Question: Why do you want us to meditate in the heart? I find it easier to meditate in the mind.

Sri Chinmoy: If you find it easier in the mind, then meditate in the mind. But if you do so, you will be able to meditate for perhaps five minutes, and out of that five minutes, for one minute you may meditate very powerfully. After that you will feel your whole head getting tense. First you get joy, satisfaction, but then you may feel a barren desert. For five minutes you will get something, but if you want to go on beyond that, you may feel nothing. If you meditate here, in the heart, a day will come when you will start getting satisfaction.

You have to be wise. There is a vast difference between what you can get from the mind and what you can get from the heart. The mind is limited; the heart is unlimited. When you meditate on the heart, you feel a sense of delight, a sense of oneness with something vast and infinite. In the heart there is infinite Light, Peace and Bliss. Other centres in the body have these qualities too, but the place where you can get them in abundant measure is in the heart. So you have to be wise. If you are hungry, you go to the kitchen for food, not the bedroom. Even though there may be a very small amount of food in the bedroom also, when you are really hungry you immediately go to the kitchen for food. Similarly, if you want a limited quantity of Light, Peace and Bliss, meditation in the mind can give it to you. But you can get infinitely more when you meditate in the heart. Suppose you have the opportunity to work at two places. At one place you will earn $500, and at the other place $200. Naturally you will not want to waste your time at the second place.

If you concentrate on the mind, you will not get what you want, because you have gone to the wrong place. Inner aspiration does not come from the mind. It comes directly from your heart. Aspiration is the harbinger of realisation; aspiration is the seed of realisation. Aspiration comes from the heart because the illumination of the soul is always there. True, the Light and the consciousness of the soul permeate the whole body, but there is a specific place where the soul resides most of the time. Reality is everywhere, but the actual manifestation of the Reality has to be in a particular place. It is like my situation now. I am here at the United Nations. If someone asks, "Where is Chinmoy?" you can say that I am at the United Nations, or you can say that I am in Conference Room 10. My presence is spiritually pervading the entire United Nations, but my living consciousness is right here in this room. If you come here, I will be able to do more for you than for others who are elsewhere in the building. Similarly, when you focus your concentration in the heart, you get much more inner satisfaction than when you meditate in the mind, because the heart is the seat of the soul. But it is difficult for some people to meditate in the heart because they are not used to doing it.

In the ordinary human life, the mind is of paramount importance. Without it we would not be able to function properly. But if you enter into the spiritual life, you will see that what the mind has mostly given you is information, and not illumination. The mind that you feed with books, the mind that you utilise to converse with people, the mind that you require in order to exist on earth cannot take you even an inch closer to God-realisation. As long as you have tremendous faith in your mind — the mind that complicates and confuses everything — you will be doomed to disappointment. Ordinary people think that complication is wisdom. But spiritual people know that complication is dangerous. God is very simple, Light is very simple. It is in our simplicity and sincerity, not in complexity, that the real Truth abides. Complexity cannot give us anything. Complexity itself is destruction. Once you are totally dissatisfied with the limited capacity of the mind, it will be possible for you to concentrate on the heart.

Real meditation is not information; it is identification. The mind tries to create oneness by grabbing and capturing you and this may easily make you revolt. But the heart creates oneness through identification. The mind tries to possess. The heart just expands and, while expanding, it embraces. With the mind you only divide yourself. The mind may try to do something and immediately the body or the vital may try to prevent it. But if the heart wants to do something, no matter how difficult, it will be done. If the mind gets no satisfaction when it tries something, it just says that there is no reality there and gives up. But when the heart does not get satisfaction, it feels that it has not done the thing properly. So it tries again, and continues trying until satisfaction dawns at last.

Let us not be satisfied with the things that we get very easily. Let us cry for something which is more difficult to get, but which is infinite and everlasting. If you get something from the mind, tomorrow doubt may come and tell you that it is not real. But once you get something from the heart you will never be able to doubt it or forget it. An experience on the psychic plane can never be erased from the heart.