Rod Dixon: Am I being reasonable to expect my family to understand my physical urge to pursue my running life? I want to please my family, yet I also want to please my running career.⁶

Sri Chinmoy: You are a great runner. Already you have achieved astonishing glories in your running career. In order to achieve such sublime heights in the running world, you have made tremendous sacrifices, and the members of your family also have made tremendous sacrifices. This kind of mutual sacrifice is in no way an indication of your negligence towards your family. In the course of thinking of the ultimate or meditating on the ultimate, along the way you make apparent sacrifices. You have to know that eventually these sacrifices themselves will become a source of illumining satisfaction or they will pale into insignificance when you are repeatedly crowned with Himalayan success.

With their human hearts, the members of your immediate family want to possess you and have you all the time around them. Your affection and love for them and their affection and love for you mean everything to them. Perhaps your running laurels are secondary to them. But again, these same members of your family each have a divine heart. Unlike the human heart, which wants to possess and be possessed, the divine heart wants only to give of itself, widen itself, receive the vast world and be received by the vast world. These are the messages that the divine heart receives from the higher worlds and offers to the outer world at large.

Those who live in the divine heart are meant for the whole world. The messages that this heart gives them they do not keep secretly and sacredly inside their immediate family. No, they offer these messages to all of humanity. So if any want to possess you or want to claim you as their own, very own, they should try to live in the divine heart, just as you are doing.

If you and also the members of your immediate family can all live in the divine heart, then your commitment to your dear ones and their full understanding of what you were, what you are and what you are going to become will eventually and unmistakably bring boundless joy and boundless satisfaction to you and also to them.

You come from New Zealand and you now live in America. Like the members of your family, New Zealand may think that it has lost you. But if we look at the truth from a new angle, then we see that, like the members of your family, your country does not actually lose you when you go abroad to run. The way the members of your family have offered you to the world at large, to be claimed by the entire world, New Zealand also has offered you to the world. Yet it can and does still claim your astounding triumphs as its own, very own.

Not only are you bringing tremendous glory to your beloved country, New Zealand, but you are also bringing glory to America and to the entire world. Nobody loses anything. All of us only gain — not only for our personal selves or for the members of our immediate families, but also for the community of nations, for the entire world.

When we use our wisdom-light, we illumine our ignorance-night and add abiding satisfaction to our own small worlds and also to the vast world that is around us.