Question: What should one feel towards those senior United Nations officials who sometimes seem to have a lesser vision of the highest ideals of the Charter of the United Nations?

Sri Chinmoy: Each individual member of the United Nations has his own role to perform. Who is senior and who is not senior? Who is important and who is unimportant? Importance in rank, importance in the outer life — these are the realities that abide in our earthbound physical mind. From the spiritual point of view, nobody can be superior to an individual who has established his oneness with the rest of the world. Somebody may hold a very high office and you may be a junior clerk. The outside world will say that you are an insignificant person at the United Nations, whereas so-and-so is a most important person. But when it is a matter of world-unity, world-union and oneness-family, we have to know that these are founded not upon rank and position but upon the expansion of the heart. When we refer to the heart, we do not mean the tiny heart-muscle in the chest but the spiritual heart that embodies the living Breath of the Absolute Supreme.

The individual whose heart encompasses the entire United Nations, the individual who carries deep inside his heart the desires, the aspirations, the joys, the sufferings — in other words, the hope-world, frustration-world and promise-world — of all the members of the United Nations is, according to me, the most important person at the United Nations. The most significant member of the United Nations is he who is all the time crying and smiling in and through each individual member. In this sense, everybody has the golden opportunity to become a most significant instrument of the United Nations. Every individual can easily bring his heart to the fore and, through his oneness-vision, bring down the loftiest messages from Above.

According to me, he who has a heart of magnanimity, a heart larger than the largest that can easily house the desires and aspirations of all the members of the United Nations, is indeed the most significant member. You may be an ordinary worker and your boss may hold a very high post. But we must realise that, as the boss has the capacity to illumine the mind or the life of the workers in various ways, even so, the workers — by virtue of their devotion, love and sacrifice — have the capacity to illumine the boss in various aspects of his life of which perhaps the boss was unaware.

From:Sri Chinmoy,My meditation-service at the United Nations for twenty-five years, Agni Press, 1995
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