Question: Please tell me what to do when I feel rejection from my spiritual brothers and sisters.

Sri Chinmoy: When you feel rejected by your spiritual brothers and sisters, the human in you will be sad, frustrated and furious. But the divine within you will immediately pray to the Supreme for forgiveness for your brothers and sisters. The only way they will get illumination is if the Supreme forgives them.

Suppose I am your spiritual brother and I have rejected you. The human in you will immediately become furious and try to take revenge, or it may withdraw. You will want to have nothing to do with me because I have rejected you or insulted you. But at that time the divine in you will try to come forward with compassion because it knows that I have made a serious mistake in rejecting you. If you also reject me, tit for tat, then in what way are you superior to me? What I have done is wrong. It is very bad, true, but if you do not want to do the same wrong thing, then you have to forgive me and you have to ask God to forgive me as well.

The Christ prayed "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." Similarly, you should pray to God on behalf of your brother or sister, who is the real culprit at that time. This is the first thing required. Secondly, you should pray to God for his illumination, so that he does not reject you or anyone else in the future. If he is really forgiven and illumined by the Supreme, then he will not reject you again.

But if you also play the same role, and reject someone who has rejected you, then both of you are going to be swimming in the sea of ignorance. He has done something wrong, and you are doing the same thing. Paying him back in his own coin does not serve any purpose. What you want, after all, is the illumination of your spiritual brothers and sisters.