Question: Do you ever have doubts that you will achieve your goals?

Sri Chinmoy: If I had the doubtful consciousness, after several attempts I would give up. Doubt I gave up long, long ago. We doubt only when we are afraid of failure. But in my philosophy, defeat and victory we accept with equal cheerfulness. Whether my Inner Pilot wants to give me the experience of failure or the experience of success, I will be equally happy because mine is the way of surrender. If God gets joy by granting me defeat, and I have oneness with Him, then on the strength of my oneness I myself will have joy in my defeat.

It is the same with success. When I defeat my spiritual children in tennis, in no way do I get malicious pleasure. As an individual, if I have victory I am happy. But on the strength of my inseparable oneness with my students, if they are suffering, if they are sad that they have lost to me, I try to take their sadness into myself like a magnet, and then I get tremendous joy. So their defeat I take as my defeat, which is only an experience, and my victory I take also as just another experience.

If I take both defeat and victory as an experience, then doubt cannot enter. If I am unable to do something, it is an experience, and if I am able to do it, this is another experience. So how can doubt come? I see the experience that I get from victory and the experience that I get from defeat as equally good experiences; therefore, doubt cannot torture me. Doubt tortures me only when I say, “What will happen to me if I don’t do something, if I can’t do something?” If I don’t do something, the world is not going to dissolve. And if I do it, the world is not going to be saved. If I lose, the experience I am getting is coming from Above; and if I win, the experience is also coming from Above.

When we can see victory and defeat as equal, then there can be no doubt whatsoever. If I cannot do something, I am happy, and if I can do that thing, I am equally happy — because both are, after all, only experiences that I am getting, and these experiences my Inner Pilot is Himself having in and through me.