Question: How do you get joy out of doing something you don't like?

Sri Chinmoy: That is called the supreme sacrifice. How can one get the greatest joy? Not by possessing, but by sacrificing. If I have ten dollars and just keep it inside my pocket, I will get one kind of joy. It is the joy of a shylock. But if I can give away the ten dollars, that is a supreme sacrifice. If a thing is done in my own way, naturally I will get joy. But always I have to ask myself, “Am I a beggar that I will only get joy from one particular thing?” A beggar only gets joy in one particular way: if somebody gives him alms or food. But you are not a beggar. So, every time you have to ask yourself, “Am I a beggar that I can get joy only by pleasing myself the way I want to be pleased?”

Your soul’s name is Nirvik; it means indomitable, fearless. If you hate to do a particular thing, and if this hatred keeps you from doing that thing, it means that your hatred has more power than your own indomitable capacity. So, you are the loser there. Hatred is one reality and fearlessness is another. But you cannot allow your fearlessness to surrender to your hatred. When Ali and Norton fight together, then we see who wins. So here also, hatred is a boxer and you yourself are a boxer. Hatred itself is a power, a negative power. And that negative power is fighting with your own quality of fearlessness. So, you have to defeat your enemy.

There are two ways to make yourself happy. One way is to run away and hide. You don’t want to be seen. You don’t want to be affected. The other way is to act like a roaring lion and fight. You tell this hatred, “You have come. All right, let me devour you with my roaring!” If everything is done in your own way, then the result will be very limited, very limited. “In your own way” means that you will try something for one second and then run. Today you will give up one thing because it is too difficult. Tomorrow you will give up another thing because that is too difficult. But everything is difficult. Life itself is difficult.

But if you do everything in God’s Way, then you don’t give up. Always you have to fight. Always you have to conquer, but not in the way that Caesar or Napoleon conquered. Caesar conquered and Napoleon conquered by seeing others’ reality as totally different from their own reality. But you won’t see it in that way. They thought that whoever did not see eye to eye with them was their enemy. But you will say that whoever does not see eye to eye with you is part and parcel of your own reality. If you are unable to feel your oneness with him, then it is a failing on your part. God is omniscient, God is omnipresent, God is everything precisely because He is one with everything and everybody.

So you have to take it as a challenge. Always you have to try to conquer your lower qualities and lower capacities and transform them into your higher qualities and capacities. At one particular place you are pure; at another place you are impure. While walking along the street you have stepped into a mudhole. Right up to the knee it is all dirt, filth, mud, clay. But from the knee upward, it is all clean. Now, if you say, “Oh, I am dirty, filthy, impure; so let me cut off my leg from the knee,” then you won’t be able to walk. You have only to clean the leg and purify it. Similarly, when you see hatred as part of your existence, you try to transform and illumine it. If you can feel that hatred is also part and parcel of your reality, but that it is something which needs improvement, purification and perfection, then easily you can conquer it. You feel that it is an insufficiency, a weakness, a shortcoming, a limitation in yourself, and not a reality apart from your own reality.