Meditation at UN – Thank You to R. Muller 13 Jan 1978 - Historical Repository for Sri Chinmoy: The Peace Meditation at the United Nations

Meditation at UN – Thank You to R. Muller 13 Jan 1978

Meditation in the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium: Robert Muller and Sri Chinmoy speak, members sing and recite.

A THANK YOU TO MR. ROBERT MULLER

During a meeting of the United Nations Meditation Group on 13 January 1978 Sri Chinmoy thanked Mr. Robert Muller, Director and Deputy to the Under-Secretary-General for Inter-Agency Affairs and Coordination, for his unique understanding and support of the Meditation Group ideals and activities over the last year.

Below are Sri Chinmoy’s remarks and Mr. Muller’s reply.

Sri Chinmoy: Dear brother and friend Mr. Muller, on behalf of the United Nations Meditation Group I wish to offer to you our gratitude-heart.

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You have been with us for a little over one year. During this short span you have encouraged us, inspired us, supported us and helped us abundantly in many, many ways. For that, unreservedly we are are offering to you our soulful heart.

A few minutes ago I read out a soulful tribute to a supreme lover of mankind, Swami Vivekananda. With your soul’s kind permission I am going to say something. Perhaps you do not know, but each soul has connections or affinities with other souls.

According to my inner vision, your soul has a very strong inner link with the soul of Swami Vivekananda. He was, he is and he shall ever remain in the earth arena an indomitable hero-warrior who came to elevate the earth-consciousness and kindle the flame of aspiration the length and breadth of the entire world.

Dear Mr. Muller, dear friend and brother, on the strength of your own inner affinity with that mighty soul- according to your own receptivity and your own capacity. inner and outer-you are doing the same thing.

Out of His infinite Bounty and out of His infinite Delight. God the Author of all good. has given you the golden opportunity to serve the United Nations. where the hope. the promise. the illumination and the fulfilment of the entire world abides.

You will be completing thirty years of your existence with the United Nations shortly. My heart tells me and my soul tells me and my aspiration tells me that the service which you have rendered is most exemplary.

In all your speeches. I see and feel many. many. many illumining and fulfilling things.

But the paramount message that you offer. which touches the very depth of my heart. is.

“Move on, O humanity. look forward. The Goal is nearing. Just believe in the Goal. The Goal is all yours.”

Your devoted. dedicated. unreserved and unconditional service to humanity will definitely. definitely bear fruit. This spring your creation unparalleled will be out. I wish to offer my sincere thanks to Doubleday for having been the instrument to bring you to the vast world. The world will see in you and feel in you not only what you have done for the United Nations. but also what you have done for all humanity.

This moment the United Nations is a seed-reality. but in days to come. in years to come. it will definitely grow into a huge banyan tree. At that time. among all those whose aspiration helped the seed grow into a banyan tree . among all those who served and nurtured the plant . your name will be written in letters of gold on the gratitude-heart of future generations. The seekers who love the United Nations and the seekers who feel that the United Nations is the answer to world problems will see in unmistakable terms that you are one of the harbingers of a new dawn for mankind.

Sri Chinmoy presents Mr. Robert Muller with flowers and special ‘fortune cookies” containing short quotes about the United Nations from Mr. Muller’s writings (Photo by Richard Howard) .

Mr. Robert Muller:

May I say a few words to you, Sri Chinmoy, and to my dear friends of the United Nations Meditation Group.

I believe that life is both receiving and giving. It is an incessant dual flow. It is by opening oneself entirely to others and by giving oneself entirely to others that one enriches oneself to the full measure of our marvellous human nature. As a member of your group, I have received infinitely more than what I have given. Any human group endowed with a good membership, leadership, heart and soul helps each member to be less lonely and to expand his self through giving, hope, aspiration and the achievement of the purposes of the group.

The Meditation Group has done this for me in several respects.

First, it has done it for my beliefs. I have always believed in the unity of mankind, the uniqueness of human nature, the miracle of life, the gratitude we owe for every moment of it, the possibility for each individual to feel life in all its plenitude, while being linked in fate and brotherhood with all other living beings on this planet.

I discovered that you among others in the United Nations shared this feeling very strongly and this made me feel less lonely, it gave me additional courage.

My belief in the oneness of mankind, in love, in hope, in gratitude, in life affirmation, in the divinity of life, in the riches of introspection and meditation have been strengthened by membership in your group.

I felt also physically less lonely, because all of you have become my friends . I know many of you personally. We meet. Our hearts beat together. We sometimes travel together. Some of you visit my office. This is also important for the human being.

To have friends, physical friends one knows, one learns to appreciate and to like, is a great tonic to life. Friendship is one of those two-way flows that make up and enrich the fabric of life .

Thirdly, you have helped and encouraged me to speak, to write and to convey on an increasing scale the message that had formed itself in me over the years.

Many of you have devoted hours of love to type, print, publish and distribute my essays, stories and speeches, most of which lay buried in my mind or dormant in a drawer.

This has led over the last twelve months to a growing interest in my thoughts, experiences and beliefs, and it may well have been at the origin of the offer by a major publisher in New York City to publish a collection of these stories. They deal with two subjects which are closest to my heart: happiness, which in my
mind is the fulfilment of the miracle of life, our recognition and testimony to the greatness of the gift bestowed upon us in the universe, and the United Nations, this great hope for human unity and peace without which there can be no happiness.

Thus, I have received from you much more than I have given. You have been a beginning for me. No good action is ever lost in the eternal chain of events. Sometimes I feel that I do no longer belong to myself. My thirty years at the United Nations have not been my thirty years, they have been the years and the thoughts of others instilled in me. I live constantly with the feelings, thoughts and teachings of U Thant, of Father de Breuvery, of Henry Bloch, and so many other good people who have enriched my life in the United Nations. I am today a completely different person from what I was when I entered the World Organization as a young man.

We are of course endowed with a given body, mind and capacities, but there is a constant accretion, a ceaseless enrichment and change in us due to experience, friendship and the teachings of others. This is the basic message I wanted to leave in my book. I have simply recorded in it what I have learned from the circumstances of my life and from people who have taught me to be a happy and confident person, starting with my grandfather and my parents, and many other people who will be surprised to find their names mentioned in that book.

Some of them will probably not even remember me. But a word by them or their example had a particular significance for me: it opened my eyes to a basic truth of life. Like a good housewife who has tried many recipes in her life and who wants to keep the best of them, I have recorded my recipes for happiness in the hope that someone may find in one of them the answer to his or her particular problem. I am happy for having written these stories: they enrich me with the impression of having transmitted the wisdom and knowledge I have acquired during my beloved years on planet Earth and in the greatest organisation which has ever been conceived by the heart of men, the United Nations.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you have done for me during this past year.

Following are several selected passages from Mr. Muller’s writings about the United Nations:

* * *

For me the tall building of the U.N. is an edifice of human hope and dream jutting into the universe and receiving from that universe increasingly clearer messages.
* * *
To me this is an organisation I would not have dared to dream of when I came out of World War 11. Mankind should be grateful every day to have the United Nations.
* * *
Year round people from all creeds and cultures assemble here to design a better future for the world. And in my opinion they will succeed .
* * *
The United Nations constitutes one of the greatest and most exciting attempts at total human fulfilment in the entire evolution of the human species.
* * *
The Charter itself is one of the greatest codes of ethics ever drafted for the behaviour of very powerful institutions: armed nations. It is the Ten Commandments of nation-states.
* * *
There are many of us in the United Nations for whom the co-operation of all nations around common goals and values is a new form of religion, a supreme path or way. The United Nations is a place of convergence for the dreams and prayers of
all peoples for a better world.