Sri Chinmoy holds a special Mother’s Day luncheon for the mothers of women disciples in the New York area. The luncheon is held at Annam Brahma, the disciple-owned restaurant in Jamaica, Queens. Each mother is given a corsage upon her arrival at the restaurant, and a few short filmstrips of Centre activities are shown. Then Sri Chinmoy gives a talk to the assembled mothers and encourages them to ask him questions. He inscribes a copy of the Sri Chinmoy Primer for each mother, and also presents each with a small box containing eight additional gifts.
Dear mothers, I am extremely glad and grateful that you have come. I am your Indian son and you are my American mothers. I have come here to be blessed by all of you. You have come to shower your blessings on my devoted head and loving heart.
In our Indian scriptures there is a famous saying: "Mother and Motherland are far superior to Heaven itself." Here we are in the presence of our kind and loving mothers.
An eminent English writer once wrote, "As we all know, God could not be everywhere; that is why God created mothers." When I was six or seven years old I read this in Bengali and I was overjoyed. But at the age of twelve, when I lost my physical mother, I gave much more value to this lofty statement. In my case God, out of His infinite Bounty, showered His choicest Blessings upon my surrendered heart; therefore, I am now in a position to contact my mother in Heaven. Just half an hour ago my mother came to me in my room with a special message from Heaven. To some of you, this may sound ridiculous and absurd, but my students, who are your dear and loving daughters, will believe what I am saying.
Heaven and earth are like two rooms. At one moment we can be in one room, earth, and the next moment we can consciously go to the other room, Heaven. When we pray to God and meditate on God, these things are not only possible and practicable, but inevitable. Out of His infinite Kindness, God has given me the capacity to have a free access to both rooms.
I give talks at various places in order to offer light to many seekers and to increase their aspiration. But today I have not come here to offer light to my American mothers. As a son, I come to share my experiences of the inner world and the outer world.
To start with, I would like to tell you that your daughters who are following our path have in no way given up their religions. I tell my students that religion is like a home, and they have to live in their homes, for how can they live in the street? So in the inmost recesses of their hearts your daughters live in their respective religions.
I happen to be their teacher. The term they use is 'Guru', a Sanskrit word which means 'one who illumines'. He who illumines the unlit consciousness of someone is called the Guru. But to be absolutely frank with you, I am not the real Guru. No human being can be the real Guru. The real Guru is the Inner Pilot inside them, inside me, inside all of us. But on the strength of my own oneness with my Inner Pilot, I can be of dedicated, devoted and surrendered service to those who follow our path.
I tell my students that ours is one of many paths; it is not the only path. Again, I always discourage them from having a sense of competitiveness. Many roads lead to the same destination. Although other Masters and their followers or devotees may claim that theirs is the only path to God, I tell my students that this is the wrong attitude. Every sincere Master, every sincere disciple, is doing the right thing according to his inner receptivity and inner capacity to realise the loftiest Truth and reveal and manifest this Truth.
In the beginning perhaps some of you thought that this Indian rascal had taken away your children. You felt sorry and thought ill of me. But I wish to say that I have not taken your daughters away from you. The Supreme in you and the Supreme in me wanted me to become the instrument to elevate the consciousness of your dear children. There are many things which your souls wanted me to do, and which your inner beings wanted me to do, but unfortunately you were not and are not aware of them. When the soul does not come to the fore, when the physical mind is not totally conscious of or convinced of the soul's light and reality, the physical mind quite often doubts the inner voice. It is the inner voice, which all of you have, that wanted these children of yours to accept a spiritual path, to lead a better life and feel God as their very own at every moment of their existence.
You may ask, "Why is it or how is it that our children did not find satisfaction in our churches and in our way of worshipping God? Why did they have to accept an Indian way of realising the Truth?" I wish to say that this is not an Indian way; it is not an Oriental way or an Occidental way. This is a universal way of awakening humanity through inner experience.
In the West we try to reach God mostly by prayer and in the East we try to realise God through meditation. But both prayer and meditation are of paramount importance in the inner life. When we pray, we come to realise that we are devotedly talking to the Almighty Father, and He is listening to us. When we meditate with a tranquil mind and with an aspiring heart, at that time we are listening to the Message of God from within. In both cases we are involved in a spiritual conversation. At times the children speak; at times the Father speaks. In the East we try to hear what the Father has to say and in the West we try to make our Father hear what we have to say. But in our path we are trying to combine both prayer and meditation. With prayer we tell the Almighty Father of our sufferings and of what we really and truly want from Him. At the time of our meditation He tells us what we should do, what we must do, in order to become His dearest and most perfect children.
I am sure that when you yourselves pray or meditate, you feel that your children are doing absolutely the right thing. They are praying, they are meditating — what for? To share with you their inner achievements. You are their mothers. You have given them love, affection, concern, compassion, earthly attainments and achievements for many years. You have given them everything that you have and everything that you are. Now the gratitude-flower in your daughters is blossoming petal by petal, and they are offering you inwardly what they have and what they are. What they have and what they are is a golden flame, a climbing flame, which we call aspiration. This aspiration is their inner cry. It climbs up high, higher, highest and from the highest absolute transcendental plane of consciousness it brings down Peace, Light and Bliss according to their power of receptivity. These blessing-gifts from the Supreme they share with their dear ones.
Undoubtedly you are the dear, dearer, dearest ones to your loving daughters. You have played your role in their formative years. What you have, you have given them unreservedly and unconditionally. Now, what they are getting from their prayers and meditation they are offering to you inwardly. God within you has played a most significant role and now God within them is also playing a most significant role. God never wants to remain indebted to anybody. God within you gave them what He had to offer to them through you. Now, God within your children is offering each of you what He has to offer you in and through them. You are bound to see and feel and grow into this at the time of your own prayer and meditation if you can remember what I am saying.
I am sure all of you know by this time that ours is the path of love, devotion and surrender. The love we are speaking of is divine love, the love for the Supreme, which slowly, steadily and unerringly grows and fulfils itself until it reaches the final destination. This love does not bind; it only illumines. Human love wants to bind and blind. But before we can bind, we discover that we are already bound.
In our human love there is always a sense of attachment. Instead of attachment, God teaches us devotedness to a high cause, to a supreme Reality. We use the term 'devotion'. In the spiritual life we devote ourselves to a high cause without being attached to it.
Then comes surrender. In our ordinary, unaspiring life, we use the term 'surrender' when we see a boss and his subordinate, a master and a slave. The slave surrenders to his master's will precisely because he is afraid that if he does not listen to the master, the master will punish him. In the spiritual life it is not our fear that compels us to listen to the dictates of our soul or of our higher existence. It is an inner urge that compels us to listen to something deep within us. There comes a time when we discover that this urge does not come from outside us or from someone else; it comes from the real in us, the divine in us, the Supreme in us. It is coming to us by a messenger from the highest plane of consciousness and this highest plane of consciousness we can claim as our own, very own, when we pray and meditate. When we do not pray and meditate, we come to realise that we are of ignorance and we are for ignorance. But when we pray and meditate, we come to realise that we are of the infinite Light and we are for the eternal and immortal Life.
"From Joy we came into existence. In Joy we abide and at the end of our journey's close into Joy we retire." This is the message of life which we have learned from the Indian seers of the hoary past. Spirituality is not and cannot be the sole monopoly of India. Spirituality belongs to everyone, but we have to know how to practise it. Here in the West, unfortunately, when we pray to God and meditate on God, quite often fear looms large. We feel that if we do something wrong, God will punish us; or if we do one thing, we will go to hell and if we do something else, we will go to Heaven. The guilty consciousness quite often tortures a Western mind.
But in the East, especially in India, the philosophy is different. For us, Heaven and hell are inside. When the mind becomes a victim to worries, anxieties and other undivine forces, when the mind is disturbed, agitated, tortured by ugly, impure and undivine thoughts, we feel that we are in hell. But when the beauty, light and divinity of the heart come to the fore and we try to reveal and manifest them in the aspiring world, then we feel that we are in Heaven. We don't have to wait for death to find hell or Heaven. Both of them are within us in our daily life, in our daily conduct. If we are always soulful and surrendered, we are in a position to remain always in Heaven in this very life on earth.
In conclusion, dear mothers, I wish to tell you again that this Indian has not taken your daughters away from you. They do not belong to me or to you or to anybody else. They belong only to the Supreme, who created you and who created your children. The Supreme in you wanted the Supreme in me to be a humble instrument to serve Him in your dear ones. What I am doing, I assure you, all of you inwardly wanted to do for your children. Earthly attainments, earthly riches, earthly prosperity you have given to your children as much as you could. Your souls, your inner beings, your loving hearts wanted to give them Heaven's Peace, Light and Bliss as well. The Supreme in you knows that He has chosen someone with more capacity to do the thing that you wanted to do. Your daughters have not left you. On the contrary, the deeper they go, the higher they go, the more their gratitude to their mothers increases in boundless measure.
