Question: How can spiritual seekers working at the United Nations make other workers feel that prayer and meditation are a tangible way of dealing with world problems?

Sri Chinmoy: You have colleagues in your own department, and they speak to you every day. The days you meditate they see something totally different in you from the days when you do not meditate. If you have achieved something in your meditation, they are bound to see something pleasing, soothing, beautiful, enlightening and illumining. So the higher and deeper your meditation, the more your face and outer being will radiate. When your being radiates, your friends and colleagues will see something totally new. At the same time, they will feel something familiar although they don’t know what it is. Why familiar? Because we have all come from the same Source. They have not discovered this secret, whereas you have discovered it. You have tried, you have practised meditation. They have not yet practised it, but they will. Your own example — not only your example, but your very presence — will inspire them.

Here on earth oneness is not established. Oneness you cannot establish on the ordinary human level where there is anxiety, worry, fear and doubt — unless you aspire. If you aspire, then your inner being tries to act all the time like a magnet. It tries to see whether there is someone whom it can call its own. So, if somebody is sitting beside you with divine joy, divine love, divine peace, then naturally the magnet that you have inside you will draw these divine qualities from that person. Again, if an unaspiring person sits beside you, who is given to worldly life and worldly temptation, immediately you will find a kind of restlessness inside your own being.

Outwardly, you don’t have to tell others hundreds of times how you have changed your life or what you can do for them. This you can tell them once in a blue moon, but it will be almost useless. But they will see you on two different days: one day when you have not meditated well and on another day after you have had a good meditation. The day you have meditated well, they will see a tremendous change in you. They will try to know what makes you on one day divine and what makes you on another day undivine. What is it that they want to have from you when you meditate, and what is it that they don’t want from you when you do not meditate? What they do not want is darkness and ignorance. What they want is the inner divinity which comes to the fore and tries to illumine the persons and the things around you.