Sri Chinmoy honours New York's finest⁵

Dearest Suvikash, dearest Jeff Kamen, I am extremely grateful to you for having invited to our gallery such distinguished citizens of New York. I wish to offer to each police officer and distinguished citizen here my heart’s deepest gratitude. The very term “police” immediately frightens the animal in us, protects the human in us, fulfils the divine in us and pleases the Absolute Supreme in us, in all of mankind. With your kind permission, I wish to say a few soulful words.

My dear police friends, my dear police brothers, I humbly bow to the divine peace-lovers in you. I soulfully bow to the divine harmony-distributors in you. Your hearts’ magnanimity tells the world that world-perfection entirely depends on a disciplined, honest and uncovetous life. True, the wrong-doers badly fail to appreciate you, but not only do we who are the seekers of the absolute Truth — who are crying for perfection-life in ourselves as well as in mankind — admire you and love you from the inmost recesses of our hearts, but also God Himself loves you incessantly and immeasurably for your sublime service-light to the entire humanity.

Your devoted lives long to cure the world malady, ignorance, completely and permanently. You unmistakably feel that the outer perfection-fruit is a gradual progress and transformation of the inner aspiration-seed. Your extraordinary dedicated service, your extraordinary experience-discovery is at once the world-illumining dream and the world-fulfilling reality.

Today’s world is wanting in peace — peace within and peace without. If we had listened to your soulful requests, if we had paid attention to your loving dictates, then today’s would have been a totally different world, a world of peace and harmony. The length and breadth of the world would have been inundated by infinite Peace, Light and Bliss. But the Absolute Supreme in you has infinite patience. He is exercising His infinite patience in and through you to awaken the divine in us, to illumine the human in us, and to transform the animal in us so that we all can be perfect instruments of our Eternal Father.

The Kingdom of Heaven need not and cannot remain always a far cry, provided each individual, each human being on earth listens to the soulful requests of our police friends and police brothers, whose very existence on earth is to see the face of peace and the face of harmony.

Finally, in the name of the Absolute Supreme and on behalf of the Jharna-Kala Gallery, to each police brother of my heart and soul I offer my ever-increasing gratitude, for you are doing the same thing I am doing as a spiritual seeker. I have been searching for peace, inner peace, for my students and for the world-community, and this very thing my police brothers are also doing in their own way. We are doing it according to the capacity that the Absolute Father has granted us and to our receptivity, each in a soulful way. So we are in the same boat sailing toward the Golden Shore, where there is no crime, no human shortcomings, no weakness, no bondage, no death; where Infinity’s Light, Eternity’s Concern and Immortality’s Life reign supreme.

[Sri Chinmoy then presented each police officer with an inscribed medallion. To Chief Carl Ravens, Commander of Manhattan South area, Sri Chinmoy also presented an original painting.]