In plain words
How happily you can live! You have married. A wife has come. Now there are four legs. Whenever you want to go out anywhere, a ‘worry’ comes up: ‘Oh, there will be no one at home!’ A year later, a son is born. Then there are six legs. As the number of legs grows in this way, our pace slows down. Your journey through life begins to limp. So, Embodiments of Prema! Cultivate Prema. Love all. But you should not load such responsibilities on your head. If you tie such responsibilities on to yourself, it becomes very hard. Many of you know this from experience. If we lighten the load, we can live happily. There will be no sorrow or hardship at all. Dakṣiṇāmūrti's message, too, is this very thing. He taught renunciation above all. His was only an exposition in silence. He stays silent. Smiles danced on His face without ceasing. What is the reason He remained the embodiment of Ānanda in that way? He did not tie responsibilities of this kind on to Himself.
That mother and child who came from Rangoon, the two of them, sacrificed their lives for Prema. Even if we die, it does not matter; but Prema we must never give up. Some day or other, there is no escaping death. However well we nourish this body today, tomorrow we cannot help leaving it. So we must give up attachment to the body. We must earn a good name. A good name is itself the true life. Even when a man dies, that name remains for ever. There is no greatness in winning a great name in society. We must earn a good name. People may look upon you as great: ‘He is a millionaire, you know!’ But what use is it? “Even a millionaire has only food and clothing; he does not swallow shining gold.” So, as long as we live, we must live in happiness and Śānti. We must make society happy. We must reduce our worldly ties. We must show Prema to all. The selfish thought, ‘I will love only my wife and children’, is not good. Fish is better than selfish. A fish moves about joyfully in the water. It takes no responsibility or burden of any kind on its head. But the man of today keeps taking on burdens until he dies. He is sinking precisely under that ‘heavy load’. So we must reduce our responsibilities and increase our contemplation of God. Only when we cultivate Prema for the Paramātma can we experience the Ānanda of Prakṛti. Duty is God. We must live in the spirit of ‘Work is worship.’ We should not add too much to our responsibilities. We must live with the courage and faith that the One who looks after all is God Himself. When God, who looks after everything, is in our home, at our side and with us as our companion, why should we fall prey to so many troubles?! That is what we tell ourselves. But we go on worrying all the same. We should not be like that. When we have offered everything to God, we must be ‘free’, without any worries. Only then do we attain Śānti. However many rites we perform, yajñas, yāgas and the like, there is no use if we do not recognise their inner meaning and act on it. We may forget the world, but we must not forget God. We must spend our life keeping God always in our mind. This, above all, is the teaching I give you today.