Stories by Sri Chinmoy's students and friends

Sweet moments with our Guru

A barrage of Candy Bullets

Sometime in the late 1990s I sat in a hotel room in Atitlan, Guatemala, feeling incredibly depressed. Every year around Christmas and the New Year, Guru would travel to different countries for all of us to share and learn from inspiring people all over the world. Several hundred of Sri Chinmoy’s students would stay at the same one or two hotels and we had many functions, plus a lot of time for sports.

Playing soccer earlier that morning, I had felt depressed. Eating breakfast—depressed. A mid-morning nap, avoiding everyone—depressed! In our hotel function room I sat at the back, avoiding Guru’s scrutiny and the banter of friends. Guru had a bag of sweets in his lap and was tossing them out, like a playful father.

Suddenly he stopped, glared at me with a fierce concentration, then began hurling wrapped sweets at me with incredible velocity. I felt a jolt inside and sat bolt upright. The sweets were whizzing by me, a barrage, bouncing off the seating and ricocheting away like hurtling bullets. I couldn’t believe it! Relentless, Guru threw one after another, firing away, a wild fusillade of candies.

Then I caught one and Guru stopped. I held it in my hand and started laughing—Guru started laughing too. Suddenly my depression went away. It was quite extraordinary. He had known how I felt and banished this force from my mind in such a remarkable way. After that I felt happy and grateful to be on the trip and didn’t allow depression back to rule my mind.

When my Lord’s Compassion-Eye
Appears,
My depression-vital
Disappears.

Sri Chinmoy 1

• 1. Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees, part 4, Agni Press, 1998

Everyday Miracles on Sri Chinmoy's Path

The Year of Endless Surprises

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!

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Dynamic Spirituality

Sri Chinmoy performs on the world's largest organ

Guru always wanted to play at the Sydney Opera House. For Guru, there was something very magical about that building. Guru liked the building very, very much. Guru said whenever he hears the name Sydney, he thinks of the Opera House. We knew that Guru would love to play the organ, so we got permission somehow, I don't know how. It was a miracle that we got permission for Guru to play the organ.

There were about maybe one hundred disciples. It was not for the public. It was only for some disciples. Also, it was being recorded by the national radio. The gentleman who would show Guru the organ was a very famous organ player himself. It was arranged that he would also interview Guru for the radio program. Guru was very excited about playing this organ. It is the largest mechanical action organ in the world. It has ten thousand pipes.

There were many forces coming together. There was the building itself that Guru loved so much, then there was the organ, which was so special, and the occasion. Guru flew especially to Sydney from Melbourne just to play this organ.

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Achieving the Impossible

All I needed was the Supreme, and I would always win

For three years, starting in 1977, some 200 New York area students of Sri Chinmoy trained as a group for the Pepsi 24-Hour Bicycle Marathon in Central Park, as he encouraged us to challenge our limitations and thus discover our deeper capacities.

Starting a month before the race, which was held on Memorial Day Weekend, Sri Chinmoy would lead us on daily training rides in Flushing Meadow Park. The Pepsi Bike Marathon drew thousands of amateur participants, but also a core group of professional riders who competed seriously for the prizes. None of our team members had experience in racing, though a few of us did cycle regularly and take road trips. The first year we entered as a team was a bit of an experiment, though I think we won a prize or two for the size of our team and for our uniforms. But the second year, 1978, we trained more seriously, and I felt that Sri Chinmoy was determined to show us the limits of what was possible.

A week before the race, Sri Chinmoy chose who would be on the two small teams that would compete for the team prizes. I felt honoured that I was the only woman on the first-string team of ten, but I was quite alarmed when Sri Chinmoy solemnly called us up in front of the whole group and told us he envisioned each of us doing 300 miles in 24 hours!

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Inner communication

A vision at 3 a.m in the morning

I was at that time still a ski teacher, so in February, I had to be one week with some children at a children's class. I was supposed to teach them skiing in the Swiss mountains. I was there in a nice wooden house in the mountains.

One night, I woke up at maybe 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. It was pitch black. I was becoming very conscious. I had never been so conscious. In this vision, I saw Guru’s face, and from his third eye a streak of light came into my heart in a color like yellow or green, something like that. Now I know it's love, the colour of love.

It expanded and suddenly I was a pond of water. The water was falling down, a waterfall into the next pond, which was much bigger. Guru's face had disappeared, but I was the water of this pond and the next pond was very big. The whole pond fell down as a waterfall into a big lake. And that water again fell down as a waterfall into the ocean.

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Constant Growth and Progress

The white bird and the lake

In my early years of exploring meditation and the little-known subject of reincarnation, I came across a rather discouraging description of the long passage of time the soul supposedly takes from its very earliest entry into the earth arena until its full blossoming in God-realisation. Imagine, said the words of an old Indian text, a beautiful white bird flying to a large lake once every several thousand years and taking away a single drop of water in its beak. The length of time it takes for the bird to empty the lake is a description – metaphorical of course – of how long it takes for this journey to be concluded, for realisation or self-blossoming to be won.

A rather bleak thought! But encouragingly, it did add the further comment that for those who have a curiosity or an awakening interest in spirituality, the lake is almost empty and the long journey of the soul is not in front of us but already behind us.

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the life-saving Divine Force

“Will everyone know I am the miracle?”

My father’s illness was unknown to me in the very beginning, as I was in New York with Sri Chinmoy and my father was back home in Australia I remember one evening Sri Chinmoy suddenly said to me, “How is your father?” I said I thought he was fine, but I was so surprised Sri Chinmoy was asking me.

It was May 1999 when Sri Chinmoy’s miracles with my father began. I called my father in Australia to see how he was, and he told me he was not feeling so good and had fainted in the shower. Now I realised why Sri Chinmoy was asking me how my father was. My brother Kishore and I felt that Sri Chinmoy had saved my father’s life, as he had probably had a heart attack.

Two months later came Sri Chinmoy’s second miracle. My father was diagnosed with bowel cancer and had to have surgery immediately. After the operation, he was taken to intensive care. During the night, my father was suddenly having serious problems Doctors and nurses were anxiously attaching wires and equipment to him. He said later he felt he was in the middle of an American TV drama hospital series. He did not know he was having another heart attack.

My mother and Kishore were informed, and Kishore called me from Australia with such concern I had to get a message to Sri Chinmoy immediately, but Sri Chinmoy was in the middle of a Peace Concert and I did not want to interrupt him. Minutes, then hours, went by. Finally, Sri Chinmoy was given the message when he went home. Sri Chinmoy read the note and immediately started meditating on my father’s soul. Sri Chinmoy told me later it was not a matter of hours or minutes but seconds before my father would have left the body. My father was extremely receptive to Sri Chinmoy’s force and he recovered from the heart attack. This was Sri Chinmoy’s third miracle.

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Treasured friendships

Guru's first meeting with Mother Teresa

We were told Mother Teresa was staying at a church in Rome, very close to the Coliseum. It was near a church but it was a convent. It was so simple. There was no running water or heat, and the nuns lived with such simplicity. Guru was so excited and so delighted.

When Guru got there, Kailash was driving, and I got to be in the car with Guru. There were about 50 disciples who were already there waiting. They wanted us all to gather at the back entrance of the convent. It was quite beautiful. There were beautiful trees and a view of Rome.

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