In plain words
Keśavāya namaḥ, Mādhavāya namaḥ, Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ: chanting so mechanically, without true śraddhā and Bhakti, the pūjās go by. Steady body, steady mind, they said. Today your very body is not steady. When the body moves in so many ways, how can the mind be steady? The mind is like water in a vessel; if the vessel moves, will the water not move? First we must train the body to keep still. This is what was said in the Bhagavad Gītā: ‘Jñāna is better than practice; dhyāna excels Jñāna; giving up the fruit of karma excels dhyāna; from tyāga, Śānti follows at once.’ In the course of dhyāna, we must first hold the body in check. Only when we set the body in the right posture will the mind too be in the right state. Only when mind and body are still does Buddhi blossom. When Buddhi blossoms, Jñāna shines forth. ‘Jñānādevatu kaivalyaṃ’: that alone is what then comes to us. Today we cannot keep the body still. We cannot sit steady even for two minutes. Even when they sit, they sit bent over. One must stay steady. For if we bend even a little in any way, the iḍā and piṅgaḷā nāḍīs in our spine are spoilt. The kuṇḍalinī śakti, which rises from the mūlādhāra to the sahasrāra, takes the wrong path. That is why man today is turning into a mad monkey. Not even an ordinary monkey: a mad monkey. A monkey will not sit steady for even a moment, will it? It keeps moving one limb or another. Its gaze too will not rest on one place; it keeps looking this way and that, this way and that. Man came from none other than the monkey. Those old tendencies have not gone yet. These nine nights were laid down to set such humanness on the sacred path and lead it into the divine, into Divinity.
Through worship of forms made of clay we must attain the Divinity that is made of consciousness
Today no man inquires into the Satya of why the holy days were laid down.