Some early experiences with Sri Chinmoy
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.
