In plain words
Embodiments of Prema! For you there is no merit and no sin. For you there is no happiness and no sorrow. You are not embodiments of mantra, not embodiments of yantra, not embodiments of tantra. You are not yogīs, not enjoyers, not renouncers. Then who are you? You are auspicious forms, embodiments of Saccidānanda. But because of the differences of upādhi, you take the One to be many and fall prey to ignorance.
The principle of the Ātma that fills all beings is ‘I’
From the man too poor to eat to the millionaire, from the unlettered man to the paramahaṃsa, every person, when he introduces himself, utters the word ‘I’. Truly, if cattle, birds and wild beasts could speak, they too would utter this word ‘I’. The whole world rests on the word ‘I’. This principle called ‘I’ is the principle of the Ātma. It is this that the Śrutis have always called ‘hṛdayam’. Hṛdaya means the seat of compassion. So all of you are embodiments of compassion! Only when you recognise this principle of compassion and live by it will peace come to the world. The principle of the Ātma that is in all beings is ‘I’. The principle of Brahman that pervades everything is ‘I’. But you fail to understand this rightly, take the body itself to be ‘I’, and sink into Māyā.
This whole world is bound up with duality. One is ‘this’; the second is ‘I’. ‘This’ is the seen; ‘I’ is the seer. Without the seer there is no seen. ‘This is a big hall.’ Here, without the word ‘this’, the question would come: ‘Which hall?’ So all names and forms belong to the seen. It is the seer who establishes the seen. If you are asked, ‘When did you come?’, you say, ‘I came on the twentieth, Swami!’ Who is it that came? The body, surely! That is, at that moment you are thinking, ‘I am the body.’ But yesterday you slipped and fell down. Today you come to Me: ‘Swami! My leg is broken,’ you say. When you say ‘my leg’, the leg must be something other than you, surely! What is other than you is the seen. The ‘you’ that is merged in all that is seen and stays one: that alone is Satya. Satya knows no change of any kind. In all three times it stays one and the same. It is this that the Śrutis have named ‘I’.
The search for God is laughable
Man's very first name is ‘I’. Rāma, Kṛṣṇa: these are names that were given. In fact God's very first name too is ‘I’. In the Upaniṣads it says, ‘Ahaṃ brahmāsmi’ (I am Brahman). That is, even the word Brahman was born only after ‘I’ was born. So the root and ground of everything is ‘I’. Without trying to recognise this, many people practise many sādhanas. They go in search of God. What is this searching for a God who is everywhere? When you yourself are God, why search at all? Is there a fool anywhere who asks, ‘Where am I?’ If anyone did ask that, people would say, ‘He has lost his wits; he must be put in a mental hospital.’ Each one is himself the embodiment of God. Each one is himself the embodiment of Brahman. But man cannot recognise this truth.