Question: There is disharmony between my parents and myself because my father is an atheist.

Sri Chinmoy: What is wrong with being an atheist? You believe in God’s Love and he believes in something else. There is nobody on earth who does not believe in something. He will believe in his food, or in his body, or in a flower or in football or in science. He has to believe in something that he has seen or he has to believe in nothing. So tell your father, “You are an atheist, but you believe in something.”

You believe in God; your father believes in something else. Even nothing is a reality. Our Indian philosophy says, Neti, neti — "Not this, not that.” This nothing also comes from the mind and heart. You can tell your father to have faith in that nothing, and he will see your God in this nothing. You can say, “I say ‘everything’. You stick to your nothing. Eventually you will see that inside my everything is your nothing, and inside your nothing is my everything.”

It is inside the finite that God is manifesting His Infinity. Right now an iota of light is everything to us. But when we go high, even Infinity is nothing because God has given us infinite hunger. We are talking about the supreme realisation. Today your father does not understand what we are talking about, but one day he will understand because he is going to realise this very thing himself.

So do not worry about your father. Tell him only to have faith in what he believes and in what he has. If he sticks to his faith, his problems will be solved. Just encourage him to derive satisfaction from what he believes is true in his life. If he is not satisfied, you can say to him, “You are not getting satisfaction from your beliefs, but I am getting satisfaction from mine, so how can you say that I am wrong? Why don’t you try my path?”