Question: How can I fight comfort in the lower consciousness?

Sri Chinmoy: What you call comfort, I wish to call pleasure. Comfort and pleasure go together. Pleasure is a form of passion, a form of destruction. Until the vital is completely purified, the human consciousness feels that pleasure is something very sweet.

Unconsciously a child takes poison. Just because unconsciously he is drinking poison, do you think that he will not be killed? Unconsciously a child places his finger in fire and he is burned. Just because he is not conscious of doing something, does it mean that he will not suffer the consequences? Since you have accepted the spiritual life, you do not consciously enter into the lower vital world. But unconsciously, in your mind, you do enter. On the physical plane you can remain thousands of miles away from the vital world. But mentally, if you cherish lower vital, emotional thoughts, destructive thoughts, naturally the mind will be destroyed.

If your aspiration is constant, then the burning flame inside you is climbing up, up, up. But if the flame is not burning, the pull of the vital becomes very strong, very strong. Again, if the flame is burning upward all the time, how can it go downward? When the flame is burning very brightly, the vital feels, “I have no place here.” The lower vital has no chance to remain in that particular person. Then the lower vital gives the death blow, a most fatal blow. At that time the aspirant has to be very careful; he has to brave that blow. If he does brave that blow, then the lower vital feels, “Oh, he does not need me.”

You want to have perfection in your nature and you want to have illumination. If you constantly feel that you want to become perfection and nothing else, then you are bound to remain at your own height. Gradually, from this height you will climb up to the highest height, which is your goal. Your own height right now is your upward aspiration and nothing else. Your ultimate goal is bound to come if you constantly strive to stay where you are right now, in your climbing aspiration.

Whoever wants to give up the spiritual life just because he is not making considerable progress or because he is falling down from time to time, is making a terrible mistake. And then something more I wish to say. After accepting the spiritual life, if you consciously leave it, then hostile forces torture you most ruthlessly and the divine forces show considerable indifference. If you don’t accept the spiritual life, wonderful. Sleep, sleep; the time has not yet come for you to wake up. But if you already have started to run, and then you go again to sleep, at that time ignorance comes and covers you totally.

So, please run towards the sun. Then darkness has to leave you. Do not be afraid of your faults. Only be conscious of your height, conscious of your goal. If you are conscious of your height and you are conscious of your goal, then there can be no fall. But if there is no conscious awareness, then every moment is dismal darkness.