Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
A talk by Sri Chinmoy
at Botany Lecture Theatre, University College, London, England
Everybody knows about spirituality according to his own aspiration, according to his capacity and according to his receptivity. Since we are all seekers here, we are supposed to know something about spirituality and we do know a considerable amount. As a seeker of the Absolute, the Transcendental Supreme, I wish to share with you my own knowledge of spirituality.
In my view, spirituality means acceptance of life — acceptance of the inner life first and then acceptance of the outer life, the ordinary life. First we have to accept the inner life. Then, from the inner life, we have to discover and bring to the fore the light, peace and bliss from our soul, to inundate our outer life.
In my view, spirituality can never mean the rejection of life or the total negation of life. To me, spirituality means the true acceptance of life. We have to accept life as it is now. But we must not be satisfied with this life, we cannot be satisfied with this life as such. It is our bounden duty to change the face of the world. But how can we do it? We can do it only when we ourselves are changed within and without. When we are transformed, we are in a position to be of service to mankind. When we can live in the soul and not in the gross physical we are ready to offer our dedicated service to aspiring mankind.
According to my humble philosophy, spirituality should never take shelter in the Himalayan caves. Those days of the hoary past are buried in oblivion. Now we have to face the world. If we enter into the Himalayan caves to look for God, then we are deliberately ignoring the possibility of an integral change, the transformation of our physical, vital, mental and psychic life. Here on earth, amidst multifarious activities, we have to realise the Highest, we have to fulfil the transcendental Supreme.
Our spiritual philosophy tells us that today needs a man of action. Today’s man cannot build castles in the air. Today’s man cannot remain unillumined. But who are these men of action? If you say that men of action are only those who are practical, it is true to some extent. But really practical men of action are those who have the divine courage to drink of something vast, infinite, eternal and immortal. Men of action are those who challenge ignorance and are ready to fight against ignorance-night, those who want to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. Yesterday these men of action were all dreamers, but these dreamers were divine dreamers. In their case, dream and reality went together. Dream was the direct vision and reality was the manifestation of this vision. Yesterday’s divine dreamers are today’s men of action, today’s divine warriors. Tomorrow these men have something else to do — tomorrow they have to be the pathfinders and the harbingers of a new dawn, a new light. They have achieved Light; they have grown into Light. Now it is their bounden duty to reveal Light to the world at large. These divine warriors, these men of action, tomorrow have to offer Light to the suffering, bleeding and sinking humanity.
Today we are all seekers. What were we yesterday? Yesterday we were in the world of doubt, teeming doubt. Our mind allowed teeming doubts to enter into us, or our mind cherished teeming doubts and made us feel that doubting others or doubting oneself was the acme of self-discovery. Yesterday we doubted God’s existence, we doubted our friends, our relatives, we doubted ourselves, we doubted everyone.
When we doubt others, in the outer world we may not lose anything. When we doubt God, in the outer world we may not lose anything. But when we doubt ourselves, we lose everything. We lose in the outer world and we lose in the inner world as well. We become veritable beggars. The moment we start doubting ourselves we weaken our possibilities and unconsciously destroy our inner potentialities.
Today we are seeking infinite Truth, infinite Light and infinite Peace. Now where can we get infinite Peace, Light and Truth? Here, inside the spiritual heart. We talk about the Universal Consciousness; we talk about the Transcendental Reality. Where is the Universal Consciousness? Where is the Transcendental Reality? Where is the message of the eternal Beyond? They are not in the physical but in the spiritual heart. The spiritual heart houses the Universal Consciousness, the Transcendental Reality, the message of the eternal, ever-transcending Beyond.
Tomorrow, what will we become? Today we are seekers; tomorrow we have to become divine lovers. In human love we are bound to be frustrated sooner or later, but in divine love we establish our oneness with our Beloved consciously, devotedly, soulfully and unconditionally.
We have to offer to the Supreme in humanity everything that we have achieved on the strength of our today’s aspiration. Offering is our self-revelation. Self-revelation is our self-offering. When we offer our Peace, Light and Bliss, we have to know that we are offering it to our own ignorant, obscure, impure, unillumined part. We are not offering it to somebody else at all. Let us say that the heart is illumined. But we have to know that the feet are also an integral part of our body. The feet, legs, arms, hands, eyes and every other part complete the whole human body. Similarly, we can take the rest of the world as part and parcel of our being, the part that needs illumination. I do not mean to say that the rest of the world is our feet, far from it. I am only saying that a portion of our entire being is unlit or unillumined.
We have two rooms: the heart and the mind. The heart has achieved or received illumination. It is now obligatory on the part of the heart to enter into the mind to illumine it. We have to feel at every moment that the mind-room — which we can call with utmost simplicity, honesty and humility our unillumined part — is ours. We have to claim the mind-room as our very own, and the mind-room also has every right to claim us. It is we who have to offer Light from the heart-room to the mind-room. And from whom have we already received this Light? From the soul, which is the divine representative of the Supreme.
We who are here on earth have come from somewhere else — far, very far away — into the world arena. What did we do, what did we say to the Lord Supreme when we left our Celestial Abode? We made a solemn promise to the Supreme that here on earth we would realise Him most perfectly, and here on earth we would reveal Him, manifest Him and fulfil Him in His own Way. This was our solemn promise to the Supreme, and He was extremely proud of the soulful promise of His divine children.
But now we do not remember our promise. Now we may consciously and deliberately try to deceive the Supreme and go back on our promise because we want to wallow in the pleasures of ignorance. But He knows that our promise was sincere and genuine, and He knows that we shall fulfil our promise to Him either today or tomorrow, either in the near future or in the distant future. He has that Vision. But we have eclipsed our vision by deliberately making friends with ignorance. We are fond of swimming in the sea of ignorance instead of swimming in the Sea of Knowledge and Light.
Once we actually enter into this world we make an inner promise to our soul and to the world at large that we will help mankind, serve mankind and illumine mankind. In silence we consciously make a solemn promise in the inner world that we will offer constant and conscious service to humanity. Like a beggar, the world looks to us to fulfil our promise. The world looks to each individual to fulfil his promise, but we do not do it. That is why the world is suffering, and still caught in the meshes of ignorance.
Is there anything on earth that can help us fulfil our promise to the Supreme and to the world? Yes. It is called experience, divine experience. Experience carries us into the past. It brings the message of the past and tells us how foolish we were yesterday. Yesterday we did not care for sublime realities, we did not care for God-manifestation. But today we do care for God-realisation, God-revelation and God-manifestation. How foolish we were yesterday! Today we are the same person, but now we earnestly pray and meditate for God-realisation, God-revelation and God-manifestation.
Experience tells us something more. The mistakes that we made in the past can easily be rectified by virtue of our inner awakening and self-discovery. A room can remain unlit for years, for centuries, but the moment we bring light into it, it is lit, it is illumined. We can see that our inner room has been unlit for millennia, but that is no reason why it cannot be illumined as soon as possible. We can illumine it and we haveto illumine it. How do we do it? We do it on the strength of our inner cry, which we call aspiration. In the outer life, when a child cries, the mother runs immediately to the child. Whatever the child wants and needs the mother brings. Likewise, when we cry inwardly for the highest Truth, Light and Bliss which we desperately need, the Transcendental Supreme runs to us and fulfils us in infinite measure.
Published in My Rose Petals, part 2
Life
A lecture by Sri Chinmoy
at ABF Huset Stockholm, Sweden
Dear seekers, dear friends, dear brothers and sisters, I wish to give a short talk on the subject of life. This subject is at once most familiar to us and most significant to us. Each individual can claim to be an authority on this subject. So I am grateful to you for having given me the opportunity to speak on this subject and be of service to you this evening.
There can be a philosophical approach to life, there can be a religious approach to life, there can be a spiritual approach to life and finally there can be God's approach to life. I wish to discuss each of these approaches from the spiritual point of view.
Philosophy is of two types. One is the outer philosophy; the other is the inner philosophy. The outer philosophy deals with some philosophical books and remains exclusively in the mental world. The inner philosophy deals with light and divinity, and with Heaven and earth. According to Indian tradition, philosophy itself is vision, for the Sanskrit word for philosophy is darshan, which means vision. We envision the inner world that is trying to come forward and manifest itself in our outer life. This inner world is the world of Peace, Light and Bliss. The outer world that we live in is full of conflicts and negativity and destructive forces. So we pray and meditate to bring to the fore the inner world and replace the outer world with it. But from the strict spiritual point of view, it is not a replacement but a transformation. The outer world is not replaced. It is transformed and illumined by the light of the inner world.
Now, let us deal with the religious approach to life. Usually there are two main religious approaches to life. One is the occidental approach; the other is the oriental approach. Eastern religion, especially the religion of the hoary past, tells us that we need only one thing: liberation. Western religion, mainly the Christian religion, teaches us the message of salvation; salvation from sin. In the East, we learn how to liberate ourselves from the finite consciousness and enter into the infinite Consciousness. In the West, we learn how to raise ourselves from the sin-reality and enter into Heaven to enjoy our salvation-light. Western religion tells us that our body, vital, mind and everything that we have is impure. In order to purify the body, vital and mind, what we need is constant prayer. When we sincerely and soulfully pray, our Heavenly Father listens to our prayer and grants us salvation. In the East, since our goal is to achieve liberation from the limited body, limited vital, limited mind, we have to practise meditation, for liberation we can achieve only through proper meditation.
What is meditation? Meditation is our conscious awareness of something vast and infinite within us. Meditation grants us Peace, Light and Bliss. With this Peace, Light and Bliss, we enter into our body, vital and mind and expand and transform them into vastness. Prayer and meditation are two approaches that lead to the same goal. This goal is called perfection.
In the spiritual approach to life, we have to know that there is a true approach and a false approach. If it is a false approach, then we want to give up life. If it is a real approach, a divine approach, then our spirituality teaches how to accept life and be fulfilled in life. If the approach is not real, we want to leave aside the members of our family, we want to discard society and the world itself. We say that the world is full of suffering, that it is all illusion; therefore, we want to leave the world. But the real approach is totally different. In this approach we accept life as such and we love life. We know that the world we live in is far from perfection, but if we give up life, if we shun life, we know that the world will always remain imperfect. Therefore, we feel it is our duty to accept life, love life and transform life.
How do we transform life? We transform life with our inner cry. There is an outer cry and also there is an inner cry. When we cry outwardly, we cry for name and fame and material prosperity. When we cry inwardly, we cry for divine Love, divine Peace and divine Light. When we get Peace, Love and Light from above, we start transforming the world around us.
Finally, I wish to deal with God's Vision-approach to our life. There is no difference between God's Vision-approach and God's Reality-approach to life. We feel that vision is one thing and reality is something else, that vision is at one place and reality is at another place. I am sitting here and you are facing me. You are the reality and I am the vision. We are not sitting together and we are not inside one another; therefore, you as reality and I as vision are two totally different things.
But this experience is only on the physical plane. On the inner plane, we get a totally different experience. There we see God's Vision and God's Reality together; there we see God's Silence and God's Sound together. For us, God the Creator and God the creation are two different things. But when we pray and meditate, we see that there is no difference between the two; both are part and parcel of God the Infinite, God the Eternal and God the Immortal.
Our physical mind tries to understand what God is on earth and what God is in Heaven. For this reason, we have created two separate existences for the reality and the vision. The mind cannot truly understand or even conceive of two things at the same time. One thought must follow another. We cannot at the same time observe two things with the same kind of concentration; one is bound to get more attention than the other. But when we pray and meditate, not only two things, but countless things we see simultaneously. Also, our focus of concentration will be equally distributed. And what are these countless things we see? They are nothing but God the creation. It is through our prayer and meditation that God the Creator makes us feel that His creation and He Himself are absolutely one. We cry inwardly to go up and be with our Heavenly Father and then He gives us a smile and sends us back to do His work here on earth in His way.
Published in My Rose Petals, part 7
Video by kedarvideo
Determination
A prayerful message by Sri Chinmoy
given during a Peace Concert at Salle de Concert in St. Denis, Greater Paris, France.
Aum... Aum... Aum...
Determination. Determination.
My soul is determined to manifest God’s Supreme Victory here on earth — now!
Determination.
My heart is determined to love God the Creator unconditionally from this moment on until I breathe my last.
Determination.
My mind is determined to send my doubt, disbelief and suspicion into an eternal exile.
Determination.
My vital is determined to transform my undivine, restless vital into a supreme, peaceful and fruitful poise.
Determination.
My body is determined to liberate itself from its bondage-slavery.
Determination.
My life is determined to serve God the Creation at every moment in His Own Way. And I am determined to smash the pride of ignorance-night, once and for all.
Determination.
Enthusiasm feeds my determination and this enthusiasm-flood comes from the inner worlds.
Compassion feeds my determination. This compassion-rain descends from the higher worlds.
When my entire being is surcharged with adamantine determination, Mother Earth blessingfully says to me, “My son, you have my divine joy and you have my supreme pride.
Again, when my entire being is surcharged with adamantine determination, Father Heaven blessingfully says to me, “My son, claim me as your own, very own. I am all yours.”
Determination. Determination
Two Other Prayerful Messages
given by Sri Chinmoy
during a Peace Concert at Salle de Concert in Paris, France
Start 2:14
Peace...
Peace is my aspiration heart's perfection jubilee.
Peace...
Start 4:20
My Lord Supreme is telling me that when I cross the long river of self-oblivion, he will immediately bless me with His Infinity's peace, peace.
All three prayerful messages are previously unpublished; they are unofficial transcripts from the video.