Question: How can we overcome feelings of resentment and anger that we feel when our superiors appear to be unfair?

Filed under Questions and Answers (Q&A) | Role of meditation at UN - Practical Guidance

Question: How can we overcome feelings of resentment and anger that we feel when our superiors appear to be unfair?

Sri Chinmoy: When we work in a group, there are many individuals, many ideas, many thoughts and many propensities working together.

But we have to do our best to feel that all the individuals in the group are part and parcel of our own existence. We have to feel that they are all limbs of our own body, and that all our limbs are working together. Then only will we get real satisfaction.

From time to time we feel that our superiors do not understand or value us. By arguing with them and trying to convince them that they are wrong or unkind, we will not be able to change their views. If we consider our superiors to be totally different from us, perfect strangers to our ideas, ideals and goals, then we shall never be able to change them. But if we take them as part and parcel of our own existence and feel that we belong to them and they belong to us, then we can eventually change them. If we can regard their lack of faith in us and lack of appreciation for what we do as a defect in our own existence-reality, then we will feel that the problem is within us and is something that we can deal with.

Again, we have to know that the appreciation of our so-called superiors is not of real importance. In the long run, in the course of our spiritual evolution, it may be of no value at all.

What matters is not what our superiors think of us but how sincerely we are trying to please and serve the body and the soul of the United Nations.

For this is what will give us real joy, not the appreciation of our superiors. If we can please the Real in us, God, then we are also pleasing the same real Existence that is in our superiors. If we are only for the satisfaction of the Real in us and in all human beings, then a day will come when the Real in us will change the minds and attitudes of our superiors. As a matter of fact, there is only one superior and that superior is our inner cry for continuous and ever-increasing perfection in our own life and in others’ lives.

Our cry for perfection is the only superior reality in us and for us.

-1 October 1976, Sri Chinmoy, My Meditation-Service At The United Nations For 25 Years, Agni Press, 1995. Earlier version appeared in Sri Chinmoy, Flame Waves, Part 9, Agni Press, 1978.