Question: How can we tell which is our ego's will and which is the Divine Will?⁵

Sri Chinmoy: When it is our ego’s will, we try to achieve something by hook or by crook. That is to say, we don’t hesitate to employ foul means. We want something to be done and then, if we see that it is not done, then immediately we try to get it or achieve it by any means: through trickery… or bribing or by adopting some kind of foul means. That is our ego’s will. And then if we don’t get it, we curse the person from whom we expected the thing or we curse the thing which we wanted to have and couldn’t get. But when it is God’s Will, we will see it as a Force coming directly from the heart. It has infinitely more intense power than the ego’s will, but this Force only uses its Power because God is inspiring it. It is the soul’s will to achieve something for God. Now, when it is the soul’s will, when we bring the soul’s will to the fore, the first thing we feel is a kind of inner conviction. Whether it is something we are saying or something we want to achieve, we will have the inner conviction that it is something our Inner Pilot wants from us.

The ego’s will is not like that. You are not convinced, but you are convincing yourself that you are doing the right thing. You are doing the wrong thing because you are adopting foul means, acting by hook or by crook. You are not doing the right thing, but you are trying to convince yourself that you are.

When it is your soul’s will, you are automatically convinced because the ringing conviction comes from deep within. In the ego’s will, you are convincing yourself through your mind, through your vital, through your physical. But, when it is your soul’s will, you will feel a kind of inner confidence. This inner confidence is accompanied by joy, by an inner ecstasy. In the case of the ego, this does not happen. In the case of the ego, while you are exercising your ego’s will, there will be some fear in it. “Perhaps I will lose the battle. Perhaps I will be smashed. I feel that I am going to be defeated by the other party.” A constant battle is going on. “Although I feel that I am stronger, superior, more powerful, more dynamic, I have no security inside me, no confidence. I am afraid that the other party will defeat me and I will lose the battle”. But in the soul’s will, it is definite that we are going to win, not by any kind of foul means but just because God wants the soul to win, because God wants to conquer ignorance, because God wants that particular soul to gain victory over ignorance. That is why God is giving indomitable will to the soul to conquer ignorance.

Now, when the soul’s will-power is expressed, it is expressed the way we see a huge wave moving in the sea. Immediately it inundates the whole consciousness. Once the soul’s will is expressed, you are bound to feel that your inner consciousness is inundated with inner energy, inner joy, inner delight, inner power, inner confidence. Everything is inundated there. But when you use your ego’s will-power, you are thinking that you are building a palace. Again you have enormous fear inside you that while you are building, your palace is going to crack, the building is going to collapse. With that kind of fear, finally it really does collapse because where there is fear, there cannot be any Light or Strength. Light cannot exist in fear. In fear only doubt comes. Our fear and doubt go together and there we see vexation looming large. In the soul’s will, we see only confidence, inner assurance, inner oneness with the soul which is Divinity.