Questions and answers

Sri Chinmoy: Now I wish to be of dedicated service to you all in a practical way by answering a few spiritual questions. Professor David Eckel: Sri Chinmoy has asked for spiritual questions. If there are any issues that you would like to raise with him that come out of your study of Hindu myth and ritual, or out of your study of Hindu philosophy, this would be a good time to ask them.

_Student:_ Where do ignorance and suffering come from? To put it another way, where does the first impulse of karma come from, especially if God is all things, and God is ostensibly free from karma and ignorance?

Sri Chinmoy: There is something in us that likes ignorance and enjoys wallowing in the pleasures of ignorance. We can call it the vital, or the physical consciousness, or the mental consciousness, or something else. But definitely there is something inside us that consciously or unconsciously supports ignorance. The camel's mouth bleeds when it eats thorns, but it continues to eat thorns. Similarly, we know how much suffering ignorance causes in our human life, but part of us does not want to go beyond ignorance.

Again, there is something inside us that does want to go beyond ignorance and suffering, and that is our soul. So at every moment, consciously or unconsciously we are supporting ignorance and, at the same time, we are consciously trying to go beyond it. But once we are awakened, we feel only the necessity of going beyond it and of remaining beyond it.

Ignorance is primarily a limitation of the human mind; this is where the problem starts. The mind has a very limited capacity. It has fixed and rigid rules. It says that if God is this, then He cannot be that. But why can God not be this and also that? If God is omniscient and omnipotent, if God is omnipresent, then He is everything. The mind is always dividing, and while dividing it is binding and limiting itself. Since human beings mostly live in the mind, we are constantly trying to bind and limit Reality. But the divine Reality is not something that can be bound. It can only be enlarged and expanded.

Unlike the mind, the heart is all oneness, so it has the capacity to become one with the Reality, like a drop that enters into the ocean and becomes the ocean itself. If we can consciously remain all the time in the heart, then we will be able to establish our oneness with the divine Reality, which is the soul's Reality. In that realm there is no ignorance; there is only light and delight.

When we approach Reality with our heart and identify with that highest Reality, we see that what we call suffering, in a deeper sense is not suffering at all. When we enter into the Buddha-consciousness, Krishna-consciousness or Christ-consciousness, at that time we see suffering as an experience that is growing and glowing inside us for the transformation of our human nature and the manifestation of a higher light from Above.

From:Sri Chinmoy,A seeker's heart-songs, Agni Press, 1994
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