Passage 8

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In plain words

There is nothing with you that is not with God. Everything is with God. And no one knows what other kinds of things are there. Things of such great worth are all there. With God. But offering worthless fruits, offering flowers that wither: is this the tax we should offer? The body as the leaf, the heart as the flower, the mind as the fruit, Ānanda as the water. We must offer tears of Ānanda. Those, and not tears of grief. In this way there are so many things we must offer to God. But we do not try to recognise such eternal, true things. We offer what comes within our sight, what appears to our eyes of flesh. All these things that are seen and made up are surely transient, one day or another. All is nāsti. Nāsti. Every single thing is transient. Satya is one, and one only. Your life and the power of God: the oneness of these two is itself the principle of the jīvātma. So today we must set the matter of education on the right path. There is no Śānti for us in playing cards. There is no Śānti for us in eating. There is no Śānti for us in drinking. If there were Śānti in these, we could sit eating for twenty-four hours, could we not! All these merely lead us onto the wrong path and push us into the path of demons. We are not people born to drink and to eat. Food was born for our sake; we were not born for the sake of food. So we must give people true Jñāna, and life, in an ideal way. We must teach our fellow men the sacred path. We must try to teach people whatever principle is true and eternal.

Students! You must give people the whole essence of the studies you have studied and see that they walk the path to the highest end. Education is not merely for filling the belly. Education is for Vijñāna. Vijñāna is what we need. And what is that Vijñāna! Vijñāna is the power to examine the eternal and the transient, joined with the knowledge that discriminates. Today we see so many people with our own eyes. Where our unrest lies and what we are doing about it, we do not understand at all. We are not giving the right medicine for this disease. If a pain arises in the stomach, we put kohl in the eyes; will the stomach-ache lessen at all? The disease is one thing; the medicine we give is another. In the same way, our unrest is one thing, and to cure that unrest we only do things that bring still more unrest.