Omaha Milo Baif Student Center
5 March 1974Dear friends, dear sisters and brothers, I wish to pose a question: do we love God? Do we really love God? The immediate answer is, “We do, we do love God.”
We love God. Therefore, we do not want to live a semi-animal life; we do not want to live a life of temptation; we do not want to live in the world of falsehood, darkness, limitation, bondage and death. We love God. Therefore, we wish to feel and grow into His Presence in all that we do and say. When we do not aspire, we love God only to fulfil our desires. But when we aspire, we love God for His own sake. We want to be freed from the snares of desire, from the teeming clouds of desire, so that we can claim our birthright in God and for God.
We love God. Therefore, we try to live within. To live within is to divinely glow at every moment. We love God. Therefore, we try to reveal without. What do we reveal? We reveal our inner divinity, our conscious, inseparable oneness with our Inner Pilot, the Absolute Supreme.
We love God. Therefore, if we see defects in others, we feel that it is our bounden duty to perfect these defects, for our sweet Lord can never be pleased with us when we consciously or deliberately fail to perfect the imperfections that we notice in others. But when we perfect others, we come to realise that our task is just an expansion of our own self-awakening. We are all members of the same family. The root and the trunk is God, and we are the branches, leaves, fruits and flowers of God, the Tree.
We love God. Therefore, we live on earth and try to manifest Him and fulfil Him in His own Way. We play our roles like divine warriors. Every day we enter the battlefield of life to fight against fear, doubt, ignorance and bondage. And at the end of our journey on the physical plane, we leave the body behind and our soul-bird flies to the highest region of Light and Delight. There we take rest for some time before coming back once more to this earth. We come to earth in order to manifest our inner divinity and to fulfil the promise that our souls have made to the Absolute Supreme, our promise to manifest and fulfil Him here on earth as well as there in Heaven.
We love God. Therefore, we want to live not in the unreal, but in the real. The unreal in us is the egocentric ‘i’, the ‘i’ that binds us and sings the song of separation. This is the personal ‘i’, which tells us that we are of the finite and cannot come out of the finite. But the real in us is the universal ‘I’. This ‘I’ tells us that we are of the Infinite and we are for the Infinite. With this ‘I’ we come into the world to sing the song of perfection and, when we retire from the earth-scene, with this same ‘I’ we sing the song of realisation which we learned here.
We love God. Divine Love is our first and foremost friend, here on earth, there in Heaven. Inside the heart of Love, we find two other friends: faith and devotion. Without faith we feel that our journey is insecure and that there is constant danger looming in our path. But when we see the face of our faith-friend, feel faith within us and grow into faith, we feel that our journey is quite safe. And when we see the face of our devotion-friend, we know that we have found a short cut, a sunlit road, to our Destined Goal.
What makes us love God? It is God’s boundless Compassion, His unconditional Compassion, that makes us love Him. God’s divine Pride in us also makes us love Him. In addition, our inner cry, the climbing flame within us, makes us love God, for this flame knows that, unless and until it reaches the Highest, we can never see the face of abiding satisfaction. The world can offer us many things, but it cannot offer abiding satisfaction. This we must get from our inner life, our inner world. On the strength of our inner cry we have to reach the highest Pinnacle; and then we have to come down and distribute to the world at large what we have received and achieved in the highest plane of our consciousness.
We are all seekers. A seeker is one whose inner being is inundated with opportunity. There are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. For a genuine and sincere seeker, each day offers a new opportunity, and each opportunity is one rung in the ladder leading to our Destined Goal. The seeker knows that if he cries soulfully from the inmost recesses of his heart, then each day he will climb up to a new and higher rung. Once we climb up the ladder of inner evolution and reach the Highest, we will see that the Highest is not something new; it was always within us, only we had not yet discovered it as our very own. Once we feel that the Highest is our very own, we have to reveal and manifest it. This is the Cosmic Game that we play and that we have been playing from time immemorial.
The deeper we go, the sooner we discover that not only do we love God, but also God loves us. But God loves us in His own Way, not in our way. Right now we feel that God loves us if He fulfils our desires or aspirations. But when we go deep within and experience real Love, the divine Love, we will feel at every moment that we are God’s chosen children. And whether He fulfils our immediate wishes or not, we know that whatever He does He is doing for our own good. Furthermore, we come to realise that He is constantly fulfilling Himself in and through us.
God is within each individual. He is found in unity and He is found in multiplicity. This moment God is unity and the next moment God is multiplicity. Again, He is unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity. When we love God unconditionally, we feel that at every moment we are facing Reality and growing into Reality and, finally, we realise that we are also transcending Reality, that we are flowing in the stream of the ever-transcending Reality, which is our perfect Immortality. Only when we are aware of our divine, Transcendental Reality can we establish our perfect Immortality here on earth and there in Heaven.From:Sri Chinmoy,The oneness of the Eastern heart and the Western mind, part 2, Agni Press, 2004
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