Question: Guru, how should we handle our parents who misunderstand the path and worry about us, and detach ourselves from our families when they stand in the way of our progress?

Sri Chinmoy: How old are you?

Seeker: Nineteen.

Sri Chinmoy: So you are no longer a minor. At the age of nineteen you are old enough to decide what is best for you, who can guide you, who can satisfy you. It is the Inner Pilot, the Supreme Pilot, who can satisfy you, nobody else. In order to attain free access to the Inner Pilot, it is necessary to have a spiritual teacher or Master, if your own commitment to your Inner Pilot is of paramount importance to you. When you are a minor it is a different matter. But when you are nineteen you have to take life seriously.

You have to decide what kind of satisfaction you want from life. Do you want desire-life satisfaction? If so, you are doomed to disappointment, for there is no satisfaction in the desire-life. But if you sincerely want aspiration-life satisfaction, you will discover that aspiration itself is satisfaction. It is not that from aspiration you will get satisfaction. No, while you are aspiring you will be satisfied, whereas while you are desiring you will become a victim to worries, anxieties and frustration. Even when your desires are fulfilled you are not satisfied. As soon as your desires are fulfilled, they multiply, and you become at that time a worse beggar. When you get $1 you want to have $10. When you get one car you want to have a better car. When one desire is fulfilled, immediately ten desires loom large in your body, vital and mind. But while you are aspiring, while you are trying to become a good, divine and perfect instrument of God, you are getting satisfaction. Even though you may see that perfection is still a far cry, the very fact that you are walking along the right road, along the road of aspiration, gives you tremendous joy, and this joy is satisfaction.

There is only one thing in life that you really need, and that is abiding satisfaction. It is only from the spiritual life, from the inner cry, that you can get true satisfaction. You have to pay all attention to your inner cry; you have to feed the inner cry. God is inside your parents. God is inside each and every individual. So you can pray to the Supreme to do the needful inside your parents, and He will do it. Your soulful prayers He will answer. But if you want to curtail your spiritual life because your parents are hostile, then you will be committing a Himalayan blunder. If your inner cry is sincere and genuine, if you really want God and God alone, then God must come first in your life. Your choice entirely depends on your own heart’s inner cry, how sincerely you need God.