“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
Our inner cry at once arises from our depths and descends from above. We know not where it comes from, or whither it will lead us. Prayer is our conscious endeavour to harness and control our inner cry, to put it to use, to give it name, voice, form, a role and direction, to employ it for our advantage.
And so we portion out the unknowable, uncontrollable, illimitable inner cry into our known, prescribed, confined framework of beliefs, rituals and apparent needs. We channel it into prayer. We pray.
The prayer that comes from our finite mind or vital quite often seeks something for ourself, giving voice to pre-conceived desires in service of our ego. In the fulfilment of these finite prayers, we miss our mark; our inner cry reveals the disappointment of our infinite soul, and bids our heart to take up a purer prayer.
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. The inner cry will always win: working its way through the finite to the infinite, through bondage to liberation, through the mind to the heart, control to surrender, through prayer to meditation, sound to silence.
The prayer of our heart yearns only to offer itself, devoid of desire, aspiring for a desireless confluence in the flow of our soul’s light and will. Rising from the heart, our inner cry casts off the finite ego-bonds. With the ultimate prayer, “Let Thy Will be done!” our inner cry unmasks itself, and its prayer-adventure is complete. Prayer surrenders to meditation. Our inner cry welcomes us to our new home.
To be effective, the tears of our inner cry must be sincere, unceasing and limitless. Sri Chinmoy described these tears as streaming from our heart, or a bleeding of our heart. When asked, how one can bring forward the determination to do the right thing, he replied:
“Only by virtue of prayer. There is no other way. Like a child, you have to cry and cry. The child thinks that if it cries for its toy for five minutes, the mother is bound to give it. No! The mother watches for ten or fifteen minutes, or even half an hour. Then she says, ‘It is a hopeless case. I must give it to him because he is not going to stop.’
“When a little child cries and cries, eventually he becomes desperate. Similarly, when we become really desperate, then the inner determination comes. But our determination is not like a child’s, no. There should be some poise in it. And there should be tears.
“If you can develop sincere tears, then you will really get determination. 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. Inside the heart, we have to feel streaming tears; we have to feel that our heart is bleeding for something. Then determination comes.
“Everything is inside the heart. If we can live inside the heart for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, we will find the answer. The question ‘How can I have determination or adamantine will’ comes from the mind, but the answer lies in the heart, the heart’s tears. For everything, the heart’s tears is the answer.”
– Sri Chinmoy
“To reach God’s Palace
You do not need an outer guide,
But you do need an inner cry.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Whatever we might imagine God’s Palace to be – whether as a place, an ideal, a realm of consciousness or state of being – it is certainly going to be fantastical, magical, blissful, thrilling and fulfilling in every way, our ultimate ideal. If the only thing needed to reach God’s Palace is an inner cry, then feeding our inner cry must be our first urgent duty, or else our ideal will forever remain unreachable. Which brings forth our next question:
“How to feed the inner cry?
Just try to claim
A higher life
As your own.”
– Sri Chinmoy
If we are satisfied with our life as is, then there is nothing to stir our inner cry into action.
Complacency captures us, our aspiration deflates and intensity dwindles as we slide into lethargy and spiritual decline. To fire it up, our inner cry needs an ideal to reach for, to yearn for, to aspire towards. By always setting our sights higher – longing for a better consciousness, a higher life, a fuller, more divine existence – our inner cry is enlivened and comes into its own.
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:
“The capacity is aspiration; the capacity comes from the inner cry. If you really do need God, if you desperately need God, then your standard is very high. If God comes first, Truth comes first, Light comes first in your life, then automatically the inner cry increases.”
– Sri Chinmoy
In meditation and the spiritual life, the master key to open every door and reach every goal is the inner cry, aspiration. Sri Chinmoy was asked for some techniques for increasing one’s heart-power. His answer was succinct:
“Cry, cry. Think of a child. A child knows how to cry. Because he feels the need of a toy, he cries. In our case also, if we need God, our Divine Toy, then we must cry. A child is not satisfied until he has his toy. In our inner life also, we must cry. We are here on earth for thirty, forty, fifty or sixty years, but if we do not get something at once, then we feel that we should not take our aspiration seriously. We have to know that the thing that we want is all-important; then only we will value it. Our human difficulty is that we do not take anything seriously. We hope for name and fame, but if we see that we must climb up a tall tree in order to get what we want, then we lose interest. So, in the spiritual life also we want God, but before we realise God, we have to do a few things. 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. What actually happens is that the road is long and arduous but, if we constantly keep the goal in our view and walk along the road, then we will reach our destination. If we really value the goal and cry for the goal, then there will always be some way for us to reach the goal.”
– Sri Chinmoy
To find our inner cry, we must identify with our soul, which is ceaselessly crying on our behalf.
When asked, what are the first steps in the spiritual life, Sri Chinmoy replied:
“The spiritual life will give you inner peace, joy and bliss in abundant measure. 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.
“We have, all of us, two different types of consciousness: one is finite, which is earthbound; the other is infinite. This infinite Consciousness, this universal Consciousness is within us. So early in the morning, go deep within. Focus your concentration on your heart and try to feel there the existence of a child crying within you. This is your soul. Then consciously try to identify with this inner being, which is absolutely yours. 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.
“So, early in the morning for five or ten minutes, please try to go deep within with your conscious mind or with your pure, sincere heart and feel the necessity of the inner life. Once you feel the necessity, your inner being will guide you, mould you and shape you along the path. Finally, you can march and run along the path. If you can go deep within and sow the seed of aspiration with your inner cry, then sooner or later you are bound to get a bumper crop.”
– Sri Chinmoy
