Sri Chinmoy’s Path

The following is excerpted from a talk that Sri Chinmoy gave to members of Sri Chinmoy Centre, London on the 21st of November, 1970.

Our path

Our path is basically the path of the heart and not that of the mind. This does not mean that I am criticising the path of the mind. Far from it. We feel that the path of the heart leads us faster towards our goal.

Suppose I want to go to a place and my destination is 300 miles away. I can reach my destination either by walking or by flying. Undoubtedly, I shall reach my destination infinitely faster if I fly in a jet plane. Similarly, if we use the aspiring heart and not the doubting mind, we shall reach our goal much faster. Our heart is all love. Our mind is quite often all confusion. Our heart is strikingly significant and important because inside the heart is the living presence of the soul. True, the consciousness of the soul permeates the entire body, but the actual location of the soul is inside the heart.

The soul has everything — Peace, Light and Bliss in infinite measure. Now, from the soul we get these divine qualities inside the heart. From the heart, again, we can bring them to the mind, to the vital and to the physical proper.

Our path is the path of the heart and inside the heart we see nothing but Love. When we say our heart, we mean our spiritual heart, which is flooded with divine love.

Whenever we think of God, we think of Him as something divine, vast and boundless. We think of God as the Omniscient, as the Omnipotent. Now, apart from having omniscience and omnipotence, God has a quality which transcends all His other divine qualities. And this quality is Love. Love is a divine magnet. It always pulls us.

We think of God, pray to God and meditate on God because we need fulfilment, we need the feeling of inseparable oneness. And it is only God's Love that gives us fulfilment and the feeling of inseparable oneness. Again, inside Love all other divine qualities, such as Peace, Light and Bliss grow. Love is the strongest force. That is why inside Love everything can grow.

We feel that our path is easier, more effective in this sense: here we don’t have to read millions of books to know what the Truth is. Here we don’t have to exercise our mind day in and day out to know what the Truth looks like. No. Truth is inside us. It is crying to come to the fore. But unfortunately, we have kept the door shut and we are not allowing the Truth to come out. Now, how can we bring the Truth out of its prison cell? Again, I have to say it is through Love. Love for whom? Love for God. And who is God? It is the highest illumined part in us. God is not something else. God is not somebody else.

In our path, the sense of identification is absolutely necessary. The highest has to feel his total oneness with the lowest. The lowest has to feel his total oneness with the highest. Needless to say that the highest always feels his oneness with the lowest. It is the lowest that finds it extremely difficult to be one with the highest because of his fear, doubt, jealousy and so forth.

But here inside the heart we have the soul. The soul has an endless and continuous flow of light. It neither ends nor stops. You will always be able to use it. You can never run short of it. God will not tolerate the doubting, suspecting and unaspiring mind for good. The soul will bring light to the mind through the heart and transform the mind at God’s choice hour.

Our path is the path of acceptance. We have to accept the world. If we enter into the Himalayan caves or sit on the mountain tops, or dive deep into the blue vast ocean and cry for our personal achievement and satisfaction, then we are not going to do anything for the world.

Similarly, in the spiritual life, real Spiritual Masters feel that is their bounden duty to eat in front of humanity and share the food with humanity. Naturally, all will eat spiritual food. Now, if humanity as a whole does not want to eat as it should, then what can this Spiritual Master do? But, if there are a few sincerely hungry, the Spiritual Master tells them, “The meal is ready. Let us eat together.”

In our path of acceptance we have to know that the earth is far from perfection. Unless we accept the earth-consciousness, how are we going to perfect it? If someone has some pain, I have to massage him. Then only his pain will go. Similarly, earth is defective at a particular place. I have to touch it with my aspiration and concern. Then only I can transform it. If I really love mankind, then I have to be with mankind and for that again, what I need is love. As long as the earth consciousness is not fully realised, I will try to remain with my inner consciousness on earth to be of service to mankind.

To conclude, our path of love is the path of inseparable oneness. On the strength of our love, we dare say that God is ours. On the strength of God's love, God claims us as His very own.

The full transcript of the talk can be found at the Sri Chinmoy Library