Question: What is the best attitude to have when meditating with others?

Sri Chinmoy: First you have to know what kind of vibration you are getting while you are meditating with others. Here all of you are good meditators. You have been under my guidance, inwardly and outwardly, for a long time, so here nobody will pull anybody else down. When you are meditating with disciples of your standard, or disciples a little less advanced, you will not feel any resistance, because everyone knows how to meditate in his own way and everyone is meditating.

Try all the time to go up. And when you have gone up to some extent, feel that you are a bird with two wings. Now what will you do? Just come down and lift your brothers and sisters with your wings. Your wings are very powerful, so you come down and take your brothers and sisters up. While you are with nice people, who are also doing good meditation, this is the best attitude to take.

But suppose you meditate with another group. Then you will get a different vibration, a different experience. Suppose you feel that there are people with a lower standard of meditation beside you, people who don't know how to meditate, or who are enjoying vital thoughts, emotional thoughts, impure thoughts. They are sitting beside you trying to fool you, trying to make you believe that they are doing a wonderful meditation, but perhaps they are thinking of their boyfriends or girlfriends, or other emotional things, and you feel that a very ugly vibration is entering into you. At that time what will you do? You will go with your own aspiration to the Highest and then, when you have solid strength, you will try to protect yourself. Do not allow these people to enter into you, and you will not enter into them. If you want to enter into them, you will be caught: whatever you got during your meditation you will lose. And if you allow them to come into you, it is like allowing foreign elements to enter into you; they will enter into you and ruin you.

In the first group, there were no foreign elements; all the disciples there were only an extended part of your consciousness. If you wish to serve them, then with your own meditation go to the Highest and offer them good will through your heart and through your illumined mind. But do not enter into the physical plane to practise it. Do it from your inner good will. That good will itself has power. You go to the Highest and say, "These brothers and sisters are impure, they are not doing well. O Supreme, give them purity. If they have a little purity, they will sincerely aspire." That should be your prayer — to give them some purity so that they can have a better meditation. It has to be done this way.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Meditation: humanity's race and Divinity's Grace, part 1, Agni Press, 1974
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