Transcendence of the past

Part I — Transcendence of the past

Question: How can I best forget the past?

Now when we say “God”, what we actually mean is Joy, Peace, Light and Power.

Joy, real joy, is the spontaneous expansion of one’s consciousness.

Next we come to peace. What is peace? A child is peaceful when you give him a toy. He plays for ten or fifteen minutes, and while playing he makes a lot of noise. But the very noise that he is making gives him a sense of peace. He may be disturbing others, but the noise that he is making is his perfect peace. This is the understanding of a child. But you are a sincere seeker. Your peace cannot come from outside, from playing games or smiling at someone. Your peace must come from within yourself. It is there, but you have to bring it to the fore through your aspiration.

After peace comes light. For a blind man, the real light is the sun. When you stand in front of a blind man and say “light,” immediately he will cry for the sun. The conception of a blind man is that the sun is the only light, because he is always in darkness. But a spiritual seeker is wise. When you say “light” to him, the spiritual seeker will immediately go deep within. There he will see the real light. You have two eyes, and they function very well. But according to the great spiritual Masters, you are no better than a blind man because your eyes do not see the real light, the light that can change your consciousness. The sun shines on all human beings, irrespective of their age or profession. A man of morality and an immoral person can both receive sunlight. But the inner light is meant only for those who are crying for God and who want to serve God. This light is within you.

The last quality is power. You see physical power, vital power and mental power all the time. You can strike and beat a person with physical power. You can torment a person with vital power. And you can exercise intellectual supremacy with mental power. But there are two other kinds of power: psychic power and the soul’s power. With psychic power we do not show our supremacy over others. We only make others feel our oneness with them. We use the soul’s power only to illumine ourselves, and while we are being illumined, we feel the existence of others in our heart.

When we pray, meditate and aspire, our soul’s power is released, and we feel our oneness with the entire world. This oneness is a result of our conscious oneness with God. Until we have become one with God, we can never become one with humanity. Someone may say, “Let me become one with humanity first, and then I will become one with God.” But I will say that it is impossible. If you really want to establish your oneness with the tree of humanity, then first establish your oneness with God, who is the root.

Very often we use our human power for destruction. At that time power takes the form of aggression. Very rarely do we use our human power for a dynamic awareness of things around us or for a dynamic movement in our life. But the soul’s power is all peace and all dynamism at the same time.

When you want to see the soul in its perfect form of peace and equanimity, look within. When you want to see the dynamic power of the soul, the power that awakens and illumines our slumbering consciousness, look within. We use the soul’s power to realise the Highest and we use the soul’s power to illumine others’ consciousness. It is the soul’s power that we use to bring the Infinite into the finite and lift the finite into the Infinite.

How can you forget the past? Do you have joy, light, peace and power, the qualities that I mentioned? The immediate answer is in the negative. Are you satisfied with what you have and what you are? Again, the immediate answer is no. If you want real divine peace, light and power, and if these are the things that you are crying for, then you will definitely get them. You will get them either right at this moment or in the moment that is fast dawning in your life. The past has played its role. Right now it can prove to the sincere seekers or to your own aspiration that you are a failure because you do not have the things you really want. Failure is one of the so-called pillars of success. You may have failed yesterday, but that does not mean that you will fail again today. Yesterday you did not aspire, but today you are consciously trying to achieve the highest, the best and the most perfect life. Today you are crying for the things that you really want and need. And today only the present or the future can give you what you want.

Now, when I use the terms “future” or “Eternity”, you don’t have to feel that this means that you must wait forever. This is a wrong conception because Eternity is here in the immediacy of today. If Eternity meant that we had to wait billions and trillions of years before achieving the Infinite, then life would be hopeless. We would be always waiting. But Eternity is where we came from. Eternity is where we still abide. And Eternity is where we will have the full opportunity to grow and develop. So here on earth, the meaning of the future and Eternity is not just today, but this very moment.

The future and the present are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. The present together with the future form reality. A coin has two sides. If you see that one side of a coin is blank, then you will reject it. When you can see the present and the future, then you are seeing both sides of reality. But if you see only one side of reality, then it is incomplete and imperfect.

Question: What is the best way for me to break my ties with ignorance?

Question: How can I offer my ignorance to the Supreme?

Question: How can I overcome the obstacle of ignorance?

Question: If all suffering is not necessarily good, should we avoid it?

Part II — Vibrations

Question: Could you speak about vibrations?

Question: Can somebody lower your consciousness by touching you?

Question: What should we do when we meet people with wrong vibrations?

Part III — Depression, frustration and destruction

Depression, frustration and destruction

There is an exercise you can do every day to be happy if you have been suffering from depression. Every day write down a list of ten good thoughts. Then, while you are working, even while customers are coming and you are waiting on them, read it. Or after the customer goes away, read it. What is important is that you have to feel what you have written. If you say, “Guru is kind to me, Guru is kind to me,” then also you have to feel it. After reading it two or three times you may feel, “Is he really kind to me? Until you feel that I am kind to you, until you are actually convinced, you are only memorising or repeating the words. If you feel, “Yesterday, Guru didn’t smile at me; he smiled at my friend,” then go on repeating, “Guru is kind to me, Guru is kind to me, Guru is kind to me.” Then the thought will come that three months ago in the car Guru did smile at you. Until that particular incident flashes back, just keep on repeating, “Guru is kind to me, Guru is kind to me.” When that incident actually comes to mind and you know that three months ago Guru was kind, then at that time you have completed the first thought.

Then take another thought: “I can eternally trust Guru, Guru will never disappoint me, Guru will never desert me.” You can also write down how many things I can do. In this way select ten beautiful thoughts.

Suppose you feel that you are jealous of someone. You can write down that you are jealous of this person on your paper. Then immediately say that I will take your jealousy away. During the whole day you do not have to complete even ten thoughts. All day perhaps you will spend on one thought. Suppose you are repeating, “Guru is kind to me,” but you are imagining only my anger or depression or what you call my indifference. If you are not successful with a particular thought, do not go on to another thought. Stay with that particular thought. Repeat, “He is kind to me, he is kind to me, he is kind to me.” Then all of a sudden, some incident will flash across your mind. You will remember that six months ago I did something very kind to you, and you will feel this. Then, once you feel the thing, then you can stop and go on to the next thought.

Question: How can we come out of a depressed state?

Question: Why am I disappointed with my human nature and other people's human nature?

Question: The other day you asked me to bring gifts for you to give out and I forgot. In a case like this, if we displease you, how do we keep from getting depressed?

When this kind of thing happens, then immediately say inwardly, “Guru, forgive me. Next time I won’t do it.” You don’t realise that if I had given one of them a sari and the other a tie, then during the whole night they would have had sweet dreams. Their energy, enthusiasm and aspiration would have gone up tremendously. You people get so many material gifts from me. “Who cares for these things?” That is what you say. But inside my gifts are boundless love and concern for you. Material gifts are like magic. Inside the tie and the sari is a big story. I am depending on my instruments like you, and this is what happens.

Sometimes I ask one of the disciples to do something for me, and in my mind I keep a fixed time. Sometimes when I ask one disciple to bring food, I don’t set a time limit outwardly, but inwardly I put a force so that in fifteen minutes he will bring it. Now fifteen minutes, forty-five minutes go by and where do I stand? I am a beggar. Outwardly, I am not telling him to bring it in a specified time; but inwardly the force that I have put gets annoyed because nobody is receiving my message. The other day I went to a disciple’s store. I was not restless, but I was in a hurry. Now one boy was absolutely in Heaven because I had come. The Goal was right in front of him. But either through nervousness or because he was showing off how fast he could work, the food was not coming. At that time nobody else was there. I was the only customer. They were trying to do it quickly, but the forces were working against them. When I ask someone to do something, inwardly I fix a time, but it is not done. I put a force on the workers, but the result does not come in the time I have allotted because concentration in the workers is missing.

Whenever I ask disciples to do something, inwardly I fix a time, but I may not tell it outwardly. You may say, “Guru, you are a deceitful person,” because I say only, “Please bring it as soon as possible.” You can call it my weakness, but immediately I fix an hour in my mind. Again, outwardly I may fix a time — say half an hour — but inwardly I may set another time. Most of the time, in my mind I expect it in a shorter time, say eighteen minutes, and I put a force on it also. But it never comes in eighteen minutes. With greatest difficulty it may come in half an hour. The same thing happens with my literary work. I will tell you that I want the work to be done in three or four days, but in my mind I keep a fixed time that is much shorter. Those books say that they are written by Sri Chinmoy, but I know in each case that not one page could have been done without my spiritual children. I know how much I owe you people, but even a beggar expects something. When I go and knock at your heart’s door, at that time I expect something from you. I do not feel that I am a beggar.

Part IV — The ego's reality

Question: How can I silence my ego?

The more we think of that ego, the easier it becomes for us. Actually we don’t call it ego; we call it our conscious oneness with the Highest, the Supreme, the Absolute. When we are consciously one with something vast, then the little ego automatically disappears. With this conscious oneness, every day think of yourself as a child of God. If you are a child of God, it means that what God has, you also have. You have inherited everything from God, but right now you are not mature so you cannot use it. A child who is four or five years old knows that his father is a multimillionaire and he knows that when he grows up his father is bound to give those millions of dollars to him. Right now the child cannot have the money because he is not mature enough; he will squander it. So you also have to feel that since you have entered into the spiritual life, infinite Peace, Light and Bliss are not vague terms. They will eventually be at your disposal. Then the little ego that wants to be satisfied with a penny or a nickel will automatically go away. When infinite Peace, Light and Bliss dawn on you, at that time you will not try to possess anything and at the same time you will not want to be possessed by anything. You don’t want to possess and you don’t want to be possessed by anyone else: this is called the true knowledge.

Question: When does the ego develop in the child and why does it happen?

Now, what is ego? It is a sense of separativity. So you see how the child wants to possess because of this sense of separativity. Possession itself is nothing but ego, the song of ego.

If a child is three years old, when his mother looks at another child, he becomes jealous, he won’t talk. In our Centres we have a few children who won’t talk if I look at their sister or brother. The children won’t even look at me. Sometimes I invite the children to the Centre and they know that they will get gifts. I am like Santa Claus waiting with their gifts for them. But if their turn comes a few minutes later than the others’, then they feel miserable. A child knows that he will get his gift when his turn comes. But if somebody else is getting a gift five minutes earlier, then he feels that he is not in a position to possess what he wants to possess. Then he becomes jealous.

So ego is possession, constant possession, whether it is a child or a grown up who is in the picture. When they fail in possessing something, then they are totally lost. Human possession wants to bind or to be bound. The son wants to be on the mother’s lap and he wants the mother to fondle him. So when we see that the child wants to possess the mother and to be possessed by the mother, then we have to know that ego has started.

Question: Why does the "I" seek so assiduously if it is the ego?

Now, the Self, the capital “I”, is self-enamoured in its own realisation of truth. On the one hand it is actually walking in the field of experience and on the other hand it is the experience itself. It also feels that it is the experiencer. Again, it is beyond all action, beyond all experience, beyond all fields of experience. We cannot bind the truth. One moment the truth is this and the next moment the truth is something totally different from this. So the “I”, the capital “I”, is all the time beyond our definition. We cannot define the capital “I” with our thoughts; it is beyond, all the time beyond them. Something is moving, but when we say that it is moving, our Upanishads say and our realisation says that it is not moving at all. “That moves and that moves not; that is far and the same is near. That is here, that is there, that is everywhere and, at the same time, that is beyond everywhere.”

So, with the mind we cannot think of this capital “I”. We can only realise the capital “I” on the strength of our aspiration. This “I”, the Self, is not seeking for anything other than itself. If we say that it is seeking for itself, that is true. Again, if we say that it is not seeking for itself, this is also perfectly true. If we say that it is all the time transcending itself and its own highest realisation or highest Truth, which it embodies, then this is also true.

Part V — Problems and difficulties

Question: What is the best way for me to conquer my faults?

The second method, which is the second-best method, is as follows: If you have a problem, then each time it arises you should convince your mind that you don’t have that difficulty. If someone is pinching you, then you must ignore it and say that no one is pinching you. Your real reality is not being affected; only the physical body is being affected. By saying that you are not the body, you can ignore the problem.

Question: How do you discipline your emotions?

First I wish to tell you about the undivine emotion, which is purely in the gross physical, in the lower vital or in the obscure mind. The emotion is constantly trying to possess either an individual or the whole world. We start with one individual, then we move to two, then three, four and five. Finally, we want to possess the whole world. “Mine, my, I": this is the undivine emotion.

But again, there is divine emotion. You are God’s child. You have to realise God consciously. You have to fulfil God on earth. These are the expressions of divine emotion. To come back to your question on how you can discipline your emotion, the answer is here. You will be able to discipline your emotion, the emotion that binds you, the emotion that makes you want to bind the world and possess the world, if you take shelter in the divine emotion. The embodiment, the expression of the inner urge to realise and fulfil God is inner, divine emotion. If you care for the freedom of inner, divine emotion, then you become all-pervading. You are thinking of humanity all at once, not in the sense of possessing humanity, but in the sense of feeling humanity as part and parcel of your own consciousness. When something goes wrong in the world, if you are affected, then you truly feel your own existence in the heart of humanity.

Question: Why do I sometimes become angry at everything around me?

Question: How can we stop ourselves from crying too much?

Question: How can we avoid crying for outer attention?

Question: What do you mean by a complacent feeling?

Question: How can we know if it is lack of desire or lack of energy that prevents us from meditating?

So if you really want to be successful, this inner urge is one thing that you need, but in order to fulfil the demands of this urge, something else is necessary and that is enthusiasm. Every day we must feel sincerely, devotedly and soulfully, that today is the last chance we have to realise the Supreme. On the one hand we are dealing with Infinity and Eternity, but on the other hand we are racing against the Eternal Time. We have to feel that this is the last day for us, absolutely the last day — that tomorrow we will not be given another chance. If we don’t realise God today, then we are finished. Somebody else will be given our chance. If somebody has aspired more than we have, then he will get the chance and we will not. But if we have aspired more, then we will get the chance.

So every day when you meditate, if at that time you can feel that this is your last day, your last opportunity to realise God, then you will try to do your best meditation. You have to accept failure if you fail, but if you sincerely try your hardest to meditate and you don’t get realisation, then you will not be depressed because you will know that you have tried.

When you start your day, feel that if you don’t realise God today, then you have lost everything and there is nothing else on earth to live for. In the evening, when you come to realise that you have not yet realised God, then console yourself. Think that tomorrow morning you will be given another chance. But when tomorrow morning dawns, at that time again the same problem will arise. Again you will think, “Today is my last chance. Today let me realise God, for I will not be given any other chance.”

Question: What should be our attitude towards expectation?

Question: How can I kill expectation?

But eventually we have to give up our expectation. We will do our best, but we won’t expect anything. First we shall start with hope, then we shall expect to become good, then we must say, “I will do the right thing. I feel that it is my duty to do the right thing, to pray and meditate, and it is God’s duty to give me what He wants me to have. At the same time I must not fix it in my mind that God will give me something just because I am praying.” We shall not fix a date. We shall not say, “On such-and-such a date if I can’t become perfect, then I am giving up the spiritual life; I don’t need God.” That kind of idea we must not cherish.

Some people are of the opinion that if we please God once in His own Way, then naturally He will please us also in our own way. But this is a very tricky way of dealing with God. God’s bargain is not like that. Whenever I say that if you please God, then God will also please you, I do not mean that if you please God in your aspiration-life, then God will fulfil you in your desire-life. One time a disciple of mine told the other disciples, “Let us please Guru in his own way, just once. Then he will please us also in our own way.” But this idea is absurd. I do say that if you please me once in my own way, then I shall please you in your own way. But you have to know that if you really please me in my own way, by that time your will and my will have become one. I execute only the Supreme’s Will. I have no will of my own. So if I execute the Will of the Supreme and you have become one with my will, then naturally at that time your will becomes the will of aspiration and not the will of desire.

Question: What causes pride, and how do we get rid of it?

Question: How can we avoid compromising in the ordinary human life?

Question: I am caught between my spiritual life and my parents. My parents live in New York and I live in Puerto Rico.

When you come here, you can visit your parents once or twice, but if you spend most of your time there, it will be a serious mistake. Even before you accepted the spiritual life you cared more for Puerto Rico than for New York. If you really cared that much for your parents, then you would not have gone and stayed in Puerto Rico. You made the choice. You left and now you are settled in Puerto Rico. Then you came back to New York purely because of your spiritual life; otherwise, you would have been with your parents some other time of the year. You should not come here with the intention of killing two birds with one stone. You have come to New York to get utmost joy, to gain more aspiration, and also to stay with your spiritual brothers and sisters and share your inspiration and aspiration. When you want to stay with your parents, at that point all your old attachments come forward unconsciously. You become your old self. This is a serious mistake. So, next time you come here, stay with the disciples and go to visit your parents only once or twice. Otherwise, you will be cherishing unconscious attachment. We find it very difficult to become detached. In your case you left them before you accepted the spiritual life. But like most people you have kept an inner connection with your parents. Since physically you are out of New York, why do you have to go back to the same place which you consciously left for a better, deeper and higher vocation and to fulfil a choice in your life?

Question: How can we overcome shyness when speaking to people about our path?

Question: How can I become more coordinated?

Part VI — The battle of the hostile forces

Question: Even when we are aspiring, dark forces can come and attack us. Is there any way that we can avoid this?

The difficulty is that sometimes ordinary forces, say, temptation-forces, are so subtle that you think that you can crush them in the twinkling of an eye. A desire comes and you feel that it will cause you no harm. You think, “If it comes in the afternoon again I will conquer it.” You have so much confidence, but in a sense it is false confidence. You think that when desire comes you will conquer it, but when it comes again you pay no attention. You think that it cannot win in a fight with you because you know that you are spiritual. If it comes again in two hours, then again you feel that it cannot take you away because you have much more capacity. This may go on three or four times more, but by the fourth time the capacity which you bragged about has become incapacity.

Question: What is the quickest way for me to transcend unconscious resistance to purifying, divine forces?

Question: As one's being becomes more pure, do the forces that test it become stronger?

Question: Are hostile forces and occult things real or illusory?

Question: How powerful are the hostile forces?

Question: By what process do hostile forces leave us?