Stories by Sri Chinmoy's students and friends
You have a multitude of questions,
But there is only one answer:
The road is right in front of you,
And the guide is waiting for you.
We, Sri Chinmoy's students, are grateful for the opportunity to share some of our most precious experiences of Sri Chinmoy with you. Like many-faceted gems, these stories reveal the powerful guidance, sweetly intimate moments, and deep inner connection that the students of a true spiritual Master can experience.
The first time I saw Guru in person was when I became a disciple in San Francisco, but the very first time I got to see him quite closely was in 1975. I was a medical student, learning to become a doctor. I was also doing research, and my advisor paid for me to go to a conference in Iceland which Guru was also attending. This was a conference on what was called “transpersonal psychology” and Guru had been invited to offer the opening meditation for the hundreds of participants.
It was a very small conference, and at lunchtime we all went to eat. Guru was there, and I happened to be sitting right across from him. I was so overwhelmed I felt as though I almost couldn’t breathe. My heart was full of joy and awe. Whenever you were close to Guru, his physical presence was so incredible, along with the spiritual aspect of being with your Master. He had so much life energy you could feel it emanating from him.
There was a cuckoo clock in the lunchroom, which would say “Cuckoo!” for the number of hours on the clock. We were eating at 12:00 noon, so the cuckoo clock went off twelve times while we sat there. I was amazed because instead of saying “Cuckoo!” the clock seemed to be saying “Guru!” twelve times. I was absolutely stunned.
I realized later that the clock was probably saying “Cuckoo,” but Guru’s presence was so strong that I heard the clock say “Guru” instead. No matter what it actually said, being so close to Guru for the very first time that day was a hugely significant experience for me as a young disciple. I treasure those moments to this day.
We came into the world,
Not only to eat material food,
But also to feed our heart
With our aspiration-meal.Sri Chinmoy1
Many, many years ago I was visiting a restaurant owned by Sri Chinmoy's students in San Francisco along with Sri Chinmoy. When Sri Chinmoy was leaving the restaurant, I was standing next to a young woman. Guru walked past the both of us, suddenly stopped, and seemingly without any outer beckoning came back and faced the young woman with eyes closed. Because I was right there, I could not help but be privy to his words, which went something like this:
"You are having trouble reconciling my life and the life of the Christ. Think of it this way. Think that the Christ is the boss, but he is in heaven. You can think of me as his secretary. My job is to screen people in preparation for meeting the boss!" (Remember, this is my memory...but it's close.)
Then Sri Chinmoy went on. "But I tell you, if you cry in your heart for the Christ...when you find him in your heart, there also you will find me. Or if you cry for me in your heart, when you find me, there also you will find the Christ."
Now, as regards a personal experience...I was raised in the Jewish faith. I had no connection with the Christ as a child. But as soon as I became Sri Chinmoy's student, it awakened in me a powerful and intimate association with the Christ, for which I am grateful.
One of my dearest friends, Sunil, prayed to the Christ for a master in the physical. When he saw Guru for the first time, he immediately felt that the Christ had made this possible, and that it was an answer to his prayers.
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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In 1985, I became the first student of Sri Chinmoy to swim the English Channel. It was a very, very special experience. As I was told later, Guru was sitting at home, meditating for most of the time on my swim, always trying to get information on how I was doing.
I was blessed with an extremely easy swim. When I stepped into the Channel water at Shakespeare Beach at 7 a.m., I was full of confidence that I would make it. After six hours into the swim, when I could see both coasts, I had the firm conviction that on the inner plane, it was already done—it just had to be executed outwardly. I felt carried by a wave of inner joy and bliss most of the time.
After ten hours, the cross-current set in and it was slowly getting dark. Previously I could not imagine swimming in the dark. I would never have dared to get into pitchblack, unknown water at night. Now, with the gradual transition into night, I felt extremely comfortable. I enjoyed the star-strewn sky above me each time I took a breath. And when I looked down into the black water—where earlier I had enjoyed watching the dance of the rays of sunlight—I started to see bright light once again. In the midst of the darkness, Guru's face - his transcendental photograph that we use in our meditations - appeared.
Because of the unpredictable, strong cross-current, I had to swim for five hours more, but it did not matter to me. For those hours, I was swimming into the light of the Transcendental, into Guru's infinite consciousness of light and delight, which was right in front of me like an ever-transcending goal.
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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As a medical doctor, I have often been in the intensive care unit. Once the Supreme also wanted me to get to know the other side. And so it happened that I found myself in this unit with a fellow sufferer next to me. He was in a deep coma and his chest was rising and falling in perfect time to the rhythm of the respirator, producing a hissing sound. This mechanical sound was intermittently complemented by a gurgling caused by the extraction of mucus from his lungs. The poor fellow wasn’t able to swallow any more either. He was receiving medication by intravenous infusion and I could tell by the electrocardiogram on the control screen that his heart could say good-bye anytime. He seemed to be a cardiac patient who had suffered an embolic stroke.
Now there I was, hooked up to infusions and monitors myself. Out of the blue my heart had gone berserk, so I landed in the hospital, where they finally moved me into the cardiac intensive care unit to better supervise all the medical experiments to be carried out on me. Being a professional doctor, I could easily interpret the graph that was bouncing on the monitor over my head: my two ventricles had started to fall out of sync and beat totally independently from each other.
This condition diminishes heart effciency and, more importantly, it induces the great risk of thrombosis with an ensuing brain embolism (a blood clot in the brain) The latter may occur after a period of 48 hours and results in a hemiplegic stroke, with the possible outcome of being unable to swallow or to speak or to think, or even death. These embolisms tend to appear particularly at the stage where your heartbeat normalises. So, after this 48-hour period elapses, it is above all extremely dangerous trying to convert the heartbeat to a normal rhythm. The doctor in charge had never in his whole life seen this condition in someone of my age.
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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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