Question: Each morning should we try to get up as early as we can for meditation?

Sri Chinmoy: If your regular meditation time is six-thirty, then that is the best time for you to meditate and not four o'clock. Start at six-thirty for now, then increase your capacity. In a few months' time you can try getting up at five-thirty or six o'clock, and a few months after that you can try to get up still earlier. If you go from here to Manhattan by train, you have to stop at many stations. Today let us say you have the capacity to go to the first station; tomorrow or after a few months you will be able to go to the second station. Your goal is like that, always transcending itself. Finally you will reach your destination. You have far to go from here, but just start; the hour has struck. If you start, that is enough for me. Then please try to increase your capacity. When all the members of a family are studying together, the little brother in kindergarten will pray and meditate and read for only five minutes; then he will close his books and go away. His elder brother who has more capacity and is in a higher course will read for an hour or two, and the third brother, the eldest, will study still longer. The parents see that their children have started reading together, but satisfaction depends on necessity. The youngest child is in kindergarten, so naturally his necessity will be less.

Again, some people believe that they don't have time to meditate at all. They have children or they give this or that reason. They think that the goal is very far. But when we start meditating, we don't have to think what our ultimate goal will be. We just start and we meditate according to our capacity.