Question: Why do bad people kill the good ones?

Sri Chinmoy: Bad people get malicious pleasure by hurting the good ones. They do not want the good qualities or capacities of the good ones to flourish. They want to kill their enemies so that their good qualities cannot spread all over the world. But what happens is this: when one good person is killed, the good qualities of that person are not killed.

A little bird is inside the cage. When you smash the cage, the bird flies everywhere. So when a good person is killed, like Martin Luther King, Jr. or President Kennedy, the body-cage may be smashed, but their soul-bird flies all over the world. The loss of the cage we cannot deny. It is a most tragic loss for the whole world. But the soul is flying and flying like a beautiful bird, spreading its good qualities here, there and everywhere. Mahatma Gandhi is another example. His body is gone, but his soul is all over the world. Everywhere people are appreciating, admiring and adoring him.

Today I am at Oneness-Family School. This little school has the highest visions, the loftiest visions. There are millions of schools and colleges in the world. They cannot all change their names, but if they could all have a sub-title then it would be ‘Oneness-Family’. Whenever you go to a school or university, immediately you get inspiration from the person the school is named after or who founded the school. When you go to a school in Washington, you immediately think of George Washington, the Father of the Nation. When you go to Thomas Jefferson’s University in Virginia, immediately you think of Jefferson’s inner illumination. All the good qualities that he embodied come to your mind. Those great luminaries, great pioneers in so many fields, have left the world, but their good qualities we still adore.

In the same way, not only the name ‘Oneness-Family School’, but the vision of this school will one day cover the length and breadth of the world. Right now it is a tiny seed, smaller than the smallest. But eventually it will be like a huge banyan tree. This vision will one day become large, larger, largest. The oneness-family-vision will be everywhere.

If you feel oneness, who is going to kill whom? Are you going to kill your mother or father or brother or sister? So when you pray and meditate, you improve your heart’s oneness. Then the whole world becomes yours. Once you feel your oneness with the entire world, you are not going to kill anybody and, if others do the same thing, then there will be no assassination, no murder. People will not hurt each other.

All the schools and universities should have the same vision: oneness, oneness, oneness. Then there will be no more fighting, no more quarrelling. Ignorance will be illumined. Now oneness is lacking. We see only the confusion of the mind. We need the heart’s dedication and the heart’s illumination to realise the vision of Oneness-Family.