Question: How can we be conscious of God all the time in our mental work, such as when we are studying?

Sri Chinmoy: When you are driving a car, your hands are on the wheel, your feet are on the gas and your eyes are looking forward and sideways. Look how many things you are doing. It is the same thing when you are studying. Easily you can keep God in mind. Before you begin to study, before you open up your book, pray to God most soulfully that your study will be no different from your prayerful thought. Then, while you are studying, you have to feel the prayerful consciousness which you had just before you started studying. It is like a flow. Once you start running properly on the right track, automatically you continue along that same track. But if you go the wrong way or take a wrong turn, then you follow in that direction.

An ordinary person will study so that he will get a diploma and become extremely great or prosperous in life. In your case, you are not studying for name and fame. No, you are studying to please the Inner Pilot. You are studying in order to become a good, divine instrument of God. And there shall come a time when the Inner Pilot will utilise you in His own Way to serve others. You will acquire knowledge and this knowledge you will distribute to aspiring mankind. So your studying will be totally different from the studying of others.

If you have that kind of attitude towards your studies, then there will be no problem. When you are studying, you have to try to feel the purpose behind it: you are studying to please the Supreme in His own Way. Then, when the time comes for you to teach, you will not teach like other teachers. You will try to bring to the fore the divinity inside each of your students so that they also can become chosen instruments of God. If you can have this idea when you study, you will see that your mental life will not be an obstruction to your spiritual life. But if you separate the outer study from the inner study, which is your prayer and meditation, then there will always be problems. At that time, you will see a yawning gulf between your mental study and your psychic or spiritual studies. They have to be blended. The capacity of the mind has to be illumined by your psychic capacity, spiritual capacity. Then there can be no problem.