Question: How can our aspiration help us to appreciate the outer world?

Sri Chinmoy: God is the only truth here on earth and there in Heaven. For the aspirant, God comes first. But that does not mean that he neglects or negates the world. No, far from it! He loves God. He loves humanity. He loves God because God is all Love. He loves humanity because inside humanity is God, the All-Love.

When we appreciate somebody’s physical beauty, we are appreciating the outer beauty, which is infinitely inferior to the inner beauty. But if we can appreciate the inner beauty first, then we feel that the outer beauty can be appreciated in a divine way as the manifestation of the inner beauty. So when we appreciate outer beauty, we have to know that inside the outer beauty is the Supreme, the All-Beauty. We appreciate the outer creation because inside the outer creation is the inner creation, which is all joy, all harmony and all perfection.

An ordinary human being can never dare to possess true hope, true love, true inspiration, true aspiration, because according to him God is in Heaven or somewhere else. He does not feel the presence of God inside him, in front of him or around him. But a spiritual aspirant who is crying for God, who is constantly shedding soulful tears, trying to become one with God, feels that God is in the inmost recesses of his heart. He has not to go to the Himalayan caves in order to realise God. His God lives inside him. He feels that because God is inside him, God’s creation also is inside him. A spiritual person always feels that God’s entire creation is his home. God’s entire creation is constantly being created and revealed with a new inspiration and a new aspiration inside the aspirant. He who has accepted spirituality in the truest sense of the term has first to feel that God is the sole reality. Then he will see that God’s creation can never be separated from God.