One year, I got very sick during the New York City Marathon. I took some aspirin along the way, thinking that it would help my sore muscles, but it actually caused a real problem in my stomach. It unfortunately started a chain reaction that started to break down my intestines.
When I ran through Central Park, I saw a disciple-friend of mine who is my coach. He was very frightened when he saw me; I had no colour in my face. And then someone I knew from the United Nations saw me just before the finish line and they had the same reaction.
When I crossed the finish line, immediately two people came up to me and said, “Are you okay? Why don't you come with us?” They took me to an emergency tent and gave me something to drink, and I got a hot chocolate. My stomach started to knot up very painfully. This was happening every five to eight minutes in a very intense way. I went to the bathroom, and it was blood. So, they immediately put me in an ambulance to take me to the hospital. By the time I got to the hospital, I was in extreme pain. I couldn't drink anything because that made it worse.
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In the school where I was, there was one seeker who meditated on Guru’s Transcendental photograph. He was not yet a disciple, but a seeker. He was in another class, but I went with the girls from his class on vacation – not vacation, but more like a school where you learned how to cook, how to do the things that girls did, such as sewing. They saw me, and they said, oh, we have one boy in our class and he is exactly like you, you have to meet him. They told him the same thing, but he was a seeker and he was not interested in getting to know a girl.
But then, a few weeks later, I was in the same room as he was. Somehow Guru managed it so that everybody else was out of the room except the two of us. We realised that we must be the ones who were exactly "the same", even though we had absolutely nothing in common. We were actually very different, but the other schoolgirls felt something was the same inside us.
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I’ll tell you a funny story. Guru had two monkeys, Jadhu and Madhu. There was a little monkey house off Guru’s porch at his house where the monkeys lived. My first job in the morning was to feed the monkeys. Each morning I would bring the food into the monkey’s house. They would come down and sit on my shoulder and they would sort of pick at the plate – it was a tin from Annam Brahma – and take what they liked. Guru would ask me if they ate.
One day, Guru told me to sing to the monkeys. I am a terrible singer. I don’t sing on key and I’ve been asked not to sing The Invocation because it puts everybody off. So I sang “Never Say No” to the monkeys. Guru would be sitting on the porch a lot of times, resting, looking out on the street. He had a couch there that he would rest on.
After about a month of singing “Never Say No,” Guru said, “Change the song.” So I sang “I dearly love my India and I dearly love my America.” And that one went on; but one is hard to sing, I love it, but I do not think I sing it right, ever.
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I became a disciple in 1975. I heard that Carlos Santana was going to be playing a concert at this Unitarian church; I was very excited because I knew he meditated. I went over a couple of hours early and I was sitting in the front row, but nothing was happening.
So I asked the person at the church when the meditation was going to be. He said, “Don’t worry, it’s definitely happening. But first we have a few children who will do piano and violin recitations.” And for the next hour and a half, I was sitting in the front row watching the children play their music.
Anyway, they finally showed up and there was a tremendous meditation. It was not an electric concert; it was a meditation with acoustic music. I had a really powerful inner experience. I felt that I was floating. I was having a kind of out-of-body experience. I had never experienced anything of that kind, and I was extremely enchanted by the experience.
Read the rest of this storyWhenever I remember how I first came to Guru, I get very emotional.
I was in high school. I was maybe 16 or 17 years old, and at the time I had recently moved from the island of Maui in Hawaii to Puerto Rico. When I was about 16, I started to have some inner spiritual yearnings and some spiritual experiences. No one, in my circle of friends in the school that I was going to, shared these kinds of experiences.
So, I started going to bookstores and looking for spiritual books. One of the very first ones I was fortunate enough to get was a book on yoga, a general book of yoga. It was not Guru’s book. I began reading about yoga and spiritual life. I started practicing the physical exercises of yoga and some basic concentration exercises on my own because no one that I knew in Puerto Rico was doing anything like this. Then I started buying other books and reading on Zen Buddhism and Hinduism and some other paths, but there was one message that kept coming out to me from each of these books. That message that these books were, these teachings, were talking about was higher worlds, higher levels of consciousness, how to achieve real inner peace. But they always said that if you want to achieve this, you need a teacher, you need a Master to guide you.
Read the rest of this storyThe purpose of life is to manifest the highest Truth which we embody. First we have to see the Truth and feel the Truth. Then we have to reveal and manifest the Truth.
Sri Chinmoy
Guru says that meditation and manifestation go hand in hand. When I have a manifestation project that is really important, my meditation becomes even more important as well. Anything that Guru has allowed me to work on in manifestation, any really important project, has only succeeded by Guru’s direct intervention and Guru’s grace.
When Guru was in the physical, after my meditation every single morning, almost every morning, Guru would call me on the phone. I had a special phone that Guru gave me. It was just for him, it was his phone. He would call usually at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning and ask me, “What news?” and then give me advice. Really, I was sharing news with Guru, but he was blessing me and guiding me and doing everything through his Blessings and his spiritual Light.
Also my name means ‘eagerness’, but nobody in the universe had more eagerness to manifest the Supreme than Guru. When we had good news in manifestation, Guru got so happy. If you serve Guru through manifestation based on your inner connection to Guru, you serve outwardly other people. And you have to know that it makes Guru so happy.
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Here is a very short but extremely significant story.
One day Guru had invited us to ask questions, and one of the girls came up and began to ask, “Guru, when Sri Ramakrishna died . . .”
Guru immediately interrupted her and said, “Spiritual Masters do not die. They leave the body but they never, never die.”
Oh, where is death?
No death, no death.
All-where I see God’s
Nectar-Breath.Sri Chinmoy 1