In plain words
The cause of this reflection is the oil, not the bowl. Only when the oil is taken away does this reflection go. Instead, when we try to punish the body, which is the vessel, the impurity that is this reflection never leaves us.
Beat upon the anthill: will the snake die? Punish your own body: will the enjoyment of sense objects cease? Just by giving up hunger and thirst, will one become a knower of the Ātma? Not knowing who one is, will one know Tattva-jñāna?
Today, merely because we bathe ten times a day, put on clean clothes, think of your God and utter a mantra mechanically, the impurity within us does not go at all. But today all we practise are bad habits of this kind. Bathing, wearing vibhūti, uttering mantras: all these are merely paths of show; they do not belong to the Ātma. For purifying the mind, this does not take even one step forward. With inquiry and with a selfless feeling we must take part in society. The Vijñāna that set man apart from the beast and raised him higher: that Vijñāna we are forgetting today. We are not trying to inquire into that principle of Vijñāna. Man takes Satya for Asatya and Asatya for Satya, and thinks that he himself, his wealth and his family are lasting. From this narrow level we must travel to the broad path. We must believe that the whole of mankind, all men alike, is one family of Īśvara. We must sacrifice selfishness. Only then do we become worthy to receive those broad feelings. Otherwise, merely by doing sādhanas in many ways, somehow, in a worldly way, mechanically, we cannot become devotees. We may study the Vedas, the śāstras, the itihāsas and the purāṇas. We may make ourselves men of great cleverness. It is not this cleverness that these sādhanas need. Rather than a hundred clever people, one person with a good heart is enough. So we must become men whose mind is a good mind. Only when we have this good mind do we enter into good works. With the mind filled with narrow feelings, feelings of envy and feelings joined with anger and passion, we cannot become servants merely by entering into these services.
Into a head that has nothing in it anything at all may be put; the head filled with this and that: will that skull become empty? Unless that skull becomes empty, can good deeds be poured into it here on earth?