Your Inner Self

Beth Day Romulo: When were you first in touch with your inner self?

Sri Chinmoy: I don't know why or how, but at the age of four I started praying because I felt something within me. The kind of prayer that I did was not taught to me by anybody. Then, at the age of seven, I started praying consciously. When I was eleven and a half I joined a spiritual community where there was a spiritual Master. Then I started praying and meditating very, very seriously. In a couple of years I felt my inner potential.

My prayer-life and meditation-life can never end. I have not stopped and I will never be able to stop praying and meditating. It is a one-way street, with no U-turns. Once you start, you have to go on. You can crawl, you can walk, you can run or you can sprint. If you want to take rest for a while and sleep, you can. But God will never allow you to go back to the starting point.

We believe in the process of evolution. Sometimes we are evolving slowly and sometimes we are going very fast. But we can't go back to our mineral life or animal life. Although we still have animal propensities, although we still quarrel and fight and do many things that animals do, we have evolved to the point where we are praying to God to make us good. Animals do not consciously pray to God to make them good. So this is the difference between animal life and human life. Human beings still embody many animal qualities, but we are trying to get rid of them and lead a divine life.