Success-height10
Where is man’s success-mountain-peak, where, where, where? It is in man’s possession-dream. It is in man’s frustration-reality. It is in man’s destruction-inevitability.Success-height, what is it? It is futile emptiness. What is missing? Light, light that illumines man’s endless darkness, is missing. What else is missing? Delight, delight that feeds man’s beginningless hunger, is missing. In the life of a Truth-seeker, success-height is utterly meaningless, and in the life of a God-lover, it is absolutely useless. A Truth-seeker constantly needs progress-vision. A God-lover sleeplessly needs progress-realisation. Progress-vision and progress-realisation alone can inundate a Truth-seeker’s and a God-lover’s life with infinite Peace, infinite Bliss and infinite Satisfaction.
Success-life is an outer cry. Julius Caesar represents this cry for humanity: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Progress-smile and the inner life go together. Inner aspiration-cry and outer progress-smile will always go together. Here we can invoke the soul of the immortal poet William Blake. The seeker-heart in him envisioned the Infinite in the finite; his was a cry of the finite for the Infinite:
  And Heaven in a wild flower,
  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
  And eternity in an hour."
In order to achieve success, an individual may adopt foul means. Again, in order to achieve success, he has to face countless difficulties: the challenging world, the teeming doubts, fears, worries and anxieties, the frightening experiences he has to encounter. But he who wants progress, only progress, in his life takes these unfortunate incidents as his experience-light. For him, each incident is an experience and each experience helps him grow into a larger reality.
Progress-life alone can satisfy a seeker’s Lord Supreme. His Lord Supreme tells him that He is extremely proud of him, for in him He has discovered a chosen instrument of His. Again, the seeker is extremely proud of himself, for he has chosen to express, to reveal and to manifest the inner divinity in fullest measure. God’s Vision and Reality — His Eternity’s Vision and His Infinity’s Reality: only a seeker-heart can embody, reveal and manifest this immortal message. He does it by virtue of his progress-life, and his progress-life is always founded upon his self-giving. Today what we call a self-giving experience, tomorrow that very thing presents itself before us as a God-becoming realisation.
10. Students Union Debating Chamber, University of Oxford May 16th, 1981. During the programme, Sri Chinmoy performed on the esraj, Western flute and harmonium. He also answered questions from the audience.↩