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The World of Noivedya
Now that Sri Chinmoy has gone, life will be different for those of us who had the good fortune to be his students. How will it differ – and how different will be? It’s too early to say. I was pondering this the other day, and it struck me how spoiled we all were for so long.
Consider the famous image of a bearded spiritual man meditating on a mountain top, visited by intrepid pilgrims who would travel for months or years to ask him questions about the meaning of life. Sri Chinmoy’s students could ask their guru such questions in the relative comfort of suburban New York (or whichever exotic part of the world we were all visiting). Even an economy-class Sydney-to-NYC flight on United Airlines wasn’t nearly as challenging as those legendary seekers’ journeys to snow-capped peaks in the Himalayas.
There were other differences, of course. For starters, Sri Chinmoy was clean-shaven. Secondly, the question “What is the meaning of life?” cannot be answered satisfactorily with a few words; it requires inner reflection. However, thanks to his years of meditation, Sri Chinmoy was able to answer our countless questions, both general and (perhaps more frequently) personal. Often, he would reply in silence, leaving it to us to find the answers within ourselves, rather than in his verbal replies. Hopefully, we have now honed that skill to expert levels.
For now it’s up to us.
A friend of mine put it best by saying that, with his passing, Sri Chinmoy has “pressed the reset button.” In his poetry and his prose, Sri Chinmoy had a gift for metaphors, so it’s logical that metaphors are flowing thick and fast from his students. The one I just mentioned, however, is probably the best one I’ve heard.
I mentioned it to some other friends a couple of nights ago, as we dined together in a local park. They all agreed that it was a suitable metaphor. “Let’s just hope that the new program isn’t infected by the mind-virus,” quipped a German guy.
“Mine has been infected for a long time,” I confessed. “I just hope the infection doesn’t completely damage the system.”
“Our Guru was the best anti-virus program,” said my German friend.
“Let’s hope that our meditation contain effective anti-virus software,” said another guy. We all laughed.
We were enjoying ourselves so much with this, even though a casual observer might have been forgiven for thinking (with some accuracy) that we were gradually working this metaphor to death. Nonetheless, I still think the whole “reset” button was a fair description of what has happened. The way we live our lives, from now on, will be just a little bit different.
I’ve been thinking of Sri Chinmoy’s most recent students, who joined his spiritual path in recent months, without ever having a chance to see him... or ask him any questions. (OK, I've met very few of them - one from Melbourne, one from Sydney, a few from Canberra. They were all accepted by Guru in September.) True, they were sad that he is gone, but they are still looking forward to the future - and noting their inspiration, I'm filled with optimism. Our Guru left us with a grand legacy - 1500 books, 20,000 songs, countless recordings and artworks...
With our Guru to guide us, the future looks great.
When our loved ones die, we journey to their wake, to offer our respects. It is the same in the spiritual life as in the “regular” life. So I can barely understand why, for the first few days after Sri Chinmoy’s passing, I stayed at home, content simply to write online tributes to him, while many of my spiritual brothers and sisters were in New York, paying their respects to him at his meditation garden. We had nightly meditations at our Centre, in which his Canberra-based students (or at least, those who remained at home) would meet. But it wasn’t the same. As I heard of the memorial service, a beautiful event attended by many of his friends, I knew I had missed something special.
Four days after Guru’s death, I finally decided to stop waiting. Early in the morning, I phoned an airline and booked a flight to New York for that afternoon (the most expensive flight to NY I’ve ever booked – but I couldn’t exactly pick and choose). I quickly threw together a few clothes in a sports bag, which was easily done. As most of my clothes were in a washing basket, waiting to be thrown in the machine, I just took whatever was still in the cupboard. (My dirty washing will have to wait an extra week.)
After a few phone calls – of the “Hi, I won’t be able to make it to dinner on Friday” variety – I jumped in my car, made the three-hour drive to Sydney and flew to New York. By that evening, after a long-extended day, I was in the meditation garden. I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Indeed, I wondered why I had hesitated.
It was obvious, of course. While I have always been happy to fly overseas, for any number of spiritual reasons, I have rarely possessed the sense of spontaneity needed for the thankfully rare moments like this, which require me to drop everything immediately, even if it means seeing off someone who meant so much to me. He always talked about the importance of spontaneity – and judging by their swift arrivals in New York, most of his students seemed to have taken it to heart. Sadly, not this one.
At least, not to the same extent. Friends of mine with full-time jobs were able to quickly arrange leave with their sympathetic employers, not wasting time. I have a flexible work situation, but I was still hesitant. “Too expensive”, “too awkward”, all the usual excuses.
Happily, I eventually came to my senses - and to NY. I saw my Guru at rest, and attended his burial ceremony. It was worth every cent, every minute, every moment of the last-minute rush. Had I come any later, I would have missed everything.
Thanks to my lack of spontaneity, I was forced to be more spontaneous than ever before.
Thank you, Guru. Even your passing reminds me that there is still so much I need to learn from you. May I continue to learn.
For more (many more) heartfelt tributes to Sri Chinmoy, see: http://www.srichinmoybio.co.uk/news/sri-chinmoy/sri-chinmoy-1931-2007/
When my father died a few years ago, I was thinking of what Sri Chinmoy might say. His words, ever inspired and powerful, would also be very comforting. I read some of his aphorisms to get me through the day.
“Death is natural. Nothing natural can be detrimental. Death is rest. Rest is strength in disguise for a further adventure.
“Death says that it is immortal. Man’s achievements say, 'Death, you are right. But the truth of the matter is that we shine perpetually upon your very breast. Not only that, we shine forever in you, through you and beyond you.'”
At the time, Sri Chinmoy was in Australia, and I was with him in Queensland. When he received the sad news, he called me to stand in front of him, then meditated - silently and powerfully - for a few minutes. At the end, he smiled, as if to say “Your father is fine.” Though he has written millions of words, his meditations could say so much with no words at all.
Now Sri Chinmoy has also passed away.
I recall his words that I read, the ones I used to cope with my father’s death. It’s only fair that Dad returns the favour. When I was a small child, I innocently asked my father why people become so sad when their friends and relatives die, why so many tears are shed over something so inevitable. Is it really sad when people die?
“Of course,” he said. “Everyone should live forever.”
Like many, many others, I always felt very close to Sri Chinmoy, so I have some sadness that I will never again see his smiling and peaceful face. Yet I don’t have any of the sense of loss I felt when my father died. When that happened, I was very upset because, with all his wonderful qualities, he had never achieved all he could have, or should have achieved. You could blame his fate, or his all-too-human weaknesses, but it seemed that his death had come too soon.
Sri Chinmoy, however, was a man who accomplished all that anyone could accomplish in a mere 76 years. Even in his final weeks – I last saw him early in September – he was active, still demonstrating humanity's unlimited power. Had he not been taken from us, of course, he would still have done more – writing poetry, lifting incredible weights, drawing Soul-Birds, playing meditative music, or simply showing his love for the world through his supreme meditation.
Here in Australia, it is four in the morning as I write this. I was informed of his passing just a couple of hours ago. Unable to sleep, I sat in front of my meditation shrine and sang forty of his compositions.
In 2004, on the fortieth anniversary of his arrival in the West, I surveyed members of the Sri Chinmoy Centre on their favourite songs that he had composed. In a project heavily inspired by my pop-culture interests, I compiled a “Top 40” from the result. Two hours ago, after meditating briefly, I took out the songbook and sang all forty of these wonderful songs, only stopping to pause after “Usha Bala Elo”. This was the song that made me decide all those years ago, in just three lines, that I wanted to be his student.
I was thinking of the other things I might do today. I’m in the middle of a project for the Sri Chinmoy Centre in Canberra, in which I am (very) gradually converting our collection of VHS videos to DVD format. It has taken over a year, partly as there is so much material, and partly because I keep delaying the project, packing away the videotapes so that they stop cluttering the carpet while something else comes to take over my time.
Yesterday I copied a rare gem – a documentary from 1974 called The Life of Sri Chinmoy. Originally a 16mm film, it is not of the best quality, but it was still a wonderful look back, seeing an old friend long before I knew him, but already saying so much more with a silent meditation than I could ever say with millions of words. But I was thinking “This needs to be updated – and of course, with all he does, it needs to be updated every week!”
Now, I guess, we can have the ultimate version. He has left a wonderful legacy. So many thousands of songs I haven’t yet learned, and probably won’t have time to learn in this life (though I’ll do my best). So many books I have yet to read. So much wisdom I should use in my life. His time on this world is over, but like any great man, his work will exist for many centuries to come.
Yesterday morning, en route to New York, I did the City 2 Surf fun run. This event, which has been held for the past 36 years, is one of those activities in Sydney that everyone (or at least, every Australian runner) should experience at least once in their lives. The announcer mentioned over the loudspeaker that it is “the biggest fun run in the world”, and while you would think this unlikely (surely Sydney, despite its size, is a little isolated), it did have a field of 64,713 people! Who can beat that?
It’s very strange to enter an event of this scale. I’ve been in races of one or two thousand people, but this is something else. It is so huge that there are four separate starts. I was in the third group – and as I waited for the previous group to move through, it struck me that they were taking quite some time. This was partly because there were so many of them, but also because so many of them were simply walking the 14-kilometre distance.
Now I should point out that I think walking is an excellent form of exercise (and thereby, self-transcendence). Though I think it’s unfair of those French “intellectuals” to berate their President for doing something as “ignoble” as jogging to keep fit, when he could simply be doing something dignified like walking, I agree with them that walking is a great thing to do. Thomas Jefferson – the greatest man ever to be President of any nation – did it regularly, saying that it was the greatest form of exercise
But for people like me who want to run, and get a good finishing time, it was awkward being on the same field as thousands of walkers.
It wasn’t waiting to begin that was the problem. (Even I have enough patience to cope with such things.) It was trying to squeeze past them, on a very crowded road, without colliding. As we ran through Kings Cross, Sydney’s most infamous suburb, I had to use all my (non-existent) gymnastic skills to dodge one participant, dressed as (I believe) a fairy queen. He had stopped so that another fairy queen could take his photo, though why they chose to do it there (in front of a non-descript grocery store, in mid-race), I have no idea.
Incidentally, the reason I was seeing fairies was not due to exhaustion, but because people were encouraged to enter the race in costume. In fact, more people were hoping to win prizes for their costumes than for their running. (Hey, finishing this race in a good time is a great personal achievement, but only the fastest elite runners will actually win anything.) So it was a celebrity field: Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Superman, a group of Samurai warriors, several women with Kevin 07 T-shirts wrapped around their waists (a sight that would be appreciated by Australians right now), some guys dressed as pencils (?), even Borat. Another time, I almost crashed into a group of young girls when they stopped to fasten their wings back on.
I imagine I probably added another two kilometres to my time simply dodging, weaving and zig-zagging past other people. If it was a nuisance for the runners, it must have been terrifying for the walkers, who would have done most of the distance in stark fear of being bulldozed by an intense pack of runners.
Despite this obstacle, the costumes added to the fun of the event – and yes, it was fun. Though I exerted myself a lot on this run, I was enjoying myself so much that it seemed much easier. Perhaps I was so focused on avoiding a collision that I didn’t even realise how much my feet were pounding the asphalt. Not until I finished did I realise how exhausted I was.
About two kilometres into the run, barely after we had left the Cross, a live version of Live and Let Die was booming from the top floor of one of the pubs, courtesy of a band that looked like Led Zeppelin and played like Deep Purple, so I’m not sure why they were playing a Paul McCartney song. (Oh well… right era.) While I always prefer listening to Sri Chinmoy while I’m running, the music definitely inspired me. I wasn’t the only one, as other runners were applauding them as they ran past. In fact, everyone seemed to be going faster as we passed this band – either because (like me) they were inspired by the energy and dynamism of the music, or because they wanted to escape it. Perhaps both.
There was a lot more music as we continued. As I ran up a hill, I could hear the Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin blaring from the speakers in someone’s house. I like this song a lot, but it’s a pity that I arrive just in time to hear the lyrics “never reaching the end”. Perhaps not the most positive words to hear.
More live music came later. A jazz band in a bus shelter. A ragtime band on one of the traffic islands. Perhaps, like the Flash (one of the super-heroes of my childhood), I was running so fast that I was going back in time, hearing the music of yesteryear as I continued…
Or maybe not. I was at my fastest by then, having passed most of the walkers, but I've never been that fast.
As I continued, I (like many people) was sprayed by someone’s hose from his front yard. He’s probably been waiting all year for a chance to do that to passersby and see them smile back at him (rather than yell at him). Having just come from a Canberra winter, I was quite unprepared for the warmth of the Sydney morning.
Soon after, the first kilometre marker appeared: 10 km. It was great to know that I was so close to the end. Well, I was actually a little disappointed at first, because I thought I’d run a bit further – but I quickly corrected that feeling. It was actually great that I had a whole 4 km to go, so that (after all that dodging) I could finish with a few kilometres of “proper” running.
It was also the nicest part of the course, as we ran through some of Sydney’s beachside suburbs – Clovelly, Bronte, Tamarama… It is not usually considered a great omen to run past a graveyard, but this was an exception. As I saw a familiar graveyard (between Clovelly and Bronte), which I have run past on several Sunday morning jaunts between Bondi and Coogee, I knew that I was almost at the end.
Bondi Beach is one of Sydney’s most popular attractions. Though the City 2 Surf bypasses the Sydney Opera House (which wasn’t yet built when this run started) and the Harbour Bridge, and Kings Cross no longer has the quaint beauty that it possessed 36 years ago, the run at least finishes with a dose of the city’s famous bush culture.
Understandably, the surf was especially crowded on this morning, as were the cafes, which would usually be an ideal place to wind down and enjoy breakfast after a run to the beach. (I’ve done it on many occasions.) But it wasn’t necessary. The City 2 Surf works brilliantly as a Sydney experience on its own. Bonuses (the sunbathing, the surf, the shopping) are unnecessary. I’m still not sure how any race could get so many people (64,713, for Heaven’s sake), but having experienced it for myself, I think I now have a few clues.
I’m constantly amazed and impressed by correspondents like Tejvan and John G, who can regularly maintain more than one blog, yet still find the time to read (and comment on) the blogs of others. How do they do that? I spend much of my day in front of a laptop, trying to do my writing work and (on a good day) keep my online presence up-to-date.
Recently, I’m afraid, I haven’t had much success with the latter duty.
To be honest, I've been reconsidering my blog spaces. While I've always tried to stay positive - give joy or inspiration to readers, or sometimes both (if I can) - I've wondered if some of my posts have been at odds with the spiritual nature of the Sri Chinmoy Centre site. They haven’t been negative, of course, but my comments on popular culture and the (hopefully) amusing anecdotes of my life haven’t really equalled the loftier subject matter more often covered on the Sri Chinmoy Centre site.
Today I started a new blog on Blogger.com, Wishful Thinking (http://markjuddery.blogspot.com), which will include many of the sorts of writings that I used to include here – my musings on world affairs and my working life.
Meanwhile, if I have any profound spiritual observations or meditations, I’ll take a leaf from great writers… like James Joyce. Yes, I’ll put everything into a 1,000-page book that nobody can understand… and which will subsequently become known as one of the greatest novels ever written!
No, on second thought, I’ll take a leaf from John G. The blog you are presently reading will still include my profound meditations and observations (which have always been somewhat rarer). Hopefully, those who have been kind enough to find my writing entertaining will still be entertained, but this will have a more spiritual focus.
Here I will be Noivedya; on Wishful Thinking, I will often go by my original name (and usual writing name). I’m still Noivedya, wherever I am, but most of my editors still know me by the name my parents gave me.
Hopefully, like John G, I’ll be able to maintain two blogs (however irregularly). See you soon – hopefully in two places.
