“To reach God’s Palace
You do not need an outer guide,
But you do need an inner cry.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Whatever we might imagine God’s Palace to be – whether as a place, an ideal, a realm of consciousness or state of being – it is certainly going to be fantastical, magical, blissful, thrilling and fulfilling in every way, our ultimate ideal. If the only thing needed to reach God’s Palace is an inner cry, then feeding our inner cry must be our first urgent duty, or else our ideal will forever remain unreachable. Which brings forth our next question:
“How to feed the inner cry?
Just try to claim
A higher life
As your own.”
– Sri Chinmoy
If we are satisfied with our life as is, then there is nothing to stir our inner cry into action.
Complacency captures us, our aspiration deflates and intensity dwindles as we slide into lethargy and spiritual decline. To fire it up, our inner cry needs an ideal to reach for, to yearn for, to aspire towards. By always setting our sights higher – longing for a better consciousness, a higher life, a fuller, more divine existence – our inner cry is enlivened and comes into its own.
Once our inner cry is engaged, naturally it longs to increase and intensify itself, for our cry knows there is no end to its work, no ceiling to its sky. The higher our aspiration, the more our inner cry is fed, the more powerful it becomes:
“The capacity is aspiration; the capacity comes from the inner cry. If you really do need God, if you desperately need God, then your standard is very high. If God comes first, Truth comes first, Light comes first in your life, then automatically the inner cry increases.”
– Sri Chinmoy