inspiration circulation

Giuseppe from Austria sent this to me today with the caption “return of the zombie” that forms the title of this post. This is my finish at the Self Transcendence Marathon in Rockland State Park in New York, which took place on August 25th. Basically, I looked up at the clock, decided 3:06 wasn’t going to turn into 3:07 anytime soon, and slowed down to a walk two metres before the finish line.

It looks like I had a pretty tough race; I did. (In fact, I decided not to publish some of my mid-race pictures in order to preserve the delicate aesthetic balance on this site.) Some of the toughness was actually quite a nice spiritual experience - you somehow realise that a lot of the pain is just you fighting and resisting and complaining inside, and as soon as you give all that up and just surrender to the experience, things get a whole lot better. I remember Suprabha Beckjord, one of the foremost women’s ultrarunners in the world and the only person to complete every edition of the world’s longest race, the 3100 mile Self-Transcendence Race, saying how ultrarunning “was a first-hand experience of God’s Grace and Compassion”. True that. It’s something you can very tangibly feel, when you let go of all the mental baggage; something reeling you in like a fisherman towards the finish line, something ‘closer to you than your own neck vein’, as the Koran would put it. In daily life, we live in the mental world, where all of these ideas - the soul, God, bliss - float around, capable neither of being proved nor disproved. It’s only when you take the plunge and do something outside the realm of the mind that some direct experience of these things can make itself available to you.

Ok, I believe I have some explaining to do…

I am in New York at the moment, with my teacher Sri Chinmoy, meditating and generally learning more about myself and the world. Saturday night meditation functions with my teacher are invariably given over to spiritual plays, and various groups take their turn to go on and perform. One of the newest groups is directed by Canadian Udar Robinson, and has gained quite a reputation over the past year or so for the quality of their plays: Sri Chinmoy gave them the name Udar: the Unbounded Troupe. There is a core of five people in the group, but they often need guest actors if there are many parts, and they are often in especial need of people willing to die quickly and without fuss. And that is where I came in.

Last Saturday, the play was a retelling of the ancient Mahabharata story of Drona and Drupada. As a child, Drona and Drupada were best friends, and Drupada (who was a prince) promised Drona (who was not) half his kingdom when he grew up. Of course, time and politics intervened, and Drona found himself out on his ear when he went to ask for his half, so naturally knives were sharpened in revenge. My job was to rush on stage to where King Drupada was holding court, announce that Drona’s army was making mincemeat of us, and then die (no better way to reinforce the point that Drona was making mincemeat of us.)

So my clothes were supposed to be all bloodied from battle, and I had these arrows stuck in my back. And I had a bottle of ketchup mixed with water. I was thinking about tipping the ketchup over myself just as I entered stage, but Dinesha also suggested I could take some ketchup in my mouth, and then when I said my first words it would all come out! Beside me in the photo is the king’s minister, played by Budhsamudra, who was shortly to suffer from a mild dose of stage death himself.

Note to self: Next time I die, I will try to die in a position where I can actually see what is going on in the rest of the play. Also, if I am dying on a gritty surface, I will try not to land ketchup side down.

Big thank you: Salil for taking these photos. He is actually one of the core group of five in the play, and was supposed to play the mighty Bhima, warrior of warriors, but unfortunately he came down with a most un-Bhimalike sniffly cold, and retired to bed whilst we were rehearsing all cuddled up with his teddy bear, who he fondly refers to as Cuddles. (All of this is said in the knowledge that Salil is too much of a gentleman to sue me for outright libel).

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

.

Anyone who has been on a juice fast, or other kind of detox program knows there is a general period of uncomfortableness whilst the fast releases all the toxins and they make their way out through your bloodstream. you could say the process of meditation is a bit like a juice fast for the entire being, and sometimes the process brings up various mental and emotional toxins that had been lying dormant deep within, and it can be definitely a trying time as they come to the fore and swirl around your system for a bit befire making their way out.

The mistake many people make is to identify with all these thoughts and feelings, and to feel that these feelings are actually part of them, and start blaming themselves for being such a bad person - all this does is give the negative qualities added strength and increase your helplessness about being able to do anything about overcoming them. All of the great meditation teachers have instead encouraged their students to instead always bring the more positive side of their being to the fore, by either invoking the opposite quality of the negative quality they are currently feeling, or to invoke their higher Self that stands eternally beyond the pale of any petty day-to-day thoughts. The great spiritual master Sri Ramakrishna used to say: “If you say, ‘I am a sinner’, eternally, you will remain a sinner to all eternity. You ought rather to repeat, ‘I am not bound, I am not bound. Who can bind me ? I am the son of God, the king of kings.’”.

The feeling of unworthiness and usefulness is something that has to be banished from a spiritual seeker’s life. All people search for truth unconsciously, but how many people aspire consciously to realise who they really are and what their trup purpose on earth is? Not very many, and if you are one of those rare few people, you are a very special soul indeed. Here are a couple of quotes I like:

“There is beauty in the birds and in the animals. They too eat and drink like us, mate and multiply; but there is this difference: we can realize our true nature, the Atman. Having been born as human beings, we must not waste this opportunity. At least for a few seconds every day, we must enquire as to who we are. It is no use taking a return ticket over and over again. From birth to death, and death to birth is samsara. But really we have no birth and death. We must realize that.”

- Sri Anandamayi Ma

If you want to make the fastest progress,
At least seven times a day,
Perhaps for only five seconds,
But with a very strong inner intensity,
Be consciously aware of your spirituality.
You are on a very, very special path.
You are not an ordinary person.
You are a chosen instrument of the Supreme.

- Sri Chinmoy

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)

“If your running is going well, it’s a sign that your spiritual life is in good nick.” - so a fellow student of Sri Chinmoy and long-time runner, Jogyata from New Zealand, likes to say. It’s certainly true that you can have experiences in running that have a life-transforming effect. My running has increased in the last few weeks as a result of the marathon training program myself and all my friend have been doing, so I have been having fair share of experiences - you can read about one race I had in Paris a couple of weeks ago on another blog post, but here are a couple of experiences I’ve had since:

The Sunday after the Paris race, I did a three-hour run in which the pace gradually increased towards the finish. I usually need to call on quite a lot of inner strength to finish these runs and I’m normally left with a fair degree of stiffness afterwards, but to my amazement and gratitude I enjoyed the whole experience from beginning to end, I felt I was just like a child running, not thinking about what pace I was running or how long I had left to go. And there were no bad after effects either, thanks to the warm-down routine I’ve recently adopted (I’ve actually just written an article about it on allaboutrunning.net). It was really quite something.

And then, in total contrast, there was the training session a a few days after, a set of five 1km fast intervals on a nearby track. No zip in the legs whatsoever, and I was struggling just to put one foot in front of the other. In the middle of that run, the previous three hour run came to mind and I marvelled at how two runs could be so different, how one could be so easy and the other so hard. But then I remembered something my teacher, Sri Chinmoy said about good or bad experiences: “If we live in the soul, we will see that everything that happens here on earth has some meaning, because God does not do anything contrary to His own ultimate Fulfilment. With our human eyes we see unbearable pain and sorrow; the whole world is full of suffering. But when we pray and meditate, when we go deep within, we see that there is no such thing as suffering or joy. It is all the operation of God’s Will. When this Will is in operation, sometimes we call it suffering and sometimes we call it joy, or we use some other term. A spiritual person tries to identify himself with the experience that God Himself is having, and not with what is taking place in the outer manifestation.“ And so I realised that, similarly, Sunday and today are merely two experiences - one day an experience where everything goes like a dream, another day an experience where every step is effort. From then on the run became much better to handle - I could somehow stand aside from what I was feeling and treat it as just another experience, rather than be caught up brooding over how tired I was and any discomfort I might be having.

At the end of that week, seven of us from the Dublin Sri Chinmoy Centre were off on a four-day cycling trip around the county of Waterford. The trip included a stop by the village of Dunhill about ten miles outside Waterford city to run a 10k race (like the Paris race, it was exactly on the 10k race scheduled on our training plan this weekend). Cycling over to the race start, we realised one thing - it was going to be hilly - very hilly. I was doing my usual race warm-up when it occured to me that I wasn’t actually in much of an inner frame of mind to run a race - I was a little tired from the cycling, a little mentally scattered, and also it was shaping up to be quite a hot and sticky day. I realised perhaps the best warm-up I could do for the race would be to meditate for a few minutes! So I found myself a nice quiet spot and meditated; and a beautiful clarity of the heart accompanied me on my way out to the race start.

Then the race began. They told us it would be a bit of up and down hill at the start, flat in the middle, and uphill at the end. Well, I reached the first major climb and came down at speed, thinking that was the extent of it, only to find a second climb straight after. Everyone I spoke to after the race said the second climb is where they really suffered, and that was only at the 3k mark. It was strange, because we were running through some of the most beautiful scenery I can ever remember looking at, but it was kind of hard to appreciate any of it! But at one point I thought of the meditation I had before the race, and specifically I remembered how good I felt walking back from it…right then, I could feel something from that experience entering into me now, and giving me new impetus. When your inner attitude changes, everything changes. We were still running through some of the most beautiful roads, but now I could really take it all in and let the serenity of my surroundings enter into me - outer movement, inner stillness. (That isn’t the race trophy I’m holding by the way - its actually the prestigious Munster Cup which the Waterford hurling team had won the previous week, and which happened to be making a guest appearance for the race)

This same feeling came to me during another three-hour run I had only a couple of days ago. This one started and continued on at a faster pace than I would have liked, and when I finished, I had absolutely zero in the tank. And i mean zero. But what kept me going was my surroundings, and the feeling of moving at speed through them. I am increasingly perceiving during running how everything around us has a kind of energy we can use - for example, running through forests or near water always seems to pick me up, as long as my mind isn’t off on holiday somewhere and I can stay in the moment and attune myself to the surroundings. You can feel it most obviously in a race with plenty of crowds, as the pure goodwill of the spectators lifts you up and encourages you to keep going - plenty a marathon runner can vouch for that! Even on our lonely training run, there was people with kind remarks as we passed by - the guys working on a manhole who told us we were flying, the guys playing volleyball who joked about our speed, the old lady walking our dog who smiled and said ‘fair play to you!’ - sometimes this means more than all the energy drinks in the world.

(Photo by Pavitrata Taylor from London, you can see more of these aphorism cards on his photo gallery… )

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.

Sometime, when I get up on the wrong side of the bed, instead of sitting down to meditate straight away, I will make myself a cup of rooibos tea, put on some meditative music and sit down at my laptop and read some meditative writings on Sri Chinmoy Library for ten minutes or so. Here is something I read this morning:

“Some people say they don’t believe in the existence of God, the Supreme. But I wish to say that someone may not believe in God as infinite Consciousness or infinite Power, but he has to have some belief and some conviction of his own; and this is the same as believing in God. If a seeker is against the concept of God, if he is afraid or if he is doubtful, let him follow his own path. Let us take away the word ‘God’ from his dictionary. Let him have the feeling that there is no God. Let him go as far as possible in negating God. At the end of his negation, there he will see that positive Truth emerges. At the end of his journey Truth looms large and he can take this Truth as infinite Consciousness or boundless Energy.“

(taken from God’s Vision-Dawn, by Sri Chinmoy )

My teacher’s philosophy has always found a way to establish a oneness between the contrasting forces of life - for example, how to have a tranquil inner life and dynamic outer life at the same time. In the above paragraph, again we see how in a few sentences he can make two seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints - atheism and religion - seem not so different after all. I always get rather sad when I see any divisive issue that groups people into opposite extremes, and it has to be said the tension between atheism and God-believers has gotten rather pronounced lately. But, with a little inner sincerity, if we can all go deep within and feel the inner conviction that drives us, we can feel it is the same yearning for truth expressed through different channels. I have great admiration for many writers who are atheist or agnostic - when they write, you can feel their inner conviction and concern for humanity in such a way that resonates with the core of my being. One example that struck me in the past year or so was reading Mikhail Gorbachev’s autobiography - I was really struck by the inner strength and humility of this great soul, and can honestly say I finished the book a more spiritual person than whan I started it!

Nothing here is intended to patronise atheists or to say to them “see, you really believe in God after all…”; it is just to suggest there is somehow a shared experience there, which it might serve us better to recognise before being so quick to point out our differences.

(Picture by Kedar Misani at Sri Chinmoy Centre galleries - I’m not sure how it ties in with the post, but it just looks nice…)

Two philosophers - Plato and Aristotle. Both had the same question - what is reality? Plato held that what is truly Real is to be found in the eternal ideals that never change no matter what happens on earth, his one-time student Aristotle disagreed. No, the real is here, in everyday life, in objects that can be measured and quantified.

Two and a half thousand years later, we had two Irish poets - W.B Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, and yet the same differing viewpoints on where the real is to be found. Yeats, the idealist, immersed in the philosophy of the East (where some people say Plato and Socrates got their inspiration from), quoted the following lines in Sailing to Byzantium:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

And we can see again here a yearning for something beyond worldly experience in these lines from ‘A Stolen Child’:

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

In contrast, we have Kavanagh, the small farmer growing seeing God in the fields and banks hedgrows of his native Monaghan, in the everyday goings-on of country life, as expressed so beautifully in his poem Innocence:

They laughed at one I loved-
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love’s doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms
The dew of an Indian Summer lies
On bleached potato-stalks
What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

When I was studying both of them at school, I definitely sympathised more with Kavanagh. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that both my parents came from very close to where he lived so I had a real feeling for the landscape, but also I was never keen on the excessive symbolism employed by Yeats (still am’nt - is am’nt a word?). But also I was very drawn to his way of seeing beauty in the everyday, in the here and now.

It’s funny, they always say you become more conservative as you grow older - less idealistic and more practical, less Platonic and more Aristotelian. I think the opposite is happening with me - not totally, mind, I still have a healthy avoidance of pure ideas that cannot be verified in the inner laboratory of the heart - but, like Yeats, I am beginning to look more and more for my inspiration to a higher reality rather in than the to and fro of everyday life.

Ultimately, however, I think both philosophies are just two matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that Eastern philosophy has managed to put together for thousands of years. My own teacher, Sri Chinmoy, being very much immersed in this timeless stream of Oriental wisdom, often refers to the transcendent Reality and the everyday reality as ‘God the Creator’ and ‘God the Creation’ . We can see that the Creation has been evolving and becoming more perfect, evolving more and more into the idea of the Creator to which it aspires. However - and this is the beautiful thread that links the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle together - that the creation can only evolve once we love and accept it for what it is. As Sri Chinmoy says: “We have to accept the world as it is now. If we don’t accept a thing, how can we transform it? If a potter does not touch the lump of clay, how is he going to shape it into a pot? The world around us is not perfect, but we also are not perfect. Perfect perfection has not yet dawned. We have to know that humanity at present is far, far from perfection. But we are also members of that humanity. How are we going to discard our brothers and sisters who are our veritable limbs? I cannot discard my arm; it is impossible. Similarly, when we meditate soulfully, devotedly, we have to accept humanity as our very own.”

Not only can the two go together, but adopting one to the exclusion of the other tends to an imbalance - For example, those who rely too much on Platonic ideals tend to try to create a utopian society which, as the philosopher Karl Popper argued, can quickly turn into a totalitarian one because not everyone sees the Truth in their own way. But those who go to the other extreme might also lose any sight of a higher goal to life, and stay ensnared in the weary cyclical churn of events without making any forward movement. So there is a need for a ‘middle path’, just like that advocated by that most well known exponent of Eastern wisdom - the Buddha. Although the Buddha’s philosophy is always said by many to be mind-based, I always feel the ‘middle path’ is something that can always be felt by going inside your own heart and listening to the inner feeling you get there, whereas following the mind is always what drives one to extremes. And here too is no different - one can place oneself in the peace and vastness of heart, as it aspires upwards to the Platonic goal, and at the same time reaches outwards in Aristotelian empathy with the myriad forms of life.

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…

I have to say I don’t spend all that much time surfing around for videos to watch on YouTube, but I’m always grateful when a funny or inspiring one gets passed in front of my nose via word of mouth. Like this one Martin pointed out to me yesterday:

I tell you , you wouldn’t want to be bringing that fellow into a china shop…

My friend Martin arrived at the beginning of the week from Graz, Austria for a couple of months. The first night he was here, he placed a book on the kitchen table with the title of “Perfektes Marathon-Training” (Perfect Marathon Training for those of you struggling to understand German) and opened up two pages in the centre of the book - a ten week training programme to run a sub-3 hour marathon. And coincidentally, it is roughly ten weeks until the Self-Transcendence Marathon in August, a marathon I had planned to run without any great expectations of doing well. The possibility of doing sub three hours had never struck me before; I had injured my knee in March, and although I had gotten back to running three or four times a week, my running was more of the ’shake-off-the-lethargy’ variety rather than any serious training. However, the program seems quite reasonable; plenty of recovery running and a good mix of races, long runs and intervals, so we said we’d just start it it and then listen to our bodies as we go along. The last thing any of us want is a return to bad knees.

The great thing is that there are four guys in the house with broadly similar running capacities: Myself and Martin have marathon bests of 3:09 (thats me in the photo) and 3:10 respectively, Matthias has a best of 2:58 (!) and Colm did his best time of 3:21 only a couple of months ago. So we’ve agreed to all be back at the house at 5pm on training days so we can all head off together. I’ve always considered myself a rather solitary runner, but it is great to laugh your way through runs with a bunch of friends rather than shuffle on alone.

The other thing about a training schedule is that it has kind of taken away some of my preformed conceptions about running. I was always one for throwing away the stopwatch and roaming my way through nature; split times and pacing were not for me, thank you. But now I’m actually doing it, I can see the merits of it - you don’t have the luxury of nature to distract you when you’re going around a boring track again and again; you have to turn to the inner landscape and run from the soaring heart instead of the complaining mind.

So let’s just take it day by day; please God I’m not posting a doleful posting next week about injuries and the like…

PS:

If you want your dreams to come true, don’t oversleep. - My brother just read this on his calendar as I was finishing this post; pretty funny.

Here you can see Aspiration-Ground, the place where we gather to meditate when we go to New York to visit Sri Chinmoy; I think at the moment this photo is being taken at a lull in between events. As you can see, many of Sri Chinmoy’s students dress in very bright colours (brighter colours are more expansive and evocative of the joy and vastness of the spirit than darker ones) and they add a touch of colour to any photo! The white streamers overhead are an ubiquitous feature of our April and August visits; as well as shielding us from the often harsh New York sun, there is something about them that really create a feeling of stillness; perhaps the wind rustling through them, or the shadows they cast on the ground, I don’t know what it is, to be honest with you! Depending on the weather and what is going on, Sri Chinmoy sometimes has his seat on the ground to the left of the photo, and then other times he sits in a covered area at one end of the grounds which is blocked by the tree.

The highlight of our April visits to see Sri Chinmoy is invariably April 13th, the anniversary of the day Sri Chinmoy first arrived in America to be of service to seekers of truth there. The meditation functions that take place on that day have a supernally beautiful quality to them: there might be over 1,500 of Sri Chinmoy’s students visiting him on that particular day, but in my memory it is always the ethereal silence of the meditations I remember most, a silence so beatific and tangible one could almost reach out with a knife and carve it.

And in the silence, the day unfolds. Sri Chinmoy begins by offering his deep gratitude to the soul of America, for hosting him so generously and self-givingly for the past forty-three years. As you may have read previously in this blog, Sri Chinmoy often lifts heavy weights in a vivid demonstration of the power of the spirit over matter; sometimes he uses these weightlifting events as an expression of appreciation, lifting overhead men and women of inspiration using a specially-designed overhead apparatus. in the same vein he offered his appreciation to the soul of America, by lifting overhead a stone fountain weighting 312lb (shown on right) containing fifty flowers, one for each of the states. Then he called all of his American students together to sing “America the Beautiful”, that quintessential evocation of the divine natural and human qualities of America, which many people take as her unofficial national anthem.

But Sri Chinmoy had not forgotten about all the other countries either. Afterwards we had a walking meditation where we all were grouped by our country of origin. As all his Irish students passed by him, Sri Chinmoy, hands folded and head bowed, humbly said “I bow to the soul of Ireland”; he did likewise for the other countries. Later we were treated to a wonderful Indian meal, eating it sitting cross-legged on the floor around our teacher as he related some fond anecdotes about when he first arrived in America.

For some of Sri Chinmoy’s students, the day really begins on the evening of April 12th; there is a 12-hour walk beginning at seven o’clock in the evening and ending at seven the morning of the 13th, in which many participate either in a walking or helping capacity. (My brother Colm took this photo at sunrise on the morning of the 13th; you can see the walkers in the background) Last year, I had gotten tremendous joy from playing my flute for all the participants and I was really inspired to do it again. So after a few hours’ sleep, I got up at 3:30 and made my way out to a nice spot on the course and started playing away. It as really tough at first, my fingers started freezing with the cold, but then some beautiful flow of the heart overtook me, songs came to me that I hadn’t played in a long time and even a couple that I had never played before, and the time flew by without me realising it. At every ultra race I ever have helped at, there has always been a very strong sense of oneness between all the participents and helpers, like we were all there to help each other have joy and make progress, and this one was no different; walkers helping walkers, helpers helping walkers, walkers helping helpers. Actually, unbeknownst to me, on the other side of the course there was a small group of musicians led by Arthur from Berlin on harmonium who actually played the entire twelve hours! it would have been nice to meet up with them; I have great memories of myself, Arthur and Sandin from Austria on tabla playing away into the small hours of the morning last year.

The rain during our stay in New York was unbelievable. They said it was the worst April in New York in 200 years. Thankfully it let up a little during the 13th, but in the succeeding days, it was back with a vengeance. Not to mention the near zero temperatures at nights. It was really really cold. You get some idea from seeing my brother Colm here in this photograph, together with Martin from Graz in Austria who is actually visiting Dublin at the moment, but they still have smiles on their faces. I have to say, I didn’t mind it at all, in fact in some strange way I was grateful for it - it was kind of a challenge where you just had to shut all out incipient negative thoughts about the weather and stay cheerful and happy.

Arguably the worst day weatherwise was thankfully a day we were all indoors: every April and August, one day during our visit is given over to - a circus! We all prepare an act or join up in groups to perform, and the result - clowns, acrobatics, choreography, skits - can take up the best part of the day. Every year, myself and my brother Colm invariably find ourselves in the grand final extravaganza directed by Charana from Wales, a glorious hotch-potch of themes and happenings which are rather incoherently strung together but no-one in the audience cares because they’re all too busy laughing their hearts out. So this time there was monkeys from the Jungle Book, nuns from the Sound of Music, custard pies, regrowing heads and a generous helping of Bollywood dancing. Myself and my brother Colm were amongst the monkeys; before the play, i noticed everyone was cutting rather large holes in their masks to see through, which in my infinite wisdom I didnt see the need for. Boy, was I wrong. i must have spent half the performance peering around in my limited sphere of vision wondering where everyone had gone. But in a performance like Charana’s, everything is so chaotic that no-one in the audience knows when something goes wrong, so i just went with the flow and really enjoyed myself.

A couple of days later, we were making our way to something entirely different - the inaugural Self-Transcendence Invitational Marathon. Every year in August, many of Sri Chinmoy’s students run the Self-Transcendence Marathon in Rockland State Park, but this year Sri Chinmoy proposed that an additional marathon be held, with entry limited to those who had a previous marathon best of 3:55 in the past five tears. I was eligible to run, but a knee injury picked up a few weeks back kept me from participating and instead, and so I instead I was helping with the race set-up. I did however get a run in after all; I was busy entertaining the runners with my flute (with much less success, it was so windy it was hard to get an music out of it at all) when Colm came past with just four miles to go. Without thinking I joined him for the last four miles, encouraging him on until he crossed the finish line in a time of 3:21, eleven minutes better than his previous best. I hadn’t thought of testing my legs out again for another couple of weeks, so it was great that I got the run in; it didn’t do my knee one bit of harm.

A highlight of the celebrations for many was the very fine performances of spiritual theater that took place. The scene on the right is from a wonderfully done play about the life of Thomas Jefferson, specifically his contribution to making religious tolerance a cornerstone of American public life. It is something that we now take for granted, but the first scene of the play brought us back to those nightmarish days where you could be persecuted for your most cherished inner beliefs, and gave us an idea of the magnitude of what heroes like Jefferson were up against. Another great play was in fact the second in a three part series about the childhood of Lord Krishna: the one running motif throughout the play is the prophecy given to Krishna’s greedy and power-hungry uncle that he would be slain by a son of Devaki, Krishna’s mother. Kamsa embarks on various unspeakable acts to quash this prophecy, only to find that the thread connecting him to the fulfilment of this prophecy is being pulled ever tighter. There are great performances by Devashishu Torpy as Krishna and especially Tejaswi can der Walt as Kamsa, who really gives an impression of a man with a giant clock over his head ticking its way down to his ultimate doom, which all his power and scheming cannot avert. I was fortunate to have a tiny role in this play, and I was very struck at the speed at which this international cast of actors could come up with something so accomplished at such short notice.

My teacher says there are some days where one can feel one’s soul coming to the fore, reminding you of why you are here on earth; this happens on birthdays in particular, but also occasions like the beginning of the new year, or the day a student and his meditation teacher accepted each other.

Yesterday, as it happens, was four years to the day I became a student of Sri Chinmoy. Now, in the past there have been days such as a birthday or a new year where I have truly experienced the truth of what my teacher was saying, and felt my soul rise up above the weary grind of existence to instill me with new inner strength and purpose, but yesterday was not one of them. Yesterday (I will be frank) was an absolute bear of a day. Two stubbed toes, one banged head, one set of lost keys, twenty things I didn’t want to do and had to do anyway, and one general feeling of wanting to crawl back beneath the sheets and erase the day from human memory.

I consoled myself with the thought that at least I was meeting up with the rest of the Dublin Sri Chinmoy Centre for meditation that evening. But, to my surprise, the general trend of the day didn’t stop once I had sat down and started to meditate. Five seconds in, a loud buzz could be heard from the intercom (wasn’t it supposed to be switched off during meditation?). My brother had forgotten the keys of the house. Apparently I had neglected to explain to him that he can’t go pressing doorbells in the middle of meditation (he knows now ). Okay. Back up to the meditation room and settle down. Our meditation room is not used for anything else except meditation, and the atmosphere of tranquility and silence that has built up there is so tangible that it is nigh on impossible not to have a good meditation, but last night was a stern test of that particular hypothesis; fitful spells of the heart shining through a tired mind’s dozy thoughts. Safe to assume there would be no reminder of my soul’s purpose today, I thought.

Of course, I was wrong. At the end of the meditation, we will often watch a video or DVD of our teacher meditating, performing music or speaking on spirituality. And as soon as I saw the cover of the video propped up against the machine, I realised that my soul had found a away to remind me after all. This is a video I have seen before many times, and it never fails to bring back the fondest of memories. The tape begins; the camera shows the room in Sri Chinmoy’s house where he exercises for two or three hours a day every day, often in the small hours of the morning. To Sri Chinmoy, his philosophy exercising to keep the body a fit temple for the shrine of the soul is not something to be talked about, but to be lived through example, day after day. There is an exercise bicycle in the middle of the room; Sri Chinmoy comes into view and stands before it, offering a prayer composed from the inmost recesses of his heart, before getting onto the bicycle. Spiritual Masters are flesh and blood like us, they walk, eat and ride exercise bicycles like we do, but the manner in which they do it is charged with such purpose and poise that even watching them go about their daily routines is a lesson in itself.

Sri Chinmoy, his legs pumping on the pedals with tremendous intensity, and yet his brow is unfurrowed, his face still keeps its meditative grandeur. He pauses briefly to switch on a CD player whose controls are taped to the handlebar, and after a few seconds we hear the heart-soaring strains of rabindrasangit, the name given to songs composed by the incomparable Rabindranath Tagore, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature and the only person ever to write the national anthems for two countries - India and Bangladesh. Sri Chinmoy listens rapt to the first song, drinking in its beauty, cycling away.

Then the second song comes on - Mono moro meghero sangit - Tagore’s beautiful evocation of the monsoons of his beloved Bengal - and immediately Sri Chinmoy sits bolt upright on the bicycle, his eyes windows into another world, his hands free as a bird soaring and tracing the contours of the song with his fingers. The great master Sri Ramakrishna often used to go into the supreme meditative state of samadhi if anyone so much as uttered the name of God; here, this simple song has sent my teacher into a state of God-oneness that melts the heart to look at. His legs, like a forgotten colonial outpost sticking resolutely to orders recieved years ago, all the while pedalling away with the utmost intensity.

It was almost four years ago, a couple of months after I became a student of Sri Chinmoy, and I was watching this video for the first time: at this very point, struck by the beauty of this spontaneous meditation, I had the most wonderful - you could say life-changing - experience. My mind, whether struck by the beauty or just the incongruousness of it all, just stopped totally for the briefest of moments needed for the heart could get through - and I could feel something of Sri Chinmoy’s blissful meditative state reach out from the other side of that television screen and wrap around me, drawing me in a bond so close and dear that I did not know where Sri Chinmoy ended and I began; I felt like a limb in a giant and sacred tree of human interconnectedness. In that moment of interconectedness, I felt my purpose here on earth, to help create a world where each of its citizens can feel exactly that same sense of love, joy and connectedness; this is something that has never left me. All the same, I am grateful to my soul for reminding me again, even if it could not come to the fore in person :).

Related Links:

• Tagore’s song Mono moro meghero sangit: I think Windows people can play it, Mac people probably have to download a plugin (boo! boo! hiss! boo!)

Photos: The ‘deflated’ boy comes from Ranjit Swanson at Sri Chinmoy Centre galleries; the second one is of Sri Chinmoy participating in a 24-hour cycle race in 1978

Our meditation centre had all kinds of plans stoked up for the weekend - going for some hill walks, playing a game of football, visiting a garden show - but the miserable weather put paid to most of them. Except the football. Yesterday was supposed to be better; we could meet up for a game of football then. Except it wasn’t better at all. We had planned to go for a bite to eat after the game, but the rain made us decide to put the cart before the horse and head to the greasy spoon (as my friend Ambarish calls cafés - where did he get that from?) first. Well, we finished that and the rain still didn’t get any better. After a brief stint trying to persuade Ambarish, who lived nearby, to put the couch and all the breakables in his house into the kitchen so we could play a game of indoor football in his living room instead, we headed out into the rain and just started playing away.

It’s amazing how you can not look forward to something at the beginning, but then really end up enjoying yourself. The wet surface really levels up all the differing levels of skill and makes for a much more equal game. The rain even stopped. I’m really glad I went out now; things like meeting up for a fun game off football tend to get easily pushed to the back of the schedule due to so-called more ’serious’ commitments, and sometimes if you don’t push aside the excuses and just get out there, the ’serious’ stuff can just take over and bury you.

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.

In addition to teaching, I do some part-time gardening to keep the pennies rolling in. Most of the time I am tending a rather idyllic city centre park that doesn’t get many visitors, leaving me in an oasis of peace and quiet for much of the day. Every day there is an 84-year old lady who comes in, supported by her two walking sticks, for a couple of laps of the park. She tells me she has fallen quite a few times and caused herself some injury, but she is determined not to give up walking - “At my age, if you give up, what else is there?“, she says.

It is now almost a month since I left New York after visiting my meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy, but the impact of that stay still lingers in my heart. I tried to write down a few of the more memorable moments in one post, but that post got way too long, so I decided to break it up into pieces instead.

First day - the balloon lift.

I awoke at 3.30 the morning after I arrived, meditated, pulled on every scrap of warm clothing I could find, and went out into the cold night air. A group of us were making the two-hour drive up to New Jersey in time for daybreak to watch Sri Chinmoy lift a hot-air balloon as part of his weightlifting programme to inspire people to greater heights in their own lives. As I had arrived late, I had to settle for a spot in the boot, which I managed to make more than comfortable - I even found time to write a couple of articles on my laptop.

We arrived to the lifting site. At this stage, we as Sri Chinmoy’s students have been witness to so many of his innovations and spontaneities that you might suspect we would be inured to it by this stage, but our teacher still finds new ways to surprise us. As we drove in, we could see that a hot-air balloon, shaped in the form of a pink rabbit, had been expertly guided onto the overhead lifting platform and sat there perched on the apparatus, as if expecting our arrival. The weight exerted by the balloon on the lifting platform could be controlled by the pilot adding or releasing air from the balloon. As dawn was breaking through the trees, Sri Chinmoy sat down underneath the platform and began a series of lifts which increased in weight as more gas was gradually let out of the balloon, leading up to a final lift of 369lbs. He then lifted another brightly coloured balloon, making its maiden flight that very morning, again in a series of lifts leading up to a final lift of 397 lbs.

Although Sri Chinmoy is noted for his vast volume of written philosophy collected in many books of talks, questions and answers, his philosophy lies much more in doing and in being a personal example of what he talks about. Just one event, like this one, captures so much of what Sri Chinmoy is all about: the yearning to always transcend and go beyond one’s present capacities, the reliance on his prayer- and meditation-life for the inner strength he needs, the constant effort to inspire others to also ‘lift’ their own standard higher - and also, in this case, the pure childlike joy of doing something completely unusual and imaginative.

And that was just the first day….

…I gradually form the habit of listening inwardly, whenever I want to say something, to be sure I have the authority to say it. Gradually I learn to keep my mouth shut, except when I really have something to say. And I come to recognize two beings in my self: a personal ego which is often inclined to chatter, without control, purely for the sake of communicating and attracting attention to my person - and in the background of my consciousness, a higher self which restrains my personal ego, telling it when and what it is to speak and do, and when it is to reman silent or passive. The important thing is to listen to and obey the orders of this higher self. Merely to hear its commands is not enough….

excerpt from ‘Initiation’ - by Elisabeth Haich

In the book, the above passage comes shortly after the author casually talks about spirituality with her trusted servant, only to realise that the servant isn’t ready to assimilate such lofty thoughts, and that telling her might even have done more harm than good by causing her undue worry. It is a passage I can most certainly identify with. I remember after I discovered the joys of meditation for the first time, I was in such a hurry to tell everyone about meditation and how great it was. Invariably many conversations around this time, if they did not start with meditation, would inevitably be turned towards meditation and end with a lengthy monologue on its benefits.

However, with the expansion of one’s meditation, one’s heart also expands. More and more, I come to realise that every human being has his own way through which his soul must make progress - for some this way will be through some kind of spiritual practice, for others their purpose might lie in making great music, art, some amazing athletic feat or perhaps raising kids, helping their community, or just getting by as best they can.

And with time, the inner voice that I yearn to connect with in meditation also comes to the fore in outer life, and I remember more and more to consult it before I talk, for it knows not only what is best for me but for everyone else, the inner voice of each human being inseperable from the inner voice of the Universe.

More and more, I remember to envision the soul of each person I am talking to, and to pray that my voice be one that is of service to it and not one that delays its progress. I always try to keep any conversation I have inspiring (in fact of late, I have become more determined to either raise the tone of any uninspiring conversation I get entangled in or tactfully detach myself from it - life’s just waaay too short to be talking about nothing), but more and more I try and judge ‘inspiring’ more from that inner feeling and less from an ‘everything-would-be-great-if-everyone-was-all-like-me’ perspective.