Meditation Matters

No matter what outer situation we find ourselves in, there is always a meditation technique that is applicable in the moment. In our spiritual life, every moment is a unique gift to be treasured, a golden opportunity for progress and growth.
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Intuitively, we know our birthdays are special, which is why we celebrate them. If our values are material and social, we celebrate with gifts and indulging in outer pleasures with friends. If our values are spiritual, we will give priority to our source – our soul, and its Source – God, remembering and focusing on the purpose for which our soul took birth in this form at this time.
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It is our soul, with God’s sanction, which chooses the time of our birth, and the environment into which we will be born, including the location, country, culture, and specifically, our parents and family connections.
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In all devotional paths, God is approached in a personal form. Any personal form must have all the human attributes, including feet. If God is to be approachable, God has to walk on earth.
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Though loneliness and boredom both arise from the barrenness of the mind, we can take both as cries from our heart, yearning for space and nourishment. The solution for both is the same: quieten the mind, dive into your heart – boredom and loneliness are banished.
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It’s easy to say: “meditate in the heart, don’t meditate in the mind!” – but being in the mind, can be like finding ourselves caught in a high-walled maze of hedges, with no clue how to find our way out.
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All that time we spend practising meditation techniques in the early morning, has to be put to practical use in the challenging moments of our lives: otherwise, what is its utility? The very purpose of practising any skill, is to improve our performance: in this case, our ‘performance’ is the living of our life.
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Like chasing the clouds away to reveal a clear sky, when doubt, fear and sorrow-clouds are banished by cheerfulness, we attain tremendous clarity, purity and certainty, the very qualities which combine to engender and nourish bravery. Cheerfulness clears the negativity-clouds to reveal our heart’s bravery-sky.
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We are God’s arms and legs, eyes, ears and beating heart in this world. God’s need for us encompasses and subsumes our need for God. Through merely giving God our attention, we gain everything God has and God is.
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The village had no water. A government expert advised the villagers to each dig a well in their back yards, to get water for their daily needs. One villager starting digging, but after one hour, when he became hungry, he went in search of a good restaurant. After lunch he continued to the pub and joined some friends for a drink.
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We are eddies swirling in the river, and this river is God – but we are so busy being eddies, we don’t notice God all around us, we don’t notice we are flowing with God, one with God, inseparable from God. We are clouds floating in the God-sky; grains of sand of the God-beach; flowers, fruits and leaves of the God-tree; little fingers of the God-body, utterly absorbed in being this little finger.
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Our breath brings us a profound spiritual message: the message of oneness. All humans, animals, trees and plants are at once breathing the same air, the one earth-atmosphere. Though breathing through countless lungs, we are all sharing one breath – the breath of life. So it is, that our one breath in myriad breaths, connects us directly with every living breathing being on this planet: with every human, each animal, tree and tiniest plant.
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Fasting cannot be considered a spiritual practice in its own right, and will never bring us to enlightenment, though occasional fasting can certainly benefit our meditation by helping to purify our physical system, clarify our mind and brighten our outlook.
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What quality do we need to cultivate, to develop this capacity for identification, and hence, assimilation? Sri Chinmoy speaks of the primary role of gratitude in our hearts…
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Just as there are both inner and outer steps that help us to prepare for meditation, so there are several inner and outer factors which help us assimilate our meditation.
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To do anything well, requires our preparation. Whether climbing a mountain, sitting for an exam, baking a pie, driving to the beach, or even going to bed, we need to make suitable preparations in both our outer environment and inner focus.
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We want to have everything, and we want to be perfect. We sometimes expect that we should be able to have everything and be perfect for the asking. Indeed, many of us take up meditation with the idea that its practice will enable us to attain perfection, while experiencing and possessing everything we fancy.
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Consciousness is expressed in myriad forms and levels. Each level is its own realm of being. From each level of consciousness to the next is a progression, an evolution. From stone to plant consciousness, from plant to animal, from animal to human, each level is a preparation, containing within itself the seeds or precursor of the next, just as the caterpillar embodies the future butterfly.
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This final part of our series on “The Inner Cry”, comprises Sri Chinmoy’s answers to two questions, and two poems. Both questions concern the process and requirements to progress from our present ignorance to our future perfection.
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In our outer lives, prosperity is associated with material wealth and riches, popularity and power, comfort and luxury, abundance, wellbeing, winning, high achievement and success in any field. Yet outer prosperity is fleeting, meaningless, unsustainable and unfulfilling if it does not flow from a sincere inner cry.
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We can develop the inner cry by giving more importance to what we really need in our life. When we give importance to our true necessity, then automatically our inner cry, our inner sincerity, is bound to increase.
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Crying and smiling are generally considered to be opposites, and mutually exclusive – we cry when we are sad; we smile when we are happy. And some might consider that an emphasis on the inner cry in our spiritual life, might be reflected in a seriousness or sternness, if not sadness, in our outer expression.
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Sometimes, despite our efforts in meditation, we feel a sense of barrenness in our life; a lack of excitement, joy, purpose, colour, light, interest, motivation, inspiration and even hope. This feeling can be fleeting, or it can set in and permeate our consciousness; it may lead to us becoming lethargic, irritable, sarcastic, careless, callous or depressed.
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Our Beloved Supreme, our Lord Absolute, our highest Self: by whatever words, Names, qualities or attributes we imagine, conceive of, or relate to God; whatever we believe, feel, know, or know that we do not know about God; whether we pray to, concentrate, meditate or contemplate on God – there is one need, one constant, one truth, one necessity – to answer our questions, fulfill our need, reveal and lead us to our goal…
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The spiritual life is not a life of compromise. Either you accept God on His own terms or you accept the outer life on its terms; there is no in-between. You cannot be fifty per cent for God and fifty per cent for the ordinary, unaspiring world. If you try to compromise in that way, you are neither here nor there; you are finished.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Just as water will always eventually find its way to the sea, so our inner cry will eventually find its way around and beyond any restriction, control, language, beliefs or understanding we seek to clothe it in.
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Everything depends on the heart’s cries and tears. If we really want to become a good person or do something for the world, we have to feel not the tears of the eyes, but the tears of the heart.
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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.
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If we feel inwardly the value of God-realisation in our life, then the so-called hardship that we go through is nothing. If we value the goal, then we are bound to walk along the path.
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People cry for name, fame, earthly achievement, success and progress and so many things. They are right in their own way. But you should start crying inwardly from this moment on for joy, peace of mind and the awakening of your inner consciousness.
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Change is the greatest challenge we all face. Always there is something within us which resists change, no matter how eagerly we yearn for it. According to Sri Chinmoy, there is only one agent capable of changing us and transforming our nature.
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As our inner cry eclipses our mind, the portals of our heart open and we find ourselves basking in our inner sunshine, flowing and growing into our perfection-potential. Our inner cries not only make our spiritual progress possible, but inevitable; they are the spark plug, fuel, engine and accelerator of our progress-life.
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Sri Chinmoy was once asked, if there is a specific way to accelerate the attainment of our God-realisation. His reply encapsulates the entire purpose and function of the inner cry.
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The inner cry is God’s secret mechanism for our illumination and perfection.
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The home of our inner cry is our soul, God’s representative within us: trace our inner cry to its source, its home, to find ourselves face to face with our soul, resonant with God’s Bliss. We have only to keep our inner cry always alive, always active: then by feeling it, loving it, treasuring and embracing our inner cry, we return with it to its home, God’s Home in us, our soul.
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Our inner cry is the engine that invokes inspiration, engages our aspiration, activates our hidden capacities and qualities, gives voice to our deepest yearnings, disciplines our vital energies, clarifies and focuses our mind, continually expands our heart, and drives us ever onward to self-discovery and fulfillment.
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Our conscious inner cry is our instrument, inspired and directed by our aspiring will. Our super-conscious, inmost cry is the executing voice of the Supreme’s Will, shaping and employing us as God’s instrument in His cosmic Game.
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If our heart is devoid of an inner cry, we cannot pretend we are leading a spiritual life. The inner cry is the beating heart of spirituality: arising from the Infinite and the Eternal, and reaching ever towards the Infinite and the Eternal. The inner cry is at once our most sacred gift from God, our most precious offering to God.
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We cannot know how good a mango tastes by hearing others’ descriptions of it, no matter how vivid and evocative their words: we have to take the mango and eat it for ourselves. So, we cannot know or experience the inner cry by reading or theorising about it.
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Problems are inextricably linked with our thought process; our thinking mind is a problem factory. Problems arise from, are nourished and perpetuated by thoughts. When we are successful in clearing our mind of thoughts, so-called problems magically evaporate.
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The inner cry is an alarm siren from the spiritual realm signifying its neglect, demanding our attention and action. It is the announcement and growing claim of our heart, a piercing ray intruding into our thought-clouded mental consciousness to summon forth our blazing higher self.
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Our inner cry does not so much calm our mind, as overwhelm it, flooding extraneous thoughts, distractions, mental and emotional flotsam and jetsam in its sheer imperative urgency. Whatever card the mind plays to hold us captive – its brilliant ideas, its doubts and fears – the compelling authenticity and urgency of the inner cry trumps it every time.
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Our inner cry is the access key not only to today’s meditation, but to every meditation and all spiritual progress from this moment forward. Our meditation paves the way for our unfolding self-discovery and ultimate Self-realisation.
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Just as light and darkness cannot coexist in the same space, even so the sleep of ignorance cannot persist when we are consumed with an inner cry for illumination. Rather than worry about our ignorance, we need only to treasure and nurture our inner cry.
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Gratitude is the most precious attainment in our spiritual life. Gratitude keeps our spiritual heart open, fresh and pure, a natural home for our higher self to grow, play and flourish.
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The best way to raise your consciousness is through inner cry. Then, in order to maintain your consciousness there on the highest level, you have to establish considerable purity in the vital.
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A disciplined life can come from only one thing, and that is aspiration, our inner cry. At any hour, that inner cry reaches God, and God is bound to fulfil that inner cry.
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Our inner cry is the agency of peace, light and bliss; the gateway to happiness, guardian of truth and guarantor of perfection. It at once fills and fulfills, uplifts and enlightens, justifies and glorifies our existence.
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The inner cry is not only the spark which ignites our aspiration, stirs our inner yearning and prompts our self-search; it is the very flaming of aspiration itself; and the spreading, all-illumining light which answers the very questions it posed, and fulfills the very longing it voiced forth.
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Sincerity and the inner cry are interdependent. Each has the other’s back: they protect, nurture and depend on each other. An inner cry is sincerity’s choice; sincerity, the inner cry’s voice.
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Our inner cry impels us always forward, inward and upward. The moment our inner cry recedes, our progress stalls and we start to fall backwards, slide outwards, slip downwards. Our inner cry envelopes us with energy and dynamism; when it ceases, we lapse into lethargy and stagnation.

The inner cry is our visa to pass beyond the mind, into the realms of meditation, spiritual progress and self-transcendence. Yet this visa must constantly be renewed with inner purity, sincerity and intensity, or else it lapses as the inner cry fades.
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The inner cry costs nothing, and gives everything. Invisible, it reveals all to be seen. Unknowable, it makes everything known. The more intense the budding inner cry, the more radiant the blossoming outer smile.

The inner cry is the secret that answers all questions, the key that unlocks all mysteries, the treasure that fulfills every need. The inner cry is the nourishment that sumptuously feeds all, the peacemaker who resolves all disputes, our protector who slays every dragon.
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A child cries with utmost sincerity, intensity and commitment. There is no calculation, hidden agenda or ulterior motive. The child is not even thinking of why or for what they cry; they just cry with their whole being, becoming their cry and nothing else, with no part of themself observing, reserved or standing aloof. It’s all in.
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Our inner cry is instinctive, intelligent and intuitive, and operates on every level of our being – physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual.
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When you are identified with this inner being, you will see the inner being is crying for you, has been crying for you and will cry for you for eternity unless and until you have become inseparably one with the Absolute Truth.
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As a young boy, he had left his home in search of happiness, vowing never to return.
Long years of living and working in various places, many adventures and mixing with people of all types, travelling, studying, fighting and exploring, brought him no closer to satisfying his need.
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Imagine your spiritual heart is a vast palace. Peace, love, joy, beauty, power, wisdom, sweetness, subtlety – each has its own room, its own domain on one of the many floors and wings of your vast heart-palace.
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Silence is the air that meditation breathes. Yes, we can be told about posture, breath control and chanting mantras, of the importance of meditating early in the morning – these are peripheral details. Yet the essence of meditation is wrapped in silence, protected by silence and blossoms within silence. Silence baffles us, a language with which we are unfamiliar: how are we going to learn the art of meditation if we don’t know its basic vocabulary?
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“Did you receive any help in learning the alphabet? Did you require a teacher to help you in mastering your musical instrument? Were you given instruction to enable you to obtain your degree? If you needed a helper to do these things, do you not also require a teacher who can guide you to the knowledge of the Divine, the wisdom of the Infinite? That teacher is your Guru and no one else.”
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While the finite can measure the finite, only the infinite can know the infinite. Our present limited awareness is like a small magnifying glass, offering us some help in exploring our immediate vicinity; while to discover and claim our larger, higher, infinite self, we need an interstellar telescope, capable of viewing galaxies far beyond our present perception.
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Most of our familiar media engages our mind and vital by capturing our attention outward to the externals of our being and our world. Meditation engages our heart and soul by focusing our attention inward to the essentials of our being and our very existence.
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Our wealth we use to obtain all the things we need for our success, progress, happiness and wellbeing. Our treasures are the things we value most and like to keep close to us – keepsakes, photos of loved ones, items of inspiration or memorabilia. Our protection and insurance keep us safe from the prospect of poverty, hunger, depression, failure and ruin. Our identification shows ourselves and the world who we really are.
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Not how long – not the quantity of our meditation, but how eager the aspiration we bring – the quality of our meditation – is the key to unlock the doorway and gain admittance to our inner palace of peace, light and bliss.
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The question immediately arises: what if one cannot meditate at the same time or place on a given day or for an extended time? What if you work shift work with varying hours each day? What if you are traveling across time zones, and cannot be at the same place even for two days in a row?
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So many of our problems and shortcomings arise from impurity in our mind and vital. Lack of purity in our thoughts, feelings and perceptions leads to confusion, misunderstanding and suffering. Yet searching for purity in our mind and vital is a fool’s errand, doomed to disappointment.
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Of all the phenomena of Nature, none is more mysterious, alluring, captivating and enthralling than the moon. Like the moon, we too cycle through phases of waxing and waning revelation; like the moon, we too have a brighter and a darker side; like the moon, we too are detached from the earth, yet captive to its orbit; like the moon, which is reliant entirely on the light of the sun for the revelation of its beauty, we too rely utterly on the light of our own soul for our very consciousness.
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No matter what time of day you are meditating, even if it is in the evening, imagine the rising sun for a few fleeting seconds. Imagine that the sun is rising and radiating light inside your heart. Or you can imagine a most beautiful and most pure flower opening up and blossoming petal by petal inside your heart.
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Sri Chinmoy advises us to imagine a flow of consciousness or light from our heart of meditation throughout our mind, vital and body. As the flow of a river is constant, continually connecting each part to every other, so must we keep our everyday consciousness open and connected to our higher self.
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When we are able to see ourselves also as not a solid entity, but rather as continually flowing energy and light, like a river apparently the same yet ever changing, then it becomes easier for us to let go of damaging thoughts and unhealthy emotions, releasing them into the flow, and keeping ourselves always open to the inflow of new inspiration, illumination and liberation.
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Of all the phenomena of the natural world, the sky has most affinity with Infinity. The ocean is vastness embodied; the grains of sand on a beach countless; the stars innumerable – yet the sky just stretches on and on, and as far as we can imagine it stretching, it leads us always further.
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To raise us from the finite to the Infinite, through meditation our heart’s aspiration strives to extricate our consciousness from its preoccupation and entanglement with small, limiting, binding and belittling thoughts, distractions and emotions, and immerse us in ever higher, purer, liberating realities.
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Sri Chinmoy emphasises, that the tree which is laden with the most fruit, bows down the lowest. This is the essence of humility: the greater the inner spiritual achievement, the humbler will be the outer personality.
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Compassion is not charity. It does not give according to the wants or desires of the receiver, or for the glory and recognition of the giver. Compassion is the unconditional and unreserved self-offering of the giver according to the true inner needs of the receiver.
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As meditation is the most natural state of pure being, so is Nature itself a perfect expression of pure meditation.
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We each have a beautiful, powerful and ever-reliable underground river flowing somewhere beneath our surface awareness. No matter how bleak, barren and hopeless our outer circumstances, our life-giving, life-nourishing, life-transforming, life-perfecting and life-fulfilling soul flows constantly within.
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As each colour has its own vibration and its own energy, so each colour embodies particular qualities that we may be seeking at one time or another. Just as we get vitamin C from oranges, protein from nuts or calcium from milk, so colours can nourish us in particular ways, each colour offering remedies for specific deficiencies we may have, or infusing us with an abundance of the qualities we need for our progress and success.
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Colour feeds us as food feeds us; colour moves us as music moves us; colour fulfils us as reading fulfils us. Colours can lift us up or bring us down. Various colours can soothe, energise, inspire, encourage, excite, weaken or dishearten us.
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To change ourselves, we must change our habits. Meditation is absolutely the best, most effective and certain means to conquer any and all bad habits – including the habits we know about, and those we are not yet aware of.
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A habit is like scratching an itch. The only way to permanently give up scratching, is to remove the itch. It is impossible simply to discard habits altogether, unless and until we have transcended the underlying needs which habits fulfil. Until then, the most effective way to conquer a bad habit is to replace it with a good habit.
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A good meditation is its own reward and fulfilment. During and after a good meditation, there is a natural clarity, simplicity, goodwill, optimism and ease. There is no disquiet, nagging doubts or grievance; the question of whether we are doing well or heading in the right direction, simply does not and cannot arise.
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Tiredness, like age, is mostly a phenomenon of the mind. More often than not, we ‘feel tired’ because we imagine we are, or think we ought to be tired. We can all recall instances when we felt we were dog tired, then received a phone call, or saw, remembered or imagined something that instantly revived us, after which we continued with surging energy and enthusiasm. If tiredness can so utterly abandon us, we have to wonder: was it real in the first place?
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Bookend your sleep with meditation. While meditating for a few minutes before you go to bed, consciously imagine your meditation continuing and expanding the next morning. Promise to your heart that you are taking a brief time-out, and will return to take up and continue where you have left off. Place an imaginary bookmark in your meditation, to “save” the place you have reached.
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Imagination has tremendous power: use it to your advantage. Imagine your house is on fire and your morning alarm is a real fire alarm; or a ghoulish monster is coming to devour you if you stay in bed one moment longer; or you will be rewarded with infinite inspiration, satisfaction and bliss if you get up to meditate this very moment.
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We know it is essential to meditate every day. And to be sure of meditating every day, it is of paramount importance to meditate at a set time, preferably early in the morning. Yet early in the morning is usually when we are asleep, or just waking up, so it is inevitable that we are all going to face occasions when we feel we are too tired to meditate.
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It is said: “Never put off till tomorrow, what can be done today.” More than anything, this applies to aspiration, meditation, self-transformation, perfection and God-realisation.
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