Question: How can you recognise self-complacency and get rid of it?

Sri Chinmoy: You have self-complacency only when you don’t want to transcend yourself. You have to run a marathon — twenty-six miles. When you have completed the race, you feel that you have done enough. To run a marathon is not a joke. Out of nine hundred disciples, only three or four can run a marathon. So once you have become one of the very few marathon runners, you feel that it is enough. There you want to end. But if you really want to transcend yourself, then you have to feel that there is no limit to your effort and to God’s Grace. Self-complacency means the end of the journey, whereas self-transcendence means the continuation of the journey. Once you feel that you have achieved the ultimate, then there is every opportunity for you to become self-complacent. But you should try to feel that the ultimate is not a fixed height. No, it is constantly transcending itself. So there can never be self-complacency. If you can feel the goal is not stationary, that it is constantly transcending its own height, and if you can enter into the height of that ever-transcending reality, then there can be no self-complacent feeling.