Invocation¹

Supreme, Supreme, Supreme, Supreme!
I bow to Thee, I bow.
My life thy golden plough;
My journey’s Goal thy soulful Dream.
Supreme, Supreme, Supreme, Supreme!
I bow to Thee, I bow.

Supreme, I am thy glowing Grace.
My world thy Feet of Light,
My breath thy Vision’s kite
Thou art one Truth, one Life, one Face.
Supreme, Supreme, Supreme, Supreme!
I bow to Thee, I bow.

Sanskrit translation of Invocation²

Isvara Parama Janaka Purushottama!
Namastubhyam Namo namah.
Jivanam mama Tava svarnabha sitah;
Gantavyam mama Tava svapnah ramitah.
Isvara Parama Janaka Purushottama!
Namastubhyam Namo namah.
Isvara, Tavaham Karuna ruchira
Jyotirmayam tava charanam me dhara
Pranascha me Te Kriranakah dristerhi
Satyam Tvam Nikhila Jivanam
Isvara Parama Janaka Purushottama!
Namastubhyam Namo namah.

Spiritual words

AUM 423-450. On 19 January 1969, at a Sunday afternoon service of the Aum Centre in New York City, Sri Chinmoy asked each of his disciples to give him one spiritual word or concept which he would then enlarge upon spontaneously saying a few words from his own spiritual consciousness. The following was the result of this spontaneous experiment.

Forgiveness

The Guru knows that he is absolutely one with his disciples in their teeming ignorance. So he smilingly and soulfully says, "Who is to forgive whom?"

Will

Our human will is at best nothing but continual empty starvation. Our Divine Will is continuous, gradual, sure and ultimate Self-Realisation. Our human will can grow into our Divine Will if we know whom to love, why to love and how to love. Whom to love? God. Why to love Him? Because He is All-Love. How to love Him? Just by feeling that I am entirely God’s and through eternity I shall remain His and His alone.

Multiplicity

The outer voice of Multiplicity is human personality. The inner voice of Multiplicity is Divine individuality. Let us listen to the dictates of the inner voice… always!

Discipline

The body’s discipline is sex-control.
The vital’s discipline is dynamic-aggression control.
The mind’s discipline is thought-control.
The heart’s discipline is emotion-control.
Man’s discipline and his soul’s divine pride go together.

Gratitude

When God fulfills your desire, you are all gratitude. When God does not fulfil your desire, if you can become all gratitude TO HIM, God Himself is bound to come to you, not only to replace and fulfil your desire, but to give you what He has and what He is: Infinitude.

Discrimination

Discrimination is the secret of success. Always discriminate light from darkness, pleasure human from Joy divine, human desire from divine Aspiration. The more you secretly discriminate, the quicker God openly comes to you.

Surrender

Surrender means immediate progress. Surrender means spontaneous joy. Surrender means matchless wisdom of the aspiring soul. Surrender means the perfection of human aspiration. Man’s unreserved surrender means God’s unconditional acceptance.

Luminosity

Luminosity is one of the divine qualities of the soul. But each soul need not and does not express itself through luminosity. It can use other divine qualities such as Peace, Bliss or Power. One has not to cry for luminosity. Luminosity is bound to come to him if he is absolutely pure in the physical, genuinely sincere in the mind and soulfully aspiring in the heart. Your soul’s foremost quality is Intuition. The foremost quality of your daughter’s soul is Luminosity. Try to grow your outer life in your soul’s Intuition. Yours is the Goal, the Goal of Goals!

Progress

Just say that the past is dust. Lo! You have made enormous progress. Just say to yourself that your name is Adamantine Determination. Lo! You have made genuine progress. Just think that your Master loves you much more than you love him. Lo! Your progress is really remarkable.

Compassion

I know what God’s Compassion is. God’s Compassion is man’s only salvation. I know what man’s Compassion is. Man’s Compassion is often the aggrandisement of his ego’s imagination. It is through aspiration that we awaken God’s Compassion in us.

Sacrifice

To please the Supreme, if you embrace death, that will be your Supreme Sacrifice. To please mankind, if you renounce your own Immortality, that will be your Supreme Sacrifice. When your life grows into spontaneous sacrifice, you become God’s unique instrument, His unparalleled representative here on earth.

Detachment

Yesterday God taught you what human attachment is. Today God is teaching you what Divine Detachment is. Yesterday you wanted to bind mankind with attachment and you sadly failed. Today you want to bind God with your Detachment. Lo! Yours is the unparalleled success.

Unity

Man does not need many things. He needs only one thing: Unity. Human unity is lip-deep. Human unity is a far cry. God cries only once. God cries because He is not fulfilled. Only human unity can fulfil God’s vision in Heaven and God’s reality on earth.

Endurance

Difficulties indicate the strength of unwanted forces. Endurance indicates the inevitable victory of the Soul’s ever-fulfilling, ever-glowing Light.

Destiny

The power that fore-ordains man’s Ultimate End is called Destiny. God uses this power in and through the Master for the disciple’s Ultimate Destination. A real disciple’s Destiny is undoubtedly the Destiny of his beloved Master.

Self-reliance

When your consciousness is in the physical, self-reliance will lead you to self-annihilation. When your consciousness is in the Soul, self-reliance will lead you to Self-Realisation. When your consciousness is in your Master, self-reliance will at once be fed by your Master’s purest concern and God’s sweetest Blessing.

Love

Your daughter needs your Love. Your wife needs your Love. But you need God’s Love. God is ready to give you His Love. But dear Abe, you are not ready. You are ready to give your love to your daughter and your wife. But, poor Abe, they are not ready. When you are ready to receive love from God, to your amazement, your wife and daughter will also be ready to receive love from you. Not one second before!

Humility

God is great because He alone embodies perfect humility. God is greater because He reveals humility on earthly soil through our climbing aspiration. God is the greatest of all because He has not separated His Transcendental Glory from His most humble creation, the blade of grass!

Perfection

Everything has dawned on earth save Perfection, perfect Perfection. For man’s perfect Perfection, two things are required: God’s absolute Will and Eternity’s Patience.

Faith

See through the eye of Faith. You will see the Eternal Truth. Feel through the heart of Faith. You will feel the Immortal Truth. What you call Faith I call the Soul’s foreknowledge of the Highest Truth.

Grace

A true disciple is she who cares for her Master’s Grace. A true disciple is she who feels that her Master’s physical existence and God’s constant flow of Grace are inseparable. A true disciple is she who has realised that without her Master’s Grace, she can do nothing and she is nothing. A true disciple is she who has realised that with her Master’s Grace she can not only become the perfect ideal of humanity but the greatest pride of God.

Contemplation

Contemplate on God. Lo! God is running towards you. Contemplate on Ignorance with your Soul’s light. Lo! Ignorance cannot bear it. It runs away. Contemplate on your self-discovery. Lo! You not only discover your true Self but you become your Eternal and Infinite Self.

Immortality

Immortality smiles at the seeker’s Inspiration. Immortality loves the seeker’s Meditation. Immortality consciously and cheerfully becomes one with the seeker’s Realisation.

Inspiration

Inspiration means the first step. The next and last step towards God-Realisation is Aspiration. He who has no Inspiration is no better than a dead man. He who has Inspiration, soulful Inspiration, is constantly running towards and crying for the Beyond.

Sincerity

Let each human being be sincere and not stupid. He has always to separate his soulful sincerity from his naked stupidity. When you are sincere to God, you realise the Truth. When you are sincere to yourself, you become the Truth.

Soul's cry

The disciple’s soul cries for the Guru’s Infinite Compassion. The Guru’s soul cries for the disciple’s eternal love for God. God cries with Boundless Joy when He sees that His two sons, Guru and Disciple, love each other, need each other and fulfil each other.

Patience

Patience is not an unconditional surrender to the Universal Suffering. No. Patience is the realisation of one’s own unlimited Consciousness. Patience is the fruit of Eternity. God most affectively sees through your Patience-Light. You try to see most soulfully through God’s Compassion Light.

Truth

The doubting mind says that there is only one Truth: the existence of God is a colossal imagination. The aspiring heart says that there is only one Truth: God is. God exists. The All-Offering and All-Surrendering soul says that there is only one Truth: God-Realisation is yours.

Common sense

Common Sense Number 1: You are God’s chosen son.

Common Sense Number 2: Not only do you need God, but God too needs you. You need God to realise your true Self; God needs you to fulfil Himself.

Common Sense Number 3: You want to realise God. Even if you don’t want to realise God, He will not allow you to remain unrealised.

Common Sense Number 4: You may think that today you are an animal, but you must think and realise that you are tomorrow’s God.

The quintessence of mysticism⁴

There are three principal paths that lead to God-Realisation: the path of Selfless Service, the path of Love and Devotion and the path of Knowledge and Wisdom. Raja Yoga (Mysticism) is a significant stage in the Yoga of Knowledge (Jnana Yoga). The knowledge Supreme is something infinitely more than mere philosophical knowledge. Mysticism is experience. This experience is the direct and intimate experience of Truth. After covering a great distance in the path of knowledge, philosophy gets tired. It takes rest. It stops. Mysticism begins when and where philosophy ends. The seers, after having the personal experience of the knowledge of Truth, reveal it to the world at large.

The seer sings:

The seer teaches us that the Transcendental Reality and the All-Embodying Existence are one and the same.

A mystic takes both unity and diversity as one. He further sees unity in diversity. He tells the world that the One and the Many are one. The One is Many in its universal form. The Many are One in their Transcendental form. In our spiritual life, we come across two significant words: occultism and mysticism. Occultism is secrecy and cries for secrecy. It wants to house everything in top secrecy. Mysticism is not like that. Mysticism is ready to offer its achievement, transcendental knowledge, to all those who cry for it.

The difference between a philosopher and a mystic can be noticed in the fact that a philosopher, with the greatest difficulty, from a striking distance sees rather imperfectly, the body of Truth, whereas a mystic enters into the very soul of Truth at his sweet will and he can live there as long as he wants to and he is also permitted by the Supreme to bring to the fore the vast wealth of the soul and share it with the seekers of Truth.

Mysticism affirms that the knowledge of the Divine is universal.

Let us for a moment enter into the lore of the supernal mystery of the Vak in the Vedas. Vak is The Word. Vak at once embodies and reveals the Truth. In its embodiment of Truth, it receives creative inspiration in infinite measure from the Supreme. In its revelation of Truth, it offers to mankind the Supreme, the Liberator Supreme. Vak is the connecting link between two worlds: the world that has not yet realised and fulfilled itself and the world that has already realised itself and is fulfilling itself.

Mysticism has a language of its own. Its name is Intuition. In it, no mind, no mental analysis can ever exist. A mystic sits on the wings of the Intuition-Bird and flies towards and reaches the Ultimate Real. Intuition reveals the perfect oneness of the Transcendental Vision and Absolute Reality. A mystic is sincere enough to tell the truth. He says that it is next to impossible for him to interpret his inner experience. No word, no thought has he, that can do justice to his experience. Here, at this point, the Vedic seer cries out: "What shall I speak, what verily shall I think?" Poor mind, poor senses are no longer alive. They have collapsed in their race towards the Unknown. Not for them, the mind and senses, the Ultimate Mystery of the Universe. Not for them, the knowledge of the Beyond. Mysticism emphasises the unity of all souls in the Universal Soul. When we look at the universe, we see it as the scene of conflict between good and evil, darkness and light, ignorance and knowledge. Needless to say, this struggle commenced its journey long before the appearance of man. It still continues. The light works in and through the aspiring soul; the darkness works in and through the unaspiring soul. The real transformation of human nature comes not through the austere, ascetic life and the complete withdrawal from the world, but through the gradual and final Illumination of one’s life. And for that, one needs aspiration. Aspiration and Aspiration alone is the precursor of this Illumination.

A mystical experience is the aspirant’s inner certitude of truth. This certitude rests on revelation. Revelation is inner authority. Inner Authority is final; who has this authority? Certainly not he who is a merciless victim to logic but he who has the experience and who has now grown into the experience itself. Logic is the reasoning and reasoned truth, which is the pride of the finite. Mysticism is the revealing and revealed Truth, which is the pride of the Infinite. If we believe in mysticism, which we really do, then we must realise that the Ultimate Truth is not only above reason, but is contrary to reason. If we believe something by reason, we enter into the life-torturing path of plurality, unconscious plurality of separateness. But when we believe something by our inner, mystic faith, we enter into the life-giving and life-fulfilling path of unity’s Transcendental Reality.

Martin Luther vehemently distrusted the effectiveness of reason. Nor did he have any faith in ritual or in mere work as a means to salvation. In his mysticism, we see the smiling and convincing face of faith. Faith alone can bring about salvation. Faith alone has the key to salvation.

Existence and Essence live together. They are one. In the thirteenth century Meister Johannes Eckhart dynamically asserted this view. We have to realise that essence is singularly manifest in the divine qualities of the human soul, whereas existence is gloriously manifest in the human qualities of the divine soul. The journey’s end of the human soul is in its complete union with God. The journey’s end of the divine soul is in its absolute manifestation of God.

Mysticism tells us that God-Realisation cannot be attained by the practice of ideas, but by the constant feeling of oneness with the Truth. An idea, at best, indicates the passive aspect of the sense world because a mental formation is directly or indirectly caught by the sense-world, whereas the feeling of oneness with Truth easily transcends the sense-world and indicates and ascertains the active and dynamic aspect of life’s evolving process in the flowing stream of Eternity.

A mystic tells the world that God’s body is wisdom and God’s soul is Love. A worldly man feels that his body, his physical activities fashion the soul. A mystic smiling says that it is the soul that moulds the body and transforms it into the unlimited consciousness-light of the soul.

According to Santayana, "Mysticism is not a religion, but a religious disease." Santayana is perfectly right when he says that mysticism is not a religion. In my opinion, mysticism is the highest aspiration that religion embodies. And as for the "religious disease", I can never be at one with Santayana in his profound realisation.

I want to say with all the spiritual confidence at my command that mysticism serves as a panacea, not only to those who cry to see their Beloved God’s face, but to those who are afraid of seeing God’s face in His Omniscience and His Omnipotence. And finally to those who are at once mercilessly and unpardonably unbelievers and disbelievers in the very existence of God.

Aum

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