Question: What you said before about denying the animal in man troubles me. I feel that as the inner life and the outer life are two sides of the same truth, that the animal and the pure wisdom in man are also two sides of the same truth and two sides of God and I can't understand why one must run away from one side of oneself.

Sri Chinmoy: Actually one is not running away. When I say that one has to get rid of it, I mean that one has to illumine one’s own consciousness. My philosophy is the philosophy of acceptance. After accepting life as it is, one has to try to transform and illumine it. If night is illumined into light, you will see the total extinction of night because it becomes all light. Now in the field of manifestation, yes, God is in the animal. God is everywhere. God is in pure water. God is in filthy water. Why do you drink pure water and not filthy water in which God is also present? Because you know you will get sick and perhaps even die. Similarly in this world, we have to know what is necessary to reach our Goal, what things are required. God is in everything, but what we cannot utilise in our journey has no place in our aspiring consciousness. If the animal quality is obstructing our way, we have either to illumine it or destroy it. We simply try to illumine it and when night is transformed into day, you can no longer call the night “night.” It is “day.” So with the animal in us, either we have to throw it aside or we have to illumine it. In our yoga, the yoga of acceptance, we do not actually destroy anything; we transform it. When we transform something, it loses its original unlit or destructive quality. Now about your simile of the obverse and the reverse, the inner life and the outer life. The outer life is the expression of the inner life. It should be. But the outer life cannot be dark and undivine, while the inner life is bright and divinely illumined. We are in a process of evolution. Once upon a time we were in the plant life, then we came to the animal life and now we are in the human life. We are evolving, transcending. The inner and the outer life must be united because God is inside, God is outside. The inner life has to inspire, energise and permeate the outer life; the outer life has to be the perfect expression of the inner life. It must catch up with the inner life and be a worthy embodiment of it.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Earth’s Cry Meets Heaven’s Smile, part 1, Aum Press, Puerto Rico, 1974
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