Question: Should we pray for more capacity or more willingness? When I pray, my prayers get confused and I usually end up praying for the Will of the Supreme, so I don't really pray for anything specific.

Sri Chinmoy: That is the best thing! Again, you can pray for willingness and eagerness, but you must not care for the result. When I request someone to call you in the evening and ask you to go to Mexico to get an exercise machine for me, how eagerly you go there! Sometimes you do not find anything. Sometimes you bring something and it does not work, but you just try again. How many miles you drive to get something for me! Is that not your readiness, eagerness and willingness? So, eagerness and willingness we always have to have.

At every moment use the heart. If you use the heart, at every moment you will be able to please me. But if you use the mind, you will say, “Oh, it is late. God knows whether I will be able to get what Guru wants or not.” Once you use the mind, you have polluted your aspiration, you have destroyed your inspiration. Never use the mind! The mind is only for limited purposes. If you see right in front of you a snake, then you will not use your heart, because God inside you is telling your mind that this snake will bite you. But there will be millions of instances in your life when you will not see any snake or any other danger, and the mind will not be needed. Again, if you use the heart, you will be at that particular place where the snake is either five minutes later or five minutes earlier. You will see that there is no snake there.

Readiness, willingness and eagerness you need, but readiness, willingness and eagerness have to come from the heart, not from the mind. The mind’s readiness will take you two steps and then you will say, “I should go and get my sweater. Perhaps it is going to rain; I need an umbrella. Who knows what will happen?” That is the mind’s readiness. The mind will always try to be ready by looking to this side and that side. The mind will always try to protect itself. But the heart has no time to think of rain or sun or anything else; it only acts.

Always we have to think of Hanuman, Sri Ramachandra’s disciple. For him there was no sun, no moon, no day, no night. And such a significant lesson he taught humanity! When he received a most expensive locket as a gift, he opened it and saw that Ramachandra’s picture was not inside. So he broke the locket into pieces. He said, “My Lord Rama is not inside. So is this of any value?”

From:Sri Chinmoy,Sri Chinmoy answers, part 17, Agni Press, 1999
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/sca_17