The bright bell tone of the singing bowl radiates outward like a warm gentle breeze.  It’s sound is light, clear, and soothing.  It’s music reaches well beyond your ear and then on into some internal place calm, deep and still within the listener.  Utsahi smiles as he gently stirs his wooden mallet in a methodical even tempo around and around the worn outer rim of the bowl.  Something many other hands have probably done for more than a century.  Today the listeners are the runners who slip by and are only briefly caught up in its spell.

It gleams as it rests in the palm of his left hand.    To get it to sing is not difficult but your touch has to be precise. Neither can you press too hard or too lightly.  But once the musician maintains their oneness with the bowl presumably it would continue to sing out its perfect pure tone. The only reason it would ever stop singing is if the hand of the player grew tired and then could simply no longer make another precise revolution of its rim.

“It was made with lots of care because you can see all the little marks that the artisan put on it.  To just show that he loves the bowl and he created a sound that is unique in this world.  This sound you cannot hear anywhere else.  Just this bowl will create this sound.  It is like our souls.  Each of our souls has a sound, and we have to make it play.”

“All singing bowls are unique and all the runners are unique as well.  And being unique we all have to express what we are here for, Our Journey’s Goal.  The bowl wants to sing.  The runners want to run.  The bowls are happy when they play their tunes that they have been made to play.  And the artisan, God, has made them special, with special ingredients.  There are between 7 and 10 different metals in this bowl.  So we are all like that.  We each have special ingredients that we are made of.  And when we do what we are supposed to do, we are happy. ”

Utsahi

“When the runners do what they are called to do, they are happy.  So maybe there is a relationship between the race and the bowls.”

 

 

 

On some level we all know that the Divine is always present within us and also fills the world around us.  We all may have different names for it, and each person when asked may have various opinions as to how much importance it has in their life and also just how much they want to experience more of it.

For the most part our day to day reality consists of all the limitations of the material world and yet from time to time we hopefully can see beyond the demands of email, our human frailties, and the problems of the world which seem to be inexhaustible.  Either we are pushed or pulled into an awareness of our true inner nature and we are then, if only briefly, no longer prisoners of our limited body and mind.  We are aware that we are part and parcel of the divine and the inner call of our journey means we need and must go beyond what we currently imagine ourselves to be.

Each year at the start of the Self Transcendence 3100 mile race I experience a profound moment of realization.  I am but a tiny part of this great event and yet each and every year when I am there, doing what I do I feel myself become more alive inside.  It is almost as though that up until then I have been lost in some unconscious slumber and simply by being at the course I am catapulted into wakefulness.  I sense a new awareness, not just within myself but also the world around becomes imbued with a radiance and glow that I had somehow not been aware of up until then.

When I talked to many of the helpers on the course this morning they also confirmed the sense of brightness and newness and clarity they experienced as well.   There are of course so many indescribable aspects of the divine which don’t easily conform to our mental notions of reality.  Each runner hopefully will describe over the coming weeks just what snatched them up from so many distant lands and then brought them to this place.  Perhaps we all can learn just a little more of what it was that made them take up the self transcendence challenge at 6 o’clock this morning and then run on and on throughout the long New York summer towards a goal that today is so far far away.

A special thanks to Sri Chinmoy who created and continues to maintain this world of wonder on this little block in Queens, on this Fathers Day.   And also a special thanks to those who from time to time drop by here on this blog and either embrace or tolerate my attempts to reveal the  miracle that is the Self Transcendence 3100 Mile race.

Question: When we attain a divine consciousness, is it better to say that the divine consciousness attains us or that we attain it?

Sri Chinmoy, Canada Aspires, Canada Receives, Canada Achieves Part 1, Agni Press, 1974

Continue reading “June 16: The Divine Journey”

Early this Spring a famous Hollywood actress appeared on a well known American television talk show.   She had been nominated for an Academy award and was thus being interviewed by many different programs in the time leading up to the show.  These kinds of interviews very rarely get too serious because for the most part viewers like to be entertained with jokes and funny stories.  What made this interview unique was that in the very heart of her interview the actress started to talk about her meeting with Sri Chinmoy, one that had taken place probably 8 years earlier.  As you watch the show you can see her very deliberately change the tone of the conversation to something that was for her very real and significant, and also perhaps something that she had never before made public.

She was not in a hurry and seemed determined to share this experience in its entirety with the host, who for his part was perhaps a little more interested in humor and frivolous topics.   As the actress told about her experience she described at length how she had been first approached and invited to come out to Queens and to be lifted by Sri Chinmoy.

There was no drama in either her words or in her memory.  It was slow, deliberate, and methodical, she wanted to share with the host and no doubt the world that something very significant and miraculous had taken place that day during her meeting.

She did not go into lengthy detail about their private conversation but she indicated that at the time of their private conversation she was having a problem in her life and it seemed as though she specifically asked Sri Chinmoy for his help with this matter.

Now she never said that he indicated in any way that he could or would help her, but in her tone and in the way she recounted her experience she seemed to make clear that indeed Sri Chinmoy did something to make a very private dream of hers come true. One that she had struggled with for a number of years.

The subject of miracles is not one that Sri Chinmoy would often ever speak of.  His path was and is not about swaying people with  spectacular showy phenomena.

Instead he wanted to inspire people from within and was not interested in tricks that would only entertain the mind but briefly.  However for anyone who spent any length of time with him, it was obvious to most that on a regular basis many events took place in and around him that were simply miraculous.   And yet in so many ways we accepted these things so readily because he himself simply did not believe in or accept that anything was  impossible.    And further more, there was no task that was too difficult to accomplish if you simply accepted his philosophy of, not ever giving up.

In 1997 Sri Chinmoy first inaugurated  the 3100 mile race.  From its inception until even today it continues to be an athletic challenge of such staggering immensity and difficulty that it is almost incomprehensible that anyone could even complete the distance little alone attract 12 runners as it has in this its 17th year.  No matter if you have never seen it up close from the sidewalk or on the internet on the other side of the world this race can never be fully experienced or understood unless you are one of the runners.   And even then something new and powerful happens each year the runners come back again.

Self transcendence occurs in each step they take in this seemingly impossible journey of 3100 miles.  Yet for those of us who watch this great miracle unfold we can still allow it to uplift us and inspire our own lives in ways that we could not have dreamt were even possible.

Sri Chinmoy, Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants, Part 82, Agni Press, 1984

Continue reading “June 15: Miracles Large and Small”