Question: What can we do to keep this spot, where you have planted this tree, a place of constant aspiration?

Sri Chinmoy: Each day, no matter how bad the weather is, one of the disciples can come and meditate here. You can do it early in the morning, at seven o’clock or so, for five or ten or fifteen minutes. When you offer your aspiration to the tree, it is just like feeding a little child. There are forty or fifty members in your Centre. One day you feed the child, another day somebody else comes. You can’t live on yesterday’s food. Each day the child has to be fed. If you come every day and feed this place with your aspiration, then it becomes strong. The little child will grow up one day and become the pride of the family. Then people will feel something here.

If a saint sits at the foot of a tree and later you also sit on the particular spot, you don’t know why but you feel a kind of saintly feeling. And again, if you sit where somebody unaspiring and undivine has been, then you feel wrong forces, lower vital thoughts, undivine thoughts coming into you. So here also, if you come early in the morning and offer your own aspiration to this place, people are bound to feel something. But if you don’t come, then there will be some very unaspiring person from the neighbourhood who will come and the aspiration here will be lost. So, if everybody takes it seriously and can come here to pray and meditate, it will definitely add to the aspiration which will be shared by the tree and all who will come. So, please try.

Sri Chinmoy, Aspiration-Tree, Aum Publications, 1976