On the First Meeting with Secretary-General U Thant
by Sri Chinmoy
during a meeting of the United Nations Meditation Group, where various people offer reminiscences about their most significant experiences at the United Nations.
With your kind permission I wish to offer two most striking experiences of mine. The first was when I met with Secretary-General U Thant in his office. His simplicity, sincerity, humility, purity and divinity made me immediately feel that I had found in him a true and genuine spiritual brother. In him I also discovered a heart of universal oneness. Then, a few years ago, I had the golden opportunity to pay my most soulful respects to the soul of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold at his grave in Uppsala. While I was offering my most soulful love, appreciation and adoration to this divinely great soul, I discovered immediately the luminosity of his mind. In his mind I found the most illumining and fulfilling vastness. Two supremely giant souls — Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant, U Thant and Dag Hammarskjold. Inside the vastness of Dag Hammarskjold my heart felt the love of oneness, and inside the oneness of U Thant my soul envisioned the vastness. Their oneness and vastness and vastness and oneness make me feel and realise that this United Nations — their dream-fulfilling reality and reality-transcending dream — will forever and ever be cherished and treasured by the aspiring, self-giving and truth-loving humanity.
Published in U Thant: Divinity's Smile, Humanity’s Cry
Sri Chinmoy meditates at an Inter-religious Observance of The National Day of Prayer at Hunter College in New York. A prayer by the First Lady, Mrs. Ford, is read out and representatives of several faiths also offer their prayers, after which scenes from Sri Chinmoy’s play, The Sacred Fire, are performed.