In plain words
You may wonder what the basis of the creation of the world is. First enquire for yourselves what the cause of a dream is. Some say thoughts are its cause. Some say food alone is its cause. But neither is true. Its cause is sleep itself. Without sleep, no dream comes at all. So, if you ask what the cause of creation is, it is Ajñāna itself. How it comes, how it goes! Then and now it stays unmanifest. In summer the whole earth dries up and looks very, very dry. But the moment the rain falls, it turns green and plants begin to sprout. Where did they come from before? Before, they were in the unmanifest form of seeds. Without those unmanifest plants, these manifest plants could not come. These seeds are karma. Whatever action we do, its reaction, its rebound, cannot be escaped. That is why it was said, “Do good, be good, see good.” Act rightly. Live rightly. When we do our work, we do it with an eye to the moment, without keeping the results in view. But when the result comes, we suffer terribly. Whether you are afraid or glad, its fruit cannot be escaped. If you put sugar in this water and drink it, saying, “This is poison, this is poison,” it does you good. If you put poison in … glass and drink it, thinking, “This is sugar syrup, this is sugar syrup,” it kills you. Even if we enjoy what is bad, calling it “good, good,” it cannot help doing harm. It is not our delusion. Our karma must show what it really is.
So for every man, practice is first and most essential. We must enter this practice through the power of the Manas. Whatever we do without this Manas joining the senses, we must live with the feeling, “This is God's command.” Someone is abusing you. Anger comes: “Why is he abusing me?” Think, “My Swami, my God Himself has come to me, scolded me, and is wiping away my fault.” How joyful that would be! Someone abuses you: “Dog! Donkey!” Why should you be hurt? When he called you “dog, donkey,” you grew neither four legs nor a tail. Why should we put on our head what is not there? We must develop this kind of forbearance while the heart is still young. Whatever anyone says to us, we must not waver. We must not be deluded. Your wavering, your delusion: all these happen only when faith in God has grown thin. It is the one who has no faith in himself and no faith in God who falls prey to many sorrows and griefs. But man today, though he has no such power, goes about swaggering in his Ahaṅkāra. Gone mad, he imagines, “I did it, I did it.” The one who imagines, “I did it,” why should he not think that its result too is the fruit of his own karma?