Question: If somebody has left the spiritual life, is it because the hostile forces grew much stronger than the positive forces?

Sri Chinmoy: In the battlefield, gradually, gradually those seekers came to the point where they did not want to fight. A real seeker will fight to the very end. I will fight for God’s Victory in my life every day. Every day I will try to bring down divine Nectar. But in the ordinary life, people fight for two or three months, and then they give up. They feel that if they do not get the victory after two months, why should they go on fighting continuously? That is the human way.

The divine way is to say, “I will fight every day for God’s Victory. I will not rest on yesterday’s laurels. Every day I will enter into the battlefield of life. I will only pray for God’s Victory — today, tomorrow and every day.”

Some people will say, “If I prayed so sincerely, why did the results of my prayer not last for at least ten days?” Somebody else will say, “No. The time that I spent praying and meditating saved me for today. Tomorrow again I shall have to pray and meditate to be safe again tomorrow. Day by day I shall renew my prayer and meditation.”

In the ordinary life, if you have one thousand dollars, then for ten days or more you will be able to use it. But the inner wealth is not like that. You cannot be satisfied with the inner wealth that you already have. You have to increase it. Otherwise you will be in trouble. There will be many days when you will get up early in the morning doubting yourself. If you do not increase your inner wealth, then doubt-poison will devour you.

We expect not only from the world but from ourselves. When we expect from the world, if we do not get the thing that we expect, we become sad for five minutes. But when we expect something from ourselves and we do not get it, the whole day is ruined. Very often our expectation of ourselves we take more seriously than our expectation of somebody else.