Student: First we have to have a high meditation, then we can experience falling!

Sri Chinmoy: You have to go higher! When we have an obstacle — on the physical, vital, mental, psychic or spiritual plane — we can either approach the obstacle as an enemy, which everybody does, an obstacle race, a hindrance, or we can say: "Here is an opportunity to strengthen my capacity. This is an obstacle; I will overcome it."

Not to take this obstacle as an enemy, but to take it as something that is unconsciously helping us to increase our capacity. If we ignore it, if we avoid it, then automatically we will increase our strength to surpass it. If we take each obstacle as an enemy, then when we use our aggression and anger, immediately we increase the power of that obstacle. But if we do not take the obstacle as an opponent, we can try to surpass that obstacle either by ignoring it or avoiding it or expanding it. In so many ways, we can go beyond that obstacle. But if we take it as an enemy, then our problem starts right from the beginning. You cross this person or that incident in your life and there is no end. Today this one is an enemy, tomorrow that one, the day after tomorrow somebody else.

It is not the person as such who is your enemy, it is the forces in them, in those people, in you, in me. Always we have to take the forces into account, not the person. Those people are as helpless as we are. Even as we are helpless, those people are also helpless. That we have to know. They are at the mercy of wrong forces as we are at the mercy of wrong forces. We are at the mercy at a certain time; they are at the mercy at a certain time. Always wrong forces are there to attack us.

There is another thing that weakens us and that is mental expectation. In our mind, we create thoughts and from those thoughts we expect something to happen. Since we created those thoughts, we think that, like children, they have to obey us. But they do not obey us; they do not listen to us. They are like unruly boys.

You have created the thoughts, true, but do not expect from them. If good thoughts do you a favour, wonderful. But just because you created them, you cannot expect anything of them. You created a plant, let us say, but then the plant dies. It does not live. So here is the thing: always do not expect, even from your own good thoughts. Your business is to create good thoughts, but those good thoughts may not come to help you at the moment you want to be helped by them. They may come at some other time to help you. Or they will help you in their own way, in their own time. But you are expecting them, here, now, at this moment and they are nowhere to be found. Then you lose your will-power, your capacities, because you are annoyed at them.

Whenever you show aggression or anger, immediately your inner strength goes away. Never think that anger is strength. Anger is absolutely weakness. As soon as you become angry, immediately your psychic strength from your heart goes away. So when the anger-attack comes, you have to say, "I will have nothing to do with you." Try to maintain your inner poise. I have a few good qualities. My soul's poise is still by far the best. It is my highest quality.