Part X — Questions and answers: University of Colorado

Question: Could you please tell us about your path to God-realisation?

Sri Chinmoy: Our path is the path of love, devotion and surrender. We feel that if we can love God truly and soulfully, we will be able to run to God faster. We feel that if we love God truly and soulfully, we will want to devote our lives to Him, to please Him and fulfil Him. Finally, we feel that we must surrender our human will to the Will of God consciously and unconditionally. We feel that if we surrender our will to God, then we will be able to realise Him in His own Way. If we want to realise God in our own way, we shall have to be satisfied with only an iota of divine Reality. But if we want to realise God in God's Way and at His choice Hour, then He will inundate us with His Infinity, Eternity and Immortality.

Love, devotion, surrender — this is our path. Divine love, divine devotion and divine surrender. Human love, we know, ends in frustration, and inside frustration what looms large is destruction. Human devotion is attachment. As with human love, with human devotion we try to possess and we are possessed. In this song of possession, we do not get any sense of satisfaction. But when we devote ourselves to the Supreme, to the Inner Pilot, we feel boundless satisfaction. When someone devotes his life to an ordinary human being, one imperfect being is devoting himself to another imperfect being. And two imperfect beings, when they come together, cannot make one perfect being. So we try instead to offer our devotion to the Perfect One, who is God, and from Him we expect perfection through our dedicated, devoted service.

Divine surrender, too, is totally different from human surrender. A slave surrenders to his master under compulsion, because he is at the mercy of his master. But in the spiritual life, when we make divine surrender to God, it is not the same kind of surrender. We feel that we are a tiny drop entering into the vast ocean. When the tiny drop, the individual consciousness, enters into the vast ocean of infinite Consciousness, it does not lose its individuality or personality. Rather, it grows into the infinite Individuality and Personality.

Who is God, after all? God is not a third person. God is our own highest and most illumined part. A real seeker can feel that there is no difference between his existence and God's existence. It is only that God's existence is his most illumined existence, while his personal existence is right now still wallowing in the pleasures of ignorance. When he surrenders, he is surrendering his lowest self consciously, soulfully and unconditionally to his highest and most illumined Self, so that his highest Self can mould him, shape him and guide him according to its own transcendental Vision.