Is spirituality man's birthright?¹

Birth is the soulful creation of God's Vision. This very birth is nothing short of cremation when it is wanting in mounting aspiration as the years advance upon the individual soul.

Man is God's spontaneous revelation. Man is God's colossal pride. Man is the song of God's glowing fulfilment.

Spirituality is the breath of God and the life of man. Spirituality tells man what God truly is and what man can unmistakably be.

"Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul." — Splendid is this mighty utterance of Thoreau. Now we have to know what the real necessities of the soul are. The soul's necessities are human aspiration and human liberation. The soul never can be nourished without human aspiration. The soul never can be fulfilled without human liberation.

Is spirituality man's birthright? The answer is in the loftiest affirmative. The modern world with its rank atheism, stark sophistication and wild snobbery tells us that a spiritual person is a monkey without a tail, a donkey that brays day in and day out. Indeed, a spiritual person is an object of merciless ridicule. He is a matchless fool. But once and for all, I wish the modern world to see eye to eye with Winston Churchill. This great man had undoubtedly a sound mind. He said: “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.” Now the fool in me has something to offer to you present here, and the world at large.

True, spirituality is the birthright of each human being on earth. But if somebody consciously and deliberately criticises the message of spirituality, misuses the power of spirituality, abuses the capacity of spirituality and ignores the living reality of spirituality, to say the least, certainly he cannot dare to say that spirituality is his birthright.

Needless to say that a spiritual figure knows what the right thing is. He also knows the right time and the right people — disciples. To him, the only right thing in the spiritual life is constant aspiration, the only right time is NOW and not the beckoning hands of the far-distant future. And the right people are those who do not have an iota of blighted doubt that God can be seen, felt and realised and that each human being will eventually grow into God's transcendental Vision and His absolute Reality. What Lincoln says is most applicable to a genuine aspirant. He says: "I am not concerned whether God is on my side or not, but I am concerned whether I am on God's side."

Time is precious. Even a child of yesterday does not have time to eat a piece of candy when it is offered by his mother. Let us not waste time. Let us try to determine as fast as we can, what is right and then who is right? To be right, always right, is abundantly more difficult than to be the President of a nation. To be right, spiritually right, is infinitely more difficult than to be the sole Monarch of the entire world.

What is right? Self-discipline. What is right? Self-discovery. Who is right? A man of self-discipline. Who is right? A self-discoverer.

In the spiritual life an aspirant has to know that it makes a difference whether the inner world and the outer world run abreast or not. He sees that these two worlds are like the North pole and the South pole, infinitely apart. He has now to split the difference between these two worlds on the strength of his aspiration's oneness with the inner world and on the strength of his soulful concern for the outer world. To his widest surprise, he will soon discover that the outer world and the inner world are the obverse and the reverse of God, the Golden Truth.

Finally if he feeds his Aspiration-Tree with his implicit love, sterling devotion and unconditional surrender to God, the Supreme Pilot, God Himself will grow and preserve the Realisation-Tree in the aspirant's devoted life and liberated soul through Eternity.

Questions and answers

AUM 381-388. These are questions and answers after Sri Chinmoy's lecture, "Is spirituality man's birthright?" at Yoga of Westchester, New Rochelle, N.Y. on 13 November 1968.

Question: Could you tell us what an aspirant's duty to society is, if he has one, and how he should relate to his total society? Should he be withdrawn or should he contribute and if so, what should be the nature of his contribution?

Sri Chinmoy: This same question was asked by a university student at the Interamerican University in Puerto Rico recently and I shall be happy to answer it again for you. It depends. First of all, we have to know the standard of the aspirant. If the aspirant feels that the inner life, the spiritual life, is of paramount importance, that he cannot do without it — if he is of that calibre — then he has to devote most of his time to the inner life, the spiritual life, to God-Realisation; his inner being will tell him to what extent he can contribute to society. But if the aspirant is just learning the ABC of the spiritual life, then I wish the aspirant to accept society as something important, needful and significant in his life, something that goes with the inner life and something that should be accepted along with the inner life.

Again, I wish to say that if he is a true aspirant, he has to go deep within in order to know how to help society. To help society is a wonderful thing. To be a philanthropist is a wonderful thing and if that particular philanthropist goes deep within and gets the direct message from the inner being, from God, then I think that only at that time will his help to society be really meaningful. Otherwise, the so-called help or contribution to society by an aspirant will be an act of self-aggrandisement, self-nourishment, a feeding of his ego.

So we have to know where the individual aspirant stands. In order to realise God, one does not have to leave society altogether for good. If one leaves society, or in the larger sense, humanity, then how can one establish and manifest divinity here on earth?

But one has to be wise in his spiritual search. He has to know that God comes first and then humanity. If one goes to humanity first and serves humanity according to his limited capacity or just to feed his ego, then he is not fulfilling God in any way in society or humanity. So to serve humanity properly, divinely, one has first to go to divinity and from there, one has to approach humanity. At that time, the help will be most beneficial.

Question: Do you feel it is important for the aspirant to follow the vegetarian diet?

Sri Chinmoy: The answer will be yes and no. It depends upon the individual aspirant. We all know that we have come from the animal kingdom. We believe in reincarnation. So once upon a time, we were all animals. Now, we have come into the human creation and we are progressing and evolving and all of us will realise God on the strength of our aspiration. For an aspirant, it is advisable to be a vegetarian precisely because when he eats meat, the aggressive quality of the animal enters into him. We are trying to live a life of peace, tranquility. If we sincerely want that kind of life, then it is foolishness on our part to eat something that would stand in the way of our meditation, concentration, etc. So it is always advisable to accept the vegetarian life. But, again, there are some countries or some parts of the world where it is exceptionally cold and there they find that it is impossible for them, I mean for those particular people, to live on vegetables alone. What are they going to do then? There if they eat meat they can live on earth. Then, again, there are some sincere seekers whose physical constitution is very weak. From the beginning of their lives, they have been eating meat and now they have formed such a habit, such a bad habit, you can say, that without meat they cannot manage even for a day. What are they going to do? On the one hand, they have sincere aspiration, genuine aspiration, but their body revolts. I feel, in such rare cases, that they should eat meat.

But as a general rule, it is always advisable to be a vegetarian because we are trying to throw away the animal qualities, propensities from our nature. Already when we go deep within, we see that we have two different qualities or natures; the divine and the undivine. The undivine is the animal in us and the animal within us will always be aggressive and destructive. The divine in us will always be progressive and illumined. So if we want to march and run towards our Goal, then we have to do away with our animal life. To do that, whatever animal qualities we take into us in the form of meat or in some other way have to be discontinued. Now to come back to your question, if one says that one has to be a vegetarian or God will not be realised, that one cannot have God-Realisation unless he is a vegetarian, then I say that it is pure foolishness. There are many meat-eaters who have realised God: Christ, Vivekananda and many others who realised God, but ate meat as others do. There are many. A few months ago someone told me that in order to have purity in abundance, he stopped eating meat and he felt that just by becoming a vegetarian, he would be able to realise God. He has not to meditate, he has not to concentrate; only by becoming a vegetarian, he could achieve union with the Absolute. So I told him that in India, all widows without exception are forbidden to take meat. When their husbands die, on that very day, they have to stop taking meat. Now in spite of my deepest love and respect for Indian widows, I don't think that they are all God-Realised souls. That kind of feeling towards the vegetarian life is absurd. Yet we have to strike a balance. For a sincere aspirant, it is certainly advisable and helpful to be a vegetarian.

My question concerns Karma. I would like to know what is the best way to get rid of bad karma.

Sri Chinmoy: The best way to get rid of bad karma is to enter into the field of meditation, concentration and aspiration. If you want to get rid of your bad karma, the first thing you have to do is to forget about it. If you think of it, unconsciously you are cherishing it, but if you think of good karma, that is to say, aspiration, meditation and concentration, then you are walking along the right path. What you did yesterday, what you ate yesterday or ten years ago is now not at all important. What you want to be now is of paramount importance. We have to know that we are not the children of the past, but of the golden future. Yesterday did not give you realisation. Yesterday did not give you fulfilment. You are going to get it either today or in the distant future or in the near future. You have to know that if you look forward, one day you will reach your Goal, but if you look backward, you will remain where you were and where you are. So in order to get rid of bad karma, the only medicine is meditation in the form of aspiration, or concentration in the form of aspiration.

Question: Do you think that the aspirant needs a living Guru for realisation?

Sri Chinmoy: To be very frank with you, the necessity of a living Guru in order to realise God is not absolutely indispensable. The first person who realised God on earth, the very first realised soul had no human Guru. The poor fellow who first realised God had only God as his Guru.

If you have a Guru, what happens? It facilitates your inner spiritual progress. A Guru is a private tutor. At every moment in life's journey, ignorance tries to test you, examine you and torture you, but this private tutor will teach how to pass the examination. If you have a private tutor you know how much help you can get in order to pass the examination. Moreover, if you get a Guru, once you get him and once you are in his boat, he takes you to the Golden Shore. You on your part have not to work as hard as you would have done without a Guru.

The Guru is approached by his disciples at any time, any hour of the day or night, in his suffering, in his joy. The necessity of a Guru for a sincere disciple is certainly of paramount importance. But at the same time, it is not indispensable. If someone is wise enough and if he wants to run towards his Goal instead of stumbling or merely walking, then certainly the help of the Guru at that time is considerable.

Again a true disciple feels that the Guru and the disciple are not two totally different beings; that is to say, he does not feel that the Guru is at the top of the tree and he is at the foot of the tree, that he is all the time washing the feet of the Guru. No, he feels that the Guru is his own highest part. If he has the feet, he has also the head. He feels that he and the Guru are one, the Guru is his own highest and most developed part. Therefore he does not find any difficulty in surrendering his lowest part to his highest part. It is not beneath his dignity to offer his lowest to his highest because he knows that both the highest and the lowest are his.

So to come back to your question: the need for a teacher. It is absurd to feel that for everything else in life we need a teacher but not for God-Realisation. But again, God is in everybody and if you feel that you don't need human help, you are most welcome. But why does one go to the university when he can study at home? He need not go to university, but he feels that there he will get expert instruction. In this world, if you want to make fast, faster and fastest progress in the inner life, spiritual life, then I must say that the necessity of a Guru is undeniable.

Question: What you said before about denying the animal in man troubles me. I feel that as the inner life and the outer life are two sides of the same truth, that the animal and the pure wisdom in man are also two sides of the same truth and two sides of God and I can't understand why one must run away from one side of oneself.

Sri Chinmoy: Actually one is not running away. When I say that one has to get rid of it, I mean that one has to illumine one's own consciousness. My philosophy is the philosophy of acceptance. After accepting life as it is, one has to try to transform and illumine it. If night is illumined into light, you will see the total extinction of night because it becomes all light. Now in the field of manifestation, yes, God is in the animal. God is everywhere. God is in pure water. God is in filthy water. Why do you drink pure water and not filthy water in which God is also present? Because you know you will get sick and perhaps even die. Similarly in this world, we have to know what is necessary to reach our Goal, what things are required. God is in everything, but what we cannot utilise in our journey has no place in our aspiring consciousness. If the animal quality is obstructing our way, we have either to illumine it or destroy it. We simply try to illumine it and when night is transformed into day, you can no longer call the night "night". It is "day". So with the animal in us, either we have to throw it aside or we have to illumine it.

In our yoga, the yoga of acceptance, we do not actually destroy anything; we transform it. When we transform something, it loses its original unlit or destructive quality. Now about your simile of the obverse and the reverse, the inner life and the outer life. The outer life is the expression of the inner life. It should be. But we are in a process of evolution. Once upon a time we were in the plant life, then we came to the animal life and now we are in the human life. We are evolving, transcending. The inner and the outer life must be united because God is inside, God is outside. The inner life has to inspire, energise and permeate the outer life; the outer life has to be the perfect expression of the inner life.

Question: What is self-realisation?

Sri Chinmoy: Self-realisation means self-discovery in the highest sense of the term. One realises one's oneness with God — consciously. Now you have studied books and people have also told you that God is in everybody. But you have not realised God in your conscious life. When one is self-realised, one consciously knows what God is, what He looks like, what He wills. Those who have not realised God will say, "God may be like this, God may be like that" — it is all mental speculation. But when one achieves self-realisation, one remains in God's Consciousness and one speaks to God face to face. He sees God both in the finite and in the infinite; he sees God as Personal and Impersonal. In this case, it is not mental hallucination or imagination: it is direct reality. This reality is more authentic than my seeing you right now in front of me.

Question: You spoke of a Guru as someone to kind of make a shortcut in the search for realisation. I find it hard in myself to channel myself in the search. Could you recommend or direct me somehow in a channelling of my energies toward self-realisation, because I find it hard to direct myself in that way.

Sri Chinmoy: Have you studied spiritual books? No? Then to start with, I wish you to study some sacred spiritual books. Please do this and then ask Sarama and Aditya about the inner life. They will help you and guide you. Only one thing: right now, do not think of realisation, liberation and salvation and all that. Those who, at the very beginning of their journey, use the terms "self-realisation", "liberation", "transformation" all the time are just fooling themselves, to be very frank with you. Please do not think I am criticising you or blaming you, but I wish to say in front of you all that these are big words. Some spiritual masters say that one should not utter these words at all at the beginning, words like "realisation", "divinisation", etc. These are all big, big words. Only when one is on the threshold of true liberation, one can use them, or when one is far advanced in the spiritual life. Otherwise people just entering into the spiritual life, who have not learned the ABC of the spiritual life, say "I want God-Realisation", say "I want liberation." Very often I hear this from people and I feel so sorry. Before they have actually started climbing the tree, they want the fruit from the topmost branch.

So please launch into the spiritual path, learn the ABC of the inner life. For that, discipline is required. Just as you take exercises every day or almost every day, to develop your muscles, you should likewise meditate regularly without fail, for five minutes, ten minutes, according to your capacity and according to the instructions given to you by some teacher. Then you have to know the necessity of feeding the child within you. When the child cries, immediately the mother runs to feed the child. Similarly we have, all of us, a child within us, a divine child, the soul. This soul has to be fed, developed, if we want spiritual fulfilment, if we want the manifestation of God here on earth. So if we feed our outer body thrice a day, it is only sensible that we feed the inner child within us at least once a day. If we do that, we shall eventually feel the Divine and realise God.

Question: Should we understand that the extent of self-realisation that we can achieve is subject to our effort and our will, which is what I did understand from your last response, or is it ultimately determined in some way by something beyond our own will?

Sri Chinmoy: Two things go together — individual effort plus the Divine Grace. If I sleep all the time, God is not going to liberate me, but at the same time if I feel that on the strength of my personal will, by hook or by crook, I will be able to realise God by exerting all my power, it is foolishness. So we have to know that God is on the third floor and I am on the first floor. There should be a rendezvous, a meeting place. I have to go to God; I have to go to the second floor with my personal effort, that is to say, with my tears, my soulful cry. And then God will come down from the third floor to the second floor with his Infinite Grace, Compassion and there we meet together. He has to give what He has, His Compassion, the flood of Compassion and I have to give my little personal effort and my tears, the flood of my tears. Then if we come together, there we meet together. Here I wish to say something. A spiritual master once was asked by her disciples how much personal effort she made in order to realise God. She said before she had realised God she thought that her personal effort was 99% and God's help, God's Grace, was only 1%. She was working so hard in order to realise God. But when she realised God, then she found that it was just the reverse; that God's Grace was 99% and her personal effort was only 1%. There she did not stop. Then she said, my children, this 1% of personal effort was also God's Grace. How is it that you are not making any personal effort, others are not making any, but why did I make it? I came to realise that the little 1% was also God's Grace. It was the divine Grace which I got and others did not get. And this Grace of God allowed me to make that most insignificant personal effort. So from the beginning to the end it is God's Grace.

Walt Whitman³

Whitman is Nature. Whitman is vastness. Whitman is all inspiration. Solid and subtle, he is the body and soul of poetry that peers into Truth. His Leaves of Grass reveals the depth of his insight and the wideness of his outlook. His determined and forceful personality shine through these poems which he calls "New World Songs and an epic of Democracy."

When the wind and storm of today brings in the golden Tomorrow, Whitman will shine forth, haloed in a new glory on the new horizon. His poems and his nation's consciousness are inseparable. One's poems must always be an absolute reflection of one's character and personality. And Whitman is no exception.

Saint Beuve's definition of the greatest poet applies most justifiably to Whitman:

Let us see and feel Whitman in his Song of Myself: Who but the poet of Tomorrow could look across space and time into its very core? Again: William Cowper said, "Wisdom is humble that it knows no more."

Whitman says of wisdom:

Don't we hear in it the voice of the Infinite and the Eternal? Whitman's one foot is, as it were, firmly fixed on earth, the other in heaven. At another place he sings: And again: Man and woman — different entities? Could the picture of oneness be better painted?

Speaking of sympathy, Carlyle affirmed, "Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one."

Says Whitman: "Whoever walks a mile without sympathy walks to his own funeral, dressed in his shroud."

Emerson and Whitman were twin-souls of the Truth: Emerson, soft, sweet and luminous, and Whitman, dynamically fronting the Reality which is manifesting more and more. Fellow-pilgrims to the Home of God, the culmination of today's world, they march in stupendous glory.

Whitman's vision of the oneness of everything and in everything compels him to reveal:

And what could be more divinely prophetic and significantly true than this: Born ahead of his time, Whitman has pointed to his nation and to the world the Path of Tomorrow. And, by the Grace of the Supreme, the dawn-rays of Tomorrow are already visible, however faintly, on Today's horizon.

AUM

Man is Infinity’s Heart.
Man is Eternity’s Breath.
Man is Immortality’s Life.