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

Seeing the God inside my son

When I started to meditate under the guidance of Sri Chinmoy, the situation in the family wasn't so good because of the doubts of my spouse and my parents. I could not even talk about meditation. But I had a little corner in the basement where I could be by myself. It was in my office behind the door. I had set up a little altar, a very minimal altar, and I would meditate in the morning. I would try to wake up at least 20 minutes before François, my son, because when he was up, it was another world, since he was hyperactive.

Both children attended the local school. François was in grade 4, Julie in grade 2. At school, François always wanted to joke around and have fun. He would do things that distracted the teacher or made him/her upset. Julie, two years younger, was an example of conformity. François was the opposite! He was a little bit hyper, and this created challenges.

So I had started meditating to help me accept my son and not get too upset with everyday events, either at home or at school. Before the children woke up in the morning, I would go to my secluded area for about half an hour of relaxation, deep breathing, building up my tolerance level…

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Dynamic Spirituality

The fountain of light

This experience is kind of neat because spiritually if we open our eyes, which many of us are not able to do so much, we realise that there were many inner things going on in Guru’s life. It was not too often that Guru shared the inner level that he was operating on. But this is one example at Aspiration-Ground.

This was 1983 or 1982. We had finished Aspiration-Ground tennis court in 1981, and Guru threw himself completely into playing tennis for hours and hours on end. We would play that first year and a half or two years, probably three to four hours every day.

People would be sitting in the stands, and Guru would have a rotation of six or seven different disciples who would play Guru in tennis. They would rotate in for two games, and then the next player would come out and play Guru. So there was a routine and an organization. Guru would always be out there so you would always see Guru. To see Guru play and run and get such joy gave everybody tremendous happiness and joy.

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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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