Question: I heard the beautiful explanation of your philosophy about life. Really, that is what I understand by philosophy. But there is a word in Spanish, maybe it is because of the translation into Spanish, "to accept life". To accept or discover. Is there not a difference between acceptance without investigation, without doubt and merely discovering life?

Sri Chinmoy: To discover life is different from acceptance. When we say, “discover life”, that means to go deep within and discover our own intuitive God-realisation. We speak of self-discovery, but self-discovery and God-realisation are one. When we discover our true self, we realise God, because in our true self is the existence of God. Now, we say life is a short span of time, say forty or fifty or sixty years. But this is not the real life. The real life came into existence and real life will always exist. This is a short span of life: fifty, sixty, seventy years which we call life, but the real life, which was there before the creation, and which transcends the creation, which is in the creation, which goes through death and passes beyond death and becomes the Infinity and Eternity together, that is called the real life.

So “acceptance” is the word I would use here for our day-to-day activities. Very often we get disgusted with the world and curse the world because of our fate. This is in outer life, in our day-to-day existence. Where the inner life is concerned, we call it discovery because we have to discover our true self and that true self is God. Self-discovery and God-discovery are one. When we are speaking of inner spiritual discovery, we call it self-discovery. But when we are speaking about our day-to-day life, people want to commit suicide because they are frustrated, they feel that the world has deserted them, the world has been a curse to them instead of a boon. So in that case I say, “No, face the world, face the problem.” When we enter into life, immediately some problem arises. Life is no problem. Life is an opportunity to realise God here on earth but instead of that, we feel life is only thousands and millions of problems. That is life.