Question: How can we integrate the mind and the heart?

Sri Chinmoy: There are two ways. One way is for the heart to enter into the mind. The other way is for the mind to enter into the heart. Let us take the heart as the mother and the mind as the child. Either the child has to go to the mother, who is calm, quiet and full of love, or the mother has to go to the child, who right now is uncertain, doubtful and restless.

When the mother comes to the child, at that time the child — which is the mind — has to feel that the mother — the heart — has come with good intentions: to calm the mind, to free it, to fulfil it in a divine way. If the doubting and restless mind feels that the heart has come to bother it, and that its restlessness is something very good which it wants to keep, then it is lost. If the child is restless, doubtful, suspicious, and if he cherishes all these undivine qualities and feels they are his best qualities, then what can the poor mother do? The heart will have the good intention of transforming the minds doubt into faith, and his other undivine qualities into divine qualities. But the mind has to be prepared; he has to feel that the heart has come with the idea of changing him for the better.

The other way, after the child has gone through everything negative and destructive — fear, doubt, suspicion, jealousy, impurity — he comes to a point where he feels that it is high time for him to go to someone who can give him something better. Who is this someone? The mother, the heart. The mother is more than eager to illumine her own child. If the mind is aspiring, it will immediately feel that the heart is the mother, the real mother. And the heart will always feel that the mind is the child who needs instruction.

Both ways are effective. If the mind is ready to learn from the heart, the heart is always eager to teach it. The mother is ready to help the child, to serve the child twenty-four hours a day. It is the child who sometimes becomes irritated, disobedient or obstinate, who feels that he knows everything and has nothing to learn from anybody else. But the mind must learn from someone else. Even the mother, the heart, gets knowledge from someone else — from the soul, which is all light. Let us call the soul the grandmother. From the grandmother the mother learns, and from the mother the child learns. The soul teaches the heart and the heart teaches the mind. If we can see the relationship between the heart and the mind as the relationship of a mother to her child, that is the best way to integrate the two.