Question: I have had a few incredible experiences. It seemed as if I was entering a different world, a totally different consciousness. But when I try to analyse them they seem so unreal that I think it must all be hallucination.

Sri Chinmoy: I feel that your experiences are of a very high order, but these experiences have to make a living factor in your day-to-day life. You are getting these experiences from your soul, but your mind is not one with the soul. Your soul can give you the experience of existence beyond death, of oneness with the cosmic nature, but if the mind wants to reduce or negate these experiences and if you identify with the mind, you will only convince yourself that they are unreal. Then you will be the real loser. These experiences must be abiding in you if you want to make lasting progress in your inner life.

You want to realise God, but it is through aspiration that you have to realise God, and not through self-analysis. If one expects to go to God through analysis he will be on a very long, tortuous, almost impossible path. The mind is constantly protecting itself by its human logic. If the mind says today, "This is the truth," tomorrow it will say that that very thing is falsehood. The mind contradicts itself at every moment, and when you become one with the mind you just enter into a sea of confusion. But aspiration comes directly from the Source. When you aspire, the heart, the mind and the vital become one with the soul's aspiration. If it has not entered the mind or the vital or the physical, then that aspiration is not complete.

I feel that you get your experiences from the soul, but unfortunately your mind is too active. There are many forces operating in your mind which consciously try to negate the soul's spontaneous truth. These high experiences have indicated to you that you should follow a spiritual path, but my path demands that you go beyond the mind. This doesn't mean that you will not use the mind, that you will act like an animal. But you will try to illumine your unlit mind. And while you are illumining the unlit mind you have to consciously remain in the heart and in the soul. Then you will be able to see constant reality in you and around you.

The experiences that you are getting are not due to your proper meditation. Right now it is due to the Grace of the Supreme that your soul is able to offer you these major experiences. But when your soul gives you the experiences, you have to know that one day you have not only to be worthy of these experiences, but you have to be in a position to have them at your command. Now you cannot have these experiences when you want, because you have not actually earned them on the strength of your inner aspiration. It is through aspiration, meditation and contemplation that we can have all our highest experiences at our command. Otherwise, we will always be at the mercy of either the soul or the divine Grace.