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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.

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.

My Lord says to me,
“My child, be not a beggar of what I have.
Be a chooser of Who I am.”

- Sri Chinmoy

(Photo taken by Prabhakar Street; the route of the marathon referred to in the previous blog entry made its way around this lake. I guess this picture was taken around 6.30am, shortly before race start. I wonder if she ran it.)

“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… )

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.

There has been a nice atmosphere in the house in the last couple of days, a sense of newness which has had me trying out new things and picking up some old habits I hadn’t touched in a while. In particular the following two habits stand out:

At the beginning of last year, I attempted what seems in hindsight a pretty brazen task - to learn a 224 line song written in Bengali (a language I cant exactly claim fluency, or even competence, in) in the space of one single day! The song, titled Dyulok chariye nara narayan, is a profoundly elevating experience of song, the words of which come from a poem my teacher, Sri Chinmoy wrote when thirteen years of age (roughly around the time that photo on the left was taken). The poem was written for his spiritual Master, Sri Aurobindo (right), in time for his birthday on August 15, 1945. Fifty years later, in 1995, Sri Chinmoy set the entire poem to music in the form of this song. I began learning the song at 7 a.m. armed with a recording sung by my friend Hiyamallar from California, only to retire five hours later with a severe bout of head-spinning, and not a lot to show for my efforts! But at least it was a start; I kept learning it for a while. But then I mislaid the MP3 player I was using to learn the song for a while and the whole thing fell apart. But in the past few days I’ve been listening a lot to a very haunting recording of that song sung by my teacher, and snatches of it kept floating to my recollection. So I dusted down my copy of the music and went at it again, and am pleased to record I have now done 17 verses out of the total 56. Hopefully I can keep a routine of learning one or two verses a day, and have the lot learned by the time I go to visit my teacher in New York in August.

The second thing is : often when the Dublin Sri Chinmoy Centre are giving free meditation classes in our beautiful meditation space, I talk a little bit on the importance of being grateful for living no matter what happens, and wonder aloud why is it that we don’t leap out of bed in the mornings and go “Yaaaaay! Another great day!” Well - guess what - the four guys in our house have agreed to do exactly that every morning! So at five to six in the morning - the time when three of us wake for meditation - all you can hear is a resounding YAAAAAAAYYY!!!! in one room being met by an equally resounding YYYAAAAAAAAYY!!!!! across the hallway. We’re hoping it will help eliminate the drawn-out ordeal that waking up can sometimes turn out into; more importantly, it means we have something to laugh about barely five seconds into our waking day and that can only be a very good thing…

My friend Martin arrived at the beginning of the week from Graz, Austria for a couple of months. The first night he was here, he placed a book on the kitchen table with the title of “Perfektes Marathon-Training” (Perfect Marathon Training for those of you struggling to understand German) and opened up two pages in the centre of the book - a ten week training programme to run a sub-3 hour marathon. And coincidentally, it is roughly ten weeks until the Self-Transcendence Marathon in August, a marathon I had planned to run without any great expectations of doing well. The possibility of doing sub three hours had never struck me before; I had injured my knee in March, and although I had gotten back to running three or four times a week, my running was more of the ’shake-off-the-lethargy’ variety rather than any serious training. However, the program seems quite reasonable; plenty of recovery running and a good mix of races, long runs and intervals, so we said we’d just start it it and then listen to our bodies as we go along. The last thing any of us want is a return to bad knees.

The great thing is that there are four guys in the house with broadly similar running capacities: Myself and Martin have marathon bests of 3:09 (thats me in the photo) and 3:10 respectively, Matthias has a best of 2:58 (!) and Colm did his best time of 3:21 only a couple of months ago. So we’ve agreed to all be back at the house at 5pm on training days so we can all head off together. I’ve always considered myself a rather solitary runner, but it is great to laugh your way through runs with a bunch of friends rather than shuffle on alone.

The other thing about a training schedule is that it has kind of taken away some of my preformed conceptions about running. I was always one for throwing away the stopwatch and roaming my way through nature; split times and pacing were not for me, thank you. But now I’m actually doing it, I can see the merits of it - you don’t have the luxury of nature to distract you when you’re going around a boring track again and again; you have to turn to the inner landscape and run from the soaring heart instead of the complaining mind.

So let’s just take it day by day; please God I’m not posting a doleful posting next week about injuries and the like…

PS:

If you want your dreams to come true, don’t oversleep. - My brother just read this on his calendar as I was finishing this post; pretty funny.