Living in a mind bound by time and space, we assume everything must age, must have a beginning and an end. How then, might we transcend the mind, how might we step beyond the progression of time into the eternal, where the very concept of age disappears?
Only one faculty of ours which is itself ageless, can take us beyond the mind, beyond time, beyond age, to where newness reigns supreme, as Sri Chinmoy writes:
“Is there anything that can never be old? Yes, there is something and that thing is my heart’s inner cry. This inner cry is ever new. Every day it assumes a new prayer-form, a new concentration-form, a new meditation-form. Every day it achieves something new from God. You may say that every day you can pray, but how can your prayer or meditation be new? But I wish to say that it is not only possible and practical, but inevitable.
“You may think Peace, Light, Bliss, Power and a few other attributes of God are enough for you. But I wish to say it is not true. God is infinite, and His attributes are infinite. So easily you can have an infinite variety of prayer, concentration and meditation. Each prayer can easily be new. Each concentration can easily be new. Each meditation can easily be new.
“Prayer defies age. Concentration defies age. Meditation defies age. Our inner cry is the mother and father of our prayer, concentration and meditation. So let us make friends with this inner cry. Let our body, vital, mind and heart make friends with this inner cry. With inner cry our entire existence, outer and inner, will become an ever new existence-reality, an ever new, ever fulfilling Dream of God in and through us.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Intensity is required everywhere and always in our life. We need intensity to focus ourselves to accomplish any task; to maintain our alertness; to perform at our best; to give our utmost. Without intensity, our concentration and meditation are pointless; our aspiration and dedication, fruitless; our spiritual quest, destined for hopeless failure. Intensity is the oxygen of every spiritual quality: inner peace, simplicity, sincerity, purity, faith, truth, love, devotion, surrender, light, delight – all depend utterly on intensity.
As a central pillar of our spiritual life, we must surely place intensity very high on our spiritual wish list. Where and how can we find intensity, cultivate and maintain it? How do we intensify intensity, how keep our intensity intense?
If we imagine intensity as something we must struggle and wrestle to attain and maintain, we are mistaken. Sri Chinmoy sees intensity in another light:
“Intensity does not mean
To forcefully push or pull.
Intensity is the inner
Burning cry.”
– Sri Chinmoy
So, intensity is not required to fuel our inner cry; rather, intensity is itself revealed and ignited by our inner cry. Our inner cry is synonymous with intensity; where our inner cry is, intensity is.
As Sri Chinmoy describes, we do not need to force the inner cry, we only need surrender to it and allow its rising flames to consume the confusion and delusion of our vital, the clatter and clutter of our mind. And we do not need to go in search of intensity; we need only allow the inner cry to claim us and flame intensely through our physical, vital, mind and heart. As a flame shines with light, so intensity radiates from our inner cry.
Wherever and whenever intensity is required in your life, simply invoke and apply your inner cry.
“You will find the smile of silence
Inside your heart’s sleepless cry.
Cry is the night.
Inside the night is the day.
As the night holds the day,
So the cry holds the smile.”
– Sri Chinmoy
You can throw away all the books on meditation, avoid all the lectures, workshops, podcasts and retreats: this simple poem contains the entire secret and truth of meditation.
The “smile of silence” is the goal of our meditation. This is not the outer silence, the absence of sounds, noises and distractions. This is the inner silence, the silent mind and tranquil vital – which we discover in the absence of thoughts, disturbing emotions, desires and attachments. The “smile of silence” is our pure being. It is not that inner silence is sometimes smiling and sometimes not – our inner silence exudes, embodies and is the perennial source of happiness. Just as smile is happiness, and happiness is fulfillment, so is inner silence happiness. Inner silence, smile, happiness and fulfillment are one and the same – various aspects of the heart-home of our meditation.
And where do we find this smile of silence, this glowing happiness and flowing fulfillment, this haven of meditation? – “Inside your heart’s sleepless cry.”
Here is the ultimate paradox of life. We associate crying with sorrow, distress, suffering, helplessness; and we are aiming for peace, happiness, fulfillment. Yet our cry, our intense inner yearning, the focus and engine of our meditation, is parent of our silence-smile, its seed and source. When our cry is genuine, our “smile of silence” inevitably blossoms, as night follows day.
The action of meditation is cry; its being is smile. As silence is hidden inside sound, so:
“Inside the night is the day.
As the night holds the day,
So the cry holds the smile.”
“Each cry
Is
An inner unfailing revelation.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Read this poem using the mind: it can immediately be doubted. Feel this poem as an inner cry of the heart: it shines as its own immediate truth-revelation.
Our inner wealth is limitless, unfathomable, unimaginable. We know we have inner capacities, qualities and experiences that are beyond our conscious reach, but we have no way of claiming or grasping them as long as we remain bound by our mind’s limited capacity to perceive, to understand and to know. The mind’s headlamp casts a very small circle of dim light, outside of which the mind cannot see, and dare not tread. The inner wealth we seek lies beyond the mind’s furthest reach.
The mind’s instruments of perception – reason, analysis, deduction – have licence to operate only within the jurisdiction of the finite, beyond which they have no utility. The spiritual realm is accessible only to our heart’s instrument – our inner cry.
The moment we apply our inner cry, we step beyond the bounds of our mind’s imagination and fly into our heart’s skies of infinite possibilities and ever-blossoming realities. Itself arising from our soul’s beatitude, our inner cry ushers us to our mutual home of infinitude, revealing all that our mind does not, and cannot know.
Seeing, feeling, discovering the spiritual wealth revealed by our inner cry, we cannot help but assimilate and grow, more and more into that deeper, higher, vaster self within. All that we might ever become, awaits the beck and call of our inner cry. There is no telling how far and how high our inner cry can and will carry us, as Sri Chinmoy affirms:
“By virtue of our sleepless inner cries,
We definitely can enter into
A phenomenal state of consciousness.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Crying for transcendence, our inner cry must constantly transcend. Asked how can we go higher and deeper, Sri Chinmoy responded with this beautiful, powerful truth:
“Once we have reached a certain level of consciousness in our meditation, we have to feel that this is not our ultimate goal. Our goal is not stationary; all the time we have to go beyond, beyond, beyond. God Himself is transcending His own Infinity, Eternity and Immortality and, as children of God, we also have to constantly transcend ourselves. We can go beyond our present-day realisation of our inner cry. Because we have an inner cry, already we have attained a certain height in the spiritual life. But the inner cry that we have right now is not enough to take us any further. So its intensity has to be increased, not by hook or by crook, but by bringing to the fore more of the capacity that we have deep within us.
“We have unlimited capacity, but we have only brought to the fore a certain amount. We have to bring forward more of our inner capacity so that we can transcend our present level of consciousness and go far, far beyond it. We have to feel all the time that we exist only for God, that we live only for God. It is not enough to feel that we live half the time for the fulfilment of God and half the time for something else. No, we have to feel that we live only for our aspiration, our dedication and our surrender to God. Everything that we have and everything that we are is for God-realisation, God-manifestation and God-satisfaction. If we feel this, then naturally the intensity of our inner cry will be high, higher, highest.”
– Sri Chinmoy
“There is a special inner cry
For every hour,
And I wish to be that inner cry
To illumine the human in me,
To manifest the divine in me
And to satisfy the Supreme in me.”
– Sri Chinmoy
This divinely beautiful, supremely significant poem is at once aspiration, instruction, revelation, illumination, and satisfaction. The poem, itself a perfect cry, describes and expresses the nature, purpose and function of the inner cry across the span of our spiritual quest.
“There is a special inner cry
For every hour… “
Our inner cry cannot be something static or fixed, nor a ritual, nor routine habit; it must constantly flow, grow, learn, evolve, adapt to the nature of the hour, the challenge of the present and need of the moment, seeking the best way to surmount each obstacle and to raise our consciousness through continual transcendence.
“…And I wish to be that inner cry… “
Our inner cry is not something we possess or direct; it is that very thing we must become, in all our being. We may have wants, desires and needs; we may direct our thoughts, intentions and actions; but the inner cry we must simply be – in being, we become its flow and grow into its fulfilment.
“…To illumine the human in me,
To manifest the divine in me
And to satisfy the Supreme in me.”
From our human perspective, our inner cry is focussed on our illumination. As dawn overpowers night, as our inner cry rises and illumines the human in us, our divine self is revealed, blooms, blossoms and is manifested. Each step leads to the next. As our divine self is manifested, our Supreme Self – composer, director and singer/songwriter of our inner cry – is satisfied. Our inner cry reaches its source, fulfilled.
In the beginning, our inner cry requires all our love, focus and attention. We cannot allow any distraction at that time. But once our inner cry is well established, it generates its own forward and upward momentum. Then, we are able to operate effectively in the outer world without our inner cry being affected.
Sri Chinmoy was asked, how one can learn to speak with the Supreme during the day all the time. He answered:
“You can speak to the Supreme at every moment just by remembering one thing, and that thing is your silent inner cry. Always you have to cry in silence, inwardly. The moment you cry in silence, you are bound to feel His Presence inside you. And if you feel His Presence inside you, you will be able to speak to Him. You can do your office work, enter into your household activity, speak to your friends; you can do everything, you will do everything. But while talking and working and mixing with people, try to feel an inner cry. Nobody will know what is happening inside your heart. They will only know what is in your mind. You are telling them something and they are hearing you. But what is happening inside you, only you will know. Easily you can do more than one thing at a time. While you are driving the car, you are watching the road and your hand is on the steering wheel and you are pressing the gas pedal. How many things you can do at once! Similarly, while you are talking to people in the outer world, you can easily cry inwardly in the inner world. So if you can cry in the inner world constantly, you are bound to speak to God.”
– Sri Chinmoy
“God asks you to pay
Sleepless and breathless attention
To your heart’s inner cry.”
– Sri Chinmoy
“Always the inner cries
And the inner tears
Have to be kept
In good health.”
– Sri Chinmoy
If a train is heading to where we most want to go, we will do what we must to obtain a ticket on that train.
Our inner cry is the ticket to our destination; the passageway to our soul; our lifeline to God; our protection against ignorance and spiritual regression; our passport to happiness, progress, fulfilment, perfection, illumination and ultimate satisfaction. Of all our possessions, attributes, qualities and capacities, our inner cry is paramount, the only truly indispensable reality in our lives.
Therefore, protecting, cultivating and enhancing our inner cry is simply our top priority. The outer flows always from the inner. To “keep our inner cries in good health” means to tend the roots of the tree, for the roots are the tree’s source; the health of the roots determines the tree’s stature, appearance and wellbeing. If we neglect our inner cry, it fades and withers, loses its power and effectiveness – and everything else in our life, inner and outer, the branches, leaves, flowers and fruits of our life-tree, suffer and wither accordingly.
We can imagine that we exist only as our inner cry: we do not have a body, vital, mind or even a heart – our entire being, all that we have, all that we are and all that we will ever need, is our inner cry and nothing else. Feel that we can exist without food, water or even air, but we cannot exist without our treasure of treasures, our inner cry – for only inside the nest of our inner cry, can we be truly safe and our destination assured.
For Sri Chinmoy, the inner cry is the interplay of self-offering between the seeker and God. We are crying to please God by offering everything we have and everything we are to God, but God is also crying to please us by offering everything He has and is to us. The problem is, we do not fully accept God’s offering.
In Sri Chinmoy’s words:
“If we can offer everything at the Feet of God, then God enters into us with His Infinity. When we see Infinity entering into us, it is the cry of fulfilment that we see within and without.
“So, let us cry. Let us feel at every moment the crying need for something that we do not have, that we do not know how to embody. In the inner world we have everything: Peace, Light, Bliss, God. But in the outer world we are lacking these very things. If we can pay more attention to the inner world, naturally the presiding deities of the inner world will be more pleased with us. Then, they will tell us to use them, they will be at our disposal. If we are really devoted to the inner life, spiritual life, we must sincerely and soulfully invoke the inner guidance, the inmost Pilot, the Supreme. We have every right to invoke His Light, His Peace, His Bliss; and He, with His deepest Joy and Concern will fulfil our aspiration. He is eager, He is crying twenty-four hours a day at every moment to please us. But we are not trying to be pleased. Even if we feel that it is not enough, let us now try to be pleased with the thing that He offers us; whatever He gives let us take with utmost gratitude.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Sri Chinmoy has spoken in powerful, evocative, direct words about the nature of our inner cry and how to cultivate it:
“How can we have inner peace? We can have it just by crying, crying for inner peace. Now, how can we cry for the inner peace? It is not easy to cry sincerely. How can we cry sincerely? We can cry by looking at our own image. If we cannot perceive our face without a mirror, we must stand in front of a mirror and see how helpless, how hopeless we are. We will see that millions of thoughts come and float right on our face. Now at this point, we must not be depressed. What we have to do is feel, ‘Is this my face? Is this my lot? Is this what I actually look like? I want to change my face, my fate; but how? By feeling tremendous inner confidence that I am God’s child. Until now, I have allowed myself to be eaten away by ignorance. Now I will not allow anything or anybody to devour me. I will only allow God to devour me. Let Him eat me up.’
“When we can have that kind of offering or feeling in our life, that we are ready to be eaten by God, piece by piece, each drop of blood, then we will see that a cry automatically comes. When we are ready to give, there comes a cry: ‘God, take me; what I have and what I am, take me. What I have is absolute ignorance, within and without. What I am right now is Your infinite Consolation and Your infinite Compassion and my very limited determination. The only thing I have is a bundle of ignorance on my shoulders.’”
– Sri Chinmoy
“If you do not have
A sincere heart-cry,
You will not be able to fight
Against the hostile forces
In the inner world.”
– Sri Chinmoy
The inner cry embodies and reveals one of the deepest truths and seeming contradictions of our spiritual life: our utter helplessness is our greatest strength.
Our inner cry is most sincere and effective when we feel we are completely lost, clueless and helpless, when we are crying out to God or our soul to save us, protect us, forgive us, guide us, illumine us and take charge of our life. For when we surrender our limited, little strength and understanding, we open ourselves to the flow of limitless power and wisdom-light within. Our inner cry invokes and binds us to this higher power. Reliant on this power, we are indomitable: no limitation can bind us, no negative thought or emotion can capture us.
“A genuine inner cry
Is of paramount importance
To outdistance
Ignorance-night.”
– Sri Chinmoy
When asked, what is the best way for us to break our ties with ignorance, Sri Chinmoy answered unequivocally:
“The only way for you to break your ties with ignorance is through your constant, conscious inner cry. When you pray, meditate and aspire, sometimes you do it consciously and sometimes you do it unconsciously. It is your obligation to be conscious all the time. When you pray and meditate you have to do it consciously. Your constant and conscious inner cry can alone free you from ignorance. It is the only answer.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Far from being an expression of weakness, our inner cry is our greatest strength, our most reliable protector, defender and fighter against ignorance, within and without.
Our inner cry is the engine of our progress. And as we grow, so our inner cry itself evolves and progresses – refining, expanding and intensifying itself – discovering ever-new forms of expression and aiming at ever-new heights – through burning desire to yearning aspiration; through pitiful prayer to bountiful meditation; through the stream of love and the river of devotion to the ocean of surrender; through liberation to realisation to revelation to manifestation, and beyond. Our inner cry has no beginning and no end: every ultimate fulfilment, a new starting point.
Our inner cry will express itself through whatever form or language is required for our progress; finding its way through inconscience, instinct and intelligence; through the unconscious, conscious and superconscious; through our weaknesses and strengths; incapacities and talents; sins and virtues; likes and dislikes; failures and successes; victories and defeats. Our inner cry spans our knowing and unknowing, the known, unknown and unknowable within us and beyond us.
The inner cry is the life force of desire, the pure heart of prayer and the sure soul of aspiration.
The inner cry is insatiable and invincible. When it reaches its limits, when it achieves all it can on one level of consciousness and becomes a barrier to its own further purpose, the inner cry does not hesitate to consume itself, to liberate, reinvent and supercharge itself: aspiration obliterates desire; meditation engulfs prayer; manifestation subsumes realisation and revelation.
The inner cry is God’s Victory assured.
Older than the universe, the inner cry is always new, ever fresh. The inner cry does not form any conception or expectation of how or when it will be fulfilled; it does not need to. Ever unfulfilled, ever unfulfillable, the inner cry stands as the architect, guarantor and witness of its own perpetual fulfilment.
How can we discern whether a cry is coming from our heart or our vital? Sri Chinmoy explains the difference:
“If it comes from the heart, then this inner cry will definitely give you joy. The vital and the heart are very close to one another. So we sometimes mistake the heart for the vital or the vital for the heart. If the cry comes from the vital, then there will be depression in your outer life. But if the cry comes from the heart, if it is a real cry, then this mounting cry itself is joy. When we intensely cry for God in our meditation or in our prayers, we do not have to wait for the results. At that time the cry itself is joy.
“The vital is very tricky. It tries to take the place of the heart. The heart is compassionate. It allows the vital to do this.
“Again, if it is a real cry from the heart, a burning cry, the cry itself has joy; it is joy itself. But many times when we feel that our cry is very deep, it is actually the cry of the vital’s suffering. The vital makes us feel that our cry is coming from the inmost recesses of our heart. In this way, the vital’s cry creates problems. Although the intense cry is there, it is not the intense cry of the heart. The cry of the vital will eventually meet with frustration because it is founded upon expectation. But when we have a very intense inner cry or longing for God, we will find that in our longing we are getting so much joy. Even if God does not come and stand in front of us, we do not mind.”
– Sri Chinmoy
