In plain words
In just these five months they finished a five-year project. This is a very big project. This project is one that will serve for a thousand years. In the future, as time goes on, no one need enlarge it any further.
The eight powers in God's creation
Embodiments of Prema!
This whole world is the very image of the Paramātma. God, who is the embodiment of the eight kinds of splendour, pervades the whole of creation through eight powers. What is chief for man, what is equal to life itself, is water. Three parts out of two of this globe of the earth are filled with water. The Upaniṣads call this water “life”. So the One whose form is water is the Paramātma Himself. Second is fire. This fire is present in the stomach of every man as ‘the fire of digestion’. If this fire of digestion itself were not there, there would be no chance at all for the food man eats to be digested and for its rasa to be sent to all the limbs. The blood, the muscles and everything else in man are forms of rasa. That is why they called God “Aṅgīrasāyanamaḥ”. Because He is present as rasa in every limb, He has the name “Rasasvarūpa”. This Aṅgīrasa is the embodiment of fire. Third is the earth. On this earth itself all creation, preservation and dissolution take place. All the food and provisions man needs arise from the earth alone. This earth is a form that gives man fitting Ānanda. So the earth, too, is the form of God. Air is like a close friend to life. Every man experiences air through breathing in and breathing out. When we draw this air in we say ‘so…’, and when we let it out we say ‘haṃ…’. Humanness is contained in just these two, “so…haṃ”. Potana said this very thing in this way:
“What is spoken, they say, is the Bhāgavatam; ‘He’ who makes me speak, they say, is Rāmabhadra; what ‘I’ speak, they say, will free from the bonds of birth and death.”
Potana set just these two words, ‘I’ and ‘He’, into it. The one who makes it spoken: He; the one who speaks: I. In Sanskrit they called the word ‘He’ ‘saḥ’ and the word ‘I’ ‘ahaṃ’. When the two joined, it changed into ‘saḥ + ahaṃ = sohaṃ’. So, what does the principle of air teach us? It demonstrates the truth ‘I am He’. That is, it proclaims the supremely holy oneness ‘I myself am God’. This air moves in us 21,600 times a day. If this form of air were not in us, our life itself would be wasted.