Question: How can I know if an inspiration comes from God or my heart or soul, rather than my mind?

Sri Chinmoy: When you approach the Supreme with the mind, all the time you will doubt whether you are doing the right thing. At that time you will think, “Will He be nice to me? Will He be kind to me?” All these thoughts and ideas will come to you. If you get the inner message to see somebody — your boss or anybody — you will simply go and see that person. But if the inspiration is from the mind, before you see him, there will be many questions in your mind. Then, if you finally do see him and have not turned back, if the result does not come out according to your satisfaction, you will curse yourself and say, “No, it was not the right thing to do. I got the wrong message.”

But if the message comes from the soul, I tell you, you will have tremendous conviction, and both success and failure you will take with the same satisfaction. You will feel this way because you got the message and you executed it. While you are executing the message, you will not expect anything in your own way. You will not expect that he will speak to you or you will get a particular thing done, no. Only you will do it, and then the result will come either in the form of success or failure. In this way you will be able to know if a message comes from within.

Sometimes some of you feel, “If God asked me to do this, how is it that I failed?” But you can fail even if you have done God’s Will, because God may only be having an experience in and through you. Sometimes I ask you people to do something and you are not successful in doing it. Then you will say, “Guru was wrong.” No, I was not wrong, but the Supreme wanted me to tell you to have an experience. If you feel that because I told you to do something, then you are bound to get success, you are mistaken. I always say that success is not what we are aiming at; we are aiming at progress. Your progress is to have faith in me, and my progress is to have faith in you and in the Supreme. Your faith in me is your progress and my faith that when I ask you to do something, you will do it — that is my progress.

So if you get the message from the heart, from the real heart which is identified with the soul, then I tell you the result will not bother you. Otherwise, if you get the message from the mind, then before you even act, hundreds of questions will enter into you. And if the result, according to your vision, is not satisfactory, then you will be puzzled. You may say that the message you got from the soul is false. But it is not false. Only it is an experience that God wants to have in and through you.