Question: How can we best utilise our outer time to better our inner aspiration?

Sri Chinmoy: Right now our time means our earth-bound time. Now, we have to know why we have this limited time. Time and life came into existence together. They were very close to each other but unfortunately, when life started playing its role on earth, it became short-lived, and in the same way, time, being a friend of life, also became short-lived. Still, they know that their Source is the Eternal.

Now, you are a seeker. When you pray, concentrate and meditate, you have to feel that each second is infinitely more important than you thought it was previously, before you entered into the spiritual life. This second you can use either for meditation or for gossip or for cherishing impure and undivine thoughts. So when you consciously use time to do something divine, you are entering into the divine Time. Divine Time means timeless Time. When you are consciously thinking of something divine, immediately eternal time comes and shakes hands with you. Usually it does not stay in human beings, because when it stays, it has to stay in doubts, worries, anxieties, jealousies and so forth. But each moment, if you want to go upward through your aspiration, then the eternal Time becomes your friend, and then earth-bound time and eternal Time can become friends.

Now, when you have prayed, meditated and played your part in the spiritual life, if realisation is still a far cry, then you have not to be impatient or worried because God’s Hour has not yet struck. You have played your part and you have to feel that God has also played His part in and through you; you are the instrument. Even when your conscious mind wants to make you feel miserable that you have played your part and still God-realisation is a far cry, you have to feel that the Hour has not yet struck. Then you will not feel miserable.

Very often we think of a date and set a deadline for our realisation. We feel that on such and such a date, perhaps after ten, twenty, forty or fifty years, we shall realise God. Then, even though it is we who have imagined the date and have created this time limit for ourselves, when that time passes by and we have not had our realisation, we curse our aspiration and we curse God. But if we feel that God has to choose the Hour, then we can be happy.

So to come back to your question, if you aspire consciously, and if you consciously pray and meditate, you will see that you are using your time most divinely.