In plain words
And, by your good fortune, in our Institute there is not a naya paisa of fees. Apart from your food, there is no way for you to misspend money on anything. When such an opportunity has come to you, you must make good use of it. Only when we make such good use of it will we be those who have fulfilled time, action and duty. We must reach a state that is to some extent beyond time. Time is swallowing us. But that is not humanness. We must swallow time. We must gain that strength. Only then will humanness take shape as divinity. Man will become God. That is the true principle of the Ātma. In the hope that recognising such a truth and living by it will be held vital, I bring My discourse to a close.
Students! There are many things here that you must learn, especially in daily life. Discipline holds a very important place in education. As important as the eye is to the body, so is discipline the foundation of our conduct in our daily life. In Telugu they say, ‘A blow for a beast, a word for a man.’ A man must change himself with a word alone. We must not go so far as to get ourselves beaten. It is the beast that gets itself beaten. Besides, you are students. You are grown up. This is a very sacred age. No one else need watch you over who is doing what in which room. There need not be someone called a monitor in each and every room. A monitor is needed only when we behave in all kinds of ways. So before anyone tells us, we ourselves, each one, must be our own monitor. We must improve our conduct without having to be told by others. In the Dining Hall, in the Reading room, in the bed room, in your hostel, in the bath room, anywhere at all, our discipline must follow us like our shadow. Wherever we go, our shadow comes along, does it not? Discipline is a big shadow for a student. The chief shadow. In this discipline we are not living the right path even a little. The warden need not see to everything. Nor need the monitor in the room see to it. You must be your own monitors. Each of you must try to learn his own discipline. Not only this: within the Hostel there is a special kind of learning. That is commonsense, general knowledge. What is Commonsense? To be quick in some one thing and talk as if you were expert in everything and very clever: that is not commonsense. One must recognise the faults that are in oneself, root them out, and develop sacred feelings in their place. One must live so that no one has to point a finger at one. So every day, from the time we rise at dawn, we must hold the feeling, ‘Gods, come! Demons, go!’ Demons, go away! Who are our demons?