Part III

SCA 906-919. Sri Chinmoy answered these questions on 26 January 2000 in Brasilia, Brazil.

Question: What role does patience play in our spiritual lives when we feel that if we do not transform our nature quickly, it will be too late?

Sri Chinmoy: Every day pray to God to give you more love, devotion and surrender. Every day you have to develop these qualities, the way you develop muscle-power. Otherwise, you have your own kind of patience, and God has His own Patience. At what point God will withdraw His Patience, we have no idea. We may do the same thing wrong again and again, today, tomorrow and even the day after tomorrow. But the day after tomorrow God may withdraw His Patience. We may feel that yesterday we did something and today we are doing the same thing, so what is wrong? If God did not punish us yesterday or today, then why will He punish us tomorrow? We have to know that God has His own Hour. God’s Patience is very, very long, but that does not mean that when the time comes, He will not punish us.

When God sees that it is a hopeless case, He withdraws His Patience. So the best thing is to take the spiritual life as seriously as possible, and if we do something wrong, not to be impatient, but to bring down light from Above so that we do not make the same mistake again. When we become impatient because we are doing something wrong, it makes it worse. But if we can have a calm and quiet mind and bring down light from Above, we can make fast progress.