In plain words
Metal. There is brass. There is gold. We think of all these as having different values. But what is the reason these values differ so much? Only because the energy of the atoms in these things is great or small. Besides, we come to their value on the basis also of the experience people have in using them.
What is inert does not change without help from the world. Consciousness needs no help of any kind. It lives in freedom. That is, what is this freedom? Svecchā is svā icchā; that is svecchā. Svecchā means nothing other than one's own divine nature. This living principle goes its way, following its will. A small example. A stone may think, "For a long time I have been standing, I am tired, I must sit down," but merely by thinking so it cannot sit. But a living man who has stood for a while and wants to sit down because his leg somehow aches can surely sit down. Such is the freedom in the living principle. And such is the want of consciousness in what is inert. … the form of the world is the unfolding of consciousness itself. So it is very hard to understand the nature of this consciousness rightly. Another kind of illustration. This is a wall. To your eye it looks high, thick and long. To your touch it seems hard. One on this side cannot see one on the other side. You think of it as merely something inert. But when we look at it from the angle of science, what is in it is nothing but an assembly of atoms. This itself is a combination of the subtlest particles, electrons, protons, neutrons. When you look at it in that light, the spaces in it between one atom and another are very wide. When we examine it with an instrument, this wall looks just the way the stars look in the sky. The wall is all holes. You do not see even one hole; … the whole wall is like a sieve. So, seen scientifically, it is something filled only with holes. Seen with physical sight, it appears to us very hard. But here there is no joining of atom to atom. The space between one atom and another is very large; so what is, is one thing, and what we experience is another. Only through such a working does the whole world appear to us. Yet we take only the forms and names of this world we see as our proof. The waves of these atoms keep changing all the time. Under the state of these changing atoms there is one unchanging root energy as its basis.