Question: If we set a specific time for our morning meditation, do you feel disappointed if we sometimes oversleep?

Sri Chinmoy: When I meditate on you, I do not depend on your getting up. My meditation is unconditional. When I meditate on you, I don’t hope that you will get up early in the morning at your scheduled time. But if you do meditate on time, then you become conscious of what I am doing. My difficulty is that my disciples are not conscious of what I do. They don’t realise that I love them infinitely more than they love themselves.

All problems will be over when each individual consciously feels that God loves him infinitely more than he loves himself. Humanity should know and believe that the Creator loves His creation more than He loves Himself. You may say, “How can it be possible?” But you have to know what value the creation has. When you think of the mother and child, in so many instances you will see that when the child is very sick and near death, the mother sincerely prays to God, “Take me, take me. Let my son stay here. He is young and he has to do so much work.” Her creation is her son, and she wants her son to stay on earth.

So here you see that the Creator loves His creation more than Himself. My spiritual disciples are my creations. Physically your parents brought you into the world. But when I gave you the message of the soul, the day I kindled the flame of aspiration within you and accepted you as my disciple, on that day you became my child. He whose inner flame I have kindled is my child, my spiritual child. When I kindle the flame of aspiration within someone, I give birth to a spiritual soul; I create life and aspiration, which is going to be transformed into realisation in the future. So naturally I will have boundless concern for my disciples, because I know what God’s Vision is for them and I know how God’s Capacity will flow through them. But what I created need not know this until the last moment, because the Vision of God is with the Master, not with the disciple. God’s Vision is also with the disciple, but he cannot always see it. But the Master’s third eye is open and he knows how far God wants to take an individual in this incarnation.

So if you are not up meditating at your specific time, I will be sad, but only in a human way. In a divine way I will not be sad, because I know that sadness does not serve any purpose. You have made friendship with ignorance. So I will try at that time to have more conscious power to awaken you and illumine you. In everything human there is always success and failure. But in the divine way, where is success and where is failure? They are nothing. In the human life, every second is either success or failure, and what we call success this moment may seem to us like failure the next moment.

This moment I am painting and in a human way I am successful. My human mind will say, “I am painting and I am enjoying it here with so many people listening to me and admiring me. I am such a lucky fellow.” Then again, the same stupid mind will say, “Look at this. My friend, another God-realised soul, is now in silence. He is meditating and enjoying the delight of Brahman and I am here with a bunch of ignorant human beings.” This moment my mind has told me how lucky I am that you people are adoring me, and the next moment my mind can tell me that all this is worthless because someone else is enjoying his transcendental trance.

But if I use my divine consciousness, I will say that what I am doing is right because God is asking me to be with my spiritual children and give them some illumination. Again, what my friend is doing is also right because God right now is asking him to do his highest meditation. So I am fulfilling God’s Will in my own way and he is fulfilling God’s Will in his own Way. If I am in the mind, this moment I will flatter myself and the next moment I will criticise myself. But if I go beyond the mind, then I will see that it is all the time God who is acting in and through me.