Yesterday I was reciting some of my favorite daily prayers, when I heard an inner voice. Its message was simple, “It’s too late, you might as well give up.”
I’ve been meditating for thirty years now. Before I accepted spirituality, I had a lot of problems with voices or so-called inner messages. I didn’t know how to fight them. When a voice would call me worthless or stupid, I would believe it. Before I embarked on the life of meditation, I thought real spirituality meant simply accepting whatever message I got as the truth.
I’m not talking about schizophrenia. It’s not that I thought there were people talking to me, or that I was getting “messages” from God. It’s simply that I didn’t know how to regulate my thoughts. I didn’t know how to control the mind, or how to silence it. So I had to live with this thought-factory that would call me worthless and stupid.
Then, in 1994, my friend Sebastian gave me a copy of Beyond Within. In it, Guru Sri Chinmoy talks about the mind and the heart. In a particularly striking answer, Guru remarks:
“We should not try to enter into the mind-room in the very beginning of our spiritual journey. To enter into this room we need abundant inner courage, inner light and inner assurance from our Inner Pilot. Very often we make a Himalayan blunder: we enter into the mind-room just because we see that it is all confusion and darkness, and we want to illumine the mind.”
(Sri Chinmoy, Aspiration and God’s Hour, Agni Press, 1977)
Sri Chinmoy advocates staying in the heart, where there is light.
I have been following his path for three decades now, and I have developed considerable inner strength. So, yesterday, when the mind told me, or the thought came, that I am useless and it’s “too late”, I just laughed at it. “Thank you for your support!” I said out loud and simply continued my daily prayers. It is so nice to have a way out of the prison of the mind, so nice.
Yesterday, I did something overdue- I went through all my paper clutter- yes piles and piles of old papers, and I sorted them and threw almost everything out: receipts, recipes, gas bills from 1998. I also went through my filing cabinets and threw out everything that I no longer need- like twenty year old tax returns and canceled parking violation checks.
But I also found two poems that I wrote a long time ago but had forgotten. The first is from 2007, and the second seems to be from 2009:
Rivers
Cry me a river
And I will buy you
A boat
To sail beyond the rages
Of spring and fall-
The blue ribbon
Winding across
This country-
Breathing
And bubbling
And sighing
With the times,
With the suns
That flash overhead
Like newly minted coins-
And you and I
Tossing pennies
Into that good river
Beneath
A vast
And ever-blossoming
Vision-sky.
GURU
Around every corner
I see my Guru
Smiling to himself,
Rejoicing in the throes
And surges
Of the Self,
Laughing with the
Full-bodied clouds in the sky,
Ringing all the old church bells-
Summoning my soul’s jewel
For worship.
Guru, Guru, Guru!
Where is reality
If not in you?
Where is Divinity
If not in you?
Guru,
Of what use to me
Are the crowns and bracelets
Of the world?
Beautiful!