In plain words
So many thousands have gathered here. For what? They have gathered for the divine. If instead you go to a liquor shop, how will such good feelings come to you?! If you give yourselves to bad habits like smoking, drinking and eating meat, and then say, ‘I am a good man’, no one will accept it. If you want to be known as good people, you must do good deeds. But with man today, what he says is one thing and what he does is another.
A sannyāsī stood before a house and said, ‘Bhavatī bhikṣāṃ dehi.’ The housewife came out: “My son! Go to the river, bathe and come back. I will give you a meal,” she said. But that sannyāsī was utterly lazy. He said, “Mother, for sādhus like us, ‘Govinda’ is always our bath.” The housewife was very clever. “My son! ‘Govinda’ is always your meal; go and come back,” she said. To have no wish to bathe and to say out of laziness, ‘Govinda is always my bath’, makes no sense. When one says, ‘Govinda is always my bath’, why should one not think, ‘Govinda is always my meal’!
Your goodness will protect you
Whoever does us even a small kindness, we must show them the gratitude they deserve. Such people, wherever they may be and whatever they may do, will surely receive good fruit. If you repay the money to the one who gave you money, he may be satisfied. But it is not enough merely to repay the money; you must give Prema. You must keep that gratitude in your heart. Only then will you truly have repaid your debt. Some betray even those who have done them great good. That is not good. Gratitude is most important for man. Without gratitude, everything is wasted. Our whole life is made up of ‘reaction, resound and reflection’. Even if the person we meet is one who hates us, if we bow to him and speak kindly, saying ‘Sir’, he too will respectfully say ‘Sir’. If we say ‘You there!’ in anger, he too will say ‘You there!’