Stories by Sri Chinmoy's students and friends
The night before I was informed that I had been accepted as Guru’s disciple, I had a very significant dream. However, I did not remember it upon waking.
The next evening I went to the Centre, where I saw several copies of Guru’s Transcendental photograph—the special picture of him that we meditate on—sitting on a beautiful blue cloth. I was invited to pick a size that I liked to be my own personal copy of the Transcendental.
The moment I touched the photo in the middle I immediately remembered my dream from the previous night. In it I saw Guru’s disciples coming in through the front gate of my parents’ yard. I stood at the front door to welcome them, and I saw Guru standing right behind them, smiling while looking directly at me.
This all came back to me in a flash, and the next moment I was back at the Centre, where I chose my copy of the photograph.
One evening not long after this, during a Centre meditation, I had another experience with Transcendental photo. I saw the pupils of Guru’s eyes turn from plain black to pure white light, which radiated outward from them.
At one point, not long after I’d become Guru’s disciple, I had a rough experience when two boys tried to rob me. They gave me a severe head pounding, and I was rushed to the hospital. While I was being taken through the hospital hallway, I caught a fragrance like nothing I’d ever smelled before ⎯serene and pure, mystical and enchanting. I turned my head, and as I did, Guru’s Transcendental photograph—one that was taken when he was in an extremely high consciousness—appeared on the wall of the hallway.
A few months later, an exhibition of Guru’s weightlifting machines was touring trough Europe, and I went to help assemble the machines when they arrived. Once we were done with that, I stayed a little longer in the exhibition hall. An incredible fragrance wafted through the air. After searching unsuccessfully for the source, I left for the night.
I spent the next day guarding the hall, and the fragrance was still present. I grew more and more enchanted by it, and kept searching for the place it was coming from. There were now flowers in the room, but the scent did not come from them, or from incense. Nothing in the room had the fragrance that I was looking for!
A week later I was asked, along with a few other boys, to help assemble the machines again in different place. We agreed happily.
After working late into the night, I was picking up the last part of the Lifting Up the World with a Oneness-Heart machine, which Guru used to lift various people as a part of that program. I accidently touched it at the spot where Guru would put his hands when he would do a lift with it. At that exact moment, the enchanting fragrance wafting through the room became even more intense. I could sense it more clearly than I could anything else—it pervaded everything.
After composing myself, I asked if anyone else had experienced this, too. Without a moment’s hesitation, Devashishu replied, “It is Guru’s fragrance—it’s the fragrance that you could sense around Guru when he was still in the physical body.”
It was the same fragrance I had experienced at the hospital.
When your consciousness is high, you even can smell a kind of fragrance around a spiritual Master. Consciously he may not offer this fragrance, but it is your own aspiration-power, that, like a magnet, has pulled it from him.
Sri Chinmoy 1
