Part V

SCA 559-562. Sri Chinmoy made the comments about obedience and answered these questions on 26 December 1997 in Guatemala.

On obedience

In life we can take everything seriously. Again, everything we can take lightly. But it is precisely because we have taken many, many things in life lightly right from the beginning that today our spirituality has become a most difficult task. In our spiritual life, there should be obedience at every moment. Once disobedience starts, there is no end. From a tiny act of disobedience, you dig a grave for yourself. Of course, if people who dig graves for themselves are on our path, I am also inside those unfortunate disciples.

There is no such thing as insignificant disobedience. You have to write this down on the tablet of your heart. If you think, “This is insignificant or that is insignificant,” then the very thing which is most important in your life will come and appear right in front of your nose, but you will say, “Oh, this is also not important.” Then something more will come and something more after that. Gradually, gradually you will see that everything in your life you are taking lightly, while as a God-seeker and God-lover, you are becoming worse and worse.

If you count the number of times you were disobedient, even yesterday, you will be shocked to discover how many times you disobeyed not me, but the Supreme in yourself. I am his mouthpiece for this particular path, but the request or the command is not coming from me. It is coming from the Highest. Your highest and my highest are the same, only I know a little more than you do. That is why God has given me the painful or impossible task of telling you again and again and again what the Supreme expects of you.

To all of you I am saying, when it is a matter of joking between boys and girls, there is no such thing as an insignificant joke. When you tell jokes, is it not an exchange of the vital? You may say that this vital exchange is not on an emotional level, but from there it starts. All the problems in humanity’s life have started from lack of seriousness.

At what point are we going to become serious in our life of aspiration? There is a two-lane road. If we take the wrong lane, we may think that in two seconds we shall come back to the right lane, that nothing will happen to us. But, I tell you, those two seconds may never come. While you are in the wrong lane, you may fall asleep. Then finished! You will have a collision.

When I took my driving test the first time, the examiner asked me to make a left turn, and I made it very nicely from the right side. Immediately I knew I had done the wrong thing. If I had said to the examiner, “I shall not do it again,” why should he believe me? I made a wrong turn, so he failed me. I deserved it. Here also, when you take the wrong lane in your spiritual life and fall into ignorance-sleep, sometimes you say, “O my God, what have I done?” But by then it is too late. Your Examiner, who is none other than our Lord Beloved Supreme, will say, “What have you done? What have you not done?”

From:Sri Chinmoy,Sri Chinmoy answers, part 14, Agni Press, 1999
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/sca_14