For those souls who have reached high meditative states and realised their oneness with the Source, their inner source commands them to be of service to humanity, sometimes in ways that come as a surprise even to them. This can certainly be said of Sri Chinmoy's athletic output; he has often said how out of all the creative endowments he has recieved through his meditation, his artistic output is the one which he least expected.
It all begain in 1974 with a spontaneous inspiration in a hotel room in Ottawa, Canada, where Sri Chinmoy was staying. Suddenly, he got the inner message to go and buy a packet of crayons and begin drawing. His very first drawings were of real-life objects, but his paintings very soon took on an abstract flow-of-consciousness quality. He describes his method of painting as follows:
"I do not use the mind; I use the heart. I try to make my heart a receptive instrument so that God, the Supreme Artist, can paint in and through me. I am like a ballpoint pen. Somebody is using me to write something. Somebody is acting in and through me."
Sri Chinmoy gave the name 'Jharna-Kala' or fountain-art to this particular way of painting; the name describes how his art naturally flows from his inner source of silence.
The following year - 1975 - was a momentous year as far as Sri Chinmoy's painting was concerned. In this year, he produced an astonishing number of paintings -200,000 in total, 16,000 of which was produced in one single day! Many of these paintings began to be exhibited at galleries in New York and further afield. Over the years, the paintings have been shown in many prestigious locations, including the Louvre and quite a few national houses of parliament. More recently, Sri Chinmoy likes to first write down a certain meditative quality, for example Peace, Forgiveness or Oneness, and then paint a painting that evokes that particular quality.
Whilst visiting Malta in 1991, Sri Chinmoy's artwork embarked on a whole new direction, in the form of his 'Dream-Freedom Peace Birds' - a series of bird drawings which evokes the freedom and vastness of the soul. Since then he has drawn over 15 million of these birds, sometimes a single bird in a drawing and sometimes in a drawing containing many birds at a time. He often will draw on unusual and imaginative surfaces like fabric or even objects like children's toys, clocks and seashells. He has spoken of these birds as follows:
"I am a man of prayer and meditation. For me, birds have a very special significance on a spiritual level. They fly in the sky, and the sky is all freedom. So when the birds fly in the sky, they remind me of the soul's infinite freedom. The soul has come from Heaven. When we think of birds, we are also reminded of our Source, and this gives us enormous joy. I feel that if people come here to view these birds, their inner hunger to fly in the sky of infinite freedom will be fed."