Part II

SCA 9-19. On 4 July 1994, after a special meditation for the American Independence Day, Sri Chinmoy invited questions from his disciples.

Question: For a disciple, is it better to know your love or to feel your love?

Sri Chinmoy: To know my love is only book knowledge. From a book you will know how I love humanity. To feel my love is infinitely more important than to know my love. Again, from feeling you can know. If your heart makes you feel how much I love you, then from there you will try to convince your mind, “Guru does love me, although he smiled at somebody else and not me.” The feeling you have that I love you has to be brought from your heart into your hesitant or doubting mind. Once your mind is convinced of my love, automatically you will know it. So the best thing is to feel it, and then from the feeling to know my love.

Ordinary human beings who are not aspiring can only know from books that God loves them. Then, from that knowledge someday they can enter into the heart to feel God’s Love in their entire life. But once you accept the spiritual life, the story is different. Right from the beginning you have to feel God’s Love in your heart. No matter how many books you have read or you are going to read, you will never get the feeling of God’s Love or your Master’s love from books. If the heart does not support the feeling, then it does not last.

To come back to your question, it is infinitely, infinitely more important to feel my love than to know it. While knowing, you may get confused or doubtful. But while feeling, you are bound to make tremendous progress and eventually convince your mind that I love you. How can you feel my love? By virtue of your own prayers and meditations. And once you feel my love, for days and months you will be in another world. If you know my love from reading my writings or from hearing about it from others, that will not give you real satisfaction and it will not last. The knowledge of my love will not last. The feeling of my love is the only thing that lasts permanently or for a long, long time.