Question: How can you maintain high aspiration when you are working many hours every day with unaspiring people?

Sri Chinmoy: When you are forced to work every day with unaspiring people, you can maintain your high aspiration in the same way that the best student in the class manages to study with bad students. The best student knows that he has a goal. He has to learn his lesson thoroughly, he has to please his teacher, he has to be inundated with knowledge-light; whereas the bad students are either totally ignorant of these things or they do not care for these things. Similarly, while you are working with unaspiring people, you have to give all your attention to your inner life of aspiration. You have to feel that your life of aspiration has a definite goal: realisation of the highest Absolute.