In plain words
I spoke of it yesterday. In any substance, where does its natural quality come from? It is not something man brought into being. It arose of itself. Where did the sweetness in sugarcane come from? Where did the heat in the chilli come from? Where did the bitterness in neem come from? Where did the fragrance in jasmine come from? People think all these are properties of nature. No. They are the principle of the Paramātma itself. It appears as the very form of this nature. We must understand this principle of nature well. In nature there are many kinds of moods. There are many kinds of differences too. There are many kinds of meanings too. To understand nature, which is such a principle of the Paramātma, is impossible for us. So, to understand the principle of the Paramātma, we must make our mind enter the supreme principle. Where does the mind come from? It came from thoughts and counter-thoughts alone. Those thoughts and counter-thoughts, in turn, came from your breath alone. After that we must inquire into sound. That is the true Brahma principle. The So'ham principle within that Brahma principle is the true Ātma principle.
“So'ham” is the Brahma principle itself
To understand the Ātma principle, we must first inquire into the principle of the breath. Without the “So'ham” that comes forth from this breath, there is no life at all. So we live only to understand the “So'ham” principle. How does its meaning go? “So'ham”: this has been called the ‘Haṃsa Gāyatrī’. ‘So’ means ‘that’. ‘Ham’ means ‘I’. That is, ‘That am I’. ‘That am I’: which is ‘That’? What is there? To say ‘That am I’, the mind is there. If one thinks this mind is ‘I’, the mind gets in the way of sādhana! So if one thinks the mind is ‘I’, the mind, they say, is nothing but a mad monkey. Relying on such a mind, by what path can you go? No… No, we must not think of the mind as mind. We must believe the mind to be God.