Part II — Question and answers

Question: I am a student. How can I study and still keep God before me?

Sri Chinmoy: It is very easy. If you study in order to get a diploma so that you will be recognised by everyone, if you study to become the wisest person on earth so that you will become the teacher of the world, then it is impossible for you to keep God before you. If you feel that you want a degree for your name and fame, for your own establishment on earth, then you cannot place God before you.

You have to feel that you are studying just because you feel the necessity of pleasing God, just because God wants you to grow and study. He does not want somebody else to study. He wants you to study. You have to feel all the time that you are studying not to please yourself, not to please the members of your family, but only to please God. Feel that God is like a mother watching her child study. While pleasing God, you are pleasing your parents, you are pleasing your relatives, you are pleasing your own self. But God should come first.

Study is itself a kind of service. You have to take your study as a form of service to God. If you study well and get good marks because you feel that this is your service to God, then you are pleasing God. Today He wants you to study, tomorrow when you complete your course, God will ask you inwardly to do some job. Then you will do this. The day after tomorrow He may ask you to do something else. So in each field you have to please God in His own way.

Studying is not an obstruction in the spiritual path. Six, seven, eight hours a day you study. You have to discipline yourself. In a few years' time, the capacity that you acquire by studying, you will be able to apply to your spiritual life. Discipline in any walk of life has to be appreciated and admired, because it is a type of strength. With this strength, God will ask you to build or to break something. If you have strength in your arms, you can lift up a heavy weight. If something has to be broken, you can break it. And again, if something has to be fixed, you can do that too.