The way to abiding peace117

A man of desire has no peace. Even when a powerful desire of his is fulfilled, he still has no peace, since teeming new desires are constantly attacking his earthly existence.

A man of aspiration longs for peace at every moment. If he listens to the dictates of his Inner Pilot and surrenders his actions and the fruits thereof to the Will of God, then a man of aspiration will definitely receive peace.

Expectation reigns supreme in both the life of a desire-man and the life of an aspiration-man. As long as an individual remains in the world of desire, his expectations will never meet with satisfaction. That is because desire lives in the finite. Although an individual may have countless desires, the desire-life itself is in the finite, of the finite and for the finite. Anything that is finite cannot bring peace. But for the man of aspiration, because he is longing for something vast, something infinite, something immortal, there shall come a time when his expectations will be fulfilled. When he gets what he is longing for, he will find that he has peace as well, for anything that is vast, anything that is infinite, eventually will give us peace. The man who has peace has everything.

A desire-man does not care so much for God the Creator, but he wants to possess God the Creation. An aspiration-man wants to be loved by the loving heart of humanity. A man of surrender wants to love God in humanity, for he sees God the Creator and God the Creation as one. Even inside the desire-man, the man of surrender sees the Presence of God. He knows that God’s Creation cannot exist without the Creator, and that God the Creator is trying to illumine His Creation. Therefore, a man of surrender tries to see God even in the dark cave of human bondage. He knows that there shall come a time when even the worst possible human being will long for freedom, and it is God’s supreme Vision that everyone who is longing for freedom will one day be liberated.

Here on earth everybody desires freedom. But there is a great difference between the inner freedom and the outer freedom. With our outer freedom we try to exercise our supremacy and lord it over others; we try to conquer the length and breadth of the world. With our inner freedom we try to become inseparably one with God’s Will. Quite often we use outer freedom to destroy the world around us according to our sweet will. But inner freedom, which is our oneness-will with God’s living Reality, is always used to fulfil a divine purpose and manifest the divine Truth here on earth. It is inner freedom that brings peace.

There is nobody who does not need happiness. But there can be no true happiness without peace of mind. Although we may not have peace right now, we can discover peace by exercising our imagination-power, the way a child exercises his imagination-power. A child imagines everything in God’s Creation in his own way. He imagines his existence in the heart of the infinite Vast. He imagines the entire universe as his own. If we start with a child’s imagination, before long this imagination will blossom into aspiration.

First we imagine peace, and then we begin to aspire for peace. When we become spiritually advanced, we adopt the way of surrender. We offer our aspiration unconditionally for the fulfilment of God’s Will, not to receive peace or any other blessing. At that time we surrender our desire-life, our aspiration-life, our dedication-life — our whole existence — to God’s Will. When our only happiness lies in our fulfilment of God, our Beloved Supreme, and in our Lord’s Fulfilment in and through us, then only can we have abiding peace.

In this world God the Creator expresses and reveals Himself through the seeker, who is none other than God the Lover. Each man, in essence, is God, but here in the world arena God the seeker longs for God the Liberator. And God the Liberator becomes God the Fulfiller while revealing and manifesting Himself through God the seeker. In seeking, in revealing and in manifesting, man achieves what he needs, which is God the Peace.


117. Wesleyan University; Middletown, Connecticut, USA, , 19 April 1986

From:Sri Chinmoy,The oneness of the Eastern heart and the Western mind, part 3, Agni Press, 2004
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/oeh_3