Question: With our extremely limited inner vision, how is it possible to separate aspiration and desire? They get merged so easily.

Sri Chinmoy: Aspiration and desire can easily be separated. If it is aspiration, automatically your existence will be separated from desire. If it is aspiration, unconditionally you will give to mankind whatever you are getting. If it is sincere aspiration, then the act of giving itself is the greatest joy. If you do something out of aspiration, then that very thing is your greatest joy, your greatest boon. But if it is desire, after ten years there will be a condition. Today you have a good desire to give something to mankind: a few fruits or a sum of money or something. But after ten years you will say, “Look at how ungrateful humanity is! I gave so much of my precious life, my material wealth, this and that, but humanity didn’t give me any credit; it didn’t thank me at all.” Desire will always cry for the result, either immediately or after ten or twenty years. But aspiration will not cry for the result. Aspiration will only cry to become unconditionally one with God’s Will.

And another thing, when I request you to do certain things for me, it is not that I am looking for the result. Far from it. I tell you, after God-realisation, there is nothing on earth that can charm me. Only one thing charms me and that is your eagerness to receive more Light, more Peace, more Bliss. When I ask you people to do something for me, it is only to create more receptivity in your life. If I ask you to make something for me, please feel that that very thing I do not need. Believe me, if I don’t have a four-track tape player, I will be able to exist on earth. But if you feel that you are working for me, then immediately your own aspiration increases. By staying on earth, if I can increase your aspiration, then I will feel that it is worth doing. Otherwise, no material object, nothing on earth, will add to my realisation. My realisation envelops my whole existence: body-reality, vital-reality, mind-reality, psychic-reality, everything. So nothing can add to it.

One disciple has asked the Mayor to proclaim a “Sri Chinmoy Day”. Now, if the Mayor had not declared it “Sri Chinmoy Day”, I don’t think that my aspiration would have descended or that my realisation would have been taken away. No, but this disciple’s aspiration increased like anything because in his own limited way he has tried to serve his Guru. The more you do for me, the more you expand your love for God, Truth and Light.

Each time you do something for me, you are creating more receptivity and bringing forward your soul’s illumination. So, ultimately it is you who gain, not I. But if you feel that you are working for yourself, then you are finished! Again, by becoming one with your achievement, I also gain. I cannot separate my achievement from yours. Your achievements I claim as my own. But unfortunately, you don’t claim my achievements as yours. When you achieve something, I tell you, I sincerely feel that it is I who have achieved it. But when I achieve something, you say, “He has done it. He will get the credit. He will get the glory.” No, no, no! Always become one with my aspiration and then you will be able to claim all my achievements as your very own.