These things he says are very unpalatable, but they are great instructions, that you may not go to extremes, either this way or that way. Spiritual life is not an extreme of avoiding or getting. It is a balance that you have to maintain between two things. Neither you should cling to the body, nor should you torture it. That is the mean that you have to maintain, the golden mean, and he was insisting on it.
People go to extremes.
Do some work. Do some japa , also. That is, every day he will prick you like this, giving one instruction or the other, and it was not easy for people to get on like that, when they could not understand him properly. And some, by God's grace, stuck, and those who stuck, I should say, were in many ways blessed many ways. We had no occasion to discuss.