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Here you can see Aspiration-Ground, the place where we gather to meditate when we go to New York to visit Sri Chinmoy; I think at the moment this photo is being taken at a lull in between events. As you can see, many of Sri Chinmoy’s students dress in very bright colours (brighter colours are more expansive and evocative of the joy and vastness of the spirit than darker ones) and they add a touch of colour to any photo! The white streamers overhead are an ubiquitous feature of our April and August visits; as well as shielding us from the often harsh New York sun, there is something about them that really create a feeling of stillness; perhaps the wind rustling through them, or the shadows they cast on the ground, I don’t know what it is, to be honest with you! Depending on the weather and what is going on, Sri Chinmoy sometimes has his seat on the ground to the left of the photo, and then other times he sits in a covered area at one end of the grounds which is blocked by the tree.

The highlight of our April visits to see Sri Chinmoy is invariably April 13th, the anniversary of the day Sri Chinmoy first arrived in America to be of service to seekers of truth there. The meditation functions that take place on that day have a supernally beautiful quality to them: there might be over 1,500 of Sri Chinmoy’s students visiting him on that particular day, but in my memory it is always the ethereal silence of the meditations I remember most, a silence so beatific and tangible one could almost reach out with a knife and carve it.

And in the silence, the day unfolds. Sri Chinmoy begins by offering his deep gratitude to the soul of America, for hosting him so generously and self-givingly for the past forty-three years. As you may have read previously in this blog, Sri Chinmoy often lifts heavy weights in a vivid demonstration of the power of the spirit over matter; sometimes he uses these weightlifting events as an expression of appreciation, lifting overhead men and women of inspiration using a specially-designed overhead apparatus. in the same vein he offered his appreciation to the soul of America, by lifting overhead a stone fountain weighting 312lb (shown on right) containing fifty flowers, one for each of the states. Then he called all of his American students together to sing “America the Beautiful”, that quintessential evocation of the divine natural and human qualities of America, which many people take as her unofficial national anthem.

But Sri Chinmoy had not forgotten about all the other countries either. Afterwards we had a walking meditation where we all were grouped by our country of origin. As all his Irish students passed by him, Sri Chinmoy, hands folded and head bowed, humbly said “I bow to the soul of Ireland”; he did likewise for the other countries. Later we were treated to a wonderful Indian meal, eating it sitting cross-legged on the floor around our teacher as he related some fond anecdotes about when he first arrived in America.

For some of Sri Chinmoy’s students, the day really begins on the evening of April 12th; there is a 12-hour walk beginning at seven o’clock in the evening and ending at seven the morning of the 13th, in which many participate either in a walking or helping capacity. (My brother Colm took this photo at sunrise on the morning of the 13th; you can see the walkers in the background) Last year, I had gotten tremendous joy from playing my flute for all the participants and I was really inspired to do it again. So after a few hours’ sleep, I got up at 3:30 and made my way out to a nice spot on the course and started playing away. It as really tough at first, my fingers started freezing with the cold, but then some beautiful flow of the heart overtook me, songs came to me that I hadn’t played in a long time and even a couple that I had never played before, and the time flew by without me realising it. At every ultra race I ever have helped at, there has always been a very strong sense of oneness between all the participents and helpers, like we were all there to help each other have joy and make progress, and this one was no different; walkers helping walkers, helpers helping walkers, walkers helping helpers. Actually, unbeknownst to me, on the other side of the course there was a small group of musicians led by Arthur from Berlin on harmonium who actually played the entire twelve hours! it would have been nice to meet up with them; I have great memories of myself, Arthur and Sandin from Austria on tabla playing away into the small hours of the morning last year.

The rain during our stay in New York was unbelievable. They said it was the worst April in New York in 200 years. Thankfully it let up a little during the 13th, but in the succeeding days, it was back with a vengeance. Not to mention the near zero temperatures at nights. It was really really cold. You get some idea from seeing my brother Colm here in this photograph, together with Martin from Graz in Austria who is actually visiting Dublin at the moment, but they still have smiles on their faces. I have to say, I didn’t mind it at all, in fact in some strange way I was grateful for it - it was kind of a challenge where you just had to shut all out incipient negative thoughts about the weather and stay cheerful and happy.

Arguably the worst day weatherwise was thankfully a day we were all indoors: every April and August, one day during our visit is given over to - a circus! We all prepare an act or join up in groups to perform, and the result - clowns, acrobatics, choreography, skits - can take up the best part of the day. Every year, myself and my brother Colm invariably find ourselves in the grand final extravaganza directed by Charana from Wales, a glorious hotch-potch of themes and happenings which are rather incoherently strung together but no-one in the audience cares because they’re all too busy laughing their hearts out. So this time there was monkeys from the Jungle Book, nuns from the Sound of Music, custard pies, regrowing heads and a generous helping of Bollywood dancing. Myself and my brother Colm were amongst the monkeys; before the play, i noticed everyone was cutting rather large holes in their masks to see through, which in my infinite wisdom I didnt see the need for. Boy, was I wrong. i must have spent half the performance peering around in my limited sphere of vision wondering where everyone had gone. But in a performance like Charana’s, everything is so chaotic that no-one in the audience knows when something goes wrong, so i just went with the flow and really enjoyed myself.

A couple of days later, we were making our way to something entirely different - the inaugural Self-Transcendence Invitational Marathon. Every year in August, many of Sri Chinmoy’s students run the Self-Transcendence Marathon in Rockland State Park, but this year Sri Chinmoy proposed that an additional marathon be held, with entry limited to those who had a previous marathon best of 3:55 in the past five tears. I was eligible to run, but a knee injury picked up a few weeks back kept me from participating and instead, and so I instead I was helping with the race set-up. I did however get a run in after all; I was busy entertaining the runners with my flute (with much less success, it was so windy it was hard to get an music out of it at all) when Colm came past with just four miles to go. Without thinking I joined him for the last four miles, encouraging him on until he crossed the finish line in a time of 3:21, eleven minutes better than his previous best. I hadn’t thought of testing my legs out again for another couple of weeks, so it was great that I got the run in; it didn’t do my knee one bit of harm.

A highlight of the celebrations for many was the very fine performances of spiritual theater that took place. The scene on the right is from a wonderfully done play about the life of Thomas Jefferson, specifically his contribution to making religious tolerance a cornerstone of American public life. It is something that we now take for granted, but the first scene of the play brought us back to those nightmarish days where you could be persecuted for your most cherished inner beliefs, and gave us an idea of the magnitude of what heroes like Jefferson were up against. Another great play was in fact the second in a three part series about the childhood of Lord Krishna: the one running motif throughout the play is the prophecy given to Krishna’s greedy and power-hungry uncle that he would be slain by a son of Devaki, Krishna’s mother. Kamsa embarks on various unspeakable acts to quash this prophecy, only to find that the thread connecting him to the fulfilment of this prophecy is being pulled ever tighter. There are great performances by Devashishu Torpy as Krishna and especially Tejaswi can der Walt as Kamsa, who really gives an impression of a man with a giant clock over his head ticking its way down to his ultimate doom, which all his power and scheming cannot avert. I was fortunate to have a tiny role in this play, and I was very struck at the speed at which this international cast of actors could come up with something so accomplished at such short notice.

My teacher says there are some days where one can feel one’s soul coming to the fore, reminding you of why you are here on earth; this happens on birthdays in particular, but also occasions like the beginning of the new year, or the day a student and his meditation teacher accepted each other.

Yesterday, as it happens, was four years to the day I became a student of Sri Chinmoy. Now, in the past there have been days such as a birthday or a new year where I have truly experienced the truth of what my teacher was saying, and felt my soul rise up above the weary grind of existence to instill me with new inner strength and purpose, but yesterday was not one of them. Yesterday (I will be frank) was an absolute bear of a day. Two stubbed toes, one banged head, one set of lost keys, twenty things I didn’t want to do and had to do anyway, and one general feeling of wanting to crawl back beneath the sheets and erase the day from human memory.

I consoled myself with the thought that at least I was meeting up with the rest of the Dublin Sri Chinmoy Centre for meditation that evening. But, to my surprise, the general trend of the day didn’t stop once I had sat down and started to meditate. Five seconds in, a loud buzz could be heard from the intercom (wasn’t it supposed to be switched off during meditation?). My brother had forgotten the keys of the house. Apparently I had neglected to explain to him that he can’t go pressing doorbells in the middle of meditation (he knows now ). Okay. Back up to the meditation room and settle down. Our meditation room is not used for anything else except meditation, and the atmosphere of tranquility and silence that has built up there is so tangible that it is nigh on impossible not to have a good meditation, but last night was a stern test of that particular hypothesis; fitful spells of the heart shining through a tired mind’s dozy thoughts. Safe to assume there would be no reminder of my soul’s purpose today, I thought.

Of course, I was wrong. At the end of the meditation, we will often watch a video or DVD of our teacher meditating, performing music or speaking on spirituality. And as soon as I saw the cover of the video propped up against the machine, I realised that my soul had found a away to remind me after all. This is a video I have seen before many times, and it never fails to bring back the fondest of memories. The tape begins; the camera shows the room in Sri Chinmoy’s house where he exercises for two or three hours a day every day, often in the small hours of the morning. To Sri Chinmoy, his philosophy exercising to keep the body a fit temple for the shrine of the soul is not something to be talked about, but to be lived through example, day after day. There is an exercise bicycle in the middle of the room; Sri Chinmoy comes into view and stands before it, offering a prayer composed from the inmost recesses of his heart, before getting onto the bicycle. Spiritual Masters are flesh and blood like us, they walk, eat and ride exercise bicycles like we do, but the manner in which they do it is charged with such purpose and poise that even watching them go about their daily routines is a lesson in itself.

Sri Chinmoy, his legs pumping on the pedals with tremendous intensity, and yet his brow is unfurrowed, his face still keeps its meditative grandeur. He pauses briefly to switch on a CD player whose controls are taped to the handlebar, and after a few seconds we hear the heart-soaring strains of rabindrasangit, the name given to songs composed by the incomparable Rabindranath Tagore, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature and the only person ever to write the national anthems for two countries - India and Bangladesh. Sri Chinmoy listens rapt to the first song, drinking in its beauty, cycling away.

Then the second song comes on - Mono moro meghero sangit - Tagore’s beautiful evocation of the monsoons of his beloved Bengal - and immediately Sri Chinmoy sits bolt upright on the bicycle, his eyes windows into another world, his hands free as a bird soaring and tracing the contours of the song with his fingers. The great master Sri Ramakrishna often used to go into the supreme meditative state of samadhi if anyone so much as uttered the name of God; here, this simple song has sent my teacher into a state of God-oneness that melts the heart to look at. His legs, like a forgotten colonial outpost sticking resolutely to orders recieved years ago, all the while pedalling away with the utmost intensity.

It was almost four years ago, a couple of months after I became a student of Sri Chinmoy, and I was watching this video for the first time: at this very point, struck by the beauty of this spontaneous meditation, I had the most wonderful - you could say life-changing - experience. My mind, whether struck by the beauty or just the incongruousness of it all, just stopped totally for the briefest of moments needed for the heart could get through - and I could feel something of Sri Chinmoy’s blissful meditative state reach out from the other side of that television screen and wrap around me, drawing me in a bond so close and dear that I did not know where Sri Chinmoy ended and I began; I felt like a limb in a giant and sacred tree of human interconnectedness. In that moment of interconectedness, I felt my purpose here on earth, to help create a world where each of its citizens can feel exactly that same sense of love, joy and connectedness; this is something that has never left me. All the same, I am grateful to my soul for reminding me again, even if it could not come to the fore in person :).

Related Links:

• Tagore’s song Mono moro meghero sangit: I think Windows people can play it, Mac people probably have to download a plugin (boo! boo! hiss! boo!)

Photos: The ‘deflated’ boy comes from Ranjit Swanson at Sri Chinmoy Centre galleries; the second one is of Sri Chinmoy participating in a 24-hour cycle race in 1978

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.

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….

In 2006, Sri Chinmoy composed Shakpura, his 13,000th song in his native Bengali language, whilst on the ultra-fast Shinkasen train from Yokohama to Hiroshima in Japan. In contrast, the song referred to his birthplace in the simple village of Shakpura, in what was then India, but is now modern-day Bangladesh. My teacher gets tremendous joy from recalling memories of his childhood in Shakpura. “In every field, we appreciate, admire and adore vastness, but the qualities of sweetness, fondness and intimacy develop inside littleness”, he says. “For me, that littleness is symbolised by my childhood village home.”

In January 2007, a choir of Sri Chinmoy’s students, led by Prachar Stegemann of Austraila, performed an extremely elaborate arrangement of this song. The arrangement consisted of four different movements, evoking in turn the sweetness and simplicity of Shakpura village, the bustle of the nearby city of Chittagong, the pride the composer feels for his Bengal homeland, and the love and affection felt for Mother India. I wasn’t there on January to see the arrangement, but Sri Chinmoy asked the choir to sing a reprise of the arrangement a couple of weeks ago when I was in New York to visit him, and I joined in at the back of the choir and helped sing it. It was a very moving experience, especially the last part; only a stone could fail to have been moved. The original January performance has just been released on Radio Sri Chinmoy…

have just returned from New York, where I’ve been spending the last ten days or so with my meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, and his students who flew in from all around the world. It has been quite an action-packed time; for sure there has been meditation (and plenty of it), but in keeping with Sri Chinmoy’s philosophy that inner progress and outer action can and must go together, there were also many singing and insrumental performances, spiritual plays, a marathon and even a circus! There is a tremendous energy present during the whole time, and I find myself getting by on much less sleep than I would normally, as I try and involve myself in as many things as possible.

The past few times I came to visit Sri Chinmoy in New York, I wrote a daily diary of goings-on both inner and outer during my stay. However this time I felt I should I just put my laptop away for a week or so and just let myself enjoy the whole experience. I daresay a few stories will emerge in the near future though.