Question: God could have made man perfect to begin with. What was His reason for putting us to all the trouble that we are going through to attain perfection?

Sri Chinmoy: God could have started His creation with perfection. But fortunately or unfortunately, that was not His intention. What God wanted was to go through ignorance to Knowledge, through limitation to Plenitude, through death to Immortality.

In the outer world, we see limitation, imperfection, doubt, fear and death. But in the inner world we see Light, Peace, Bliss and Perfection. When we live in God’s Consciousness, there is no imperfection. It is all Perfection. When we consciously identify ourselves with God’s Consciousness, we observe that there is no imperfection because God is perfect Perfection. But if we do not live in the divine Consciousness, naturally we will be yoked to the imperfection of the outer world.

God is a divine Player. He is playing His divine Game and He knows the ultimate end. At each moment He is revealing Himself in us and through us, in spite of the very fact that we see, nay create, a vast gulf between ourselves and God. In the physical world, the miseries, troubles, frustrations and despair that we are going through are nothing but experiences on our way to the ultimate Goal. But who, after all, is having all these experiences? It is God and God alone. What actually is happening is the self-revelation of God in His manifested creation. A seeker of the Supreme, living in the Supreme, being one with the Consciousness of the Supreme, sees and feels that his life, both inner and outer, is a projection of God’s ever-transcending Perfection growing into perfect Perfection.