Part V

SCS 88-92. Questions and answers following //A true seeker.//

Question: How can one know God when he is carrying on his day-to-day earthly responsibilities?

Sri Chinmoy: He has to know that what he is calling responsibility is not something thrust upon him; it is something necessary in his life. Responsibility is something very painful. Human beings don’t want to be responsible for anything. But necessity plays a role of paramount importance. If someone feels it is a supreme necessity to take care of the members of his family, to do everything that is needed in his family, then he is doing absolutely the right thing. At that time God is acting in and through him.

If an individual takes his tasks as a responsibility, then he is shouldering a heavy burden. On his shoulders he is placing a very heavy burden. But if he takes his life as a supreme necessity for God-realisation, God-revelation and God-manifestation, then no matter what he does, what he says or what he becomes, there will always be satisfaction, abiding satisfaction. Here it is an inner urge that he is fulfilling. It is not that from the outside world somebody has forced him to do something and he is doing it. He is under no compulsion to do it unwillingly. If we accept life as the supreme necessity to love God and serve God in mankind, then we can satisfy ourselves and we can satisfy the rest of the world in the midst of multifarious activities.

If we take life as a necessity, then there is all joy; we do the needful in order to derive happiness. But if we take the world as something foreign to us, as a stranger who is not part and parcel of our life and with whom we have not established our oneness, then naturally anything that we do we will feel was done either under compulsion or because we have a big heart. But if necessity prompts us, then we are not showing any kind of compassion; we are only trying to bring to the fore the oneness-reality that we have within us by loving and serving the human beings around us.