Question: With each new day, how can I have the feeling of transcendence, especially in meditation?

Sri Chinmoy: Every day comes to you as a new hope, new promise, new aspiration, new energy, new thrill and new delight. You have already seen thousands of days and tomorrow will dawn in its turn. If you think that tomorrow will be just another day like the thousands that have gone before, then you will make no progress. You have to feel that tomorrow is something absolutely new. You are going to create something new in your life.

Or you can remember one particular day when you got tremendous joy, or the day that you accepted our path wholeheartedly. On that day you got the greatest joy. I accepted you and you accepted me. Remember that, and try to go one step forward. When tomorrow dawns, if you can have more delight than on that special day in your life, then remember tomorrow’s greater joy. And the following day, try to go one more step forward. Always try to go forward. From joy we can have greater joy; from greater joy we can have greatest joy.

Now, how can we transcend ourselves? You can transcend yourself only by discovering and maintaining your joy. If you discover your previous joy, and then if you can maintain it, you will have energy to go one more step forward. To go ahead, you need capacity. But if you do not have the first capacity, which is joy, then you cannot have the second capacity and the third capacity.

You are lying down, then you have to get up. That is the first capacity. When you get up, you have to start walking. That is your second capacity. The third is to run fast, faster, fastest. So in this case you have to think of the first day you entered into the spiritual life seriously. That is your first capacity. Tomorrow you should get more joy. That is your second capacity. The third day try to cultivate more aspiration, more promise to yourself, more serious promise to the Supreme. Every day you have to energise yourself to such an extent that you can feel new hope and aspiration. If there is no hope, that day is dead. If there is no promise, then I am dead.

If we want to live on earth, we need hope. This hope is not our mental hallucination. Far from it! Hope is like a vast, sunlit field. Promise is the seed. If you do not have a field, how are you going to sow the seed? The seed grows and your promise is fulfilled only through constant aspiration. Aspiration was inside hope. Now it is inside promise. Then you will see that one day it will germinate, one day you will get the fruit of your aspiration, which is realisation — constant, conscious, inseparable oneness with the Supreme, the Highest.

At every moment bring forward newness, newness. Then only you will see that you will transcend yourself. Always have newness in thought, in action, in speed. Then you can transcend what you have got. What you have is good, but it is not enough. You need something more. What for? Not in order to personally fulfil or aggrandise yourself, but for the sake of the Supreme. If you do not have infinite peace and light, how are you going to manifest the Supreme?

Hope and promise at every moment you have to treasure. From hope and promise you have to think of Infinity. A day will dawn when you will fulfil the message of Infinity.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Sri Chinmoy answers, part 35, Agni Press, 2004
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/sca_35