In plain words
Always remain in Śānti alone. Why? You yourself are the embodiment of Śānti. You yourself are the embodiment of Satya. You yourself are the embodiment of Prema. Where could you search for it as something apart. If one who is himself Prema goes searching for it, that is sheer foolishness. A small example. A man went into a room and was searching all through it for something, poor fellow. This man can see everything. Things he had never once seen, every one of them, he can see. But one thing he cannot see. What is that? He does not know himself. He cannot see himself. Everything else in that room he can see. In just the same way, the man of today searches for everything in this vast world, the world built up of what is seen. All that he searches for he can see, but the one who searches he cannot see. That itself is the secret of Vedānta. What is it he wants, that he searches? He is on a search for Satya. But Satya is there. He himself is Satya. But he searches for Satya outside. If we search outside for the Ānanda that is within us, will we find it? With a necklace on your own neck, ‘Where is my necklace? Where is my necklace?’ if you search outside, will you find the necklace? With your spectacles on your own nose, if you say, ‘Where are my spectacles, where are my spectacles?’ where can you search and find them. It is all within oneself. Yet one searches outside. What is the reason for this? This very feeling, that the body is the self, is the root cause of all these.
It is only through the feeling ‘I myself am the body’, set on this body, that man lives this life. That is exactly why we stay far from Satya. That is exactly why we stay even further from Prema. ‘I have Prema; I love my parents. I love my sisters and brothers,’ you think. This Prema is not Prema. The Prema of parents, the Prema of wife and husband, the Prema of brothers, the Prema of sisters: in all of these, every one, there is selfishness to some degree. But the Prema that is free of selfishness is the Prema of the Ātma. The Prema with which one loves oneself. Who is meant by oneself?