Question: Recently I read about a person who was buried alive for eighteen days and came out unharmed. Does the kind of meditation you teach enable one to eventually perform such feats?

Sri Chinmoy: My teaching is not a kind of miracle-mongering. My business is to help seekers to reach God. Being buried underground for eighteen days will not help us in our spiritual search. What leads us to God is our aspiration, our inner mounting cry.

If somebody performs miracles or supernatural feats, he is not helping us directly or indirectly to realise God. At most we learn from him that there is no end to human capacity if we enter into the secret domains of the cosmic realities. So my teachings have nothing to do with the display of these kinds of silly miracles. If you really want to realise God, if you really want God’s infinite Light, Peace and Bliss, then you should keep millions and millions of miles away from fortune-tellers and miracle-mongers. If you think that they inspire you, then you are mistaken. Go deep within and you will discover that they have just aroused your idle, eyeless and fruitless curiosity. Curiosity is not spirituality. And secretly and consciously the fortune-tellers and miracle-mongers have offered you something more: temptation. Temptation is the harbinger of destruction. It is here that the divine mission of your life — unsuccessful, unfulfilled — comes to an end.

Let us be on the alert. I urge you not to confuse your heart’s genuine meditation with fortune-telling and miracle-mongering. Don’t waste your time. Your time is precious. Your meditation is priceless. Your achievement shall be the treasure of timeless Eternity, measureless Infinity and deathless Immortality. Don’t wait. All things come to him who waits, except the realisation that today embodies and the liberation that now reveals.