Question: I have been meditating on my navel centre. Do you feel this is wise?

Sri Chinmoy: According to the strict Hindu system, this chakra should not be opened up until the heart centre is opened up. If the navel centre is opened before the heart, then the lowest vital, the most impure vital, may enter into the heart and destroy all your spiritual possibilities.

At this point in your spiritual development the navel centre is not a safe centre. It is the centre of dynamism, strength, power and so forth. You should meditate on your heart centre to get peace and love and joy. When you have peace, love and joy, you will feel that peace itself is power, love itself is power, joy itself is dynamic power. If you open the navel centre, where there is dynamism, and if you misuse this dynamism, it becomes brutal aggression. The navel centre is also the emotional centre. With this emotion you can expand yourself and become the Infinite. But again, when you start receiving the emotion of the navel centre, you may become a victim to pleasure, earthly pleasure, and human weakness. So God is not allowing you to open this centre. He is protecting you.

God does not want you to misuse the dynamic qualities which you have inside and around your navel centre. What He wants from you is the inner cry for Him. This inner cry is not here (in the navel) or here (in the throat) or here (in the third eye) or here (at the crown of the head). It is only in the heart. The one place to cry for God is here. If you really cry for God, no matter where you are or in which position you are, you are bound to feel God's Presence. And when you feel God's Presence, you can feel that the divine energy, the kundalini, is already awakened and is rising toward the highest. From one centre to another, it is going up, up, up. If you can feel God's living Presence inside you, this energy that you are speaking of will be yours in boundless measure in a very short span of time.

You cannot live without God; I cannot live without God. Everybody has to live with God, but to feel His living Presence is something else. Those who have realised God feel God's living Presence twenty-four hours a day. If you cry for that living Presence, your whole being, your inner existence and outer existence, will be flooded with divine dynamism and boundless energy.