Sri Chinmoy:
The Peace Meditation at the United Nations

Shraddha

Shraddha

Question: How can a person detach himself emotionally from irritating people and situations?

Sri Chinmoy: First you have to identify yourself with the person who is creating the irritation. Suppose you are in your office and somebody is creating unnecessary problems. If you get angry with him, that will not solve the problem. Instead, you will be tortured inwardly by your anger even while you are being tortured outwardly by the person. If you allow yourself to become angry, you will only lose your own inner strength. But if you come down to the standard of that person and identify with him, you will see that he himself is very unhappy and, therefore, consciously or unconsciously he is trying to make others unhappy as well. The moment you identify with the person who is creating the situation, half your irritation will go away. At the same time, your presence inside that person’s ignorance will take away half the strength of his attack.

Another way to avoid becoming involved in irritating situations is to invoke peace. For a spiritual person, it is always advisable to bring down peace from Above. While invoking peace you will feel enormous strength inside you and around you. The power of inner peace is infinitely greater, infinitely more solid and concrete, than any outer situation that anybody on earth can create. Your inner peace can easily devour the irritation that somebody else causes you.

If you are in the office, it may be difficult to invoke peace. If you pray in front of others, they will only misunderstand you and mock you. But if there is a quiet corner where you can meditate undisturbed by others and bring down peace, then you can do it even in your office. Otherwise, the best thing to do is to invoke peace during your morning and evening meditations, and to keep that peace locked inside your heart to be used whenever you need it most during the day.

Sri Chinmoy, My Meditation-Service At The United Nations For 25 Years, Agni Press, 1995.  -23 March 1973 (p.276)

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Sri Chinmoy: Before we enter into a project, we must sincerely feel that we have been given the necessary capacity to accomplish it. Then, once we undertake it, we have to bring to the fore our inner determination and inner faith. After that, in silence we must say to ourselves that the project that we have undertaken has already been done on the inner plane.

Let us take the inner plane as a higher plane and feel that we have a free access to this higher plane. Let us envision a tree right in front of us. The topmost branches, where the fruits are, we can call the higher plane. Once we climb up and pluck some fruits, we have accomplished our project on the inner plane. But this particular plane is not the plane of manifestation which is at the foot of the tree. So it is obligatory for us to climb down to reach the outer plane.

If we feel that we have already climbed up the tree and plucked the fruits and that now we only have to climb down, we will have much more confidence. If we are sure that something has already been achieved on the inner plane, it is much easier to manifest it on the outer plane. From beginning to end, the one thing that is of paramount importance is confidence. We have to feel that we can do something, that we shall do it and that we have already done it. If we say we can do it, we are not fooling ourselves; if we say we will do it eventually, we are not fooling ourselves. And if we say we have already done it, we are not deceiving ourselves either. For on the inner plane we have already done it on the strength of our inner faith and determination.

-8 March 1978