Question: When someone feels a beautiful poem inside, what prevents its outer expression?

Sri Chinmoy: There are two main reasons. The first reason is that when you feel a poem, you doubt it; you doubt whether it is real or not. You feel, “Oh, how can I have that kind of beautiful feeling? Five minutes ago I told a lie, ten minutes ago I was jealous of somebody, so it is impossible to feel this way now.” But what happened five minutes ago has nothing to do with what you are feeling right now. The mind is so clever. When you have a wonderful experience, a very good, high experience, your mind will immediately try to throw cold water on it, because your mind does not want you to have joy in its pure form. Your mind will immediately ask you how you can experience this kind of thing when you acted so undivinely just a little while ago. The mind will say it is all a mental hallucination. And the moment you give up the experience, the same mind will come and say, “See, you are such a fool! You have lost everything; you have thrown away everything. God alone knows how many months it will take you to get this experience back again.”

The second reason why you cannot express a poem that you have inside you is that there is a gap between your feeling and your becoming. When you feel something, if you do not immediately become that thing, then your vital being revolts. The vital being feels that you have allowed a stranger to enter into you, and it becomes jealous. It acts just like a child when he sees that his mother and father have allowed somebody else to come and stay at his house. Naturally he becomes jealous because he feels that now his parents won’t be able to pay as much attention to him as before. When you feel something inside you, it means that you have invited someone or something to your house, but he has not yet entered. Once he enters, the expression is as good as achieved, but before he enters the child may revolt. He may start crying and say, “I don’t want him; I don’t want him.” But if the parents become serious and say, “I have invited him and he will definitely stay,” then it is all over. Once you become what you feel, the difficulty is over. These are the two main things that keep you from manifesting in your outer life what you feel within yourself.