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The Secret of Inner Peace

A lecture by Sri Chinmoy
at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut

Dear sisters and brothers, I shall show you how to acquire, here and now, inner peace. My help is not advice. Mine is not the way to advise people what to do or what not to do. It is true that everyone is unselfish and liberal when it comes to giving advice and, unfortunately, I am no exception. Yet I fully agree with Chesterfield, who says, “Advice is seldom welcome and those who need it the most, like it the least.”

This world of ours has everything except one thing: peace. Everybody wants and needs peace, whether he be a child or an octogenarian. But the idea of peace is not the same for each individual. It sadly differs. A child’s idea of peace is to beat a drum. Beating a drum brings him joy, and this joy is his peace. An old man’s idea of peace is to sit quietly with his eyes and ears closed, so that he can escape the fond embrace of the ugly and restless world. The general in Eisenhower spoke on peace: “We are going to have peace, even if we have to fight for it.”

The indomitable Napoleon voiced forth, “What a mess we are in now: peace has been declared.” The Son of God taught us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Somebody has very aptly said, “The more we strive for peace on earth, the more it seems that the dove of peace is a bird of paradise.”

To be sure, peace is not the sole monopoly of heaven. Our earth is extremely fertile. Here on earth we can grow peace in measureless measure.

I am supposed to speak on the inner peace. I wish to confine my talk to the spiritual seeker in each of you. A genuine seeker after peace must needs be a seeker after love. Love has another name: sacrifice. When sacrifice is pure, love is sure. When love is divine, in sacrifice there can be no “mine,” no “thine.” Love is the secret of oneness. Sacrifice is the strength of oneness. Self-love is self-indulgence. Self-indulgence is self-annihilation. Love of God is the seeker’s greatest opportunity to realise God.

We sacrifice our precious time to make money. We sacrifice our hard-earned money to fight against time. In order to have something from the outer world, we have to sacrifice something of our own. Similarly, in the inner world we offer our aspiration in return for God-Realisation. The flame of our aspiration is kindled by God Himself. The fruit of our realisation, too, we get from God directly. God is the Inspirer in us. God is the Eternal Giver. God is the Eternal Receiver in us. God uses aspiration to take us to Himself. God uses realisation to bring Himself to us. God is sacrifice when we live in the world of aspiration. God is sacrifice when we live in the realm of realisation. But God says that there is no such thing as sacrifice. There is only one thing here on earth and there in heaven, and that thing is called oneness: the fulfilment in oneness and the fulfilment of oneness.

There are four kinds of seekers: lamentable, incapable, promising and fulfilling. The lamentable and the incapable have to be patient; they have to wait for the Hour of God. The promising and the fulfilling are already singing and dancing in the Hour of God. They are constantly meditating on God. This is their inner life of realisation. They are soulfully and spontaneously acting for God. This is their outer life of revelation.

To come back to the secret of inner peace, our questioning and doubting mind is always wanting in peace. Our loving and dedicated heart is always flooded with inner peace. If our mind has all the questions, then our heart has all the answers. The answers are perfect precisely because they come straight from the soul, which sees the Truth and lives in the Truth. And Truth, Truth alone, is the Goal of Goals.

If you want to have the inner peace, then you must follow the path of spirituality. Spirituality is the answer. There are three ages of man: under-age, over-age and average. To the under-age, spirituality is hocus-pocus. To the over-age, spirituality is something dry, uncertain and obscure. And to the average, spirituality is self-oblivion, self-negation and self-annihilation.

But a true seeker will say that spirituality is something normal, natural, spontaneous, fertile, clear, luminous, divinely self-conscious, self-affirmative and self-creating. If you have a spiritual teacher to help and guide you, then you are very lucky. Listen to him always, until you breathe your last. If you stop taking advice from him, then yours will be the loss and not his. Even in the ordinary human life one needs a teacher, a mentor. There is considerable truth in what Churchill says: “In those days he was wiser than he is now — he used, frequently, to take my advice.”

If you don’t have a spiritual Master and if you don’t care for one, then at every moment please listen to the dictates of your soul in absolute silence. Peace you want and need. To have peace, you must have free access to your soul. To have free access to your soul, you must have inner silence. To have inner silence, you need aspiration. To have aspiration, you need God’s Grace. To have God’s Grace, you must feel that you are God’s and God’s alone, always!

We are now in Connecticut. The motto of Connecticut is supremely significant. My heart of devotion and my soul of love are singing the matchless motto of Connecticut: Qui Transtulit Sustinet — "He who transplanted sustains.” God transplanted truth to earth, and He sustains this truth with love. In the combination of the two lies the secret of inner peace.

Published in Eastern Light for the Western Mind

Courage versus Humility

A lecture by Sri Chinmoy
at the United Nations in New York

Courage challenges the world. Humility illumines the world. Courage strongly urges us to stand up for our own rights. Humility soulfully inspires us to stand up for God’s rights alone.

Courage is not aggression. Aggression is man’s destruction-force. Humility is not humiliation. Humiliation is man’s rejection-force. Courage is man’s self-determination. Humility is man’s oneness-distribution. Self-determination eventually succeeds. Oneness-distribution constantly proceeds.

Courage is man’s conquering force. Humility is man’s unifying force. Courage feeds the divine human in us. Humility feeds the unifying and immortal divine in us.

The seeker in us uses courage to conquer the teeming doubts in the mental world. The seeker in us uses humility to constantly gain faith, to increase faith in God’s universal Oneness and Light.

Courage is the struggle, birthless and deathless, between man’s victory and defeat, between man’s joy and sorrow, between man’s smiles and tears, between man’s acceptance and rejection, between what man has and what man is. What man has is sound-satisfaction and what man is is silence-perfection.

Humility is man’s divine and supreme Glory-bird that flies from God’s Infinity-Dawn to God’s Eternity-Day and from God’s Eternity-Day to God’s Infinity-Dawn.

With courage we manifest God in our own way. With humility, God manifests Himself in and through us in His own Way.

Published in United Nations Meditation-Flowers and To-morrow's Noon

The Inner Experience of Bliss

A lecture by Sri Chinmoy
St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University; New York

Anandaddhyeva khalvimani bhutani jayante
anandena jatani jivanti
anandam prayantyabhisamvisanti

From Bliss we came into existence,
  In Bliss we grow.
At the end of our journey’s close,
  Into Bliss we retire.

The inner experience of Bliss. The inner experience of Bliss is the achievement of liberation and perfection.

Liberation is the death of the world-sound and the birth of the soundless sound, the Cosmic Sound.

Perfection is God’s Promise to man. Perfection is God’s Achievement in man. A liberated soul is earth’s highest Height. A perfected soul is Heaven’s deepest depth.

A liberated soul carries the banner of realisation. A perfected soul carries the banner of realisation, revelation and manifestation.

Realisation is self-discovery. Revelation is self-glowing. Manifestation is self-fulfilling. In realisation one knows that he is none other than the great God. In revelation one knows that he is none other than the benevolent God. In manifestation one knows that he is at once the great God and the benevolent God.

The inner experience of Bliss is the marriage of God’s Grace and God’s Race. God’s Grace creates humanity’s capacity. God’s Race creates humanity’s receptivity.

In capacity God is the Creator. In receptivity God is the Enjoyer. The Creator is the One in the many. The Enjoyer is the many in the One.

A seeker envisions Infinity’s Bliss. A Yogi becomes Infinity’s Bliss. An Avatar is Infinity’s Bliss. The Supreme, the Absolute Supreme, is the Source of Infinity’s Bliss. A seeker is God the tireless walker. A Yogi is God the fearless marcher. An Avatar is God the deathless runner.

The Supreme is the walker’s experience. The Supreme is the marcher’s confidence. The Supreme is the runner’s assurance.

The inner experience of Bliss far surpasses all the treasures of Divinity’s Reality and Reality’s multiplicity. We can have the inner experience of Bliss if we can acquire the inner silence and if we can have inner guidance.

The inner silence is the silence of goalless movement and thought-waves. The outer silence is the silence of the physical senses.

The inner guidance is like a mother’s constant and conscious guidance of a child. The outer guidance is like the guidance of a blind man leading another blind man.

The inner silence is the fulfilment of life and the fulfilment of reality in us. The inner guidance fulfils the individual life in the Life universal.

The inner experience of Bliss is never and can never be a gift of the miracle machine. The inner experience of Bliss is a gift of the natural self of a normal man. The inner experience of Bliss begins in self-offering and ends in God-becoming.

Without Bliss, man is an external superficiality. With Bliss, man is a fulfilling inner and outer reality. Without Bliss, man is a song of frustration and destruction. With Bliss, man is constant fulfilment and constant perfection.

In the spiritual life a surrendered disciple is his Master’s growing Bliss, and a totally surrendered, unconditionally surrendered disciple is his Master’s ceaseless Bliss.

In the spiritual life we need experience, we need confidence, we need assurance. Experience is the discovery of infinite Life within us. Confidence is the supreme mastery of our soul over darkness and night. Assurance is our inseparable oneness with the Light of the Supreme.

Night we were. Light we are. Delight we shall be.

Published in Promised Light from the Beyond.

The Seeker

A talk by Sri Chinmoy
in the Brooklyn Center at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York

Here we are all seekers. A seeker is he who most of the time lives in the inner world. In the inner world the seeker has quite a few friends and quite a few enemies. Doubt and fear are his worst enemies. Faith and courage are his best friends.

Fear usually lives in the vital. Doubt usually lives in the mind. Faith lives in the heart and courage lives in the soul.

We fear precisely because we live in the division-world. We doubt because we fail to live in the oneness-world.

Faith and courage. A seeker needs faith both in God and himself. If he does not have faith in God, he cannot manifest the divinity that he has within. And if he has no faith in himself, then he will not be able to discover the divinity that he embodies. So it is of paramount importance for him to have faith both in himself and in God.

An ordinary man has faith in himself, but this faith is not the faith of a seeker. The faith of an ordinary man we call a disproportionate ego. A seeker has faith. His faith is founded upon his humility, his purity, his divinity and his oneness with the Will of his Beloved Supreme.

The seeker has to travel a long and arduous road, but when his inner being is inundated with indomitable courage, his journey’s goal does not remain a far cry. His very courage expedites his journey.

The body-consciousness or physical consciousness at times lives in the vital — the insecure, impure and aggressive vital. At other times it lives in the doubting, suspicious, sophisticated and ultra-modern mind. Again, the physical consciousness at times lives in the heart, which is flooded with poise, peace and light. On very rare occasions the physical consciousness or body-consciousness lives in the soul. There it discovers, to its wide surprise, the soul’s capacity: the indomitable courage and adamantine Will of the Supreme that the soul embodies. The Absolute Supreme acts through the soul’s adamantine will.

A seeker is he who constantly tries to keep the body-consciousness inside the soul’s divine reality; for the soul is inundated all the time with inspiration, aspiration and realisation, and the seeker knows that this is what he needs. When the seeker’s human reality enters into the soul’s divinity and lives there for some time, it achieves divine qualities and divine capacities in abundant measure. The world of frustration and failure it leaves far behind. Only in the world of success and progress, the world of ever-transcending beauty and perfection, does it live. And eventually it grows into Infinity’s Love, Eternity’s Bliss and Immortality’s Life.

Publsihed in Wisdom-Waves in New York, part 2