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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, not changing exactly - I just realise I want my site to be a bit bigger! I’d like to have loads of inspiring articles on meditation, the inner life, great spiritual masters, people and events that have lifted humanity out of the ordinary, and just about anything else inspiring I can squeeze in.

So one of these fine days, my blog (which is powered by Wordpress and which I have absolutely no complaints about) will move slightly, and exist side by side with a very nice content management system (CMS) called Drupal which will let me organise all this nice content in a way people can be really inspired by. I am currently contributing to a site called allaboutrunning.net where Drupal is used, and I like it the more and more I use it.

(I have spent a long time working on another CMS called Plone, doing technical work for such inspiring sites as poetseers.org and writespirit.net. I’d just like to say that Plone is pretty cool as well, just in case it is miffed at me for switching over - content management systems have feelings too you know . )

I was just doing a spot of gardening a couple of days ago in this glorious weather when a blue butterfly chanced across my path. I had never seen a blue butterfly before - my childhoods were spent chasing Red Admirals and such - but the colour of this one was so unusual as to make me wonder if God was not playing one of his little Games again. In spiritual circles, this kind of light blue evokes vastness and consciousness, the vastness of the sea and the sky. In the course of the day, I was indeed to see more blue butterflies, but none near as blue as that first one I saw.

A couple of days later, I had half a mind to take a pruning shears to a holly bush just a ways up the road, but my boss reckoned there might be holly blue butterflies nesting there. A quick perusal of the BBC website reveals holly blues (top left) are actually quite rare, andd actually easily confused with the common blue butterfly (right). Maybe the first one I saw was a holly blue, because it was MUCH bluer than the others. In any case, I’ll leave off pruning the holly bush for another month or so.