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I have been delving into the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna quite a lot lately. This book is a landmark tome in spiritual history; it is a series of diary reminiscences of the last five years in the life of the great spiritual Master, Sri Ramakrishna, as noted down by one of his foremost disciples, Mahendranath Gupta, who wrote under the nom de plume of M. As such, it is perhaps the first truly first-hand account of the life and times of a spiritual Master. In addition, reading the book reminds me of how the way the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna pulled together and intensified their spiritual practice after Sri Ramakrishna’s passing mirrors what has been happening to many of us disciples of Sri Chinmoy ever since the sad news of our own teacher’s departure from this world.

Sri Ramakrishna spent the majority of his life in the temple grounds of Dakshineswar, about four miles northeast of Calcutta. It was here he underwent the spiritual practices in many different traditions and realised they were all different paths to the same goal, and it was here people flocked from far and wide to hear him tirelessly giving of his love and wisdom. In the introduction to the Gospel, the translator gives a description of the grounds which inspired me to try and piece together a map, hunting down bits of information on various websites and putting things together like a detective novel.

It turns out I was merely reinventing the wheel, thanks to a fantastic map and gallery provided by Alan Perry, who went on a pilgrimage to Dakshineswar in 2002. Looking at these photos, one can really orient one’s bearings inside Dakshineswar, and image oneself travelling to the panchavati, the grove of trees which Sri Ramakrishna planted himself and where he underwent much of his spiritual awakening, the room where he spent time with his closest disciples talking for hours on end from his first-hand experience of God, and the temple hosting the statue of his beloved Mother Kali, who for him was a living reality at every second.

I hope that sometime in the future I might be able to take the reader on a similar tour of Aspiration-Ground in New York, my own Dakineshwar, and show him all the places where my Master Sri Chinmoy weaved his earthly play of love and wisdom until his passing in October 2007.

On the morning of 14th April 1950, a large comet slowly moved across the south Indian sky. My spiritual Master Sri Chinmoy, then a young man of nineteen, was captaining one of the two soccer teams that were playing that day in the spiritual community where he spent his adolescence and early adulthood. Suddenly, upon sighting the comet, the head of the spiritual community stood up and folded her hands in the traditional Indian gesture of solemn respect. Both teams followed suit, standing there in the middle of the field, hands folded, in absolute silence. With the passing of that comet something most profound had just departed the earth; on the sacred hill of Arunachala, the great spiritual Master Sri Ramana Maharshi had breathed his last that very morning.

Question: What is the significance of a comet?

Sri Chinmoy: When something most precious leaves the
earth-consciousness, then a comet will be visible. From the
spiritual point of view, when you see a comet, something very
significant has taken place on earth.

On October 24th 2007, a small comet called Holmes suddenly became visible in the Perseus constellation of the night sky, increasing its luminosity by a trillionfold. It was a breathtakingly starlit Saturday night as we came home from a beautiful meditation with fellow students of Sri Chinmoy from many different countries, and one of us got the inspiration to look up the thoughtful link that Sarah posted on the Sri Chinmoy Inspiration Group provided to find the comet.

Find Cassiopeia, I told Steve when he arrived back at the house. Now go to the middle of the ‘W’ and make your way down the line on the left side and keep going; that’s Perseus, the great hero, readying an imaginary bow for the shot. I made a circle with my fingers around Perseus’s left shoulder and told him to look through it; inside the circle was a triangle, consisting of Mirfak (the brightest star in the Perseus constellation), another star, and Holmes. It’s the fuzzy one. Stars are as clear as pinpricks; comets are blurrier and more diffuse. That’s our comet.

The sky was speckled with stars, and to most people on earth it would be indistinguishable from any of the rest of them. And then some people look up and out of all those dots find the one thing that is special to them.

“And at night you will look up at the stars. Where I live everything is so small that I cannot show you where my star is to be found. It is better, like that. My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens . . . they will all be your friends. And, besides, I am going to make you a present . . .”
He laughed again.
“Ah, little prince, dear little prince! I love to hear that laughter!”
“That is my present. Just that. It will be as it was when we drank the water . . .”
“What are you trying to say?”
“All men have the stars,” he answered, “but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You–you alone–will have the stars as no one else has them–”
“What are you trying to say?”

“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night . . . You–only you–will have stars that can laugh!”
And he laughed again.
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you . . .”
And he laughed again.
“It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh . . .”

(excerpt from The Little Prince, by Antoine de St Exupery)

“When we concentrate on the divine heart and feel the real divine heart, we will see that inside it the entire universe exists, that the heart is vaster than the universe itself”: that’s what our teacher once said. And inside this heart, one fuzzy speck in the sky watches overhead, and smiles.

I know what I know, and it is enough.

* * * *

I ran the Dublin City Marathon last Monday. I hadn’t particularly trained for it, and the events surrounding the passing of my meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, meant that during the month of October I had run less than ever, but when ever I thought about the marathon, I felt intuitively that running it would be some kind of fitting tribute to my teacher and all that he has given me since I became his student four years ago. (I’m always praying for more of this kind of inner clarity as regards what to do, so when I do get an inner feeling like this, the least I can do is act on it post haste)

However with the paucity of training I had done, it wasn’t long before it got pretty tough out there on the course. But at around mile fourteen the following song came to me, and I was singing it under my breath for the next few miles:

All Your Grace, all Your Grace,
All Your Grace, all Your Grace,
My Lord Beloved Supreme!
All Your Grace, all Your Grace,
My soul and I are able to join
In Your birthless and deathless Race.
- Sri Chinmoy (1)

And in this song something which had been perturbing me since the previous night’s meditation resolved itself, like one of those shoelace knots you pull on to find out it isn’t a knot at all. I was reading something after the meditation had ended - my teacher had been talking about how often when we do something, we often outwardly give credit to God or our Higher Self to appear spiritual, but inwardly our ego is still busy grabbing the credit for itself. It’s quite interesting actually, because I had probably read that very same passage three or four times over the years without taking much notice. Yet this time, the very same words seemed to set my whole life situation alight. How often I had secretly exulted in doing something when I knew quite well it wasn’t really ‘me’ that did it, that my ‘doing’ was merely the fortune of being in the right place at the right time when the inner suggestion came? There simply are not enough fingers to count.

And yet now, whilst I was running and singing, singing and running, the song made me realise that races like these are one of the few times I actually do give credit to a higher source - during a race, you often reach a stage where you just realise what is bothering you are mainly mental and emotional fluctuations, and they have no basis in reality outside of you creating them. So you stop creating them. And then the inner power takes over in such a tangible way that the mind cannot take any credit whatsoever. All Your Grace, indeed.

The marathon also was an illustration of how close the members of our meditation centre have all become as a spiritual family over the last few weeks: at the half way mark we were unexpectedly greeted by Ambarish, who spent the rest of the race cycling all over Dublin with drinks and energy gels in hand (and taking these photos). Mile 18 and 19 are the toughest miles on the course, but lo and behold, my brother Colm was standing there fresh off the plane from New York, and we travelled the mile together whilst he told me all the things that had happened during his stay.

* * * * *

I waited a few days before I felt sufficiently recovered to run again; my first run was on Saturday morning. I was in Cambridge for the weekend, meeting up with all my fellow students form Ireland, England and France for a weekend of meditation and remembering the outpouring of service to humanity that was our teacher’s life (2). So I left Steve’s house at seven in the morning, intending to run for twenty minutes and armed with some vague directions to some green space half a mile down the road. I reached some railway bridge; there was a young guy standing on it looking at the trains passing by, with a bottle of rum for company. Probably someone on an extended Friday night, I thought, as I passed him and said hello.

You’re Irish, aren’t you, he asked. Where in Ireland are you from.

From out the country, I replied, though I’ve been living in Dublin these past seven or eight years.

So then, as if it were the natural next step in the conversation, he told me his best friend’s sister had just passed away. Aged just eighteen. Just went to bed one night and never woke up. And so he was out here contemplating, reflecting on life and death, and wondering what his friend must be going through. There really is nothing like having someone pass away to make you realise how precious life, we both agreed. Or how frail and mortal you are.

I told him how I had also lost someone very dear to me in the past few weeks, and how his passing had spurred me on to embrace every second of life, to squeeze every last moment out of the time I had left. Because my departed friend had never wasted a moment when he was on earth.

He didn’t really believe in God or heaven or any of that stuff. Outwardly, I said nothing - it’s none of my business what other people believe - but it made me realise how lucky I was in the gift Sri Chinmoy showered upon all his students and loved ones with his passing: namely, the realisation that the human soul is eternal journey in which death is only a checkpoint. I tried to imagine how people could cope without any certainties about spirituality or what happens after death, but I couldn’t. Maybe one can in a Buddhist-like ‘everything is impermanent and everything ceases to exist’ kind of way, I don’t know. In a strange way, I was almost grateful for that bottle of rum he had.

We talked about marathons; he’s definitely thinking of doing one soon. I told him he should; he has the runner’s physique.

He was a very nice guy; I enjoyed talking to him tremendously. On occasion, I have been guilty of dishing out plenty of lofty advice and walking away with a rather unbalanced elated feeling, like something went wrong somewhere; essentially, I had been giving out advice to feed my ego rather than out of true service to the person I was talking to. This time I went away feeling that perhaps this time I had done some little service. Grateful for the fortune of being in the right place at the right time.

From beyond, the teaching continues.

---

* * * * *

Footnotes (the Sign of a Serious Blog Entry)

(1) Sri Chinmoy had composed this song only a few months ago; during the running of the 3100 Mile Self - Transcendence Race between June and August, he would arrive early in the morning and teach a new song to a group of singers who were cheering on the runners in this epic race by singing songs for them. The above words are from memory; I think they’re right, but I’ll keep an eye out for the published version to check them against.

(2) While we were in Cambridge, some of us found time to attend a service in King’s College Chapel; Sumangali Morhall from York describes the experience in her blog far better than I ever could.