Question: Sometimes when I am working, I get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of what my boss wants of me that I forget about my spiritual life.

Sri Chinmoy: You have been cultivating your own divinity for five or ten or twenty years, but now you are compromising it just to please your boss. I always say that the spiritual life is not a life of compromise. Either you accept God on His own terms or you accept the outer life on its terms; there is no in-between. You cannot be fifty per cent for God and fifty per cent for the ordinary, unaspiring world. If you try to compromise in that way, you are neither here nor there; you are finished.

The things that you should take pride in are the very things that you are discarding because one of your co-workers may ridicule you or your boss may not promote you. If you do not value your own spirituality, your own divinity, then there will be nobody on earth to value it. Because you are afraid of losing your outer wealth, which is not going to happen, you are not valuing your inner wealth. Your inner wealth is your real treasure, but you take it as only a grain of sand.

Your inner treasure you have to cherish at every moment. At every moment you have to become your heart’s aspiring cry and your soul’s illumining smile. At every second you have to allow your inner cry to lead you, guide you, shape you and mould you. Your heart’s mounting inner cry wants to climb up to the highest height, but for the sake of outer success and outer comfort, you are destroying its upward flight. You are sacrificing and silencing your inner cry or throwing cold water on it. Your inner cry is like a ladder that will take you up, up, up; but you are not using the ladder. This is a most deplorable mistake that you will regret to the end of your life!