Question: How can we recognise our guilt and use it for our self-improvement?

Sri Chinmoy: First of all, we should not try to recognise our guilt. If we try to recognise guilt, there will be no end to this guilt. Thinking about guilt is the negative approach. If we constantly examine what is inside a dustbin, then all we will ever see is rubbish. Guilt is like that. The very thought of guilt takes us away from light. Immediately, obscurity comes and covers our whole existence. If we want to be aware of guilt, if we try to discover where guilt comes from and what its function is, then we are destroying the divine part in ourselves. Guilt has come from wrong action. This wrong action we negate, not by thinking about it, but by doing something right. Only this kind of action will help us nullify its power.

We do not have to enter into darkness in order to see light or appreciate light. Let us enter directly into light itself, and what light has to offer we shall accept and use to fulfil our life. If we stay in a dark room for twenty-four hours of the day, we will not get light. Even if we stay there for hundreds of days, we will not get light because light is not available there. What we must do is go where there is light.

We are trying, in the spiritual world, to go beyond the mind. With the mind and through the mind we have not been able to achieve anything significant in the inner plane. So it is better not to think of guilt at all, but to think only of the divine possibilities that we have. Each human being has infinite divine possibilities. These possibilities have to be manifested in the form of realities. We started our soul's journey many thousands of years ago. We have gone from the mineral life to the plant life to the animal life; and we are now in the human life. What we want is the Goal and not the beginning of the road. We want to be transformed and illumined. Already we have covered a great distance. Now we should run, for the Goal is ahead. If we look backward or sideways we will stumble and fall. We should try, instead, to see only our divine qualities, and to manifest them in our lives. In order to do this we must see the light inside us and around us. Only then will we reach the Goal, which is all Light.