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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links:

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

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

You can view this on the ABC website, but I just thought I’d put it here to ensure it gets kept for eternity.

I know not truth
But I know its golden smile.
I know not man
But I have his complaint-file.

History man has.
Mystery man is.
Mastery man needs.

Preach
Only what you do.

Practice
Only what you know.

Reach
Only what you see.

Teach
Only what you are.

****

All these poems are taken from a very charming book of aphorism-poems written by Sri Chinmoy called You and I are God - an equally charming title!

I was having lunch with a friend a couple of days ago, and at some point we were talking about experiences we have had, where for a moment one can see ‘behind the curtain’ of the day-to-day world to a deeper higher state, where you see things as they really are. And I remembered a couple of early experiences with my meditation teacher which I had honestly almost forgotten about, so much has happened in the mean time, and I’d like to write about them now just so they don’t remain buried beneath everything else that is happening in life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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