Concentration is the Arrow.

Meditation is the Bow.

When you concentrate, you focus all your energies upon the chosen phenomenon in order to unveil its mysteries. When you meditate, you rise into a higher consciousness.

Concentration wants to penetrate into the object it strives for. Meditation wants to live in the vastness of Silence.

In concentration, you endeavour to bring the consciousness of your object right into your own awareness. In meditation, you rise from your limited consciousness into a higher and wider domain.

If you want to sharpen your faculties, concentrate. If you want to lose yourself, meditate.

It is the work of concentration to clear the roads when meditation wants to go either deep within or high above.

Concentration wants to seize the knowledge it aims at. Meditation wants to identify itself with the knowledge it seeks for.

An aspirant has two genuine teachers: Concentration and Meditation. Concentration is always strict with the student; Meditation is strict at times. But both of them are solemnly interested in their students’ progress.

From Eternity’s Breath, by Sri Chinmoy

However, it is always very tempting to make the jump straight to meditation. When I began meditating, I would preface my meditations with some concentration exercises but this didn’t last for long.

Ever since I was a kid, keeping myself focused on something and seeing it through to the bitter end was never one of my strong points, especially if it wasn’t one of my passions. So I have decided to spend a little amount of time honing my concentration skills, so that I can meditate longer and deeper. I wrote an article on one concentration exercise I am using:

http://www.srichinmoybio.co.uk/blog/productivity/an-easy-to-learn-concentration-exercise/

I am also hoping that my improved concentration skills will have knock-on effects in my daily life, especially in getting the will power necessary to make sure every choice I make during the day is one that helps me towards my ultimate goal of enlightenment (hey, why settle for less?)

In his lifetime, my teacher engaged in so many fields of endeavour - spirituality, art, poetry, peace activism, composing songs, theatre, running, lecturing, cycling, instrumental performances, tennis, weightlifting - that it is often a challenging task explaining to anyone unfamiliar with my teacher’s work exactly who Sri Chinmoy was and what he did.

From my perspective, the answer is clear enough: he was my spiritual Master, my guide to inner realms of freedom and vastness beyond the confines of the mind I never previously knew existed. And yet for thousands of people who did not and perhaps never will embark upon the spiritual life, he was still a powerful source of inspiration and never-say-die spirit, often in areas directly connected to their own fields. Runners, swimmers and triathletes would credit his vision in setting up the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, the worlds largest organiser of endurance sporting events. Diplomats, world leaders and peacemakers all around the world would fete his tireless efforts in creating one initiative after another to build global harmony from the bottom up. Artists, composers and musicians alike would stand in wonder at the quantity of his output in each of these fields, and the way his creations flew like an arrow beyond the mind’s obfuscations to the heart of something much deeper and vaster within ourselves. But for the general public, their first introduction to Sri Chinmoy might well have been through watching television reports of his record-breaking feats of weightlifting strength. In many ways, his weightlifting feats were furthest from the realm of traditional spirituality; that’s perhaps why they were the most dramatic and belief-challenging demonstration of meditative power of all.

I remember feeling rather bemused when I first heard about my teacher’s weightlifting, and it only added to my feeling that this was not a meditation path in the way I grandly thought meditation paths should be - you know, cross legged for hours, cups of green tea and all that. But on the other hand, I was having very deep and profound experiences of meditation, experiences I never even came close to in a year of meditating by myself before I came to the Sri Chinmoy Centre. So I (rather wisely, in hindsight) made the decision to kind of suspend judgement on the weightlifting for a while, and just give this whole being-a-student-of-a-great-spiritual-Master thing a little while to play out and see where it took me.

It turned out that my teacher’s weightlifting would play a significant role in my own inner development. When I saw my teacher for the very first time, it was on a visit to Oxford whilst he was lifting lecturers from that august university. I have to say it wasn’t something I really grasped the first time I saw it; I really appreciated the atmosphere of silence and intense concentration that surrounded the actual lifts themselves, but my ideas as to What Meditation Should And Should Not Be were still quite strong at that stage, and I much preferred the meditation functions later on in the evening, with their musical performances and the Master meditating on each of us as we walked past him. A year later, I myself got lifted in the same manner as those lecturers, and I had quite a nice experience which I wrote about in a previous blog entry. But it was not until a couple of months after that, when I again visited New York to attend a 3 day weightlifting exhibition that Sri Chinmoy was giving, that the full import of what Sri Chinmoy was trying to achieve - and was achieving - with his weightlifting came to bear on my life. Most of the time when I can feel my teacher’s guiding touch in my life, it is something I first feel in the heart, the core of my being, an inner illumination which then spreads to the mind, emotions and body. But the experience I got this November was something of a direct assault on the mind itself, on its limitations, its smug assumptions as to what was possible and what was not.

A couple of days after I arrived, the main day of the exhibition began with a series of lifts performed on the outdoor garden of Aspiration-Ground, the place where Sri Chinmoy spent much of his time meditating with his students. There was a huge array of lifts planned that day - a small summer house, a yacht which the lifting crew had somehow managed to perch on a steel apparatus above Sri Chinmoy’s head, a fishtank, a 4 foot tall ice statue of a bird which San Diego artist Papaha Gosline had only carved a couple of hours earlier from a block of ice with his chainsaw, a camel….and an elephant. Sri Chinmoy usually has a team of his students dedicated to setting up and taking down all the lifting apparatus, but due to the huge array of lifts, it was basically all hands on deck, and I found myself helping to set up the lifting apparatus for the elephant. I was a little too busy to contemplate the surreality of setting up a lifting apparatus for an elephant; there was a tremendous current of energy with everyone moving around and putting things into place; Olympic athletes, weightlifting and bodybuilding greats, literary figures, as well as media from around the world, all mingling on the front lawn.

The elephant was to be lifted using a standing calf raise, a lift which had been part of Sri Chinmoy’s repertoire since 1986; Sri Chinmoy would place his shoulders under a set of pads and push upwards using his heels, lifting the entire platform a couple of inches under the ground. The assembling in itself was quite a feat of strength. It took four people to lift out each of the heavy steel girders that would lie underneath the lifting platform; then we added a steel frame that connected to a set of shoulder pads, put the platform in place, and added a protective screen so the elephant would not get startled by Sri Chinmoy standing right in front of him. And we stod back from putting the last bolt in place, and it struck me, how simple the whole apparatus was. Girders connected to framework, framework connected to shoulderpads; Sri Chinmoy pushes upwards against the shoulderpads and lifts the girders. And something about that simple fact just drove it home to me, that yes, my teacher really is lifting all that weight there on the platform.

But now Minnie the elephant is coaxed onto the platform with a bucket of tasty apples and carrots (actually, she ate all the apples and threw away the carrots with her trunk); there is a brief moment of meditative concentration, and I had one of those blink twice to see if that is actually was what you’re seeing moments - an elephant is being raised up off the ground before my eyes. My mind; trying to trace where all of its assumptions about reality are failing; girder connects to frame, frame to shoulder pads, elephant walks on platform, man lifts elephant…. I felt as if my mind was being levered open; the collection of things it holds to be true, the decisions it has made about what is real and what is not, propping each other up like ne’er-do-wells in a tavern; one assumption turns, and the rest suddenly don’t seem so sure in their positions anymore…what other assumptions am I making? What other limitations am I placing on the way things could be?

And then one realises that is exactly what my teacher is trying to do - to introduce everyone he met to the realm of the possible. And of course, for everyone who seizes that passport to the possible and brings its liberating touch to bear on their own lives, there are others who rigidly cling onto the assumption that such a thing cannot be done, simply because, er, it cannot be done. It has been that way throughout history. Not everyone wholeheartedly embraced quantum theory when it was first developed; some leading turn-of-the-century scientists like Rayleigh (and even Einstein to an extent!) went to their graves unable to fully accept the new system. James Joyce’s Ulysses was greeted by famously mixed reviews - one reviewer declared memorably that he had felt like “a general just after putting down a major insurrection” and yet that book singlehandedly changed how people wrote novels, and its impact can be felt right to this day. In his famous 1962 book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the scientific historian Thomas Kuhn cited a psychological experiment where people were dealt cards from a pack, in the course of the experiment introducing non standard cards such as a red club or a black diamond. The result? A select few people figured something had changed straight away, others merely continued as if the cards were mere standard cards. Why? Because that was the way things should be. Others again went through a period of mental uncertainty as they perceived something was wrong but they could not figure it out - reminiscent of Dogen-roshi, the founder of Zen in Japan who once declared that if the mind does not bristle at a new truth when it first encounters it, then it is not really a new truth at all - the bristling is merely the resistance to your mind expanding.

In hundreds of years time, when our descendants are doing things and living dreams we do not believe possible now, they will look back on people like Sri Chinmoy who paved the way for those possibilities to present themselves, whose own personal efforts made those who saw them look at their own life goals and ask the question of questions - “Why not?”. For they will know that which we can only currently dimly percieve - that inspiration truly moves the world.

When in New York to visit my teacher Sri Chinmoy, I often have occasion to stop by my friend Anugata’s house which is just up the hill from Aspiration-Ground, not least because of the free internet connection that can be obtained if you lean your computer a certain way against the window Anugata lives upstairs, and in the stairwell there is the above beautiful framed picture of Sri Chinmoy. It is absolutely huge and takes up at least half the wall, and when I look at it I have this tremendous feeling that my teacher is really close to me - often my exit from the house has been delayed at least five or ten minutes just from looking at this picture.

The picture was taken by Projjwal Pohland from Germany, who over thirty years took many beautiful pictures of Sri Chinmoy - many of which can be found in his photo gallery - but none so beautiful as this, I think. I must ask Projjwal the circumstances under which the photo was taken. It somehow does not seem like other for-the-camera pictures - a lot of the photos where Sri Chinmoy sat for the camera have this tremendous air of dignity and inner strength, almost like a statesman, whereas this photo seems to embody something else entirely - love, concern, eternity - one can only grasp at words.

Actually, this unusual photograph also reminds me of an interesting anecdote about another picture of Sri Chinmoy (unfortunately I cant find an online version of that particular picture). One time when I was visiting new York, myself and Databir had a gentleman’s disagreement (for want of better words) during a frenetic game of early morning frisbee. By way of patching things up, the great and good Databir later that day brought me a very beautiful photo of Sri Chinmoy in deep meditation, eyes raised upwards as if soaking in the entire expanse of Heaven.

Apparently, Databir told me, there was a plan to put this picture on the front cover of one of Sri Chinmoy’s books. Someone else objected, arguing that Joe or Josephine Public don’t exactly come across someone in this state of meditation every day of the week, and that they might be a little startled - perhaps one of the stately photos mentioned above would be more suitable. The photo was presented to Sri Chinmoy - he looked at the photo for a few seconds, and then exclaimed in a childlike voice “But…it’s me!”. A very sweet reminder that these high states of meditation are not something a spiritual Master goes into from time to time, they are something that he eternally is.

At the end of each meditation function, we generally have the Indian traditional custom of prasad i.e. food that is blessed by the master before being offered to everyone at the function. I dareday some of the fondest memories many of Sri Chinmoy’s students have are of when he was giving prasad - one could very tangibly feel the light the master was offering both to you and to the food itself.

A lot of the time when Sri Chinmoy was giving prasad, he would first ask the children under eighteen to come up first who had come to visit with their parents, or the more elderly members of the audience so they could come up at their own pace. Other times Sri Chinmoy would ask us all to come up in stages - for example he might say those over 30 years on the path, followed by those over 25 etc. I remember one time he asked us all to come up by age, starting with youngest and ending with eldest. As the older members came up I remember Sri Chinmoy commenting how he couldn’t believe how young some of them looked compared to their age - a definite testament to the power of meditation.

One very fond memory I have is when Sri Chinmoy asked us to come up according to our religious background. First he called for Christianity. I didn’t really consider myself an orthodox Christian so to speak, but I saw a few others in the same boat getting up to go down, so I figured he must be talking about background rather than actual practise. Then he asked for Judaism, followed by Islam, which he referred to in such affectionate terms as his ‘dearer than the dearest’ Islam. I have always been very struck by Sri Chinmoy’s appreciation for this oft-misunderstood religion; Sri Chinmoy taught me in regarding other ways to the Goal than my own to move beyond mere tolerance (which often smacks of superiority) to a feeling of oneness, of feeling their experience as my very own. Then came Hinduism, Buddhism and finally Sri Chinmoy asked for those of no religion to come up, and a few people came. “I also have no religion“, Sri Chinmoy smiled sweetly at them. “My only religion is my love of God.”

(Picture by Adhikari Diganta Pobitzer on Sri Chinmoy Galleries)

My fellow students of Sri Chinmoy, Tejvan Pettinger and Sumangali Morhall, have recently posted very amusing poems based on the top keyword searches for their respective sites tejvan.co.uk and sumangali.org.

Of course they had the good sense and decorum to limit their poems to the first 25 searches, but I am congenitally devoid of such things, you see. So I have produced my own keyword poem to rival in length Sri Aurobindo’s epic Savitri (almost 24,000 lines) - or at least I started upon my epic task before realising that not enough people are visiting my site to generate the required number of lines. Boooo.

So here it is. I had to omit a rather large number of stunningly inappropriate conjunctions of words, and was left with this. Enjoy, or at least do me a favour and don’t think worse of me

cache public
about shane magee
chinmoy

sri chinmoy autobiography
concentration span
aum meditation

horse
boost concentration
ramakrishna disciples
how to create a normal candle

expectation meditation
inspiration blog

death
the mahabharata
a record breaker

wisdom eastern to overcome habits
anandamayi ma
sri chinmoy

sri chinmoy books on finding self
articles on self discovery
world clock
births
deaths

relationship between spiritual master and student
ramanasram
mother kali
plato

scariest picture ever
adolescent bangla song
heart versus mind

aum japa
how to create an oasis
cycles of thought

how to incorporate meditation into your daily life
inner voice
death can be an inspiration

spiritual blue butterfly
listening to your own voice
intensive training programme for sub 3 hour marathon

life lessons because of death
the true challenges of life
concentrating in heart meditation

indian spiritual masters image
buddha in cave & trishatur
spiritual queries to ramkrishna mission

warrior of light comments
about he knows that
without inspiration and experience
no amount of training will help him

secret of happiness desires
name is shane
irish song

I am just after finishing what might possibly be one of the most intense experiences of my short span of life so far. A couple of weeks ago, myself, Colm and Matthias participated in our first hill race (thats where the above photo comes from), and enjoyed it so much we decided to go to the second race, which was held in the foothills of the Wicklow mountains this morning.

Darkened skies and plenty of rain greeted our arrival, but of course silly me saw no reason to change from my shorts and flimsy T-shirt apparel. The first part of the race didn’t give much of a sign as to what was to come. as we clambered up the mountain, we were well protected by forest cover, and began to settle down and pace ourselves.

About 20 minutes into the race, myself, Colm and Matthias were following each other as the path turned to go up another mountain. And then things started getting surreal. First we went into open country, with no protection from the winds that were blowing. The road was straight, uphill and seemed to go on forever and ever. And then came the hailstones. Big ones. And we thought that was bad, but then we reached the top of the mountain only to find that we had actually been protected from the full force of the wind, now coming at us from the side at sixty or seventy miles an hour. All the big heavyset runners had an advantage here; for me it was all I could to to stop the wind blowing me off the path. At one stage, I got pelted by a particularly vicious hailstone, which was kind of the straw which broke the camel’s back; I just yelled out loud at the top of my voice, declared I wasn’t going to take this nonsense anymore, and set off at top speed to show Mother Nature that it had just messed with the wrong Irishman.

We turned again, with a near-hurricane at our backs, and into a whole different kind of craziness. Such was the force of the wind that it carried you along at top speed without any say-so on your part, and I had to summon all the dexterity at my command to stay upright amongst all the rocks and boulders. Such was the strength of the wind that it even blew me straight up a steep uphill section without any effort on my part. But then I had a crucial lapse of concentration and followed two other runners into what proved to be a wrong turn! It was pretty galling after all that effort to look back and see a slew of runners who were behind you make the right turn and powering on ahead. I did my best to recover but the damage was largely done and I ended up 20th or thereabouts, where I could have at least been in the top 10. Colm ended up sixth overall, the best runner from our Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team. He said he really had a nice experience during the entire race where he was chanting ‘I am not the body, I am the soul’ over and over again and he could feel some soul’s quality powerfully bursting to the fore.

Upon finishing, we all agreed we must be insane, because nobody in their right mind would find themselves doing something like this. But then again, nobody in their ‘right mind’ seems to be as cheerful, smiling and appreciative of the joys of life as the people you find participating in these mountain races. And yes, we’ll probably do it again, crazy people that we are.

One day during my visit to the Dominican Republic, a group of us decided to take a day to explore a cave in a national park perhaps three hours drive from where we were staying. Upon arrival we were all fitted out with caving gear and then given a horse to take us to our destination. We started out at walking pace, but then someone charged ahead on their horse and the rest followed suit. I remember looking back and seeing the rest of the crowd galloping around the corner in unison like something out of a John Wayne movie. My horse was pretty temperamental, preferring to take me through every bush and thicket on the path rather than stick to the road, but that’s because it was probably afraid of Balarka’s horse, which was trying to eat it. I’m not joking. Balarka’s horse would pull up alongside mine, turn its head towards my horse and open its mouth as wide as possible, wait for five seconds as if to ensure the largest possible bite, and then try to take a big chomp out of my horse. It’s a miracle I got the poor horse home in one piece.

You can see the video by clicking on the ‘more’ link:
(more…)

Many of Sri Chinmoy’s students read his poems and aphorisms as part of their meditation practice. Much of the time, people turn to his three major collections of aphorisms - Ten Thousand Flower-Flames, Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants, and Seventy-Seven Thousand Service Treees - but Sri Chinmoy also wrote many smaller collections of poetry as well. Here are some nice poems I found in two of these smaller collections:

From I Need only God:

How will you know
If you are divine?
You will know
If you are divine
When you discover
That without your body’s Himalayan achievements
The world can exist-
But not without your soul’s
One little smile.

I had many more lives.
I shall have many more lives.
But I have only one Master
And that is what I always want.
Who is my Master?
My own higher Self,
My Eternity’s All.

******

From Every Day a New Chance:

I may not know what it means
To be perfect,
But I do know what it means
To be happy.

Forgive
If you want to regain
The full freedom-joy
Of your mind and heart.

Not a fear-prompted prayer
But a love-inspired meditation
Can and does
Gladden God’s Heart.

(Photo by Pavitrata Taylor: Last August, when I was in New York visiting my teacher, some doves were released as part of a ceremony - this one, instead of flying off, stayed around till the end and then went)

I have just returned from three weeks in Dominican Republic, a gathering of students of Sri Chinmoy from all over the world. Every year, Sri Chinmoy would leave snow-bound New York and go somewhere where his constant creative output and tireless work for peace would not be impaired by the sub-zero conditions. He would use the occasion to visit like-minded workers for a better world to exchange inspiration, visit his meditation centres in far-flung locations, or simply as a chance for some time with his students. Our teacher is no longer with us, but this trip seemed like a perfect chance to meet together, share experiences and memories and continue the amplified impetus for inner discovery which our teacher’s passing has given us all.

For much of the trip I was not so much concerned with my new outer surroundings so much as my inner landscape - meditating three times a day, and exploring the creative realm by participating in performances of music and spiritual plays. However there were more than enough opportunities to get out and get to know the soul of the country. A few days into the trip, I joined the team from the World Harmony Run, the celebrated initiative to promote friendship through running that Sri Chinmoy gave birth to 20 years ago, and spent the morning visiting schools not very far from where we are staying. Often when we visit schools we give a very nice presentation, all centered on the theme that harmony is something that can be created by each and every individual; sometimes the schools themselves take up the baton and add their own special contribution.

Something very nice happened at the end of one of the meetings. We were all mingled in a sunny courtyard, talking and laughing with the children in the three or four words of Spanish we had, when all of a sudden I saw one of our team members running around, child perched on his shoulder, both having the time of their lives. Next thing I know all of the team were hoisting children on top of their shoulders - it seemed as if half the class were airborne as we ran, twirled, danced and whooped around the place. No-one wanted it to end.

Sometimes there are moments where the fetters of time just seem to drop off, and the hard facts of life recede into the background.

I have been delving into the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna quite a lot lately. This book is a landmark tome in spiritual history; it is a series of diary reminiscences of the last five years in the life of the great spiritual Master, Sri Ramakrishna, as noted down by one of his foremost disciples, Mahendranath Gupta, who wrote under the nom de plume of M. As such, it is perhaps the first truly first-hand account of the life and times of a spiritual Master. In addition, reading the book reminds me of how the way the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna pulled together and intensified their spiritual practice after Sri Ramakrishna’s passing mirrors what has been happening to many of us disciples of Sri Chinmoy ever since the sad news of our own teacher’s departure from this world.

Sri Ramakrishna spent the majority of his life in the temple grounds of Dakshineswar, about four miles northeast of Calcutta. It was here he underwent the spiritual practices in many different traditions and realised they were all different paths to the same goal, and it was here people flocked from far and wide to hear him tirelessly giving of his love and wisdom. In the introduction to the Gospel, the translator gives a description of the grounds which inspired me to try and piece together a map, hunting down bits of information on various websites and putting things together like a detective novel.

It turns out I was merely reinventing the wheel, thanks to a fantastic map and gallery provided by Alan Perry, who went on a pilgrimage to Dakshineswar in 2002. Looking at these photos, one can really orient one’s bearings inside Dakshineswar, and image oneself travelling to the panchavati, the grove of trees which Sri Ramakrishna planted himself and where he underwent much of his spiritual awakening, the room where he spent time with his closest disciples talking for hours on end from his first-hand experience of God, and the temple hosting the statue of his beloved Mother Kali, who for him was a living reality at every second.

I hope that sometime in the future I might be able to take the reader on a similar tour of Aspiration-Ground in New York, my own Dakineshwar, and show him all the places where my Master Sri Chinmoy weaved his earthly play of love and wisdom until his passing in October 2007.

I ran the Dublin City Marathon last Monday. I hadn’t particularly trained for it, and the events surrounding the passing of my meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, meant that during the month of October I had run less than ever, but when ever I thought about the marathon, I felt intuitively that running it would be some kind of fitting tribute to my teacher and all that he has given me since I became his student four years ago. (I’m always praying for more of this kind of inner clarity as regards what to do, so when I do get an inner feeling like this, the least I can do is act on it post haste)

However with the paucity of training I had done, it wasn’t long before it got pretty tough out there on the course. But at around mile fourteen the following song came to me, and I was singing it under my breath for the next few miles:

All Your Grace, all Your Grace,
All Your Grace, all Your Grace,
My Lord Beloved Supreme!
All Your Grace, all Your Grace,
My soul and I are able to join
In Your birthless and deathless Race.
- Sri Chinmoy (1)

And in this song something which had been perturbing me since the previous night’s meditation resolved itself, like one of those shoelace knots you pull on to find out it isn’t a knot at all. I was reading something after the meditation had ended - my teacher had been talking about how often when we do something, we often outwardly give credit to God or our Higher Self to appear spiritual, but inwardly our ego is still busy grabbing the credit for itself. It’s quite interesting actually, because I had probably read that very same passage three or four times over the years without taking much notice. Yet this time, the very same words seemed to set my whole life situation alight. How often I had secretly exulted in doing something when I knew quite well it wasn’t really ‘me’ that did it, that my ‘doing’ was merely the fortune of being in the right place at the right time when the inner suggestion came? There simply are not enough fingers to count.

And yet now, whilst I was running and singing, singing and running, the song made me realise that races like these are one of the few times I actually do give credit to a higher source - during a race, you often reach a stage where you just realise what is bothering you are mainly mental and emotional fluctuations, and they have no basis in reality outside of you creating them. So you stop creating them. And then the inner power takes over in such a tangible way that the mind cannot take any credit whatsoever. All Your Grace, indeed.

The marathon also was an illustration of how close the members of our meditation centre have all become as a spiritual family over the last few weeks: at the half way mark we were unexpectedly greeted by Ambarish, who spent the rest of the race cycling all over Dublin with drinks and energy gels in hand (and taking these photos). Mile 18 and 19 are the toughest miles on the course, but lo and behold, my brother Colm was standing there fresh off the plane from New York, and we travelled the mile together whilst he told me all the things that had happened during his stay.

* * * * *

I waited a few days before I felt sufficiently recovered to run again; my first run was on Saturday morning. I was in Cambridge for the weekend, meeting up with all my fellow students form Ireland, England and France for a weekend of meditation and remembering the outpouring of service to humanity that was our teacher’s life (2). So I left Steve’s house at seven in the morning, intending to run for twenty minutes and armed with some vague directions to some green space half a mile down the road. I reached some railway bridge; there was a young guy standing on it looking at the trains passing by, with a bottle of rum for company. Probably someone on an extended Friday night, I thought, as I passed him and said hello.

You’re Irish, aren’t you, he asked. Where in Ireland are you from.

From out the country, I replied, though I’ve been living in Dublin these past seven or eight years.

So then, as if it were the natural next step in the conversation, he told me his best friend’s sister had just passed away. Aged just eighteen. Just went to bed one night and never woke up. And so he was out here contemplating, reflecting on life and death, and wondering what his friend must be going through. There really is nothing like having someone pass away to make you realise how precious life, we both agreed. Or how frail and mortal you are.

I told him how I had also lost someone very dear to me in the past few weeks, and how his passing had spurred me on to embrace every second of life, to squeeze every last moment out of the time I had left. Because my departed friend had never wasted a moment when he was on earth.

He didn’t really believe in God or heaven or any of that stuff. Outwardly, I said nothing - it’s none of my business what other people believe - but it made me realise how lucky I was in the gift Sri Chinmoy showered upon all his students and loved ones with his passing: namely, the realisation that the human soul is eternal journey in which death is only a checkpoint. I tried to imagine how people could cope without any certainties about spirituality or what happens after death, but I couldn’t. Maybe one can in a Buddhist-like ‘everything is impermanent and everything ceases to exist’ kind of way, I don’t know. In a strange way, I was almost grateful for that bottle of rum he had.

We talked about marathons; he’s definitely thinking of doing one soon. I told him he should; he has the runner’s physique.

He was a very nice guy; I enjoyed talking to him tremendously. On occasion, I have been guilty of dishing out plenty of lofty advice and walking away with a rather unbalanced elated feeling, like something went wrong somewhere; essentially, I had been giving out advice to feed my ego rather than out of true service to the person I was talking to. This time I went away feeling that perhaps this time I had done some little service. Grateful for the fortune of being in the right place at the right time.

From beyond, the teaching continues.

Footnotes (the Sign of a Serious Blog Entry)

(1) Sri Chinmoy had composed this song only a few months ago; during the running of the 3100 Mile Self - Transcendence Race between June and August, he would arrive early in the morning and teach a new song to a group of singers who were cheering on the runners in this epic race by singing songs for them. The above words are from memory; I think they’re right, but I’ll keep an eye out for the published version to check them against.

(2) While we were in Cambridge, some of us found time to attend a service in King’s College Chapel; Sumangali Morhall from York describes the experience in her blog far better than I ever could.

On the morning of 11 October, my meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, attained Mahasamadhi - the term used in Indian spirituality to describe the process by which an enlightened being casts aside his physical frame - and left the confines of his physical body.

In his quest to demonstrate to the world what we are all capable of, he had pushed that body to limits that no body had ever gone through before. When knee injuries prevented him from continuing his prolific marathon and ultramarathon career, he merely found another opportunity to demonstrate the power of the human spirit, through the medium of weightlifting. As the years passed and even walking became extremely painful, he would instead travel walking distances in a motorized cart which we would affectionately call his ‘chariot’, and he would often begin meditations in his beloved Aspiration-Ground by driving around in one large loop meditating on each section of the audience. Over the last year of his time on earth, his pain-racked left shoulder joined the list of bodily casualties no longer able to help him in his quest, and yet he would still lift objects with his right arm in a manner that seemed as if he was throwing his entire being against the weight in an eternally defiant protest against the inconscience of matter, against the insentience of the whole world.

In truth, everything could have gone - that beautiful golden voice of his, his ability to move even - and he would still have found a way to show us the eternal within ourselves; the very sight of his face, surrendered to God through night and day, through thick and thin, would have still been enough.

But it was time to go. God had called him home.

Yes, it caught us all by surprise, we who were spiritually weaned on the stories of the great spiritual Master Sri Ramakrishna and his long and glorious swansong; perhaps we thought that like his students we would also be given time to prepare, perhaps we colluded in the wishful thought that it would go on for ever. But Sri Chinmoy never in his lifetime once shirked from the hard course of action if the inner command dictated it; he knew we were ready to be pushed out of the nest and start flying for ourselves, and he also knew the only way we would really find that out for ourselves was if we were given that push.

And we were ready. We are ready. Twenty years ago this wouldn’t have happened, remarked a long-time student of Sri Chinmoy’s, as we saw accommodation quickly and efficiently being arranged for a thousand visitors that suddenly converged on Aspiration-Ground from all four corners of the globe, as we saw the care and compassion taken to ensure students and friends of Sri Chinmoy alike had adequate time to say goodbye to his physical envelope, as we felt the love behind the copious and nourishing food being made available at all times of day or night during the week-long vigil, and as we bathed in the supernal beauty of the memorial and burial services guided by heart’s feeling rather than dry ceremony or custom - yes, as we watched these things unfold we felt as if it would have been this way if the Master had stipulated every step himself, and we felt how proud he must be of his students, his spiritual children as he often dearly called them, picking up the baton and running with it.

We are ready. The life’s work of Sri Chinmoy was dedicated to pointing out the eternal and transcendent within ourselves, the core from which stems all that is good in humanity. “As long as I am alive, I will definitely tell the whole world that the soul exists.”, he would say. “For me, the body, mind and vital are all unreal. Only the soul, which is eternal and immortal, is real.” Ah, we listened and nodded and thought we knew, while in truth we only believed. But now we do not believe. We know for certain. His body is now out of view for ever, and yet each of us, to a person, feels the Master’s presence stronger than ever, teaching us things that he never could whilst he was on the physical plane. And hand in hand with these teachings comes a new intensity and purpose to receive them, and a new resolve: no more wasting time, no more excuses, no more self-created obstacles between us and our Goal. The news of our teacher’s Mahasamadhi has shone a mirror into each of our lives, in a way a way our minds could just not glibly cast aside; imperfections and faults we secretly tolerated only ten days ago seem grimly detestable things now, things that need to be expelled from our system as soon as possible, as we march onwards towards the infinity of our Soul.

We are ready. During his lifetime, my teacher always stressed the importance of having a feeling of love and oneness amongst his students; for him, any work we did for him was worthless if there was no happiness or harmony behind it. He once made the following comparison:

“You can bring a flower and throw it on the shrine, or you can bring it with your heart’s devotion-tears and place it on the shrine. If you just throw the flower on the shrine, will the deity be pleased? Similarly, if individuals who are working on a project are quarrelling and fighting, then if one person brings me the good news that the thing has been accomplished, am I going to be happy? The fruit is there, but it tastes rotten because the persons who were involved in bringing the fruit have quarrelled and fought. Always try to bring forward the attitude of loving oneness. I did not come into the world to have my name in the street. I came into the world to raise the consciousness of each person and to turn each person into a living God.”

And once again one cannot help but feel the pride Sri Chinmoy must have in us now, for we are finally coming to realise the most precious gift he left us with: each other. Yes, that feeling of family was there already, sometimes, but we never paid it the notice it deserved, so absorbed were each of us with the cosmic spectacle the Master traced out over his lifetime. Now with his passing, we are all pulled together in grief but much more importantly in love and oneness, in taking hope from observing with new eyes the seven thousand jewels our teacher has left behind in the form of his students, in seeing the transformation-miracles our teacher has wrought in our spiritual brothers and sisters as well as ourselves. Moment by moment, we are watching the future of our path evolve, like a butterfly slowly emerging from its chrysalis, guided not by rigid structure (Sri Chinmoy was never fond of rigid organisational structures) but by the ever-expanding love and concern we all feel for each other, for our teacher, and for the world.

We are ready. And this feels like only the beginning.

Related links:

• Leave a tribute to Sri Chinmoy…
• Sahayak Plowman’s tribute on Sri Chinmoy Books site
• Final moment farewells: a recent post by Sharani Robins
• S. Neil Vineberg shares an excerpt from Sri Chinmoy’s ‘Millenium Interview’ with Dr. Russell Barber, former Religion and Ethics Editor at NBC-TV. Sri Chinmoy is asked, “What happens down the road when the time comes for you to retire or be called to the Father?”, and gives a particularly eloquent answer that is currently giving us all enormous solace.

(Photos: Sharani Robins and Jowan Gauthier at Sri Chinmoy Centre Galleries)

The first one happened a couple of days into my very first visit to New York to see Sri Chinmoy, about a year after I became his student. For the last twenty years, Sri Chinmoy has been very active in the field of weightlifting and in these fields has performed many remarkable demonstrations of the power of the human spirit. One afternoon, he was was having a training session with a difference - he was lifting his students overhead while they stand over him on a specially created overhead platform. I had seen Sri Chinmoy lift weights before, but I was still curious to experience being lifted; it was the one aspect of my teacher’s activities that didn’t fit into my comfy stereotype of a spiritual Master, and I was still kind of wondering where it all fitted into the big picture. Naturally, I made sure I was going to be one of the people to be lifted.

All the people to be lifted were weighed and then we stood in a line in ascending order of weight; being rather light (or at least I was back then!) I was one of the first ones to climb the steps onto the lifting platform. Of course, many people has been telling me what an experience they had when Sri Chinmoy lifted them and how they were lifted up in spirit as well as body, and of course this created some very nice expectations on my part that this would happen to me too. My teacher is forever trying to warn us against expecting things in the spiritual life, and focus instead on doing things just because it is the right thing to do, as exemplified in this rather nice aphorism he once penned on the subject:

Constant expectation
In one’s own way
Is an infallible way of losing
One’s present joy.

So there I am, up on the lifting platform, trying to stop my mind anticipating the experience, as Sri Chinmoy meditated just before the lift. Then I could feel the platform under me rise, stay for a few seconds, and fall again. And no experience. So much for expectations. I came back down the stairs, not really knowing what to think, and made my way out of the meditation ground as soon as possible, not wanting anyone to come up to me and ask how it was, just wanting to get out of there.

And then when I was just clear of the meditation ground, I was struck by a tremendous wave of solid, solid peace, along with an urgent inner command: find the nearest silent space and sit down. I sat there, on a park by the lakeside, for I know not how long. For the first time, I experienced what it was like to be completely disjoint and separate from my mind; all of my previous meditation experiences, no matter how high, always had some subtle element of background noise the mind, diluting the reality of what I was feeling. But now I was here, in the heart, in the Real, and my mind was somewhere else entirely. I was aware of my mind, but only as a location far, far away, and as nowhere I wanted to visit anytime soon.

In front of me, a beautiful little Sikh girl busying herself playing with the ducks waddling by the lakeside. And she came up to me and asked me something about the ducks which I wasn’t really in any fit state to comprehend - I remember my inner being watching this spectacle with a kind of bemusement as if to say “little sister, you do realise I’m going to have to go ALL the way over there to my mind, just to understand the question and come up with an answer?” I did something in reply to her, and I hope it was coherent; she seemed to like it anyway, for she gave me a huge smile and ran off.

The second experience happened a few months earlier in May - Sri Chinmoy was visiting Slovenia at the beginning of that month; he was invited to take part in the celebrations marking that country’s accession to the European Union. This to me seemed like a perfect opportunity to see him; I could visit my friends and fellow students of Sri Chinmoy in Graz, Austria (I had spent over a month and a half in that town over Christmas) and use Graz as my base to stay the night, as the main cities of Slovenia were a mere couple of hours away.

The last evening of Sri Chinmoy’s visit was spent in the second largest city of Maribor, and we were having a meditation function. That evening wasn’t a particularly pleasant one for me. It had been an extremely hectic schedule, combined with all the driving to and from Graz, and at that stage, I was tired, and more than a little cranky, and wondering what I was doing here, hundreds of miles away from home. At some stage during the meditation function, we were invited to go down and look at a huge array of bird drawings that Sri Chinmoy had created during his trip, and so we filed past them in single file in a kind of walking meditation. I went down, more looking for something to distract me from all of these negative thoughts than anything else, and I went along the line looking at the drawings although I wouldn’t exactly ascribe the term meditating to what was going on! I came to a point to where the line doubled back to another table of drawings; Sri Chinmoy was sitting at one end of the room talking to someone else, and I looked up from the drawings in his direction just before I turned, as he looked around from his conversation long enough for our gaze to meet; I turned around, and felt as if I had to modify my balance because something very heavy was missing, what was it? It was the negative thoughts I had just a moment ago! But where had they gone? Thoughts just don’t go like that, don’t just completely disappear to be replaced by …nothing…. there was only the joy and certainty of heart, which was always there, which is always there, but which until this moment had been painfully obscured by the clouds of negativity emanating from my mind. It was a very potent demonstration to me of what a burden our thoughts can be; in the outer world they might not weigh anything, but in the inner world they can be very heavy indeed.

The mantra ‘Aum’ (or Om as it is often spelt) is generally regarded as the mother of all meditation matras. The word itself defies English translation; it is the sound of the mantra itself that it is important, and is held to be the seed-sound from which the ebbs and flows of creation spring, and thus to chant the mantra is to gradually enter into the mysteries of the universe. For thousands of years, yogis and ascetics have chanted this mantra as their sole spiritual practice, and many have attained the ultimate goal of meditation - enlightenment or God-realisation - by doing so. Indeed, some of these sages have reached the stage where when they stopped chanting, they could hear the mantra being generated spontaneously in the inmost recesses of their hearts.

I first encountered the mantra Aum when attending meditation classes run by the Dublin Sri Chinmoy Centre. Even though I liked the classes very much and was inspired to ask Sri Chinmoy could I become a student of his, I never have really explored the mantra ‘Aum’ at all in the four-odd years between then and now, as I seemed to make more progress with silent meditation, singinging longer mantric songs, and the English (though no less powerful for that) mantra ‘Supreme’. However I was at a meditation class last night at which my friend Martin, originally from Graz in Austria but on a lengthy soujourn in Dublin, was talking about ‘Aum’ and he mentioned a specific exercise using japa (constant repetition of a mantra) to purify the being which Sri Chinmoy once recommended:

“The best way to repeat a mantra to attain purity quickly is to ascend by steps. You all know the significance of AUM, the sacred name of God. Today, repeat five hundred times ‘AUM,’ ‘Supreme,’ or whatever mantra your Master has given you. Then tomorrow, repeat it six hundred times; the day after tomorrow, seven hundred; and so on, until you reach twelve hundred in one week’s time. Then begin descending each day until you reach five hundred again. In this way you can climb up the tree and climb down the tree.”

“When you do japa, do not prolong your chanting too much. If you prolong the syllable AUM, you won’t have the time to chant five hundred or six hundred times. Just say the syllable in a normal but soulful way so that you will get the vibration.”

So I became inspired to try this for a month - that’s two up-and-down cycles of mantras. I began my first 500 aums this morning, and the practice definitely does fill you with plenty of energy for the day ahead. Let’s see how we progress….

I came across a very interesting world clock counter on poodwaddle.com, (thanks to Joy Bringer at zaadz for finding it) showing world population increases, births, deaths and a whole bunch of other stuff. You can show increases on a yearly, weekly and daily basis - mot to mention the ‘now’ button, upon pressing which all the counters start off from zero. Within the first twenty seconds, there are 90 births and 41 deaths - including a couple of cases of heart disease, a traffic accident and a suicide - 27 marriages and 6 divorces. 8 hectares of forest have been cut down, 33 cars manufactured, 73 bicycles, and 58 computers.

It would be nice to see some of the more depressing stats here balanced out with statistics like number of smiles given, number of kindnesses performed (and so forth), but I suppose goodness has always been much less amenable to measurement than its counterpart. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s old maxim comes to mind: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye….”

The most striking thing, for me at any rate, was going to the ‘daily’ button and looking at the number of deaths. It is only 1 pm here, and already 82,000 people have shuffled off the mortal coil today, replaced by almost 200,000 new souls eagerly embarking on their new world-adventure. In this age of standing out from the crowd, there is something very levelling about one being placed in the daily ‘outbox’ of the world along with over eighty thousand people you never met. For a few minutes, I looked in mute wonder at the game of birth and death being played out before my eyes; somewhere in these figures an invisible hand beckoned me, and fed my inner yearning to dig beyond the figures and find the meaning behind it all.

I just watched Oceans 13 - I do like that whole Oceans series; most action stories nowadays are relying on increasingly ruthless and sadistic villians to keep the suspense screws tightening, but instead the focus in these films is on always the ingenuity of the scheme, and the bonhomie between the cast, you almost even feel all the good and bad guys could sit down together over sushi and reminisce about it all afterwards. Another film I also like very much is Star Trek: Insurrection. “An appealing millennial throwback to the hippie dream that is part and parcel of Star Trek’s utopian ethos.”, wrote the reviewer in the New York Times. I always liked the utopian ethos of Star Trek, everyone getting along and all that. I never liked those sci-fi film where the future is just as messed up as the present is. Plus I’d watch paint dry if Patrick Stewart were painting it. In days gone by, I used to imagine myself directing King Lear with him in the lead role. What else? Ah, yes. Close your eyes and don’t laugh: Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. There, I said it. I think because it’s just good storytelling, and good storytelling warms the heart. And some of it is extremely funny, like the bit where (at a time when the Arabs were like the Silicon Valley of the Middle Ages) the Moorish guy played by Morgan Freeman gives the technologically-backward Kev a little telescope to see the approaching enemy, and then the camera pans back to see Kev fearfully holding out his sword as if trying to prod the soldiers he sees in the telescope; Morgan then snatches the scope from him in despair and wonders aloud how these fools ever captured Jerusalem. Oh, wait, there’s actually a spiritual bit in this, where the little kid asks Morgan did God paint him, and Morgan says yes, because Allah loves wondrous variety. So there. I’ve kind of always had a soft spot for Kevin Costner, I have to admit, some of the films he’s done have had a very idealistic core.

(hmm, I believe the blog falls a little short of the comprehansive listing that the title might have suggested, but it appears these days you have to couch the title of your post in the words “the most..(insert something) Ever!!!” to get any attention, so who am I to disagree?).

My Lord says to me,
“My child, be not a beggar of what I have.
Be a chooser of Who I am.”

- Sri Chinmoy

(Photo taken by Prabhakar Street; the route of the marathon referred to in the previous blog entry made its way around this lake. I guess this picture was taken around 6.30am, shortly before race start. I wonder if she ran it.)