Parenting & Family Quote by Sri Chinmoy

The line sounds like a gentle correction, but it lands as a moral dare: you do not get to use spiritual language as a private badge. Sri Chinmoy takes a phrase that can drift into self-soothing identity ("I am a child of God") and flips it into an obligation ("then others are also"). The grammar is doing the work. "If" turns devotion into a test; "then" turns belief into a social consequence.

Chinmoy wrote and taught in a late-20th-century landscape where Eastern spirituality was being imported, personalized, and sometimes commodified in the West. In that climate, God-talk could become wellness-talk: a declaration of inner peace that leaves power, prejudice, and hierarchy untouched. This sentence refuses that escape hatch. It insists that spiritual belonging is not scarce. The moment you claim proximity to the divine, you inherit responsibility toward people you might rather categorize as strangers, rivals, or less enlightened.

The subtext is also a critique of selective compassion. Many religious identities quietly run on exceptions: my group is chosen, my suffering is special, my morality is purer. Chinmoy collapses those loopholes with a simple symmetry. "Ourselves" and "others" share the same status; the only remaining variable is behavior. If you speak the language of God while denying dignity to others, your piety becomes performance.

It works because it is disarmingly plain. No doctrine, no threat, no metaphysical detours - just a logical mirror held up to the ego.