Newness and transcendence
Every day must come to you as a new hope, a new promise, a new aspiration, a new energy, a new thrill and a new delight. Tomorrow will dawn and you have already seen thousands of days. If you think that tomorrow will be another day like those which you have already seen, then you will make no progress. You have to feel that tomorrow will be something absolutely new that you are going to create in your life.You can remember one particular day when you got the greatest joy, or the day that you accepted our path wholeheartedly. Remember the day I accepted you and you accepted me. Remember that day and then try to go one step forward tomorrow. Tomorrow you can have more delight than you had, say, three years ago. Then, the day after tomorrow, remember that joy and try to go one more step ahead. From joy you can always have greater joy, greatest joy, You can transcend yourself only by discovering and maintaining your joy. If you discover your previous joy and maintain it, then you will have the energy to go one more step. To discover, you need capacity; to maintain, you need capacity; and again, to go ahead, you need capacity.
If you do not have the first capacity, then you cannot have the second capacity. And without the second capacity, you cannot have the third capacity. Suppose you are lying down and then you get up. Getting up is your first capacity. If you know that you are no longer sleeping, that you have stood up and are looking around, then you have taken the first step. Then, when you get up, you have to start walking; this is your second. Then, as your third capacity, you have to run fast, faster, fastest. So if today you think of the joy you had when you first entered the spiritual life sincerely, that is your first step. And tomorrow, if you get more joy, you should take it as your second step. Then on the third day, you will get more aspiration and make a more serious promise to yourself and to the Supreme. That is your third step. But if you don't think of the day you accepted the spiritual life, when you gave up your desire-life and entered into aspiration-life, then you are not taking your first step. And if you do not take the first step, then the desire-life will compel you to lie down and sleep with ignorance again.
You get up early in the morning. That is your first step. Then you wash your face; that is your second step. Then, when you start eating, that is the third step. In the spiritual life, the first step is to get up from ignorance. The second step is to look around and start walking. The third step is to run the fastest.
Every day you have to energise yourself to such an extent that you will feel new hope and new aspiration. If on a particular day there is no hope, then on that day you are dead. If on a particular day there is no promise, then you are worse than dead. If you want to live on earth, then you must have hope. Hope is not a mental hallucination; far from it. Hope is a vast field. And if there is promise, then you can feel that you have sown the seed, the promise-seed. But if you don't have a field, then how are you going to sow the seed? So, you have to know that your hope is the field and your promise is the seed. Your promise is fulfilled only through constant aspiration. Aspiration was there inside hope, aspiration is now inside promise and, one day, when the promise-seed germinates, you will get the fruits of your aspiration. That is realisation: conscious, constant, inseparable oneness with the Supreme.
So it is only with newness, newness at every moment in life, that you can succeed and transcend yourself. If you always have the hope of newness in thought and in action, then only you can transcend. What you have is good, but it is not enough. You need something more. But this does not mean that you will act like a greedy man who has one dollar and wants ten dollars. You should only feel that you can't manifest the Supreme unless you become infinite like Him. You need more, but not for your own personal fulfilment or aggrandisement. Without infinite Peace and infinite Light, how are you going to manifest the infinite Supreme? Therefore, you have to treasure hope and promise at every moment. It is with hope and promise that you can think of Infinity, and it is only with Infinity that you can fulfil the message of Infinity.