Question: In our daily life are we to work to suppress our emotion? What is the nature of emotion as you see it? Is there any way we can control it?

Sri Chinmoy: No, in our daily life we should not work to suppress emotion. We have not to suppress anything. Suppression is very bad. If we suppress something today, tomorrow we will be subjected to its revolt. Suppression is not the answer. We must not suppress our emotion. What we have to do is to illumine it. While we are illumining it, we shall feel real joy. Now, by suppressing, what do we actually accomplish? Nothing. We are only forcing ourselves beyond our capacity and sincere willingness. As we have a desire to enjoy a life of pleasure, so also have we a desire to suppress life. A life of gross pleasure and a life of suppression are equally bad. They are followed by frustration. Frustration ends in destruction.

Suppression is not the right method of getting joy from life. Let us try to find out the right method. If our aim is joy, we must know that joy is in light. Let us think more of Light than of night. Automatically our inner light will come to the fore.

We have to know that there are two types of emotion: human emotion and divine emotion. Emotion as such is not bad. But human emotion is, unfortunately, bad. With our human emotion, we possess and we are possessed. Divine emotion is something else. It is like this: “I am God’s child. How can I do something that is wrong? My Father is All-Light. He is All-Perfection. He is All-Love. He is for humanity. He is for the universe. It is beneath my dignity to surrender myself to ignorance.” This emotion comes directly from the heart, from the inmost recesses of our heart. Here, this divine emotion grows and flows. But the other emotion which we observe and to which we are subject, is our vital, human emotion, our lower vital emotion. That emotion we have to transform, illumine. As night has to be transformed into Light, so also human emotion has to be transformed into divine emotion.

If we meditate more on the positive side, that is to say on Light, then Light is going to descend on us. But, if we think of night and are afraid of night, then we are unconsciously entering into the domain of night. Whenever we think of night, of darkness within us, we enter into night’s domain. But, if we always think of Light, which is after all our true Joy and Saviour, then we are running towards our destined Goal.

So I wish to suggest to you that when human emotion appears, do not try to suppress it, but try to think of divine emotion. When you are enlarged, when you are in Infinity, you will get boundless joy. You will not then care for tempting and tempted pleasure. We know that when we meditate, we enter into the world of Joy and Delight. We know the difference between pleasure and Delight. Human pleasure frustrates us and destroys us. Divine Delight feeds us and immortalises us.