Part II — Manifestation

Question: Is there any way you can incorporate your spiritual life into your everyday life?

Sri Chinmoy: Naturally you can and you should incorporate your spiritual life into your everyday life, only you must do first things first. The spiritual life comes first. That is to say, if you pray or meditate early in the morning before you go to the office, before you enter into your earthly activities, you are doing the first thing first. If you do it the other way around, if in the morning you lead an ordinary life and then after say 11:00 am or 12:00 noon you try to aspire, it becomes almost impossible.

You have to feel that the outer life is not to be discarded as a filthy rag. The outer life has its own value in our evolution. Only right now, it does not have as much light as the inner life. Since the inner life has light, naturally you will try to bring to the fore the light of the heart, the light of the soul. If you expect light from the physical body, the outer mind and the outer life, you will be frustrated because they do not have any light. If you concentrate on the inner life, on the inner heart and the soul, you can easily get abundant light and then you will see that the outer life and the inner life can easily march together. This is the only way you can integrate the inner and the outer life.