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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