Part 2: University of Toronto

Question: Do you have a particular meditation technique?

Sri Chinmoy: No, our technique is love, devotion and surrender. We practise this in our silent meditation and also in our life of divine manifestation. An outer technique we do not have; but our inner technique, or rather our path, is the path of divine love, divine devotion and divine surrender. These are like three rungs in the ladder of spiritual evolution: love, devotion and surrender.

We differentiate between human love and divine love. Human love binds; divine love liberates. Human love wants to possess and be possessed; divine love always wants to feel universal oneness through conscious and constant expansion. Human love eventually leads to frustration; divine love is a constant expansion of our consciousness. In divine love, all is self-giving with no expectation of anything in return. We try to love God inside each human being and in this way we develop divine love.

Then we try to devote ourselves to a higher cause, to the Supreme. If we love God inside each human being, we try to serve Him in everyone. We offer our dedicated devotion to divinity within humanity. In human life when we use the term ‘devotion’, what we are thinking of is pure attachment. If we go deep within, we will feel that when we are attached to someone we are wasting our energy on him. But in divine devotion we always feel the necessity of offering our very existence to the One whom we really and eternally love, who is God.

Finally, we try to surrender ourselves to the Will of God. Divine surrender is not made under any compulsion. It comes from our inner awareness of Truth and Reality. It is not the surrender of a slave to his master. At every moment the slave is at the beck and call of his master. If he does not listen to the master, then the master will punish him. But our surrender to God is not like that. There is no reluctance on our part to serve God or surrender our individual will to His infinite Will. We do it cheerfully, devotedly, soulfully and unconditionally. We feel within us the bounden duty to surrender to Him because He is all Love, all Light, all Wisdom. When a tiny drop of water enters into the ocean it loses its own individuality, but it gains the universality of the ocean itself. When we surrender to God, we do not regard God as a separate person or somebody other than ourselves. We feel that God is the highest and most illumined part of our own existence. This highest part also belongs to us, but right now our conscious existence is in our lowest part. We are living in the earthbound consciousness; but if we can enter into our highest part, then we can be totally freed from ignorance, darkness limitation and death. We therefore try to enter into our highest part, or we try to bring down our highest part into our less illumined part so that we can be inspired, illumined, transformed and perfected by the highest Light in ourselves, which is God.

If you want to call this a technique, you may do so. But we call it our path. Each seeker has a path of his own. He walks along that path and eventually reaches his destination. We know that those who follow the path of love, devotion and surrender will ultimately reach the goal. Those who are following other paths will also reach the goal. The destination is the same for everyone, but the paths are many. Each path is absolutely correct in its own way. But the individual seeker has to choose the path that suits him best, because he cannot follow ten different paths. He can follow only one path. Otherwise, if he is constantly changing his path, he will never reach his destination. In an ordinary school, we study many subjects — history, geography, science, physics and so on. For each subject we need a teacher. But in the spiritual life, God-realisation or Self-discovery is the only subject. Since there is one subject one spiritual teacher is enough.

We start with divine love and try to love the entire humanity with the inner awareness, consciousness and conviction that inside each individual is the presence of God. Just because we love God we try to devote ourselves to Him and serve Him in mankind. Then, because we know that it is His Will and not our will that can perfect the world, we surrender unconditionally to His Will. Again, we know that His Will is not and cannot be separated from our real will, the will that comes from the very depths of our soul; therefore, we try to remain in the soul, for there we can easily feel His Will. When we live in the mind, very often we are confused; we do not know what God’s intention is. We doubt His existence. But if we remain in the heart and the soul, then at every moment we feel that we are a conscious channel for God’s Will and we try to serve mankind by executing His Will.