In plain words
Know yourself!
What is sacrifice? Is it giving up the wealth you have? No. What you must give up is desire alone. If you give up desire alone, there will be no sorrow of any kind. All worldly ties of kinship are like passing clouds. A ‘wife’ may be here today; tomorrow ‘life’ may go. A son may be here today; tomorrow he may be gone. All these ties of kinship come and go like pictures in a cinema. What is birth? What is death? Both are the same. For just as birth comes, so too death comes. So you must not trust in anything. You must trust yourself. You say, ‘I am’, ‘I am seeing’, ‘I heard’, ‘I ate’. You must know who this ‘I’ is. You are doing postgraduate study; you are doing a Ph.D. But however advanced your studies, ‘Who are you, sir? Where have you come from?’, so you question others, but ‘Who am I? Where have I come from?’, do you ask yourself that? Without knowing who the ‘I’ is, ‘Who are you? Who are you?’, what use is it to keep saying that? Every man must recognise his own true nature for himself.
Take the good, cast off the bad
When clouds come across the sky, the moon cannot be seen. If you wait patiently a while, the clouds move away and the moon is seen again. In the same way, the ‘clouds’ that rise in you, anger and vexation, envy, pomp and the rest, will move away if you are patient a while. But you do not have that patience. Haste in everything! Haste leads to harm. Haste makes waste, waste makes worry. So, do not be in a hurry. It is only because man cannot recognise his own true nature that worry burns him up.