Question: Could you comment on the saying, "Seeing is believing"?

Sri Chinmoy: When you live in the ordinary world, the unaspiring world, you have to see in order to believe. But when you aspire, first you believe the truth and then you see the truth. You have faith in something, and your faith is the precursor of your being. Normally you say, "Seeing is believing." But if you have belief in something, then only you can say that believing is seeing.

You have to have faith in your Master. You have to have faith that your Master is a realised soul and that he can grant you realisation. It is not only the Master who decides when to give you God-realisation: it is the Supreme who tells the Master the exact hour when realisation will take place. You are the instrument of God. If you have faith in your own life, that is to say, in the life of aspiration, and if you have faith in the divine Grace, then you can say that you are going to see, feel and become the Truth. So faith is the precursor of realisation. When you actually realise the Truth, at that time you will see that realisation is totally one with faith. Faith sees what is coming ahead; faith becomes totally one with what you are going to realise.

So the higher you go the more clearly you will be able to see that faith is clearing the way. It is your own faith in yourself, in your spiritual Master and in your life of aspiration that is hastening your realisation. What is realisation? Realisation means that you know that you are not the finite, you are the Infinite. It is in the finite that the Infinite is playing its favourite tune. You are also revelation, the revelation inside your Master. You are the revelation that is operating in and through your Master. When the Infinite plays through the finite and uses the finite as his very instrument, and when the finite can claim the Infinite as its own in the field of realisation and in the field of manifestation, then only God the Infinite and God the Finite become totally fulfilled in each other.