Question: Guru, when you are not around, how can we maintain a very strong and intense aspiration?

Sri Chinmoy: It entirely depends on your inner connection with me. You work in an office. You may speak to your colleagues for hours, but your heart is not in them. Needless to say, their heart is not inside you, either. Your heart is in your spiritual life, inside your Guru, inside God. Your outer being is with your colleagues, doing all kinds of office work, but your heart is somewhere else. You have already established a very close, intimate connection with my soul. All my good disciples have done it.

The mistake that you make and others make is that you have a fixed goal. If you come to a certain standard during your meditation, you feel that you have reached your goal. Or if you get a little joy in your inner life, then immediately you get a complacent feeling. But I wish to say that our goal is an ever-transcending goal. You want always to rest on yesterday's laurels. Yesterday you got an iota of joy and today you are crying to get that same iota of joy. But how do you know whether the Supreme wants you to have that iota of joy or whether He wants you to go farther, higher and deeper?

When I started to lose weight, my weight was 168 pounds. First, the goal was 165, then it came to 160, 154, 152, 148 and so on. But the amount of progress one can make on the physical plane is very limited. I can come down to 130 or so and then I cannot go any further. In the physical, the goal is always limited. You can go to your maximum and then you are finished. But in the spiritual life, the goal is not fixed. There is no end in the inner world. Here we are dealing with Infinity, Eternity and Immortality. Where is Infinity or Immortality on the physical plane? Immortality is in consciousness. If you have developed an immortal consciousness, only then are you serving the Supreme all over the world. On the physical plane, all spiritual Masters will leave the body. But the consciousness that they bring down is offered to the whole world. The Christ brought down the infinite, immortal Consciousness. The Buddha did the same. Sri Krishna did it and other spiritual Masters did it also. The consciousness that they offered remains immortal.

So, in your case, it happens that you always try to reach a particular goal. If you know how to run fifty metres, then after you run fifty metres, at that time you feel that your part is over. If you cannot run fifty metres one day because of a stomach upset or headache, you feel miserable. But the Supreme does not want you to be satisfied with fifty metres. He wants you to run fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four metres. So when you have a higher goal, automatically your aspiration increases. Otherwise, if you are aiming at the same goal, you don't go very far and it becomes monotonous. Because you are all the time reaching the same place, you don't want to go there. But if you feel that your goal is constantly going farther, farther, that it is ever-increasing, ever-ascending, then there is constant joy.

Joy is in achievement, in progress; joy is not in success. Success ends our journey, but progress has no end. When you have a fixed goal and you reach it, that is your success. After that, you are finished. But if you don't have a fixed goal, if your goal is going higher, higher, then you are constantly making progress. In continuous progress, our goal is going beyond, beyond, beyond, beyond. Then we get the greatest satisfaction. So do not be satisfied with success. Aspire only for progress. And each time you make progress, it is your real success. Every day when you meditate, feel that you will go still deeper, fly still higher. Then you will be able to maintain your conscious oneness with the Supreme.