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.
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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.
