Question: When a disciple who has been with you for many years becomes old and leaves the body, what will happen to his soul?
Sri Chinmoy: There are disciples and disciples. There are good disciples and bad disciples who have stayed with me for many years. Good disciples will be treated in a special way. I can give you an example. Two excellent disciples of mine passed away not long ago. One is Agni, the other is Ananta. They were precious, most precious jewels in our spiritual family.Each real spiritual Master has a plane of consciousness or a kingdom — whatever you want to call it — in the soul's region. Your Guru also has a place. You can call it a divine kingdom. Only the real Masters have it. It is like having two houses. Here I have one house, and I can easily have another one in Puerto Rico, India, California or somewhere else. So, in the soul's region, I have got a very vast kingdom. There are already some disciples there from my previous incarnation, as well as some of my soulfully sincere admirers, great devotees and excellent disciples from this incarnation. Ananta and Agni, who were both extremely good disciples, are also there. Every day their souls come to me, or I go to them to feed them. And what they do, no disciples on earth do, or will do. Ananta always holds my divine banner and marches in the inner world, and Agni always claps when he sees me. They are always proclaiming our victory, the victory of the Supreme, in the inner world.
Again, there were some useless disciples who have also died in the past few years. I accepted them as disciples, but they were useless; their souls are not yet really good. You may say, "How can a soul be bad?" But when the soul mixes with the vital and is dominated by the vital, then it has a strong impression of the hungry vital, the wolf-like consciousness, the lower, animal consciousness. When this predominates, the poor soul literally hides. So there are some disciples who were with us for six or seven years, who are not in my own soul's realm. They see me in the soul's region; they see my height, and they blame me for everything. They say, "How is it that you didn't help me or prevent me from doing undivine things so that I could also go to a very high place?" I literally begged those disciples not to mix with ignorance and do undivine things, but they did not listen to me. Now who is the loser? If I repeatedly beg you not to do something, and if you do it anyway, then it is your fault, not mine. These people who were really useless disciples accuse me of not helping them or saving them when they lived in the vital while they were on earth. Even now they are moving through the vital worlds to the soul's region. But the soul is weak and the vital accuses me. So how can these disciples remain in the plane where Ananta and Agni are? Impossible!
Some of these disciples are already desperately trying to come back into this world. But I know that when they come back, they are not going to accept the spiritual life again immediately. Here on earth they have already exploited the divine Compassion which I embody. Once you exploit the divine Compassion, which I have brought down in infinite measure, you do not get it again so easily. Otherwise the next time, again, it will not be valued. In this world, everything has to be valued; otherwise, people will squander it. Then he who has given it finds that he has just been wasting his time and effort. The father leaves behind a large sum of money and, if the son is not wise enough, he squanders the money and becomes a beggar. At that time, his father has every right to feel that his son did not deserve his generous gift.
God's Hour has struck for all those who are my disciples, but some of them — many of them — are exploiting my compassion, love and blessings. What will happen to them? They will have to wait for God's Hour to strike again for them at another time. It may take one hundred years, two hundred years, four hundred years or more; but if they reincarnate in six or ten years, they are definitely not going to accept the spiritual life. They will go through lower vital animal life for many years, for it is not the Will of the Supreme to grant them this kind of opportunity again soon. God deals in and through us all with infinite Compassion. But this infinite Compassion is not going to knock at their door again immediately, because if it does, they will only disregard it and exploit it again. For them, there is something called eternal time.
It is better not to deal with a spiritual Master at all than to exploit his concern and compassion. In our strict Indian philosophy it is said that once you have seen light, if you consciously go back to darkness, then the divine retribution is unimaginable. But if you remain in darkness and have no idea of what light is, no sense of light at all, then your suffering is not so bad. For an ordinary person in the vital world or the physical world, who has not accepted the spiritual life, darkness is what he has and what he is. For him, retribution is very little. Like a child who is totally ignorant, he does not know that there is something called knowledge or wisdom. When he grows up, he becomes a man of knowledge. Then his whole inner being will eventually be flooded with wisdom. But after seeing light, if he goes back to ignorance and speaks ill of light or says there is no such thing as light, who is fooling whom? If somebody says the world is all darkness and there is no such thing as the sun, the sun will continue to do its duty. By saying that there is no such thing, one cannot destroy the existence of the sun.
To come back to your question, what will happen after death entirely depends on what kind of disciples they are. If they are extremely good, then it is a golden opportunity for them to go to a real Heaven. But those unfortunate disciples who are a real burden here cannot be a burden there, for there they will have no place. If you are running a big factory here in California and somebody has badly dissatisfied you, then if you go to some other state and open another factory, are you going to give a chance to that same person? Never! You will say, "Enough. I have suffered much from you in California. I am not going to let you bother me here." In my case also, souls that have not received light, that have created many problems, that have cast a slur on our spiritual mission, will never, never be given a chance in other worlds. If one person has dissatisfied me unthinkably here, then why should I give that person another chance there? I will not give it.
Good disciples here on earth will make boundless progress. And there in Heaven they will be of constant help to the Supreme in me. As here they help, there also in a different way, they will serve the Supreme in me. The bad ones, wherever they go, will be equally bad, so they will not be given a chance there. The good ones will continue embodying me and manifesting the mission, and the bad ones will go their own way.
