Entries Tagged 'Spirituality' ↓

They do not sell your statues in the shops, O Mother.
Buddha, Ganesh, Lakshmi, all in vogue,
adorning lobbies of comfortable houses,
prosperity to those who already have,
a scent of spirituality to mask the rot

but you, Mother, are not in fashion.
no marketing niche for you,
no category
the analytic mind sees you coming,
scythe gleaming in the sun
to once and for all
cleave the Real from the unreal
it drops everything
and flees

Mother, we talk amongst ourselves
about how life is suffering
life is unfair
sometimes I imagine
that when I get to the soul’s world
I can write God a strongly worded letter
demanding immediate and radical changes
to the Cosmic Game
before I agree to come back down again

but you,
you are just having the time of your life,
are you not?

and those who come to know your dance
can see it everywhere

I bet that was you
with your arms around your long-suffering servant
as the car gracefully pirouettes through the air
with him in it
I see you taunting the forces of death
just try
i dare you
i double triple dare you
touch him
go on
cross that line
and see what happens

I bet that was you
coasting inland
atop a chariot of tidal waves
gathering souls to yourself
like a blackjack dealer in Vegas
ready to spread them out again
on freshly-watered soils

I bet that was you
standing on top of the crossbar in 1988
when Charlie Redmond took that penalty
and you were laughing your head off

I bet that was you
dancing with a fury
and a speed
that makes you seem everywhere at once
stampeding through opposing armies
like a Nebraska linebacker
as tanks shatter through walls
as men pierce through boys
and the game gathers pace

And I know that is you
standing behind your chosen sons
the great Masters
who like the Buddha
will not move
will not sleep
until your six billion children
one by one
awaken
rub their eyes
and wonder why it took so long
to truly live

your dearest, dearest, dearest sons
dearer to you than your own Life
yet you strap them to the leaden harness of a human body
as they hold their nose and take the plunge
immersed and alone in the sea of ignorance
but you stand beside their bed
as they lie hooked up to the machine of maya
you hold their hands
as they siphon the ingratitude and begrudgery of the world
out through their very bones
Oh Mother, often I marvel how they can stay on earth for so long
and when I do
in the silence
then
I sense the starlit footprints of Your Compassion.

Mother, the PR department have been on to me
they say you are giving God a bad name
you are not projecting the right image
they have given me a 492-page manual on politically correct etiquette for cosmic gods
they want you to study it
they want you to put some clothes on
and behave yourself
maybe then, they say, they’ll even be able to sell your statues in the shops
but their stilted ideas about compassion
bind and blind compassion itself
because the more I discover you
I see your naked sword is indistinguishable from your cooling touch
your reaping is indistinguishable from your sowing
that the hour of death is as much your Compassion
as the hour of birth
and that the entire universe
is but a one-act play
of your Love

.

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn’t decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

(Jaaludin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks)

I came across this gem on poetseers.org. I like poems like this that lay down the gauntlet and prod you out of any complacency you might be feeling. The mind can make everything seem mundane, even the spiritual life. And the spiritual life is the greatest adventure there is. Living at the limits of the possible, challenging your imperfections at any turn, witnessing little miracles of growth and transformation happen when you least expect them. It’s important to remember that.

(I read another poem on the same theme, if not quite in the same vein, yesterday - it was written by Vikramaditya, an American student of Sri Chinmoy. It was called ‘The Wrath of Vikramaditya’. The wrath was directed at anyone who had been practising meditation and had allowed the notion to creep into their minds that perhaps they can relax and let enlightenment come in the next incarnation or the one after that….there is indeed wrath in this poem, a lot of it, two pages worth to be exact, a big stick to Rumi’s little carrot - but perhaps both are needed, stick and carrot alike. Vikramaditya’s poem is available in the August 2005 edition of Panorama, a compilation of poetry prose and art created by Sri Chinmoy’s students from all around the world. Actually, I believe that is Prabhakar Street, one of the editors of Panorama, in the above photo, which was taken by Jowan Gauthier)

In India, there have been a few select spiritual figures who have come to be known by the title paramhansa, among them for example, Sri Ramakrishna and Paramhansa Yogananda. Many translations of this Sanskrit word give it as ‘heavenly swan‘ or ‘transcendent swan‘.

As well as the obvious connotations of grace and beauty, the swan also evokes other spiritual qualities. It can live equally on land or water, a metaphor for the paramhansa’s ability to be at home both in the inner and outer worlds. According to Indian legend, the swan also is able to separate milk from water, and so the paramhansa is similarly supposed to be able to separate the Real from the unreal on the strength of his meditative awareness.

However, there is a school of thought that says that the literal translation of paramhansa is not ‘heavenly swan‘, but rather ‘heavenly goose‘. The goose, being mainly a farmyard bird in the west, is commonly ridiculed as having characteristics of foolishness and woollyheadedness (which is why the translators probably elected to to choose the swan instead!). But in India the goose carries those exact same attributes of grace and beauty as the swan, in particular the bar-headed goose (photo on right), which twice a year makes the arduous crossing over the Himalayas from Central Asia to India. During these migration, the geese have been observed flying at heights of 9150m, higher than any other bird; yet another analogy with the paramhansa, who flies to sublime meditative heights that the rest of us long to reach for.

I have just spent the past weekend in Paris, meeting up with all my friends and fellow students of Sri Chinmoy, meditating, taking in some of the sights and sounds of Paris, and having lots of inspiring conversations on life, happiness and the meaning of it all (in other words, a typical Paris café conversation). The weekend also coincided with the arrival in Paris of the World Harmony Run - a global relay in which an Olympic style torch is passed from hand to hand as it makes its journey throughout the length and breadth of the world, bringing the people and communities it reaches together in a shared wish for a better world.

On the Sunday, all the World Harmony Run members went to the famous Bois de Vincennes, home of the kings of France before the mighty Versailles was built, to participate in a 10k race. In a wonderful coincidence, my training schedule for the August Self-Transcendence Marathon also has a 10k race pencilled in for today! So today I went along with the team, aiming to try my luck and come home somewhere under forty minutes.

They say that every experience in life is a lesson that helps you understand more about yourself and the universe, but for me, a race is much more like an intensive weekend workshop in self-discovery than a lesson! Every time, I find I really have to go deep within and bring out the absolute best within myself in order to keep going. And today was no different. Even before the race, there were all kinds of things gnawing away at me: stomach troubles, tiredness - all things which can really make you miserable if you let them! Thankfully over the years, meditation has given me a certain amount of inner strength and made me realise the importance of staying happy and cheerful no matter what. So I went and started warming up, and found out that I was actually feeling quite good after all.

The first part of the race I enjoyed tremendously. There is something about French organisation that always brings a smile to my face, and the sight of five race marshals at the starting line having an animated discussion amongst themselves whilst checking that the front runners were toeing the starting line was an amusing distraction from any nervousness I might face. Then the gun went off and everyone tore away at breakneck speed; I joined them for about ten seconds before reminding myself to run my own race at my own pace. The race was two five km laps through roads and park trails, and some lovely stretches where I could really feel Mother Nature giving the runners an extra boost of energy.

The sacond lap is where the problems started. A familiar sensation started occuring down the right side of my body, the beginning of a pain in my side that comes from not having enough electrolytes in the system. Over the last few years, i have had to slow down to walking pace because of this problem; it had been on my to do-list over the past week to get mineral supplements now that I have started marathon training, but life of course got in the way. But now the only thing I could do was just keep running and hope I wouldn’t suffer a repeat. But around this time, I also discovered something very interesting - I remembered reading some advice given by my teacher, Sri Chinmoy to use if you were feeling down or depressed: “Your outer smile can help your running considerably. When you smile, you disarm your opponent. Take running, for the time being, as your opponent. While you are fighting or struggling with your enemy, which is running, if you give a smile, naturally your enemy will lose some of its strength. So play a trick on your enemy by smiling. This may sound absurd, but I assure you it is true.” And so I started smiling as I was running: all of a sudden I felt myself going just that little bit faster, as some of those energy-sapping worries began to clear a little bit.

All during a race like this I really try and keep my awareness in the heart rather on my mind or my body - I find that this is the crucual factor in my enjoyment of the race. After all, children are in the heart and they seem to be able to run wherever they want and never get tired, so I think that’s a pretty good example to copy! It has to be said that for me some races are better than others in this regard - for this race, the night before I had not slept very much, or meditated particularly well in the morning, so I was finding it considerably difficult to detach myself from my wandering thoughts. Also, I could feel a tremendous emotional resistance coming from my emotional being, which seemed to increase the faster I went! But I know now from many races’ experience that after a while if you keep trying to stay in the heart, all these problems just go away after a while, and you end up running from a beautiful inner space of enthusiasm and joy.

And that is what happened. I found myself running down a spacious tree-lined avenue, and all of a sudden something came to me that could not be described as a thought, but more an inner message that came from the depths of my being: that every step I take makes be better able to do my part in creating a better world. Each and every soul comes to earth with something to offer, a unique and peerless contribution to make towards a better world; through life we all wander, searching for that very something that will give it meaning and purpose, that will rise it above the mundane. And if we are truly lucky, we find something that resonates within the very core of our being, something that when we do it we feel this is what we are here on earth to do. I am one of the lucky ones. Everytime I sit down to write, everytime I am giving free meditation classes and introducing the joy of meditation to those who might never have heard of it before, even when I am meditating by myself and can somehow sense my silent outpouring of goodwill spreading like pond ripples to the rest of humanity: this is why I am here. And every day I find myself spontaneously praying to expand my capacities so that I can bring to these activities more inspiration, more joy, more love.

This is how God answers such prayers. A tree-lined avenue, two kilometres to go. The same obstacles I face in a race - physical exhaustion, emotional turbulence, doubts about my capacity - are only a more condensed form of the obstacles I face within as I try to expand my capacities in everyday life. And every step I take here and now is a step towards making those obstacles go away forever. And I finish the race with nothing but gratitude in my heart, for I am, indeed, one of the lucky ones.

There has been a nice atmosphere in the house in the last couple of days, a sense of newness which has had me trying out new things and picking up some old habits I hadn’t touched in a while. In particular the following two habits stand out:

At the beginning of last year, I attempted what seems in hindsight a pretty brazen task - to learn a 224 line song written in Bengali (a language I cant exactly claim fluency, or even competence, in) in the space of one single day! The song, titled Dyulok chariye nara narayan, is a profoundly elevating experience of song, the words of which come from a poem my teacher, Sri Chinmoy wrote when thirteen years of age (roughly around the time that photo on the left was taken). The poem was written for his spiritual Master, Sri Aurobindo (right), in time for his birthday on August 15, 1945. Fifty years later, in 1995, Sri Chinmoy set the entire poem to music in the form of this song. I began learning the song at 7 a.m. armed with a recording sung by my friend Hiyamallar from California, only to retire five hours later with a severe bout of head-spinning, and not a lot to show for my efforts! But at least it was a start; I kept learning it for a while. But then I mislaid the MP3 player I was using to learn the song for a while and the whole thing fell apart. But in the past few days I’ve been listening a lot to a very haunting recording of that song sung by my teacher, and snatches of it kept floating to my recollection. So I dusted down my copy of the music and went at it again, and am pleased to record I have now done 17 verses out of the total 56. Hopefully I can keep a routine of learning one or two verses a day, and have the lot learned by the time I go to visit my teacher in New York in August.

The second thing is : often when the Dublin Sri Chinmoy Centre are giving free meditation classes in our beautiful meditation space, I talk a little bit on the importance of being grateful for living no matter what happens, and wonder aloud why is it that we don’t leap out of bed in the mornings and go “Yaaaaay! Another great day!” Well - guess what - the four guys in our house have agreed to do exactly that every morning! So at five to six in the morning - the time when three of us wake for meditation - all you can hear is a resounding YAAAAAAAYYY!!!! in one room being met by an equally resounding YYYAAAAAAAAYY!!!!! across the hallway. We’re hoping it will help eliminate the drawn-out ordeal that waking up can sometimes turn out into; more importantly, it means we have something to laugh about barely five seconds into our waking day and that can only be a very good thing…

To make the fastest spiritual progress, my meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, emphasizes being cheerful and happy just as much as - and sometimes even more than - meditation itself. When one is happy, the horizons of his or her world expanding, difficulties shrink into the background, and one can just follow the lightness of the heart. Which is why Sri Chinmoy always tries to encourage us to put aside any mental dryness and heaviness and just stay happy. And this week, sixty-five students of Sri Chinmoy from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and France (and some from even further afield) have all come down here to County Clare to do just that - have joy.

It has been a pretty eventful weekend: meditations in the morning, lunchtime and evening, some very soulful singing and instrumental performances, some team games down at the beach (including a race to see who could build the best sandcastle in twenty minutes), the obligatory visit to see the Cliffs of Moher (this has been on the wish list of many of Sri Chinmoy’s students ever since they saw the cliffs on a World Harmony Run video), some funny and inspiring anecdotes about Sri Chinmoy’s recent trip to Mongolia and a major concert in the Royal Abert Hall that many of those who came were working on last week, and of course a game of football for the boys! In between, there are opportunities to tour the beautiful countryside and gain inspiration from Mother Nature, or for old friends living a sea’s width apart to meet and catch up on the latest news.

To top it off, we had a hilarious competition where we were split into four teams, given a short story and given twenty minutes to concoct a play. We were wondering whether to do this or do some singing instead; we instead reached a ‘compromise’ where each play had to include at least one of Sri Chinmoy’s soulful mantric songs (and any other songs if we so wished). The story our team was given was called ‘The Brahmin Monk and the Two Thieves - three characters in all, but we needed nine so all of of us could participate! So one line in the play “one day, a Brahmin monk went to give rites to a family” turned into a whole family scene with father, mother and delinquent problem child (played by Alex with his red hoodie pulled up so tightly around him he looked like Kenny from South Park). This, plus a minor amendment of the play title to to ‘The Brahmin Monk and the Two (Or Possibly More) Thieves” meant everyone now had a part. The play was largely comedic in content, but we tried to have a soulful bit whilst the monk was conducting the rites where we could sing one of Sri Chinmoy’s beautiful mantric invocations to the great spiritual teachers. However the audience were still too caught up laughing at ‘problem child’ Alex to really appreciate the soulful import. Perhaps we would have been better off using one of Sri Chinmoy’s lighter more childlike English songs (like as in another play where they sung a delightful song Sri Chinmoy composed in praise of ice-cream!), but we’ll learn in future. The rest of the play went off like a dream, and we managed to turn it into a real musical - the thieves were humming the ‘Pink Panther’ theme as they were sneaking after the monk, and the whole play ended in an ensemble performance of ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’. The other plays were equally hilarious; another play had two or three people join together to create a human horse, and another one took advantage of the Irish location to indulge in an extreme bout of stage ‘Oirishness’. Adarsha from Glasgow was in this play; Sri Chinmoy regards him as the most soulful singer out of all his students, and indeed he had sent us all to heaven the previous evening with his unearthly singing of two of his teacher’s songs. But in the play, he was singing ‘The Wild Rover’ which was a bit of a contrast to say the least. All the plays gave everybody such joy; I thought I heard a couple of suppressed giggles during the subsequent meditation as some of the play’s joyful moments unwittingly came to mind in the silence. Many people had to travel such a long distance to be with us in the West of Ireland, but I think the joy and laughter they got from these few days were worth it.

“Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” So wrote Vaclav Havel, who fought to restore democracy in Cold War-era Czechoslovakia and then went on to become Czech president. I first read this quote in a collection of essays called The Impossible will Take a little While, put together in 2004 by Paul Rogat Loeb when people’s helplessness and despair at the current global situation was probably at its peak. The basic thread running through the entire book: no matter how insignificant we view our actions to be, we have no idea of how they will come to affect the future.

I picked this book up a year later, on a visit to New York see my meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, and its message was really what I needed to hear at that particular time. The book is largely aimed towards those who work for change on social and political levels; granted, none of the things I do may be social activism per se - giving free classes of meditation to the general public, helping with putting on concerts of meditative music, and working to create havens of inspiration the Internet (like this one - eventually!) - but I definitely feel these activities are a parallel approach towards a more harmonious world. By inspiring people to be more peaceful and content in themselves, we reduce the greed and insecurities that are at the root of so many of the worlds problems; by expanding people’s horizons one at a time, the whole world gradually awakens to what is possible. Plus - and this is the main thing, I suppose - when I do these things I get a deep feeling of satisfaction inside my heart, a feeling that I’m doing what I’m here on earth to do.

But at this particular time of my life, some part of me was quite despondent about how much my efforts really changed things. Sure, thirty or forty people might come to each meditation class, but does that really change things in a country of four million, let alone a world of six billion? What is the point of one finger in a dam with a million cracks?

But the first thing I got from this book was that all the truly inspiring people of our era - the Nelson Mandelas and the Rosa Parks of this world - were first and foremost good people. Good people who were ready when the time came. And goodness is a fruit that takes time to ripen. The distinction between greatness and goodness is one that Sri Chinmoy often makes in his writing: “Greatness is not illumination, but goodness is“, as one of his meditative aphorisms goes. True greatness, the kind which inspires others, can only be founded on a bedrock of goodness, and goodness takes time. We are so used to everything happening instantly nowadays, that we become frustrated when change does not happen in the same way - we want McChange, with fries.

But the most striking thing I took from the book was the numerous examples of how actions that the people who did them thought were insignificant ended up having huge consequences unknown to them - how the sight of a small group of mothers huddled in the rain protesting against Vietnam convinced some extremely influential personalities to throw their weight behind the campaign, how a small and unsuccessful campaign to shut down an unsafe nuclear station in America sparked off a successful campaign in far-away Kazakhstan, how an edited compilation of Buddhist texts (which the editor thought to be a worthy but minor task at the time) provided critical spiritual support for jailed opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.

However, another main theme running through these texts is that the best attitude to take is not to do the right thing in expectation of results, but to do it because from within you know it is the right thing to do. These texts are drawn from people of both spiritual and atheist backgrounds, but some of the writing contained with in is very reminiscent of the karma yoga espoused in Indian spiritual tradition: “Thou hast the right to action, but not to the fruits thereof” , so goes the Bhagavad Gita, India’s most famous spiritual text. For those of us who are trying to work for a better world, the only way is to just ‘plant ourselves at the gates of hope‘ (as one account in the book puts it) and keep on working from the heart regardless of the ups or downs we may face.

You can read more about this book on its website…..

In 2006, Sri Chinmoy composed Shakpura, his 13,000th song in his native Bengali language, whilst on the ultra-fast Shinkasen train from Yokohama to Hiroshima in Japan. In contrast, the song referred to his birthplace in the simple village of Shakpura, in what was then India, but is now modern-day Bangladesh. My teacher gets tremendous joy from recalling memories of his childhood in Shakpura. “In every field, we appreciate, admire and adore vastness, but the qualities of sweetness, fondness and intimacy develop inside littleness”, he says. “For me, that littleness is symbolised by my childhood village home.”

In January 2007, a choir of Sri Chinmoy’s students, led by Prachar Stegemann of Austraila, performed an extremely elaborate arrangement of this song. The arrangement consisted of four different movements, evoking in turn the sweetness and simplicity of Shakpura village, the bustle of the nearby city of Chittagong, the pride the composer feels for his Bengal homeland, and the love and affection felt for Mother India. I wasn’t there on January to see the arrangement, but Sri Chinmoy asked the choir to sing a reprise of the arrangement a couple of weeks ago when I was in New York to visit him, and I joined in at the back of the choir and helped sing it. It was a very moving experience, especially the last part; only a stone could fail to have been moved. The original January performance has just been released on Radio Sri Chinmoy…