In plain words
The cause of all these worries is having no work. For that … they put the brain to work. An officer sitting in that tent saw him. He kept thinking of them, shedding tears. The officer called him. ‘Bābū, come here,’ he said. Pointing to a spot, he told him to dig a pit four feet this way and four feet that way. He told him to dig the pit in good, hard ground. It took three days. Digging, digging: this is how the poor fellow toiled. After three days he came to the officer and said, ‘Sir, my work is done.’ He asked him how many times he had thought about home while he was digging this pit. ‘Where was the time for me, sir? This took all of it. I did not even remember any news of home,’ he said. The officer said, ‘Only because the children of today have no work, their whole mind is filled with crazy delusions.’
So we must give children plenty of work. What this work does is this: even if you get tired from this work, it does not matter, but bad feelings stay out of you. In colleges outside, only because they have no work, they needlessly sink into worldly affairs and go off as far as the bazaar. Here, work is worship. Evenness in karma. ‘Work, work, I want work’: this longing must come from within. This is what Kṛṣṇa said. You crazy fellow! Karma fosters in us very sacred designs. I have no need to do karma. There is nothing in this world I need. There is nothing for Me to lose. Yet I Myself perform this karma. For what? For the uplift of the world. Only when I act does the world act. Our right lies in karma alone. What do some people in the world think today? When someone sits comfortably with no work and sleeps: Abbā, how lucky that fellow is! He has no work at all; he eats a fine meal and goes on sleeping. We should have luck like that, they say. This is not luck. It is ill luck. It is laziness. You must work: when the arms move, the belly is filled. Only when you work does what you have eaten get digested. If you do not work like that, you know, there are iron machines. If you leave it like that without working, it rusts. Once this rust sets in, that machine no longer works. First of all it gathers like dust. When air gets into this dust, it turns into rust. Because this rust sets in, its working bursts. When it has burst, we put it aside to rest.
So what is a man who does not work like? He is like a machine that has rusted. So we must work. If we keep working well, no illness will enter us at all.