An Ever – Transcending Goal

Vasanti on right after a Channel relay swim with World Harmony torch, Sept. 2009 (with Viktoria from Iceland, left)

In 1985, I became by the Supreme’s grace the first disciple to swim the English Channel. (Another disciple did it one day later, much faster; his pilot had wanted to wait one more day for even better weather conditions.) It was a very, very special experience. I could feel the inner and outer support and oneness of so many disciples. And, as I was told, 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., others told me later, 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, 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.

Vasanti (Heidelberg)

Heidelberg half marathon 2009

Visit Vasanti’s Channel Triathlon Blog for more experiences of training for Channel swim

Very Good

Sri Chinmoy playing tennis - photo by Prashphutita

Before Aspiration-Ground was built, Guru played tennis on a makeshift tennis court at Jamaica High School. The disciples watched and meditated from the sidelines. One day while Guru was playing tennis, I was visualising a film about the tennis star Jimmy Connors that we had seen the night before at Progress-Promise. The camera angles were imaginative and powerful and caught a gracefulness that Connors had when playing tennis. I was thinking that a film like that should be made of Guru’s tennis.

Just then, Guru looked over at me and blessed me. Weeks went by and I could not stop thinking about that blessing. I wrote to Guru and asked him if he was blessing me because he was happy I was thinking about him or because he liked the idea.
A short time later Guru said, “So Niriha, you want to make movies?”
I said, “Oh Guru, I was not thinking of my doing it. I just thought that someone should.”
Guru said, “You do it, you do it.”

So I started researching what equipment was needed and how much it would cost. Video was so new at the time that I did not really consider it. I was looking into film, but I discovered it was very expensive. A shop owner suggested I consider video, but in 1981 very few people even had video cameras and few stores sold them. I asked Guru if I should get a film camera or video camera, and Guru replied, “Video, video.”

The next question was how to get the money for the equipment. Within a week from the time I decided what equipment to get, my father informed me that he had just had a very successful transaction in his cable television business and that he was creating individual trusts for each of his seven children. I asked him if I could withdraw the amount I needed for the video equipment and he readily agreed. The timing was excellent, since I wanted to get the equipment soon—and since the “trust” rapidly disappeared when my father invested it in a bad scheme.

On July 27, 1981, with my brother holding the heavy video recorder while I held the camera, I took my first video of Guru as he played tennis at Jamaica High School. Guru looked over at us and said, “Very good! Very good!”
Niriha (New York)

One of Niriha's DVDs from Father's Day 2007

Niriha has been producing videos of Sri Chinmoy and Sri Chinmoy activities for the past three decades.

In Defence of Goodness

For children, the ideal of a perfect world, a world based on goodness and kindness, is perfectly natural, as natural as breathing.  It takes us quite a few years to realise that the outer world doesn’t live up to those standards of this inner Utopia. I remember being in the midst of a perennial adolescent shouting match with my younger brother, turning around to find my three-year old cousin standing at the end of the hallway, tears rolling down her face. She didn’t understand: why did people who were so nice to her have to be so mean to each other? I remember my own childhood experience, setting a room full of relatives to laughter by wondering aloud why everyone in the Middle East couldn’t all just be friends. But it all seemed so simple. Why couldn’t they be?

We get older, our mind develops. Our world is filled with people, with experiences helpful and hurtful, and we craft a complicated toolkit of social skills – how to react, how to build emotional shells around ourselves, how to keep people at just the right distance, close when you need them, pushable away if you don’t. And in this swirling, complicated world, the simple ideal of a harmonious world fades away. Goodness is seen increasingly as a liability, a thing to be displayed to a limited amount of people in a quid pro quo fashion – you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.

Yes, my view of goodness had certainly been coloured this way over the years. But when I became Sri Chinmoy’s student, and had the chance to spend time with him, something unexpected happened. All of these notions of goodness were turned completely on thir head.

Firstly: Goodness – unconditional goodness: It did exist. A happy world: Absolutely possible. When I began meditating, I reconnected to the same inner certainties I once had as a child. And I realised, why, as a child, they had felt so real. This inner Utopia: it wasnt just mine – it was inside the heart of every human being. It was a connection to a universal source of love. It was the realisation that the entire world was evolving into that very same perfection. We didn’t just have to lamely acept our imperfections; we could rise above them and grow into the person that God always meant us to be. Goodness was not a moral code imposed from outside; it was a signpost to happiness that emanated from the deepest reaches of our being. One of Sri Chinmoy’s aphorisms says it simply: “Goodness means the heart in action.”

However, uncovering this goodness required you to do one thing: to go beyond the confines of the limited mind, and to take your guidance from the heart, the place where you can feel the essence of your being. I learned that if you remained in the mind, then every positive movement had a cynical response, every idea of beauty wilted under its undercutting gaze. The French philosopher Rene Descartes, en route to his famous statement Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), first postulated that he knew nothing. That the only thing he knew was that he doubted everything. And in doing so, he unwittingly cast a light on the true workings of the mind: it may be a thinking machine, but before that, it is a doubting machine. The seed of goodness cannot survive in this barren climate. You had to go to a higher and deeper place inside yourself, one that was not based on analysis, but on awareness. Experience. Being. In the heart, you could gain self-knowledge, be happy and do the right thing all at the same time.

Secondly: not only did goodness exist – it had power. World-changing power. Not the kind of power we see on our TV screens, where a speech, a protest, an advertising campaign, tries to change everything in one fell swoop. This kind of power began inside the hearts of each person who kept that flame of goodness alive there, and spread like ripples in a pond, one gesture of kindness after another. It drew out the goodness in others, and in turn they felt empowered to share that goodness with the people they met.  More and more, I saw how one good action could set off a whole chain of unanticipated events, and have consequences far beyond your imagination. That you could truly make the world a better place, one small act of goodness at a time.

Thirdly, that goodness was a torch you carried in a world that very often preferred to remain dark. That very often there was a stark choice between following your inner quest for happiness and purpose, and surrendering to the mediocrity of the status quo. To make that choice required bravery, integrity, and sureness of purpose – a far cry from the milk-sop stereotype often associated with words like ‘goodness’. You had to inwardly have the attitude of a warrior, unafraid both to face your own imperfections and the reactions of a world that was sometimes welcoming, sometimes uncomprehending – and other times downright hostile.

It seems to me that any genuine movement towards a better world will always meet with resistance from people who thrive on the current unhappy state of things. Some of these people once themselves were on that inner quest for happiness, for a more perfect world, but have given up and become re-mired in the mind’s confusion; they recreate the role of the fox in Aesop’s Fables and proclaim that the grapes never tasted good anyway. It is an argument that hopes to tap into that primal doubting nature of the human mind – that human nature cannot really be perfected, that true unadulterated goodness cannot really exist in this world and that those people trying to bring it about must really be up to something else.

What can I say? Through meditating with Sri Chinmoy and connecting with my inner sense of purpose, I have come to realise a profound and simple truth: that goodness and happiness are two sides of the same coin. If I were to encapsulate what I’ve learned in one sentence as Sri Chinmoy’s student, it would probably be something like this: the only time I am truly happy and fulfilled is when I am living my life to serve other human beings. Not only that, but through his own sleepless service in whatever field he thought he could make a difference, Sri Chinmoy allowed me to have a first-hand eyewitness account of a life lived solely for the service of humanity. If I had one wish for the world, it would be that every person might come across someone like Sri Chinmoy in their lifetime, just to see what is possible from a 100% self-giving life.

I remember one time a few years ago when my teacher was being called all kinds of horrible things by people who certainly knew better. His reaction struck me, a new disciple at the time, as the true hallmark of a genuine spiritual teacher. His first and only thought, was for the spiritual welfare of his students. Inside this distressing state of affairs, he saw an opportunity – by encouraging his students to write about their experiences, it would serve as a kind of spiritual sadhana for us, where we could serve and inspire others, and make rapid spiritual progress at the same time.  And we did, and we got so much joy, not only from writing, but also from reading each other’s stories and experiences. Instead of battling negativity by descending into the sewer of argument and controversy, we illumined it by building a sunlit window onto the joys of spiritual life. And that was Sri Chinmoy’s philosophy all over. Everything was positive, positive, positive. If you had to overcome a bad quality, you didn’t increase its power by thinking about it, you focused instead on cultivating its opposite good counterpart.  If you suffered one of life’s setbacks, you didn’t spend your time on pointless post-mortems, you instead increased your gratitude for the one important thing you still had and would have forever – your special place in God’s universe as God’s child.  In Sri Chinmoy’s world, goodness and positivity abounded everywhere.

I have to admit, this is the first time I have written anything on the spiritual life in almost a year. But as I write, I am reminded of that feeling I had when Sri Chinmoy asked us to write all those years ago – that in a way we were defending not just one person or one philosophy, but goodness itself. That we were keeping that torch shining in the darkness, for people we might never meet, searching for truth and meaning, who might stumble across something written by one of us, and read-first hand accounts of lives where goodness and happiness are inextricably intertwined.