Well, now two of us know
This is one of the stories in our Story-Gems project, a collection of our experiences with our Guru, Sri Chinmoy. Project homepage »
In a dream five years after Guru passed away, he looked at me pointedly and asked lovingly yet knowingly, “Is everything okay?”
My initial reaction was to say, “Yes, yes, of course,” (partly out of a desire to not create any problems for Guru – which is actually totally stupid because if something is not okay, then Guru is the exact person to fix it – and partly out of embarrassment in not wanting to acknowledge that I was having a problem).
Just as I was about to respond within this dream, I remembered a situation in real life when Guru had gently inquired as to why he had not been seeing me around. I had responded by saying nonchalantly, “Oh Guru, I’ve been very busy working on the World Harmony Run,” when the real reason was that I was extremely upset with another disciple and also very mad at Guru because that disciple was very close to Guru. (I think that if I had actually admitted that to Guru, I would have burst into tears and totally broken down—there was so much emotion bottled up in the situation. Upon reflection, I think Guru was trying to help me release that emotion rather than let it fester.)
Anyway, Guru sadly acknowledged my response and lovingly requested that I come to functions. That very evening, Guru launched into a long public discourse, talking generally about disciples being honest with him and how he can see through our half-truths and evasive responses as easily as you or I might drink a glass of water. Listening to this, I fidgeted in my seat.
Having learned from this real-life experience, when Guru asked me in the dream if everything was okay, I said that I would like to tell him privately what was bothering me (in this dream I was in Guru’s house and there were other people around).
We went into Guru’s kitchen, where I was alone with him, and I explained my problem.Guru said, “You should have said something earlier, because you need help.” I was about to point out that Guru had passed away five years earlier, but I held my tongue as I knew Guru would get very upset with me. He would launch into a whole talk about whether I believed in the inner world and all that. (Which of course I did, as this whole exchange was taking place in the inner world, in my dream!)
Guru then reassuringly followed up with, “Well, now two of us know.” I knew that what he meant was, “Now you can rely on me to fight this battle with you.” And because I do believe in the inner world and the inner life, I felt confident in this reassurance, which helped me to face the situation.
No more darkness, only light
This is one of the stories in our Story-Gems project, a collection of our experiences with our Guru, Sri Chinmoy. Project homepage »
So the first time that Guru saved me was on New Year’s Eve on a boat trip from Trinidad to Tobago. On the boat trip to Trinidad Guru asked me if I could find him a jackfruit. Because jackfruit was out of season, I went all over Trinidad looking for it. I had so much joy going all over the place. Finally I found one man who said, “I don’t have any now but in a week I can get it for you.” I said, “That’s perfect because we will be going back tonight, which is New Year’s Eve. We will be going back to Tobago and in four or five days we will be flying home from Trinidad. We’ll be flying home. And on that day, I will come see you.”
On the boat trip back, a man, not in our group, had a heart attack. I was a medical student then and I heard people saying, “Is there a doctor? Is there a doctor?” I ran over to the man. There was also a doctor there, and both of us went to see the man.
The man actually was not alive. He did not have a pulse, but we tried to bring him back. My friend the doctor was pushing on his chest, and I was breathing. We were trying very hard. When I was trying to help the man breathe, he gave a cough. Often times it is called a death cough. Often times after a person passes on, their lungs release air. The man gave a cough and something from inside him, like his saliva, went into me. What happened was that he passed away; we could not bring him back.
After about an hour, I started to get a fever. I started getting very weak and had a very high fever. By the time we got back to Tobago, I was so sick. I remember going back to my room. We were staying in cabins. I could only lie down, I was so weak. For three or four days I felt so bad. I was so sick.
Guru was asking and asking about me and sent people to help me all the time. Around the clock, people were helping me. But I was so weak… I was very, very weak and my fever was so high. Where we were there were hardly any doctors. Even after four days, I was still so very weak, and the fever was still very high. We went back to Trinidad to the airport. It was very, very hot, I remember. I was so weak that I could only lie down by a tree waiting for the airplane.
In the meantime, remember that I had arranged with a man to get a jackfruit for Guru. I had arranged to meet the man at the airport. He had a big and beautiful jackfruit that he had brought for Guru. The disciples opened it up and prepared it for Guru. Guru came over to me and gave me by his hand a piece of jackfruit and said “Long live Agraha.”
On the airplane I was very grateful to Guru and also grateful that my prasad had come. When we got back to New York, I was so sick and my fever was so high that the boys took me straight to the hospital. They didn’t even go home. I was so sick and so weak. Besides the fever I was just very, very ill.
The doctors could not find out the cause. They gave me every antibiotic and it was not working. They told my friends that they should “call his family because he will not live.”
By that time, I was in the intensive care unit. I remember Guru came into the hospital. No one was allowed in the intensive care unit, but Guru came in. Somehow, he got physically into the room.
I forgot one thing. The night before it was so hard for me to breathe that I wanted to give up breathing. I remember thinking late at night, “Let me just stop… it is so hard to breathe!” I could hear Guru’s voice inwardly and most powerfully commanding me, “No! No you must breathe! You must try!” And I did breathe. It was a really tough night, very difficult night, but I did breathe and stayed alive.
The next day, Guru came to the hospital. I was in the intensive care unit, and Guru came into the room. I folded my hands and sat up. I was just like a child and was so happy to see Guru.
Guru said, “Good boy, can you see the light outside, can you see the light?” I said, “Yes Guru, yes Guru.” Then Guru said “From now on, no more darkness, no more darkness, only light, light.” Guru meditated on me and then he smiled and left the room.
I was so happy, I was crying. I was so grateful.
What happened then was absolutely amazing. The very minute that Guru left the room—the very minute!—all of a sudden I started to perspire profusely. My heart was beating fast because I was so happy and so excited and grateful to see Guru. The nurses came running in and asked what was going on since my heart was beating fast and I was perspiring so much.
They said “What’s going on?” I said, “Everything’s wonderful! I’m so happy!”
What actually happens is that when you have a fever and the fever breaks, you perspire a lot. At the very moment that Guru left, after he gave that beautiful message and blessed me, the fever broke. Nothing the doctors could do could save me. But Guru came and saved my life.
The doctors said, “We have no idea what happened to you, but a miracle has happened.”
I said, “I can tell you what the miracle was. It was my Guru.”
I was in the hospital for quite a while, but slowly, slowly, I got better and better and better.
Unlike human doctors,
God cures the patients
With unseen medicine.Sri Chinmoy 1
- 1. Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees, part 23, #22359, Agni Press, 2001
'Tell Guru she is dying; we don’t know what else to do'
During an evening concert given by Sri Chinmoy in New York in 1990, it suddenly felt difficult for me to breathe. My fellow disciple Kritagyata, who is a nurse, wrote a note to Sri Chinmoy to alert him, and Sri Chinmoy replied that she should immediately take me to the hospital.
That night in the hospital was very difficult, even with the oxygen and all the medication the physicians gave me. In the morning I awoke, exhausted, to find a priest praying near me. (It was a Catholic hospital.) My diagnosis was a pulmonary embolism; clots from both my legs had gone into my lungs. Being a physician myself, I knew the chance of surviving was small, and my heart began to talk with Sri Chinmoy. I said, “If it is good and necessary that I continue to work on this earth, please come help me!” I felt like I was suffocating and knew that medical science could not do anything more.
Shortly after, I was sure that I saw Sri Chinmoy sitting near my bed. He told some of his students afterwards that my soul had been calling him very powerfully. Sri Chinmoy’s mighty presence was necessary for only seven or eight seconds before I again began to breathe normally. With tears of gratitude I told him, “Dear Guru, thank you for my life; again I can breathe easily.” Sri Chinmoy answered inwardly that I did not take adequate care of my physical body, which is the youngest member of our inner family — body, vital, mind, heart and soul. He advised me to postpone an upcoming trip to Russia.
A new decision was made about my illness when other clots were found in the lungs. “Urgent surgery” was the reply of the vascular surgeon. He put a filter into the vena cava, the large vein in my abdomen, to catch and prevent new clots in my legs from going towards my lungs. But, two hours after the operation, the same feeling of suffocation returned with severe pain in the lungs.Nothing more could help me physically. I knew at this moment, as before, that only Sri Chinmoy could help me. The cause of this second approach of death was the complications of recurrent pulmonary emboli during the operation and accompanying pleuritis. This affected my breathing even more, and I wasn’t getting the necessary oxygen into my body.
The last thing I heard, before I closed my eyes at about 2 a.m., was Kritagyata phoning Ashrita, who gives messages to Sri Chinmoy. She said, “Tell Guru she is dying. We don’t know what else to do.” Never will I forget her face hovering over me with so much love and compassion. A smile of gratitude came from my soul, and then I lost consciousness with the sure feeling that I was in the hands of the Supreme.
When I opened my eyes, it was 7 a.m. … I was alive. During my absence from the earthly environment, I had seen the most beautiful landscape that one can imagine: sweet green meadows full of flowers, rivers, butterflies and birds, and big forests with a pure, mild atmosphere. I remember hearing a divine, quiet music and seeing wonderful colours.After I left the hospital, I often wished to see and feel that unearthly beauty. This wish was so strong and repeated so often that some friends decided to tell Sri Chinmoy about it.
One day at his tennis court, Sri Chinmoy called me to come and sit on a chair next to him. We meditated for about ten minutes, though to tell the truth, I lost track of the time. I felt the vibration of a very powerful energy around my hands and head, and after a few seconds, around all of my being. With this energy came an excellent, pure joy and delight. I saw a yellow aura around Sri Chinmoy’s head. I had wanted it to last forever, this extraordinary feeling of losing the body and finding satisfaction in the pure joy of existence.
So Sri Chinmoy gave me another life and showed me what I must still learn in my stay on this earth: how to maintain this divine consciousness. He gave me the faith and knowledge that the Being who is all love, goodness and compassion will always do what is best for us and for everybody. This truth brings divine peace, in life and in death. This was the wonderful lesson my heart learned that April: how, with Sri Chinmoy’s help, to overcome the fear of death.
An early spiritual experience
This is one of the stories in our Story-Gems project, a collection of our experiences with our Guru, Sri Chinmoy. Project homepage »
From a young age, I was really determined to learn how to meditate. Of course right away as soon as I started meditating with Guru, my meditations got better. I remember sitting in front of my shrine for hours. This was way back in my first few months on the path, and I had a deep and real spiritual experience. I came downstairs, and my mother looked at me and said, “There is something different about you. Did you get a haircut?” She could not understand. I had really had an enlightening experience. So I went to our group meditation, and after the meditation Guru was still in a very high state of consciousness. He eventually came down from his height and said something like, “Oh, now some of you think that just because you have had a spiritual experience, you have realised the highest. No, no, no. You have a long way to go.”
I knew right away that Guru was talking to me. I felt very embarrassed, but it was also good because Guru made it clear that this was only the beginning. It was nice, because Guru usually does not like us to share our spiritual experiences with other people, but this one particular time he said, “If you have had a spiritual experience, then you can come up and tell about your most profound experience.”
So I went up and spoke about my experience, although I did not say what had happened—that Guru had exposed me (although no one knew it was me). I just said that the experience and its effect went on for a few days, but then it went away. Guru responded, “No, no, no! It did not go away. It will always remain carved on the tablet of your heart.”
The Year of Endless Surprises
This is one of the stories in our Story-Gems project, a collection of our experiences with our Guru, Sri Chinmoy. Project homepage »
In early 1998 Guru completed what was then his most prodigious poetic work—the 270 volumes of his monumental Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants—and so concluded an epic venture spanning more than fourteen years. It was another of those relentlessly sustained and patient undertakings which together coursed like a braided river through Guru’s life, those multiple strands of inspiration, of paintings and soul-birds, literature and music and wonderfully original things.
One evening we were with Guru shortly after the last poem in this series had been written. We asked Guru for suggestions for how his New Zealand disciples could celebrate the culmination of this vast poetic work.
Guru rose and went through a doorway into an adjoining room for two or three minutes, then came back with a series of ideas that quite astonished us. It was as though he had also stepped through an unseen portal into another world where the future, the unimagined, the possible, lay awaiting its manifestation—and gathered from there a few trinkets to bring back. The first of these? That we shake 27,000 people’s hands, giving each of these people a card of poems and a sweet!
This unique challenge consumed the New Zealand disciples for some time. We visited school assemblies, announcing a handshaking-record attempt to honour Guru’s achievement. We stood at escalators in shopping malls with a microphone to introduce ourselves and, armed with a hand-held manual counter to accurately record numbers, visited universities and busy streets. We toured towns, distributed 27,000 sweets, and gave away 27,000 large cards—each carrying an explanation of Guru’s achievement and a sample sprinkling of 27 poems, like this one:
If you want to remain always happy,
Always perfect and always fulfilled,
Then always keep inside your heart
A pocketful of sweet dreams.Sri Chinmoy1
Everything about this unusual commemoration charmed people a lot, and left 27,000 spirit-awakening, heart-warming mementos with their 27 inspirational poems scattered throughout this peace-hungry world.
Later in the year of 1998—that bustling, breathtaking year of endless surprises and astonishing undertakings—Guru challenged us all to further highlight the completion of Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants. Guru summoned his Australia and New Zealand disciples and we stood before him in a semi-circle, in wonderment, racking our brains for wonderful ideas to further commemorate this mammoth achievement.
It was Guru—who else could imagine with such inventiveness and freshness?—who first suggested different assemblies of animals to illustrate the vast number of poems in his latest work. Could we gather together 27,000 kangaroos or lambs or cows to numerically demonstrate the multitudes of aphorisms, the seemingly infinite gold nuggets of wisdom?
We accepted the challenge to film 27,000 lambs in New Zealand, a documentary that involved locating a high country station with almost numberless sheep—and would permit us to visit for this unusual purpose.
Guru loved the result and on several occasions watched excerpts of the video—it was over an hour long! There they were, 27,000 lambs and ewes, some as a long procession winding down from high country pastures and mountainscapes and streaming across the yellow-tussocked foothills to winter in the valleys; others crowded into pens or plodding along country roads or scattered like handfuls of tossed white sesame across startling green hillsides. Each lamb was a poem and all the poems a galaxy of tiny gems, flung like stardust before our amazed, uplifted eyes.
How often like this Guru changed the entire course of a year with his challenges to accomplish something fresh and new and extraordinary—the routines of the everyday replaced by a divinely inspired clarion call, an attempt at things seemingly impossible. Eagerness and enthusiasm, resourcefulness and daring, self-belief and God-belief—we were being trained in discipleship, discovering a new path for a modern world, exploring all the possibilities to find and manifest the eternal message of spirit.
- 1. Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants, Part 6
The essence of "Run and Become"
This is one of the stories in our Story-Gems project, a collection of our experiences with our Guru, Sri Chinmoy. Project homepage »
As a brand new disciple of Sri Chinmoy, Subarata was quite sure she would never take up running. Reluctantly at first she would jog a few metres, walk a little, then allow herself to be coaxed into another short stint of jogging. Very gradually the distances increased; then came the trips to New York for Celebrations, the many races, and the opportunity to run with Guru. Very slowly, running became established in her spiritual life.
Guru’s explanations about the spiritual significance of running, and the inner and outer benefits it conferred, were deeply felt by Subarata. She noticed the development of willpower and self-discipline, the fostering of aspiration and clarity of mind, a widening world of personal possibility. Perhaps most importantly for her, running opened up an inner doorway, a portal through which she could really feel her soul’s connection with her beloved teacher. Her running became an expression, an extension of her devotion.
Although ungifted with speed, she had doggedness and patience and accepted the physical challenges as a fast track in her spiritual journeying. “If this is what I have to do to realise God,” she once said in the middle of a painful multi-day race, “then I gladly accept it. This and much more—give me more.”
Subarata brought her tenaciousness and mental toughness to her participation in triathlons and ultra-distance races. She competed in three 700-mile races—in the Septembers of 1991, 1996 and 1998—completing the distance on that final thirteen-day outing with only three hours to spare. She never saw these events as a race or competition but simply as an intensification of her own spiritual life. All her mental barriers fell away, leaving her feeling her trusted teacher very close within her heart.
Her running and her wonderful reason for running inspired many New Zealanders to tackle these great distances. (Guru’s spiritual name for her—Subarata—succinctly means “the message of inspiration.”) The New Zealand Ultra Runners Association ranked her as our nation’s second-best woman ultramarathoner of the twentieth century.
Subarata’s multi-day races gave her many inner experiences, and these experiences became her motivation in repeatedly attempting distances which were often frightening to her mind. In a sense she abandoned herself to them, surrendering and entrusting herself to her Guru. Running became centre-stage in her discipleship. Here she could deeply live the spiritual life in one of its purest forms, confronting in herself during the long hours of each day the frailty of the body and the stubborn resistances of the mind, wearing them down till only the trusting heart was left. In her running, as in her departure from this world, she most intensely invoked her Guru—in both, she most felt his responsive presence. Out on the road, everything was simple, everything else fell away. There was only the essence of life, only its ultimate purpose.
article by Jogyata (Subarata's husband)
A Lesson in Forgiveness
This is one of the stories in our Story-Gems project, a collection of our experiences with our Guru, Sri Chinmoy. Project homepage »
I had been divorced from my husband for about seven years. He was absolutely dreadful in his relationship with our two children and was providing very little financial help. I was so furious with him that I could not speak to him. If he phoned, I would just pass the receiver to one of the children without saying a word.
One morning I decided that I had had enough. It was time to contact a lawyer and pursue him legally for proper support.
I sat for my 6:00 a.m. meditation, and there was Guru, just staring back at me from the Transcendental photograph on my shrine 1. I immediately felt that he did not want me to call a lawyer. I was determined to go ahead with my plan and stared back at the photo. However, I had the strong inner feeling that Guru simply would not budge.
Finally, in my heart, I asked Guru, “I can see that you don’t want me to proceed, but what shall I do?”
Immediately came the inner reply, “Forgive him.”
“Forgive him?” I asked in astonishment. “He’s been so bad, absolutely horrible and totally irresponsible. He doesn’t deserve to be forgiven!”
Again Guru said, “Forgive him.”
Finally, I gave in. I said, “All right. Since you whom I love so dearly are asking, I shall try to forgive him.” I sat at my shrine, entered deeper into my meditation, and tried to let go of my anger.
Suddenly, I felt Guru in the inner world grabbing a huge, ugly monster, tearing it away from me and hurling it into the Beyond. I was shaking with emotion, and it took quite a while for me to settle down and go on with my day.
Needless to say, I never called a lawyer.
A week or so later, my ex-husband phoned, and I was astonished to discover that my fury had dissipated and I was able to speak to him normally.
This experience taught me that we can never have a life of peace and happiness if we harbour feelings of anger, resentment, and hatred for others. We must forgive, not because someone deserves it, but to liberate ourselves from negative forces.
This experience also showed me Guru’s incredible love, oneness, and concern. Outwardly, I had never told Guru about my frustrations with my ex-husband, but inwardly everything was visible to him.
- 1. the picture that we, as Sri Chinmoy’s disciples, use as a focal point for our meditation practice
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