In plain words
‘Mother! What is the goal of human life? Where have we come from? What is it that we must do? Forgetting these, deluding ourselves and imagining that we can stay fixed in this physical, worldly world, we are wasting our time. Nara means the Ātma. The five elements, beginning with ākāśa, all arose from this Ātma. They are called nāras. Since He is the Lord of the nāras, God is called Nārāyaṇa. On this very basis, every man is the very embodiment of the Ātma. Man, who arose from the Ātma, is entering avidyā, which has an end, and the non-Ātma. None of the acts belonging to this world give Ānanda, or glory, or happiness, or Śānti. All are of an impermanent nature. That is why I have come now, to go among the people, to teach them about these feelings of the non-Ātma, and to turn their minds towards the Ātma,’ He told His mother; He bowed to her and left home.
From there He went to the bank of a river called Jamṭāk. Going there, He bathed, learnt a mantra from a guru called Yusuf, and took up a dīkṣā for forty days. He enquired. What is life? What is the destination of life? What is its aim? In the enquiry, ‘What is the work we must do in this human life?’ He kept a very hard dīkṣā for forty days. However long we live, we bring this life to its end with nothing but food, sleep and the like. We cannot take up any new path at all. We are wasting all our time in maintaining ourselves and our families. It is God alone who maintains everyone. So who is to maintain whom? In this way He went on enquiring. He planted three things firmly in the world. God is one alone. He is one endowed with great powers. He is one who has wondrous miracles. He would show those miracles to people and try to turn them towards Himself. The people of today turn their eyes towards God only when they see powers. You must not hurt anyone. The one who dwells in all beings is the one Lord of all. Whoever is hurt or pained, the hurt reaches God alone: so He fully decided, and set out back from that harsh forest. From then on He went on giving these teachings to the people with a very sacred feeling, with a joyful heart, in words that delighted them. Carrying on His mission in this way, day and night, without worry and without food, He threw Himself into His work with this one thought: how to bring the powers of God into these people, how to set the feeling of God in these people's minds.