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“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.