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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links:

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

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