In plain words
So just as our mother teaches us various kinds of learning, in the same way this Sarasvatī, the Divine Mother, makes us learn every kind of learning. Beloved man is the child of three mothers. These three mothers are not apart from us. They live within us. Only when we make manifest these powers hidden in us, secret and unmanifest, do we become persons. As long as we cannot make these powers manifest, we have no right even to call ourselves persons. Every mother takes our hand and teaches us to walk, with care. How we should take our food: she gives us very soft things and teaches us to eat rice. Mother teaches us words; she teaches the first words, ‘Ammā’, ‘Appa’. The one who teaches words is the mother. The one who teaches walking is the mother. The one who teaches how to eat is the mother. The one who teaches all learning is the first mother, the mother herself. That is why Vemana too said in small words:
The son who has no kindness for mother and father, why should he be born, why should he die? Are not termites born in an anthill, and do they not die?
We must regard our mother and father as Īśvara and Pārvatī. We must serve them. If we are too feeble to please even them, how then can we please God? So what we must learn today is this: on the path that is natural, that is true in everyday life and is most needful, we must follow the path of Satya. We must show forth the path of the ideal. Only when we believe God to be the embodiment of power does the power fit to attain Him also arise in us. All these arise in a mother’s Prema alone. Only when there is mutual affection, the child’s for the mother and the mother’s for the child, does this power arise through the two of them. In the way heat arises in our two hands when we rub them together, that is our power. That is our current. That is our light. That is our feeling. In the midst of a mother’s Prema we must develop the Tattva of a Prema that flows both ways, and tender affection.
In the Rāmāyaṇa you have one fine ideal. Sītā is living in Vālmīki’s āśrama. She thinks of nothing but Rāma, without ceasing. Her sons Lava and Kuśa, bowing to their mother’s command, learn every kind of learning within their mother’s Prema, in their mother’s very lap. Holding their mother as their support in everything, they live their daily life with the wish to please her. All that they learned from their guru, they would recite back to her. Their mother too taught them many lessons in good qualities.