I am determined to liberate
My life
From the burning attachments
Of my present and past life.
– Sri Chinmoy, Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees, part 26, Agni Press, 2002
From the spiritual point of view, each thought carries a special weight in our mind. Each thought has a special signification. In our ordinary life, we all know what a thought is. We create thought. We cherish thought. There is nobody who does not know how to think-do ordinary thinking, that is. If someone does not know how to think, we call him a fool. But if one who has a developed mind chooses to stop thinking, if he has learned the art of stopping the mind, he makes tremendous progress in the spiritual life. When a thought enters into a seeker's aspiring mind, he has to feel that it is like meeting an enemy on the battlefield. The more one can silence the mind, the sooner one realises the Goal.
The human mind feels that thought is the ultimate power and light. Unfortunately, this is a deplorable mistake. The aspiring heart constantly receives the supreme message from the soul. Only by silencing the mind can one receive this message and reach the highest absolute Supreme. The Lord Buddha silenced his mind and entered into Nirvana, the bliss unfathomable of the Transcendental Height. The Christ opened his heart and embraced all humanity on the strength of his universal oneness with his Father, the ultimate Goal. Either by silencing the mind or by opening the heart, today's man can become tomorrow's God, tomorrow's Divinity. And embodied Divinity soon becomes revealed Immortality.
Desire and aspiration are two simple words, but they embody tremendous power. Aspiration consciously follows the road of light, whereas desire consciously or unconsciously follows the path of darkness. Darkness means satisfaction in limitation. Our desire wants to grab and possess, but before it possesses, it is possessed. While being possessed, while enjoying consciously or unconsciously the role of subjugation and imperfection, desire is to some extent satisfied. At the same time, desire embodies power which very often ends in frustration. And this frustration gives birth to destruction and annihilation.
Each human being has aspiration; each human being embodies aspiration. This aspiration in him builds up the tower of Truth, Light and Bliss. Aspiration is never satisfied with imperfection. It climbs up high, higher, highest. At each moment the mounting flame in us, while climbing toward the highest, illumines the obscure, impure, unaspiring elements of our gross physical. Then finally, he not only realises but also manifests the Kingdom of Heaven in his inner being.
Desire is the product of our thought waves. Aspiration is the product of our soul's will. The soul's will we can possess and claim as our very own only when we consciously surrender what we have and what we are to the Supreme. What we have is an inner longing for Truth, Light and Bliss. We have to offer this longing unconditionally to the Supreme, our Inner Pilot. What we are is ignorance, unfathomable ignorance. This ignorance, too, we can and must offer to the Supreme consciously, devotedly and unconditionally. But instead of doing this, we wallow in the pleasures of ignorance and, what is worse, we often do it consciously and deliberately.
The desire in us demands that the physical in us rest eternally in the sea of ignorance. The aspiration within us warns us that once we go to sleep we will find it extremely difficult to awaken our consciousness and get up. The realisation in us, our soul's realisation, tells us that we are already fast asleep in the domain of ignorance, and that we have been sleeping there for millennia.
A sincere seeker of the highest transcendental Truth can transform and purify the desire life with the life of aspiration. In order to do this, he must know what desire has done for him. Desire has offered him a sense of dissatisfaction. Even after his desires are fulfilled, still he is dissatisfied. The seeker sees that in the depth of his desire and in the very fulfilment of his desire there looms a sense of complete dissatisfaction. Why is this so? It is because desire is not the ultimate Truth. Desire cannot offer us the ultimate Truth, which is all satisfying. But when we follow the path of aspiration, even am iota of Light satisfies us. Although we know perfectly well that an iota of Peace, Light and Bliss cannot quench our eternal inner thirst, each iota of divine Truth, Peace, Light and Bliss carries tremendous satisfaction for us. And gradually, on the strength of our aspiration, each tiny drop of Divinity grows into a vast ocean of Fulfilment.
Aspiration embodies satisfaction. Desire embodies dissatisfaction. Each human being has the right to stay either in the desire world or in the aspiration world. Here we are all seekers of the Truth. For us, aspiration is the road. We shall walk joyfully along the road of aspiration. Today the very thing that we call aspiration, tomorrow we shall call realisation. The day after, we shall call the same thing revelation, and the following day we shall call it manifestation, our manifestation of Divinity. A sincere seeker is blessed with inner vision when he has free access to the Source. He continually and constantly depends on his inner vision. Once he has established his connection with the Source, his life becomes the realisation message of God, the illumination message of God, the perfection message of God. And in the course of time, in either the near or the distant future, in the process of evolution humanity is bound to accept these messages. What is the essence of these messages? Love, love divine, which is the song of universal oneness. If we silence our thought waves and listen to our heart waves, we can spread the love message of the Supreme. We can offer this love message to the world at large, and we can sing the song universal to kindle the flame of aspiration in all individuals.
We are now conscious of the supreme Tree. We are climbing up the Tree. Eventually we can grow into the cosmic Tree and then we can watch the multifarious leaves, which are our brothers and sisters, grow and unfold. It is we, the seekers of the ultimate Truth, who can feed the inner hunger of these leaves of the supreme Tree.
January 9th, 1974
2:00 p.m.
Manning Hall Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island