In plain words
What does it matter how the world was born, or how it ends? You who have fallen into it and are suffering, look first to your own matter and know it — that much, firmly, śruti and smṛti teach. Once you have come to know who you are, all the rest will of its own accord become clear, in full detail. Because within the brahmāṇḍa you are a piṇḍa — just as, from the knowledge of a single lump of clay, all clay vessels are known to be nothing but clay — in just that way, once your own matter is known, everything will have been known, and you will become one who has known all.
The nursemaid, whose chief purpose is to stop the child's crying and bring him comfort, invents a made-up story and tells it to the child for his entertainment, keeping him content all the while. The nursemaid's chief purpose is the child's comfort alone; guided suitably by her own intellect, she takes up a story as her means of contenting him. In just that way, jīvas, deluded by beginningless Māyā and laden with the vāsanās of the saṃskāras of many births, cannot help asking, on seeing and experiencing the world directly before their eyes, how it came to be. For such people, śruti's consoling pronouncements must indeed be spoken. All these sayings of the smṛti about the Supreme, one must grasp, are of that same kind. To the question of how creation arose there is one, and only one, answer. If the answer to how dreams arise is settled, the answer to how creation came about will also be found. Whatever causes dreaming is the very same cause of the creation of the world. The power of sleep creates dreams; the power of Māyā creates the world. Just as an unreal dream unfolds without order or regularity, however it appears, in that very way the unreal world too unfolds without any order at all. This, indeed, is the true doctrine of Advaita: that the whole world that is seen, in its entirety, is nothing but a dream — that very doctrine is the doctrine of Advaita. This same thing is what is called abheda-vāda.