Question: I am a student. How can I study and still keep God before me?

Sri Chinmoy: It is very easy. If you study in order to get a diploma so that you will be recognised by everyone, if you study to become the wisest person on earth so that you can teach the world, then it is impossible for you to keep God before you. If you feel that you want a degree for name and fame, for your own establishment on earth, then you cannot keep God before you.

You have to feel that you are studying just because you feel the necessity of pleasing God, just because God wants you to study. You have to feel all the time that you are studying not to please yourself or the members of your family, but only to please God. Feel that God is like a mother watching her child study. While pleasing God, you are pleasing your parents, you are pleasing your relatives, you are pleasing your own self. But God should come first.

You have to take your study as a form of service to God. If you study well and get good marks because you feel that this is your service to God, then you are pleasing God. Today He wants you to study. Tomorrow when you complete your course, God will ask you inwardly to do some other job. The day after tomorrow He may ask you to do something else. So in each field you have to please God in His own Way.

Studying is not an obstruction on the spiritual path. You have to discipline yourself to study six, seven, eight hours a day. In a few years' time, the inner capacity and discipline that you have acquired by studying, you will be able to apply to your spiritual life. Discipline in any walk of life has to be appreciated and admired because it is a type of strength. With this strength, God will ask you to build or to break something. If you have strength in your arms, you can lift up a heavy weight. If something has to be broken, you can break it; and if something has to be lifted, you can do that too.