Question: You have drawn three million birds; one of your students has just run a thousand miles. This is genuinely inspiring, but it is also quite extreme. Could you explain why you go to such extremes?

Sri Chinmoy: If you use the mind, you will say that we seem to be doing everything to the extreme. You may say that we are greedy persons. We are not satisfied with a little food; we want to eat voraciously — a larger than the largest quantity. But if you take it in a different way, if you see these things in terms of God’s Infinity, Eternity and Immortality, then do my three million birds have any significance? Does someone's running one thousand miles have any significance?

We feel that we are birthless and deathless pilgrims walking along Eternity's Road. We see only our earthly life, but in our Heavenly life, our souls have been running throughout Eternity. Whatever we have in the inner world, the soul's world, is infinite, eternal and immortal, and these inner qualities and capacities we are trying to bring to the fore. When we are in the body, mind or vital, everything is so limited. We are caged in a prison cell. But when we are in the soul, which is the direct representative of God, we are dealing with the limitless.

What the Supreme is trying to do is to let the finite in us, the little brother in us, try to follow the big brother in us, which is the soul. So our outer life is trying to run side by side with our inner life. Our inner life is flowing eternally in and through us, and we are trying to bring to the fore its boundless capacities. When one of my students runs one thousand miles or when I am drawing three million birds, at that time we are trying to enter into the unlimited Source, which we all have within us and which we actually are. We are trying to bring our own limitless capacity to the fore.

The mind is always telling us that we can only reach a certain height, but how do we know that this is the ultimate height? The mind may tell us that we can run only 100 metres, but now you can see that people have already run a thousand miles. Now the mind is saying that perhaps the maximum they can do is two or three thousand miles. But God does not want to bind us. God's Vision is infinitely larger than the outer reality. When God created reality, God the Creator became God the creation. But God is infinitely, infinitely larger than His creation-universe. God the Creator, the One who had the Vision, is infinitely greater that His creation. You are a film producer. You can create films, but what you produce cannot create you.