who is this student? You call yourself a student by the body. I am a teacher. By your body's nature you think you are a teacher. To think in this way, “I am a brāhmaṇa, I am a kṣatriya, I am a śūdra, I am a man, I am a woman, I am young, I am old”: all these feelings keep covering us only through the delusion of the body. If you look at it as the Ātma, you are not a brāhmaṇa. You are not a śūdra. You are not young, not old, not a woman, not a man. Not a teacher. Not a student. That is precisely why, by keeping this delusion of the body, we drift far from our own svarūpa. We cannot see it. He cannot know himself. That is why, whoever comes: who are you? If you ask, he says, I am so and so, and points to a name and a form that belong to the body. So what is the reason man cannot recognise his own reality, his own Satya, his own svarūpa? Mala, the fruit of great sin. That is, the fruit of evil thoughts. Next, through restlessness he cannot recognise his own svarūpa.