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I have just returned from three weeks in Dominican Republic, a gathering of students of Sri Chinmoy from all over the world. Every year, Sri Chinmoy would leave snow-bound New York and go somewhere where his constant creative output and tireless work for peace would not be impaired by the sub-zero conditions. He would use the occasion to visit like-minded workers for a better world to exchange inspiration, visit his meditation centres in far-flung locations, or simply as a chance for some time with his students. Our teacher is no longer with us, but this trip seemed like a perfect chance to meet together, share experiences and memories and continue the amplified impetus for inner discovery which our teacher’s passing has given us all.

For much of the trip I was not so much concerned with my new outer surroundings so much as my inner landscape - meditating three times a day, and exploring the creative realm by participating in performances of music and spiritual plays. However there were more than enough opportunities to get out and get to know the soul of the country. A few days into the trip, I joined the team from the World Harmony Run, the celebrated initiative to promote friendship through running that Sri Chinmoy gave birth to 20 years ago, and spent the morning visiting schools not very far from where we are staying. Often when we visit schools we give a very nice presentation, all centered on the theme that harmony is something that can be created by each and every individual; sometimes the schools themselves take up the baton and add their own special contribution.

Something very nice happened at the end of one of the meetings. We were all mingled in a sunny courtyard, talking and laughing with the children in the three or four words of Spanish we had, when all of a sudden I saw one of our team members running around, child perched on his shoulder, both having the time of their lives. Next thing I know all of the team were hoisting children on top of their shoulders - it seemed as if half the class were airborne as we ran, twirled, danced and whooped around the place. No-one wanted it to end.

Sometimes there are moments where the fetters of time just seem to drop off, and the hard facts of life recede into the background.

Right now I am in much warmer climes than I am used to for this time of year (namely, the Carribbean), here with all my friends from the Sri Chinmoy Centre. Just as when we meet in New York, there are plenty of meditation functions which mix silent meditation together with singing and instrumental performances, poetry and more besides. Around this time of year in particular, there are plenty of pieces of spiritual theatre which are rehearsed and enacted for our fellow students of Sri Chinmoy in the audience. In fact I was in one such play a couple of days ago, directed by my friend Kaivalya from London.

Kaivalya wanted to enact a scene from the Mahabharata - tha great Iliad-like epic of India - detailing the climactic lead up to the terrible battle of Kurukshetra. This battle is ingrained in the Indian psyche, for out of it comes the dialogue captured in the Bhagavad Gita, India’s equivalent to the Bible. I was to play the weak and blind Dhritarastha, whose passivity encourages his avaricious son Duryodhana ever closer to war, despite Krishna’s best efforts to avert it.

I was to sort out the sound too. Big climax at the end, I was told - lots of earth shaking, tremors, rumbles, sounds of war, that kind of thing. So I went hunting on the web, found lots of nice sounds, but nothing that seemed to evoke the moment.

However on the morning of the play, I remembered the GarageBand program that came free with my Mac. I had used it very briefly in the week following the passing of my Master as a way of documenting that incredible time of transition, and the thought came to me now - why not try to create some kind of score? So I cobbled together all the sounds I had, messed around with the keyboard sounds a bit, and lo and behold, I had something.

So I went to Kaivalya (who was playing Duryodhana) and Vidura, who was playing Krishna (for those of you who know the Mahabharata, that’s probably a bit confusing, since Vidura is also the name of a historical character in that great epic) and presented them with the first draft. Too subdued, I was told. The beginning of the score documents a very intense scene where Krishna, seeing Duryodhana attempt to capture him, laughs out loud, showing the assembled audience as he does so a glimpse of his fearsome power as the Lord of creation and destruction - his Universal Form, as it commonly called:

“Krishna laughed, loud and long. Even as he laughed, he began to glow like lightning. All the devas emerged from his body. It was a terrifying aspect. There was Brahma the Creator, on his chest the eleven Rudras, on his shoulders Indra, Varuna, Kubera and Yama, Agni glowed in his mouth - all the gods assembled in his form. Balarama at his left hand, and on his right, Arjuna, behind were Bhima, Nakula, Sahadeva and Yudhisthira - all the heros were there. His arms were many. They held the weapons Panchajanya, the chakra Sudarsana, the gada Kanmodaki and the sword Nandana. Fire spread from his eyes and nostrils. No-one had the power to look. All eyes were closed except those of Bhisma, Drona, Vidura and the great Rishis. Even the blind king was given the power to see…

Dhritarastra: You are the Lord of the earth, and I have seen your form. Having seen you, I do not want to see anything else….”

So I was asked to try and capture something of that terrifying power.

So myself and Vidura went up to my room and did some apocalyptic laughter into the microphone, and I played around with things a bit. Unfortunately so much of my time went into recreating the first part of the score that I basically gave myself twenty minutes to do the rest - the climactic drums and tremors leading into the final declaration of war - so that bit sounds rather lame. In fact, I had to ask my brother Colm to play some ‘war drums’ and include it into the score literally five minutes before we were to go onstage.

So here it is, warts and all - I recommend it be played loud just as it was indended in the play.

The first minute is Krishna’s expansion into his universal form, then a lull for Dhritarastha to say a few words, and then finally the build up of drums whilst Krishna and Duryodhana switch from jaw-jaw to war-war (to grave-turningly misquote Winston Churchill)

The irony is, it never got used in full. During the play, as Krishna began to laugh and radiate power, it was played at full volume, drowning out everything else (according to plan). However it was so loud it triggered an automatic cutoff in the sound system so most of it was never played and the play finished in silence. The audience of course never knew any different, but we as the actors were definitely left with a sense of what might have been.

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.

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.

The mantra ‘Aum’ (or Om as it is often spelt) is generally regarded as the mother of all meditation matras. The word itself defies English translation; it is the sound of the mantra itself that it is important, and is held to be the seed-sound from which the ebbs and flows of creation spring, and thus to chant the mantra is to gradually enter into the mysteries of the universe. For thousands of years, yogis and ascetics have chanted this mantra as their sole spiritual practice, and many have attained the ultimate goal of meditation - enlightenment or God-realisation - by doing so. Indeed, some of these sages have reached the stage where when they stopped chanting, they could hear the mantra being generated spontaneously in the inmost recesses of their hearts.

I first encountered the mantra Aum when attending meditation classes run by the Dublin Sri Chinmoy Centre. Even though I liked the classes very much and was inspired to ask Sri Chinmoy could I become a student of his, I never have really explored the mantra ‘Aum’ at all in the four-odd years between then and now, as I seemed to make more progress with silent meditation, singinging longer mantric songs, and the English (though no less powerful for that) mantra ‘Supreme’. However I was at a meditation class last night at which my friend Martin, originally from Graz in Austria but on a lengthy soujourn in Dublin, was talking about ‘Aum’ and he mentioned a specific exercise using japa (constant repetition of a mantra) to purify the being which Sri Chinmoy once recommended:

“The best way to repeat a mantra to attain purity quickly is to ascend by steps. You all know the significance of AUM, the sacred name of God. Today, repeat five hundred times ‘AUM,’ ‘Supreme,’ or whatever mantra your Master has given you. Then tomorrow, repeat it six hundred times; the day after tomorrow, seven hundred; and so on, until you reach twelve hundred in one week’s time. Then begin descending each day until you reach five hundred again. In this way you can climb up the tree and climb down the tree.”

“When you do japa, do not prolong your chanting too much. If you prolong the syllable AUM, you won’t have the time to chant five hundred or six hundred times. Just say the syllable in a normal but soulful way so that you will get the vibration.”

So I became inspired to try this for a month - that’s two up-and-down cycles of mantras. I began my first 500 aums this morning, and the practice definitely does fill you with plenty of energy for the day ahead. Let’s see how we progress….