Question: Is obedience-power the only way to please God with permanent aspiration-perfection?

Sri Chinmoy: I have spoken about obedience and about surrender. Now I wish to say that if a seeker’s obedience is happy, cheerful, sleepless and breathless, then the seeker can definitely please God. But that is not the only way, no! There are various ways. One person will say, “With obedience I want to run the fastest to please God in His own Way.” Somebody else will say, “I want to run the fastest and please God through aspiration.” A third person will say, “I want to please God and run the fastest with my dedication.”

So there are many ways to please God and run the fastest. If you choose the obedience-road, then I wish to say this obedience has to be cheerful, happy and spontaneously self-giving. Then obedience becomes a most powerful way for the individual disciple or seeker to please God. If you want to run the fastest along the obedience-road, then your obedience cannot be imposed. It must not come out of fear of punishment for disobedience. No, it has to come out of love.

If you have that kind of obedience, naturally you will be able to run the fastest on the obedience-road. At that time, your aspiration, like a flame, automatically will go high, higher, highest. That is because constant, sleepless and breathless obedience cannot be separated from the highest aspiration. The higher your aspiration goes, the more you value the importance of obedience. Similarly, the more you obey God’s Will, the higher you will be able to go in your aspiration.

But on the practical level there is something else to consider. Often the seeker says, “If I go to school and do not obey the teacher, then the teacher will punish me. If I am working in an office and I do not obey the boss, then the boss will fire me. But if I do not obey God, what will happen?” When the disciples start disobeying God, most of them feel that there is no retribution. There is retribution, but it does not come immediately. If today you disobey God in a very serious way, then God may wait ten days to punish you. But again, during those ten days, you may do many, many good things to please God, so God may forgive you.

Many times it happens that we commit Himalayan blunders. But when we do not get the punishment immediately or in the near future, we feel, “Perhaps God has forgiven us, or perhaps it was not a blunder after all. Our mind made us think that we made a mistake, but perhaps our mind was wrong.” Disobedience is a destructive force in us which often hides itself. We find reasons to justify it. But if we have done something really unspiritual and have not been punished, we have to feel either that the time has not yet arrived or that God has forgiven us on the strength of our good actions.

There is something most important that the disciples do not pay any attention to, and that is remorse. People say repentance purifies the soul. Repentance does not purify the soul; the soul is above that. However, repentance definitely purifies the heart. When we do something wrong, if we shed streaming tears, then inside those tears there will be remorse and our heart will be purified. Then our heart will not permit us to make the same mistake in the future. From repentance our heart becomes strong, stronger, strongest so that it can challenge the mind and not give the mind another chance to make the same Himalayan blunder.