Question: Since you feel that spiritual aspirants should pay more attention to the heart than to the mind, I assume that your path is primarily a path of the heart. Can you please tell me in what ways your path tends to focus the aspirant's attention on the heart?

Sri Chinmoy: Love, devotion, surrender: this is our path. Love is the first rung, devotion is the second rung, and surrender is the third and final rung of our spiritual ladder. As you know, the heart is the seat of love. Human love is immediately followed by frustration, but divine love is an expansion of our consciousness. Human love means only one thing: possess and be possessed. Divine love means another thing: illumine and be illumined, liberate and be liberated. When we try to possess others, we are immediately possessed. When we try to illumine and liberate others, we ourselves are illumined and liberated.

In human love we observe a significant thing. When we love someone, we try to spend our precious time with that particular person, or thinking about him. We devote ourselves to the person. In the spiritual life, too, if we really love God, or some spiritual Master, then naturally we will have the inner urge to offer our pure love to him and to devote ourselves to him through our aspiration and self-dedication. Otherwise, what we have is not real love. Even human love freely offers its service to please the loved one. In the spiritual life this self-offering has to be far more intense. We should be ready to give all that we have and all that we are to God, to our spiritual Master, to the path that we are following. This total self-offering is devotion.

But complete liberation comes only with surrender to the Will of the Infinite. By surrendering our finite existence to the Infinite, we become consciously one with the Infinite. We are not entering into a stranger or a foreigner; the Infinite is our own unrealised power. The finite has always been the unfulfilled, unmanifested part of the Infinite. As ordinary human beings we are finite, but as conscious divine instruments we can never be finite, for inside us the glowing Divinity of the Supreme has come to the fore.

We have to have the feeling of true love for the Supreme in us. Then we have to know that only in sincere self-dedication does our love find its expression. But in order to achieve true fulfilment constantly and eternally, we have to see and feel our true oneness with the Absolute. The heart has the secret key to open the door of identification and allow us to see our oneness with God. Once we feel our oneness with the Absolute, we have to make this oneness total, permanent and eternal. For this we need the divine message of surrender. Our implicit, unreserved, inseparable, eternal, unconditional surrender to the Supreme is absolutely necessary for God-realisation. Love is the first necessity. Devotion is the second necessity. Surrender is the third and ultimate necessity. These three steps will take us swiftly, safely and surely to our transcendental Goal.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Mind-confusion and heart-illumination, part 2, Agni Press, 1974
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