Chapter 12. Keeping Your Joy

Cry within. Meditate within. Dive within. Your inner achievements will far outweigh your outer imperfections.

GUARDING YOUR INNER WEALTH

After you have finished meditating, you have to assimilate the result of your meditation into your inner system. Only then does it become a solid, absolutely permanent experience that is inseparably one with your existence. If you enter into a quarrel with someone or get into some unpleasant situation before the peace, light and bliss from your meditation are assimilated, then everything can be lost. Not even an iota will remain. Even by speaking with someone you can lose what you have received during meditation. Someone may come up to you and say, “How are you?” and he may take away all the peace, light and bliss that you have received. That is why you should not talk to anyone immediately after you have had a high meditation, until you have assimilated what you have received. Also, you should not eat immediately after meditation. You can move around or read if you want, but you should not eat a full meal for at least fifteen minutes or a half hour. If you are very hungry, though, it is all right to take a small quantity of milk or juice.

Normally, it takes quite a few hours to assimilate everything that you have received during meditation, and during that period you have to maintain the light that you got. How? Through your inner awareness, and by being careful of how you deal with the outside world. However, sometimes it happens that during your meditation you are receiving and at the same time assimilating. Then, when you stop meditating, it is all assimilated.

You can think of assimilation as establishing a lifelong friendship, an eternal friendship, with someone who has come into your life. If peace, light and bliss come into you during meditation and you do not make them your eternal friends, then naturally they will leave you. But if you establish an eternal friendship with them, then your friends will have an opportunity to inspire you, guide you, mould you, shape you and share with you their divine capacities and divine qualities.

Again, you have to know that assimilation is not always what the soul wants. At times the soul is eager to assimilate and keep something for quite a few days before expressing it. At other times the soul wants to reveal and manifest the qualities that it receives during meditation immediately or after only a few hours. This expression can be to others, to the atmosphere or to the Universal Consciousness. The inner wealth is like knowledge. One person may say, “Let me learn a little and teach that small amount.” But someone else may say, “No, let me learn as much as I can, and then I will teach others.”

Q&A

Question: What qualities are most important for the absorption of light?

Sri Chinmoy: The absorption of light demands absolute sincerity and purity. Anybody who is one hundred percent sincere and pure in his spiritual life can immediately absorb light. The sincerity that I am speaking of is not ordinary human sincerity, but spiritual sincerity, which is infinitely more subtle. Spiritual sincerity asks whether you are ready to make all sacrifices in order to please God. If God asks you to give up everything for His sake, if He says, “Give up everything and walk with Me, run with Me,” and you are ready to do it, that is called true spiritual sincerity. Spiritual sincerity is constant inner and outer sacrifice. If there is no sacrifice in the inner life or the outer life, then sincerity cannot take birth. Constant self-sacrifice to realise the Highest is called real sincerity.

But if there is no purity, immediately you will lose the light that you have received. Purity is actually the vessel inside you which holds spiritual light, peace, bliss and power. Very often you receive things and then you lose them because impurity enters into you. Impurity does not only have to do with lower vital movements. Doubt, fear, jealousy and insecurity are all forms of impurity. One of the undivine qualities that goes hand-in-hand with impurity is self-deception, so you have to be very careful. If you want to expedite your spiritual journey, then purity must come first. Otherwise, no matter how much light you have received or are going to receive, you will not be able to keep it.

Question: At the end of meditation I feel very good. Is there anything I should do with that feeling, or any way to utilise it?

Sri Chinmoy: Whatever you feel should be preserved. How can you preserve it? By offering gratitude to the Inner Pilot. Also, you can try to feel that whatever you have achieved can be transcended. If you have received or achieved a dollar’s worth of peace, then next time you can try to get ten dollars’ worth of peace. And if you feel that you have developed an inner muscle to receive, then you can continue strengthening that muscle. In this way you can develop a very powerful inner capacity.

Question: After we stop meditating, how can we maintain the level of consciousness that we reached during our meditation?

Sri Chinmoy: Here in the meditation hall we are all aspiring; that is why our consciousness is elevated. When we go home, our consciousness will go down. Some calamity may take place or we will just enter into ordinary activities, and we will lose our aspiration. Even if there is no outer disturbance, still we find it difficult to remain in our highest consciousness because we are not used to living there. We aspire for half an hour with utmost sincerity, and then relaxation starts. We feel that we have worked very hard, so now we are entitled to take rest for an hour or two. We do not value what we have achieved. We feel, “Even if I lose it, I will get it back tomorrow.” So we start reading a newspaper or watching television, and in this way we enter into relaxation.

If we want to maintain the height of our aspiration, then our aspiration has to flow continuously. Suppose we have meditated for an hour or so and we do not have the capacity to continue meditating. Still, we can do something which will maintain and preserve our meditation. We can read spiritual books, sing spiritual songs or listen to soulful music. We can go to visit a spiritual friend or, if that is not possible, call him on the phone and speak about spiritual matters. Another thing we can do is write about our experiences, not with the thought of publishing them but just to keep them in our consciousness. While we are writing down an experience, we are revealing our own inner light. Then, each time we read about one of our own experiences, we get new inspiration and aspiration. Even while we are eating we can remember what experiences we had during our morning meditation. Like charging a battery, we are charging our memory with spiritual energy. In this way we can remain in the spiritual flow that we had during our meditation, and keep our consciousness high until our next meditation.

If we want to maintain our height and make the utmost progress, we have to be very wise in our day-to-day lives in how we spend each second. A time will come when we will not have to have any restrictions in our life; our life itself will be a continuous flow of aspiration. But now we have to use our conscious mind in order to aspire.

Question: Sometimes after meditation I lose the joy that I have received from my meditation, and I feel very bad. Why do I lose my joy?

Sri Chinmoy: There are two reasons why you lose your joy. One reason is that your mind starts functioning most powerfully and vehemently. While functioning in this way, it allows obscure, impure and undivine thoughts to come in either consciously or unconsciously. When impurity enters, joy has to disappear. But if purity is well-established in the mind, the joy will last for a long time.

Another reason why you lose your joy is that your inner vessel is small, and you have taken light, which is joy itself, beyond your capacity. The quantity of light that you have received during your meditation has satisfied you, but your inner vessel is not large enough to hold it. When you lose it, you feel sad.

Question: Sometimes I feel very sad when I come down from meditation.

Sri Chinmoy: The sadness that you feel is quite natural, because you were in a higher world and then you had to come back to the earthly level. At that time, the worries and problems of the world enter into you. But if you meditate sincerely for a few years, these problems will not stand in your way, because when you come down from your meditation, you will have tremendous peace, poise, joy and love for humanity.

Right now you have boundless love for your child. But after you have meditated for a few years, you will have even more love for your child, because you will feel the presence of God inside him. Right now you do not feel the presence of God inside your child all the time. If he is naughty or if he breaks something, then you do not think that God is operating inside him. At that time you are exasperated and you say, “No, no, this is not God; this is the devil incarnate.” But there will come a time when you will see God inside your son all the time, no matter what he does or what he says. When you progress to that point, you will not feel drained when you come down from your meditation. On the contrary, even when you enter into the activities of ordinary life you will be able to maintain the same joy, delight, peace and poise.

When you are meditating you have to feel that you are climbing a tree. You are going up high, higher, highest to collect the mangoes and bring them down for distribution. But if you feel sad when you come down, that means you want to eat them all by yourself at the top of the tree. You don’t want to bring them down and share them with others. So when you go up, always go up with joy; and when you come down, also come down with joy. When you go up, feel that it is for achievement of the highest; and when you come down from meditation, feel that it is for distribution.

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Now is the time to make good use of time. Today is the day to begin a perfect day.

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Each conscious step of purity is a precious milestone-victory along my heart’s aspiration-road.