Question: In the beginning of the year you said you were so proud that in this difficult year our vitals — unlike our minds — chose to help us in our spiritual life. I was wondering if you could give us some tips on how to make use of that strength in fighting our spiritual battles.

Sri Chinmoy: It is the tears of our heart that can expedite our progress, not the tears of the vital. Sometimes when people cry, they think it is coming from the inmost recesses of their heart, whereas actually it is coming from the vital. The heart and vital fool us because they are very close. In the twinkling of an eye someone can swim in the sea of tears and think it is coming from the very depths of his heart. But actually the tears are coming from the dramatic, emotional vital, almost like crocodile tears. When you see a first-class actress shed tears, do you think it is coming from the heart?

There are two ways to make progress with our heart’s cry. If the cry comes from the very depths of our heart because we feel that we have lost God’s Compassion, God’s Love or God’s Blessings, and we are crying to regain these things, then definitely we are going to make progress. We have to feel that we have lost something very precious and then cry to get it back. This is one way to make progress.

The other way is to dive deep within and cry to love God only and please God only. Again and again we may fail; but inside our heart-breath we have to feel that this is what we really want to do.

We shed tears through our eyes. But God’s Eyes and His Tears are inside His Heart. And when we pray and meditate, we see that His Heart is inside His very Breath. The deeper we go in our meditation, the sooner it becomes clear to us that He takes our spiritual failures as His own defeats. On the one hand, He is beyond everything. On the other hand, because He has accepted human form, He wants to evolve and make progress in and through the human form.

So we have to see if we are really trying to make Him happy in His own Way or if we are only trying to make ourselves happy in our own way. The moment we try to make Him happy in His own Way, we see Him smile and dance. Again, if we do not try to please Him in His own Way, immediately we see the undivine, hostile forces dancing in front of us. Each time we lose in the battlefield of our own aspiration, they dance most shamelessly.

When two teams play football, very often the winning team will congratulate the losing team, saying, “You played really well.” The winners try to console the losers, either sincerely or insincerely. But in the case of divine and undivine forces, it is not like that. The divine forces have come to illumine the hostile forces, but the hostile forces have come to destroy the divine forces. The hostile forces are not gracious losers or gracious winners.