Part III

//The following questions were answered by Sri Chinmoy at the San Francisco Sri Chinmoy Centre on 31 May 1973.//

Question: What can I think of to help me cry only for the Supreme? Quite often desire for other things will obscure my inner aspiration. What can I think of that can strengthen my inner aspiration?

Sri Chinmoy: You have to feel that the day you accepted me as your spiritual teacher was the very beginning of your life. Spiritually you are just one year old. Now, you have to know whether a child who is only one year old has any responsibilities. No, he has somebody to take care of him. When you grow up, when you are eighteen or twenty, you will want to take all the responsibilities from your mother and father. But a child always cries to remain in the lap of the mother or in the arms of the father. So how can you increase your inner cry? You can feel that you are a child only one year old, and not a young man of twenty. Consciously you have to feel that you are a child. If you think of yourself as a child, then every day you will be able to make progress.

Who makes noticeable progress? A child, not an old man. Old people do not care for progress. But mere years do not make people old. Somebody may be sixty or seventy years of age, but that person may have the enthusiasm, inner joy and inspiration of a child. Again, there will be people seventeen, eighteen and nineteen years old who have no aspiration, no inspiration, no dynamism. In the spiritual life we are not concerned with earthly years, but with our inner eagerness to do something, to become something. Now what should we become? Only a child of God.