Question: I am strongly tuned to the mental plane. What can I do to enter into my inner being and feel my inner self more in my daily meditations?

Sri Chinmoy: Try to think that you have three things in your possession: the soul, the heart and the mind. In your case one possession, the mind, the intellectual mind, is suffering because it has been given very good training at Yale and now you are neglecting it. Try to take the mind as a possession, but feel that it is a very heavy burden on your shoulders. Who wants to place a heavy burden on his shoulders? Feel that you can easily take off this load; you can get rid of the gross physical mind.

Your heart is another possession. When you think of or try to feel the heart, feel that there is something inside the heart and that is why it is beautiful and meaningful. Your last possession is your soul, which represents reality and divinity. The soul needs a heart. The heart needs a soul. The soul is a seed; the heart is a tree. The seed needs the tree; and if there is no seed there cannot be a plant. The heart-plant comes from the soul-seed; then the plant grows into a tree and the tree becomes a banyan tree. But first there must be a seed.

If the mind is creating problems, feel that you don't need the earthbound mind. You have had enough use from it. Just take the heart as a plant and the soul as a seed. If you can grow into the consciousness of the seed, there will always be the possibility that the seed will germinate and you will grow into a plant and then into a tree.

Think of what will produce results. The conscious awareness of the soul will always create something ever new and vibrant. If something constantly grows inside you which is pure, divine and immortal, then automatically things that are not immortal and aspiring in the physical mind will be transformed because of the constant growth. They will be transformed and illumined if they have not already left. If the mind still remains a heavy load, it will be transformed. All you have to do is to give all importance to the seed, the soul. Then the physical mind will leave you or it will have to surrender to the flood of light inside the heart which is the soul.