Sri Chinmoy – Page 45 – Perfection Journey

April 22nd….The One Mile Loop

It is a very precise and accurately measured piece of road. For many years trying to find the ideal course in Flushing Meadow park seemed like an endless quest. Yet just a few years ago this particular configuration seemed to be, if not perfect, than at least an ideal set up for the large number of runners who wanted a safe, flat, place to run for 10 or 6 days.

This short film is the easiest way to experience the course in its entirety. Obviously the harder way, getting a number and taking part will provide a much more satisfying challenge. Than you can see and experience for yourself its scenic length hundreds of times. Yet the one mile loop, like the race itself, is not for tourists or those who are just curious.

Taking part in any of the Self Transcendence races provides the runners with an opportunity to discover their own limits, and in so doing attempt to reach out beyond what they think is possible. Reveal within themselves, in a tangible way, that the great adventure of life is not just about reaching a goal with the physical. That once we attempt to go beyond our limitations that we can realize, soon or latter that we are in fact limitless beings.

Click to Play:

https://vimeo.com/125789349

It will be 30 years ago this week that the first real great Self Transcendence race took place, not too far from here, organized by the Sri Chinmoy marathon team. It was America’s first 1000 mile race and the runners had 16 days in which to complete the distance. It was so new that whoever won the race would automatically set the American record.

12 runners stood on the starting line that day May 1, and what was not surprising to his students, was the presence of Sri Chinmoy himself, the founder of the marathon team. He was 53 years of age.

3 runners managed to complete the distance before the cut off. The winner Don Choi, who won in 15 days and 6 hours said, “The immensity of this race is so great, I can’t comprehend it yet.”

Sri Chinmoy’s comments on his race:

Originally I wanted to run seven miles every day during the 1,000-mile race. I felt that if I tried to do 13 miles, I would not be able to continue. But at the end of the race I had completed 208 miles — an average of 13 miles a day for the 16 days of the race.

Three people completed the full distance: 1,000 miles! Here is the proof that there are a few things the mind cannot understand — when the soul operates through the heart or through the vital. To run 1,000 miles is beyond the comprehension of the mind; the mind cannot imagine it!

Perhaps now people will be inspired to sponsor 1,000-mile races.

By the first week of August I do hope to complete my 1,000 miles. I am going on, going on. God knows if I can do it!

— 17 May 1985

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April 21st… I Run For God

Nearly 20 years ago Georgs Jermoalajevs won the Self Transcendence 10 day race with 727 miles. It was 1996 and he was 49….. (it is tempting but not accurate to say ‘just 49‘ ). Back then his steps were light and strong and his face beamed with a radiance that shone brighter than practically every other runner I have ever met. His capacity for multi day running seemed limitless.

He was someone who looked as though he was simply born to run long distances. There was a naturalness about his ambling stride, and he seemed to be most at peace, when he was moving forward, which he could do for days and days at a time.

Both time and life itself, in the past 20 long years, that have stretched out between then and now have diminished some of his outer mechanics. But he still bears the same brightness and sweetness that is indistinguishable from the lithe powerful figure who once tirelessly ran these New York one mile paths in competition. This essence he has maintained, this essential life ingredient remains undiminished and still vibrant on his face and in the way he shuffles relentlessly around the loop.

His hair now as pale as a drifting cloud. Lines etched deep across a still bright glowing face that has witnessed many challenges that most lives in this world of joy and turmoil that we all share and of course seek out the swiftest path to take us through it.

In 2 days he has run 144 miles and if you look at the 2 young man who have kept ahead of him it makes some kind of sense. But when you look back at the long long list of other young men who are gathering up behind him, it just makes no sense at all. How is this possible? How can a man twice the age of the rest of the field do so incredibly well.

In that summer of 1995 Georgs was hungry for as much competition as he could find. He came back to New York that June and ran the inaugural 2700 mile race in 40 days. The next year it would become the 3100 mile race.

Georgs had a few astonishing years after that. In 1997 he set the world record for 1000 miles for age 50. After that life and ultra distance running, at least his coming to New York no longer connected. He tells me that for a time the most he competed was in one 26 mile marathon a year.

Something changed. Something in Georgs’ life shifted, and in the ways of all astonishing things, 72 year old Georgs Jermoalajevs has found himself once again back at the Self Transcendence race. He, not unlike the Phoenix bird has risen up from the ashes of his past and has found new life and purpose on this one mile loop in flushing Meadow.

“I am very glad to be back. It is my biggest dream.”

He tells me that he has a new expression that sums up his life now. “I run for God.” He says that many people identify with this philosophy. He says in particular at home in Latvia people like it. “Great words. People in Latvia agree to use them in their own life.”

Vera helps with some translation and when Georgs describes the atmosphere he says a word that neither of us recognize. Then Vera says, “aura.” Yes, yes, he says. He spreads his arms out to gather symbolically all the runners out on the one mile course. “Very good aura together. We make this aura very special.”

Click to Play Video:

https://vimeo.com/125631093

Continue reading “April 21st… I Run For God”

April 20th…A Perfect Day To Run

The conditions at the race for most of last night and now, for most of the day, can only be gently described at best as challenging.

https://vimeo.com/125527648

For several million New Yorkers, April 20th rolled in as a cold and rainy day, accompanied by generous gusts of wind. A day which glowered in grim contrast to the glowing Spring day which immediately and brightly proceeded it. For several million residents of New York city the unrelenting weather conditions were a damp inconvenience, that only briefly set back the inevitable triumphant return of Spring back to this now grey dull city.

For the 50 runners of the Self Transcendence 10 day race however there is no escape and no way but not to confront head on a day in which most of us would rather duck and hide and grab a warm hot coffee (sugar optional). Mileage must be completed no matter how ferocious is the weather. Particularly when as the days slip past the miles do not get any easier.

Telling the story of just how bad it was here today is not easy. A small comfort for the journalists whose toys and technology do not mix well with such conditions. But for the runners there are no safe excuses if the course floods, your tent gets wet, and every article of clothing has suddenly become drenched, and nearly impossible to make dry once more.

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April 19th….The 10 Day Race Starts

Under the best of possible conditions the Self Transcendence 10 day race started.

https://vimeo.com/125403178

Before the start there was still lots of preparation going on. Rimas sets up his tent.

Budjargal from Mongolia is relaxing because soon he will be running

Runners pick up their race numbers from Sahishnu.

Others find time to relax in all kinds of ways.

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April 18th…. The Day Before The Start….”Feeling Young”

An Interview with Manoshri Sykorova, who is running the 10 day race, her first multi day event.

https://vimeo.com/125346108

Like Manoshri, George Biondic is also running his first 10 day race, and by coincidence they both are from Canada. George however is 62 years old. He has nearly 30 years on her and was probably competing before she was born. He is a well seasoned and very experienced ultra runner. Yet like all great adventurers he, like all the remarkable athletes who will call this one mile loop home for the next 10 days, is keen in reaching out for new experiences. Even one as challenging as running for 10 days.

He jokes as he tells me that his warranty is expiring on his body. “My knees are evidence. My ankles are evidence. Things that once upon a time, like a little sprain would be gone. Now a week……2 weeks. It just takes a lot longer for my body to recover.

I throw back the obvious question to George after he says this…… so why would you do something like this?

“My neighbors said it…..George you are obsessed. At first it kind of hurt a little bit. But you know what….. They are kind of right.”

“Running is something that is so deeply ingrained in my psyche, at the same time it brings me such joy. It makes me feel young. Once you get past 60 you don’t want to get older. The highest point in my year is a race like this. Everything else disappears, and I am young and I am flying.”

Continue reading “April 18th…. The Day Before The Start….”Feeling Young””

6 and 10 Day Race 2015…Set Up

https://vimeo.com/125309298

Our Cycling Champion

He never heard the words spoken in person. Instead they were passed along to him through a phone call from an excited friend. As he listened at his home in England to the brief yet potent phrase, he did not know what to make of the call coming so late in the evening from New York.

The friend told him that Sri Chinmoy had just remarked to a couple of people, “Tejvan is our cycling champion.”

On hearing this, Tejvan was intrigued as to what his teacher had meant by saying that. True he enjoyed competitive cycling but he, at age 31 in the summer of 2007 was at best only an amateur cyclist, though he had won quite a few local races. To become a national champion was an incredibly lofty achievement in the very competitive world of British cycling. One that was still a long way off.

Also, like many other part time athletes he had lots of other responsibilities. Not the least of which, in order to pay the bills, was his job as a tutor of economics in Oxford. In addition he also spent many hours each day on various volunteer Internet projects.

When asked about all the tugs and pulls on his time and his life he says, “the most significant part of my life has been being a student of Sri Chinmoy. The spiritual life and meditating you could say have been the cornerstone of my life.” He became a student of Sri Chinmoy in 1999.

Audio Part 1:

Tejvan Part One

The notion of being a champion was of course appealing. One that was certainly not impossible, but for all appearances it was something that was extremely remote. For just to fulfill all your daily obligations is difficult enough, and yet to excel at them all is something most of us just don’t care to think about, little alone try to succeed at.

He modestly says, “I am fortunate to have a few different hats to wear.”

Yet to even to begin to understand the relationship between a spiritual master and their students is to realize that every word spoken, every glance exchanged, are just fragments of things that exist only on the surface of a very vast, deep and inner relationship. One that transcends all that we physically see or mentally understand.

A spiritual master has only one objective when they take on the responsibility of having students. That is to tirelessly inspire them to succeed, challenge and nurture them to grow spiritually, and set forth goals that will teach them that nothing in their lives is truly impossible to achieve.

This in a nutshell is what Sri Chinmoy had set out for Tejvan when he called him a cycling champion.

Continue reading “Our Cycling Champion”

Venu: The Flute of Lord Krishna

It is not an easy thing to fully describe and share meaningfully even one experience in our lives little alone try and express the totality of a lifetime. A little more than a year ago, Venu, who had been a disciple of Sri Chinmoy for 40 years passed away. His exemplary life of devotion and dedication to his Spiritual Master was unique and were it not for the exhaustive logbooks that he meticulously kept none of us could possibly understand just how remarkable his life really was.

For all those whose own lives intersected with the dynamic and powerful orbit of Venu’s, we knew at least something about how relentless and all consuming his training regime was. You could not help but be aware of this because he seemed to be perpetually training and preparing for one event or another. Particularly the swim run in San Diego, which was like a yearly sacred pilgrimage for him. It was only when his journey on the earth plane had made its final lap, that those of us who loved and knew him well tried to take some fuller account of this life. A life which always seemed to brim with enthusiasm, optimism, and tireless dedication to the inner life.

Somehow the task of cataloging his life by going through his log books fell upon Astika, who had lived with Venu for almost 40 years. Over the course of a year he tried to take stock of the information collected there. Which chronicled not only in fine detail the trajectory of his physical accomplishments but in a very special way illumined his inner life as well. Astika sifted through all the meticulous details kept there and also the personal notes and photos kept within them. This then are portions of his loving recollections of his brother friend Venu, as written in his recently published book…….Utpal

I was in the San Francisco Sri Chinmoy Centre with Venu for almost four decades, lived in the same house with him for years, ran races with him, worked side-by- side with him, talked running and cycling with him right to the end. I shared his enthusiasms for many things and took issue with him over some other things. He was my friend, a very good friend, but it wasn’t until the day I opened the pages of one of his training logbooks that I really met him face to face and heart to heart. Until that day, I had no idea at all of who he really was, nor did I possess any proper sense of the heart that beat so devotedly within his breast.

To meet Venu through the day-to-day entries of in his training diaries, is to meet ones own self face to face. It is to see and feel the rise and fall of an ocean vast energy, the same life energy that animates each and every one of us. It is to be swept along in the streaming drama of that energy. To bear witness to Venu’s struggles, to see how he managed his successes and failures, is to gain a valuable perspective on our own.

For this reason, we have made his logbooks available to everyone. The entire collection is, or soon will be, posted at the Sri Chinmoy website. I recommend them to everyone, regardless of your gender, personal interests or spiritual orientation. To open the pages of Venu’s training diaries is to take a stroll down to the seashore of this vast ocean of energy and feel the ebb and flow of it as it moved through the veins of one very good man. You won’t need to be an athlete to benefit.

For those who knew Venu even casually, this will come as no surprise; he carefully observed and evaluated everything he did. He was a meticulous record keeper, particularly when it came to his workouts. He was a true believer in original self- knowledge; it was the only kind of knowledge he really trusted. As a consequence, he scrutinized his body’s response to exercise and diet as well as a number of other experiences very closely. Many people do this; to one degree or another, we all do it.

What separated Venu from most is that he acted upon his observations in a most disciplined manner, changing his daily routines, his diet and exercises accordingly. But beyond athletics, he changed his thoughts and opinions as well, according to an ever widening range of observations. He was a student of the hard science of yoga almost as much as he was a devotee of the yoga of love. And yet, the notations in his logbooks are almost cryptic in their brevity. He does not analyze or offer an opinion on anything, not even his own workout routine. Partly, this is because his logbooks were always meant to be a private notebook to himself. They didn’t exist to explain or narrate anything to others. The brevity of his entries was also because Venu believed that opinions were… well, just opinions. His view was that our understanding even of ourselves, much less the world, was very a subjective and individualized thing. “Reality” for him was in the numbers and the personal experience that came from generating those numbers.

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Progress Is Not A Prisoner Of Time: The 47 Mile Race 2014

You tell the world:
Progress, progress, progress!
Progress within, progress without.
That progress is not and cannot be
A prisoner of time.

Sri Chinmoy, Gorbachev: The Master-Key Of The Universal Heart, Agni Press, 1990

Sometimes there are moments that are so sweet and precious that we never want to let go of them. But time, as it always does, and of course as it must do, eventually snatches at the edges of our memories. The past cannot hold on to us for long. At best we can only extract from our trans-formative experiences that which can enrich and prepare us for the next challenge. In so doing we lighten our burdens and leave behind hopefully, at least some of our imperfections and doubt.

For those who want to dedicate themselves to living on a spiritual path there is no stopping, there is only progress and moving forward. The beyond does not tire, the dream reality of tomorrow continually beckons to us, the summit of perfection will always be our ultimate destination.

In 1980 the 47 mile race was still very new and very challenging. For the students of Sri Chinmoy there was always a powerful incentive to run the race just as there continues to be one now. At the stroke of midnight on August 27th it was Sri Chinmoy’s birthday. There was no better offering to your spiritual teacher than to run the very race that he created. One in which for 2 years straight, both in 1979, and again in 1980 he ran the 47 himself.

In that race in 1980 he ran 1 hour and 15 minutes faster than he had the previous year. His time was 11:27:24 and because of his physical ailments he would never run the race again.

What also happened on that remarkable night was that Virendra ran a time of 5:09:30. As someone who came in 5th that year and was just a little more than an hour behind I have a very real sense of just how remarkable Virendra’s achievement really was.

Two years ago when asked about that night Virendra said,

“It is an offering from my side and it is grace from Guru’s side. I couldn’t have done it without it. I remember once about 2 hours in where I had my focus really solid. I was kind of in autopilot, and I was running and running. I didn’t have a single idea how many miles I had run or what the pace was. I remember looking down at my legs and saying, wowwww, who is making these run? They are just going by themselves. I remember telling the counters, I don’t want to hear any splits. I don’t want to hear my marathon time. I don’t want to hear anything. Just wake me up with one lap to go. I had no emotional attachment to that race whatsoever. It was a job that had to be done and that is it.”

“I am so happy to have that kind of treasure to put at Guru’s feet. I really felt at that moment how big it was. We were chasing 6 hours and then out of the blue comes this 5 hours. I remembered thinking, Guru is going to like this.”(laughter)

Now it is 34 years later and no one has even gotten close in those many years, that is except Vajin. Who 2 years ago at age 32 made a very serious attempt to surpass Virendra’s achievement. “The funny thing was that I was hoping to break the record, than I don’t have to do it any more. (laughs)

“But that’s not how Guru works. He doesn’t want things to come easily. He wants you to work for things.”

At the time he also said, ““I am definitely going to try it again. ” He was just 1 minute and 26 seconds off the record.

“It is so satisfying because you put so much into it. It means so much having Guru run this race and Guru run with this flag. This race has a special consciousness. There is no other race that can compare to this. It is a race purely for the soul and for the spirit, and for our Guru. For me it is such a significant race to do. I mean to come here and share it with my brothers and sisters from all over the world.”

Progress: A short film of Sri Chinmoy running the 47 mile race in 1979 and 1980

There is no end to our inner progress, no end to our inner progress. Progress, progress, progress! My Guru, your Guru, everybody’s Guru is the Supreme. I tell you in all sincerity, the Supreme Himself is progressing. Now, can we believe it? We cannot believe it. Our mind will not believe it. How can the Absolute Highest be progressing? Infinity we cannot measure, Eternity we cannot measure, Immortality we cannot measure. But when God, out of His infinite Bounty, opens up our third eye, we can see that God Himself is progressing. Not only on earth and in Heaven, but in His own highest Reality, I tell you, God is progressing, progressing.

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You can say that God is absolute. That is true, absolutely true. But in His absolute Reality also, progress can be made. When God used His Vision to create the universe, His Vision was always Self-Transcendence, Self-Transcendence.

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Therefore, the terms that we use—Infinity, Eternity and Immortality—He far, far exceeds. God’s Infinity we cannot believe; our mind will never believe it. The mind can only believe so much. The heart, on the strength of its identification, can go very far. But if we are in the soul-consciousness, we see that the Absolute Supreme Himself is expanding, diving deeper and climbing higher.

Continue reading “Progress Is Not A Prisoner Of Time: The 47 Mile Race 2014”

World’s Largest Flower Garland…The Amazing Things You Can Do When You Are In Your Heart

“We are trying to break the record for the world’s largest flower garland. So we have 185,000 stems of carnations freshly arrived from Colombia.” …. Pavaka

The sun has just started to brighten up the large playing field in Queens. Many hours earlier around 5 am Pavaka, had gone and picked up the huge mountain of boxes from a warehouse. Now that the boxes, filled with cool carnation flowers are stacked by the gate. The real job of breaking the Guinness record has just begun.

It is not something that Ashrita has not attempted before. Being the man with the most Guinness records period he continually scours the book looking for new challenges. But this record is uniquely special. Tomorrow would have been Sri Chinmoy’s, his spiritual Masters 83rd birthday.

So he, along with the help of Pavaka, and gradually increasing crowd of fellow student disciples are attempting to do something which is not just record breaking but really awe inspiring. It will take a lot of work, it will not be easy, and as the day progresses it gets hotter all the time.

Pavaka says, “we had gotten the record 2 years ago. I think it was 2 and 1/4 miles I think, and that was since broken. So now we are trying to get it back. I believe it was broken in India.”

“The 185,000 flowers is what we calculated would give us a 5 mile long garland. Which would really break the record.” Pavaka explains that the flower tops will be cut off of each stem and then a slim wire is inserted through a section of tightly bunched flowers. This in turn is connected to another section, and so on. This will continue until all the flowers are looped around the perimeter of the field. “So it is not like it is 5 miles of a single strand. There is a wire going through the whole thing. We are going to assemble it in 3 foot segments.”

Pavaka actually works in the flower import business and he tells me he is familiar with the very farm in Colombia where the flowers were grown. He told them that he wanted flowers for a special project. “So they sent us very short carnations, at a very good price. Those flowers flew from Colombia last Monday to Miami. A week ago they were cut.” He says that the short stems meant the flowers were less expensive to ship and also that only the blossoms will be used.

“Carnations are one of the hardiest flowers out there.”

I ask him, as one who works all the time in the flower business what he enjoys about this project. “I am personally doing this as a volunteer. It is quite a unique project and everyone working in the chain of it was quite interested in what we were doing.” There is also, to add to the pressure, a time limit on how long the project can take. Pavaka says they have use of the field only until 1pm. Now just 6 hours away.

He says he will stay no matter how long it takes.

Click to Play Interview:

Pavaka

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