Sri Chinmoy’s 74 Flute Concert
The following is a short article written for the New Zealand based international flute magazine Flute Focus in 2005.
Meditation master and musician-composer Sri Chinmoy celebrated his 74th birthday last August with a number of unusual accomplishments. In addition to an epic outdoor concert featuring performances on 74 pianos – a grueling three hours long but a sheer delight to over 1,000 guests and students from some 45 countries – Sri Chinmoy also played next day on a total of 74 flutes.
The accomplished flautist who often performs on a number of New Zealand made instruments had assembled over 90 flutes for the occasion, mostly sent by students who in various parts of the world had heard of this project and wished to support it.
Surrounded by an amazing and colourful array of multifarious flutes – wooden flutes, ceramic flutes, metallic flutes of all shapes, colours and sizes – Sri Chinmoy played each for several minutes in a second marathon concert. In the following days, he also sang 74 of his own songs written in his native Bengali language, and some 200 songs written in English.
A four time New Zealand visitor who has enchanted audiences here with his free concerts of meditative music, Sri Chinmoy has amassed an enormous musical legacy of more than 18,000 published songs, offering these to countless people globally in over 700 concerts dedicated to world harmony.
– Jogyata.
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Ultra Races and Guinness Records
The following is an article written for a New Zealand athletics magazine in 2005.
The Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team has had a good year. 30,000 Kiwi school kids participated in the New Zealand leg of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team sponsored World Harmony Run, a 70 nation torch relay dedicated to fostering international friendship through sport, and up and down the country everyone's looking forward to a bigger and better 2006 version next May. And Auckland members earlier travelled to New York to help in one the worlds most gruelling and mind-boggling sports events, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team's , an event he calls 'gluggling'. During his first attempt a tiny parrot fish kept biting him on the nose – distracted, he dropped a ball at 16 minutes and had to start again!
Some of Ashrita's other records include the fastest mile pushing an orange with his nose; the longest time balancing on a Swiss ball (3 hours, 30 minutes); the fastest mile on a pogo stick; and the most milk crates ever balanced on anyone's chin! Oh, and don't forget he balanced a milk bottle on his head continuously for 81 miles of race-walking; pogosticked up the 1,900 steps of Toronto's CN Tower; somersaulted the entire twelve and a quarter mile length of Paul Revere's ride in Massachusetts; and had to be helped off the Oprah Winfrey Show by paramedics when he consumed on camera some of the world's hottest chilli peppers.
In Auckland the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team hosted New Zealand's national 24 hour track race at the Millennium Stadium – two competitors joined an elite race-walkers global fraternity, the Centurion's Club, exceeding the entry qualifying distance of 100 miles within 24 hours. And in Canberra, aided by some of our Kiwi team, the Australian Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team organised three of the biggest triathlons in the southern hemisphere, including the gruelling three day Ultra-Triathlon in which competitors complete a 15 km swim, 400 km cycle leg, and 100 km run!
In New York, Marathon Team founder Sri Chinmoy, 74 years old and still incredibly strong, met world marathon champions Paul Tergat (2:04:55), Paula Radcliffe (2:15:25) and Tegla Loroupe (2:20:43) and presented each with a special award honouring their achievements in running. Sri Chinmoy has long maintained that a human being will some day complete a sub two hour marathon! - and believes that the main barrier is not a physical but a spiritual one.
Athletes have long known of the relationship between mind-body-spirit in sporting success – the principle of holistics – and practitioners of yoga, meditation and multi-day sports events have for centuries explored this principle to gain an edge and transcend their physical limitations. Recently Sri Chinmoy attracted renewed interest and attention in the mind-body connection with several astonishing feats of his own. He hoisted two huge dumbbells weighing 740lbs overhead from their cradle on a custom-built exercise machine, then went on to wrist curl – 10 times with each arm – a record 256lb dumbbell.
"Out of all the weightlifters and champion bodybuilders I have seen," respected weightlifting authority and Mr Olympia Contest Chairman Wayne DeMilia commented, "Sri Chinmoy is the only one I have ever seen wrist curl a 200 pound dumbbell." And Jim Smith, Registrar of the British Amateur Weight Lifters Association said, "The strongest men in the world are seeing that a 74-year-old man is curling with one arm much more than twice the weight that the world's best bodybuilders and weightlifters can curl with two arms."
Why does Sri Chinmoy bother to lift these super-heavy weights at what he describes as 'the ripe old age of 74'? In his own words:
"What I wish to show by these feats of strength is that prayer and meditation can definitely increase one's outer capacities. I hope that by doing this I will be able to inspire many people to pray and meditate sincerely as part of their regular daily routine... The physical body has to become a pure and perfect instrument of the spirit. I am doing these lifts with the physical body, but the strength and power are coming from within – from an inner source."
Sri Chinmoy's recent weightlifting achievements encourage us not to grow old, to dare to tackle new challenges, to believe in our own unlimited potential – the fullness in life, he tell us, is in dreaming and manifesting the impossible dreams.
– Jogyata.
Sri Chinmoy – Into The Unknown
The following is an article that was written in 1990.
It is a few minutes before 5.30am. The Indian meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy quietly walks into his light blue living room which, strewn with barbells and weightlifting machines, looks more like a gym.
After several minutes of prayer and meditation the 75-year-old spiritual master positions himself beneath two giant dumbbells suspended from metal frames, each one equivalent to his own body weight of 150 pounds.
Grasping a dumbbell in each hand, he pauses again, drawing upon inner reserves beyond the physical before straining upwards against their combined weight. A loud, humming groan accompanies his effort, as, freed from gravity the dumbbells rise up into the air.
After holding the weights aloft for five seconds, he lets them return to their metal harness – a loud clang bounces off the walls before the room returns to silence.
This latest recent effort represents a further attempt by Sri Chinmoy to demonstrate that mind and spirit can move mountains.
"Physical energy has only one source and that source is spiritual energy. As long as we remain conscious only of the body, we are not aware of this. But when we go deep within through meditation, we see that spiritual energy is the source of physical, vital and mental energy," says Sri Chinmoy of his remarkable effort.
"What I have done in weightlifting offers a golden opportunity for people who remain only in the body and do not care for the spiritual to see what can be done on the physical plane by virtue of the spiritual. And people who have spiritual awareness, who practice prayer and meditation-life, will see how spirituality can become part and parcel of physical activity."
This synthesis of outer fitness and inner search is present throughout the teachings and activities of the spiritual Master, sports philosopher and master athlete, Sri Chinmoy. The qualities needed to attain a difficult physical goal are the same ones needed for the training of the spirit. We all have unlimited potential, he says. To bring these capacities to the fore, we need faith, discipline and the determination never, never to give up.
Sri Chinmoy is unique among Eastern spiritual Masters in emphasising the importance of sports in the spiritual life. His yoga encompasses not only profound mystical philosophy, but also physical fitness, a full acceptance of ordinary life, a vision for world harmony, and a deep involvement in poetry, art and music.
The cornerstone of this yoga is the principle of aspiration – the urge to transcend, to reach for something higher and more fulfilling. This continual movement toward greater perfection, Sri Chinmoy believes, is the creative and energising force of the universe – the electrical current that runs God’s cosmic game. Our purpose in life, he teaches, is to plug into this divine current and allow it to guide our lives so we can ultimately transform ourselves and the world.
Sri Chinmoy is not a mere philosopher, he's a living philosophy, for if nothing else, he practices what he preaches. To see him struggling along with his students in a 26-mile marathon, or the 47-mile ultra-marathon he holds each year on his birthday, is convincing proof that this master is one with his followers.
His international Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, which now sponsors more than 500 races a year, is more than a classy running club. It's one of the flagships of his spiritual vision. It's motto – Run and become. Become and run. Run to succeed in the outer world. Become to proceed in the inner world – is a call to both body and spirit to strive for something beyond themselves, a personal best on the race course and in life as well.
This athletic view of life, with its constant drive for self-transcendance, finds its consummate expression in Sri Chinmoy himself. During the 24 years he has lived in the U.S. he has written more 1000 books of spiritual poetry, plays, stories and philosophical essays, composed several thousand devotional songs and completed some 250,000 paintings and drawings – visions, he says of higher worlds he has experienced during meditation.
Sri Chinmoy attributes all of his accomplishments to God's Grace: speaking of his recent weightlifting he commented:
"Great champions are of the opinion that 70 to 75 percent of weightlifting is mental preparation. But in my case, 100 percent is due to God's Grace and God's Compassion. Without my prayer-life and meditation-life, I am sure I could not lift more than 60 pounds."
– Jogyata.
Running with the Torch in New Zealand
This article was written in 1993 following the New Zealand leg of the World Harmony Run that year.
On Sunday evening incoming black clouds cover the Waitakere Ranges west of Auckland, hinting at rain, but on Monday morning the sky is clear for the beginning of the World Harmony Run in New Zealand.
We have planned a three-day Auckland wide relay, then three days of regional runs through each of the four largest cities to the South. Final destination – Wellington; our capital and southernmost point of World Harmony Run '93.
Precious McKenzie, power-lifting legend, meets us at our opening ceremony in Manukau, where 600 children stand to cheer the diminutive local hero. In this southern city, with its alliance of Polynesian, Maori and European New Zealand cultures, the issue of peace has immediate relevance. A household name, Precious gives the Harmony Run's theme of oneness a solid credibility.
Bald-headed for many years, Precious points with friendly irreverence to the equally bald headmaster and claims that they share the same barber. Everywhere there is laughter, smiling faces, smiling eyes. As he talks and jokes the barriers are tumbling down and we are dissolving into an easy familiarity. He is reaching out with his heart and offering the message of the Harmony Run in a powerful and memorable way.
Day two calls for a hectic tour of twelve schools in West Auckland. There are relay races, cultural items and songs; posters and banners are displayed, and the torch is touched by thousands of small hands.
A national children's TV show sends a camera crew and celebrity presenter along for a whole day. The programme will be seen by most of the country's youth, appropriately, for tomorrow's harmony grows in the hearts of today's children.
Our celebrities bring something unique and fresh to the Harmony Run, a special way of touching the children and making the message of the relay accessible and grounded in real life. The children know and love these faces from their favourite soaps and dramas – and here they are in person, talking about the Harmony Run.
Actor Tom Kline from 'Shortland Street' invites 700 schoolchildren to close their eyes and to feel that peace is a light in their hearts. ‘Now offer this light to your friends, to everyone in the room, now to the kids in Sarajevo, kids in Russia, kids in Somalia, kids who have no homes, no parents, no love. Feel something for them. They're part of our family too.’
At first awkward, the kids are suddenly moved – the Harmony Run comes to life, its message clearly felt. They rush to hold the torch. TV sports commentator Darren Young gets the tougher kids to 'high-five' with the person next to him and make a new friend. Pandemonium reigns as 700 children slap hands. They'll remember the fun and laughter after the day is over and something else will be left too, a seed of understanding.
At the middle of the next day we reach the great volcanic plateau. Snow-covered wintering mountains rise up on the horizon, a vast blue lake stretches before us and on all sides are the pale blue, faraway silhouettes of further mountain ranges. Everyone wants to run with the torch across these beautiful landscapes and soon our whole team is out on the road.
Later that evening we learn that Wellington will become a Sri Chinmoy Peace Capital – the fourth in the world. It's one of many New Zealand cities that have been dedicated to peace and honours both the real contribution of the World Harmony Run to New Zealand and the vision of its founder, Sri Chinmoy, for whom peace is both a supreme reality and highest achievement.
It's a wonderful finale to our Harmony Run. We feel privileged to carry the torch for this emerging new world of peace and to be a part of the global Harmony Run with its supreme and timeless message.
Returning to Auckland, we stop by a mountain lake to enjoy the immense silence. There on a small sign we place our last Harmony Run aphorism where it flutters like a small, triumphant flag. Someone will read it.
Peace in the oneness-world-home is the supreme fulfillment of humanity's birthless and deathless promise to God.
– Sri Chinmoy.
– Jogyata.
Running for Peace
It's mid-day in Auckland on a summer Thursday. The Domain grandstand, a popular landmark for local runners, has been transformed by a bright array of helium balloons. The Auckland Girls Grammar School band are belting out a succession of festive songs and a large body of lunchtime runners are warming up, out to do justice to a new mile circuit of the park.
The occasion is the inauguration of New Zealand's first Peace Mile, an accurately measured one mile loop of the Domain which links Auckland with a network of over fifty Peace Mile cities worldwide, and focuses on the Olympic theme of athletics and world harmony.
The person after whom the Peace Mile is named has also arrived.
Smiling and composed despite an exhausting flight from New York, Sri Chinmoy mixes unobtrusively with local runners. He is the inspiration behind history’s longest running event, the recent 43,000k Peace Run, a relay spanning six continents and involving hundreds of thousands of athletes in eighty countries.
The director of the Peace Meditations at the United Nations in New York, Sri Chinmoy is also an internationally respected spiritual leader who has dedicated his life to world harmony. His international marathon team organises over 500 races each year worldwide and provides essential support to several major outside events.
Today Sri Chinmoy does not speak but rather, standing in a semi-circle of attentive runners, offers several minutes of silent meditation for the Peace Mile inauguration. It's an unusual moment and the silence is unexpectedly powerful.
Some well-known faces are present. Auckland's mayor, in high heels, confesses she has left her running shoes behind to avoid having to run! However Parks and Recreation director Barry Bonner, an enthusiastic supporter and architect of the Peace Mile concept, has left his suit at the office and is lining up for the inaugural one mile race. Richard Tout, NZ's record holder of 24 hours, 100 miles and 100k, is also there along with ultrarunner Sandy Barwick.
The Park Director now offers some reflections on the need to find inner peace, acknowledges Sri Chinmoy's unique contribution to athletics and world peace, and unveils the sign. There is generous applause and then silence as everyone reads the gold and green placard. Try to be a runner reads the quotation at the bottom, and try all the time to surpass and go beyond all that is bothering you and standing in your way. Be a real runner so that ignorance, limitations and imperfections will all drop far behind you in the race.
Olympic canoeist Ian Ferguson starts the one and three mile races around the newly established loop, amid cheers from a large contingent of schoolchildren. New Zealand's first Sri Chinmoy Peace Mile is now fact.
Sri Chinmoy is unique among spiritual leaders in his belief that sport, particularly running, is an important 'personal growth' discipline, cultivating qualities which are important to the spiritual life he advocates.
Running form two important disciplines practiced by his students – on the one hand developing physical wellbeing, strength and dynamism; and on the other, inner peace and poise, mental strength and inner capacities. A decathlon and sprint champion in his own youth, Sri Chinmoy then turned to weightlifting to help him overcome a chronic knee injury.
Inspired by their teacher's personal example, many of Sri Chinmoy's students have applied his philosophy of self-transcendence to their own field of endeavour – many have swum the English Channel, some hold national and international running records; one, Ashrita Furman, holds over 100 current Guinness world records, itself a record for the most held by any person!
Sri Chinmoy offered the following comments on competitive sport:
"Our aim is not to become the world's best athlete. Our aim is to keep the body fit, to develop dynamism and to give the vital innocent joy. Our aim should not be to surpass others but to constantly surpass our own previous achievements. We cannot properly evaluate our own capacity unless we have some standard of comparison. Therefore, we compete not for the sake of defeating others but in order to bring forward our own capacity. Our best capacity comes forward only when there are other people around us. They inspire us to bring forward our utmost capacity, and we inspire them to bring forward theirs. This is why we have competitive sports. Our goal should be our own progress, and progress itself is the most illuminating experience."
On the benefits of meditation for runners:
"Through meditation we can develop intense will power, and this will power can help us do extremely well in our outer running. Meditation is stillness, calmness, quietness, while the running consciousness is all dynamism. The outer life, the outer movement, can be successful only when it comes from the inner poise. If there is no poise, then there can be no successful outer movement. Poise is an unseen power, and this unseen power is always ready to come to the aid of the outer runner."
Sri Chinmoy's own running serves as a reminder that he is not just another armchair philosopher. A veteran of 21 marathons and also some ultra-marathons, Sri Chinmoy still participated in his students' races and followed an astonishing daily schedule of weight-training and workouts that leaves little time for rest, right up until his passing in 2007. At the Domain Sri Chinmoy jogs slowly around the new Peace Mile on his injured knee, a humble figure in a green tracksuit whose inspiration and talents have touched so many lives. One is reminded of his words to the first of his students to complete a marathon: "Now you see what is true for all human beings – we are all truly unlimited if only we dare to try and have faith . . . our goal is always to go beyond, beyond, beyond. There are no limits to our capacity because we each have the infinite Divine within us."
This article was originally written for a New Zealand running magazine following Sri Chinmoy's second visit to New Zealand in 1989.
An Advocate of Peace
This article was written in 1990 following Sri Chinmoy's second visit to New Zealand in 1989.
At a time when religious differences continue to create division and turmoil in areas of the world, it is refreshing to reflect upon the efforts of a recent New Zealand visitor who has done much to promote greater unity and global awareness among the world's religions.
He is a man who on three separate occasions met Pope Paul VI at the Vatican and had a special friendship with the Pontiff; a composer of devotional music whose meetings with Pope John Paul II inspired eleven songs using words spoken by the Holy Father; an author of over 1000 spiritual books and plays, including a life of Christ entitled The Son, which ran for two years in London and was hailed by Christians of all faiths as a masterpiece; and an athlete who sponsors inter-faith tennis tournaments for religious leaders to encourage unity and oneness among religions.
That man is Sri Chinmoy, director of the non-denominational Peace Meditations at the United Nations in New York.
The humble and quietly spoken Sri Chinmoy resists any attempts at religious classification – ‘my religion is love of God’ – and identifies rather with the universal truths which he believes most religions embody. He once commented: "I have the deepest admiration and adoration for the Christ. Although I was born in India and brought upon the teachings of Krishna, the Buddha and other spiritual Masters, when I studied the Bible I found that the teachings of the Christ and the teachings of our Indian Masters are the same. This is because God is Truth, God is Love, and Truth and Love are universal."
Now 75, Sri Chinmoy spent his first 33 years in India before moving to New York in 1964. At the invitation of diplomats and staff members, he was invited to conduct twice-weekly meditations for world peace at the United Nations, a role he has continued to fill ever since. So successful were these programmes that in 1984 Sri Chinmoy was invited to inaugurate weekly peace meditations at the United States Congress in Washington in the same spirit and format.
UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar said: "In your meditation you see beyond the superficial distinctions of race, sex, language or religion, as the Charter encourages us to do. You concentrate on the truths and ideals which unite all mankind: the longing for peace, the need for compassion, the search for tolerance and understanding among men and women of all nations... In recalling the fundamental goals which inspire our work, you are helping to reaffirm our commitment to the organisation and it's purposes."
In his first and memorable meeting with Sri Chinmoy in 1972, Pope Paul VI commented: "This meeting of ours has been most essential. The Hindu life and the Christian life shall go together. Your message and my message are the same. When we both leave this world, you and I, we will meet together."
At their last meeting, in 1976, Sri Chinmoy presented Pope Paul VI with a book he had written about him, Compassion-Father, Champion-Brother, Perfection-Friend.
Sri Chinmoy is regarded as the most prolific composer of devotional music today, with over 19,000 compositions to his credit. These has been performed at over 700 free concerts of harmony-inspiring music in major concert venues world-wide.
His favourite instrument is the pipe-organ, and many Aucklanders will remember Sri Chinmoy's astonishing and moving performance in the Auckland Town Hall last November. He has performed in many major cathedrals around the world and this year performed on the Vatican organ, a special honour which acknowledges the respect in which he is held in the international community and which recognises both his musicianship and his accord with religious leaders.
After hearing a performance of Sri Chinmoy's music, the late John Balka, director of the office of sacred music at St Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, remarked: "Sri Chinmoy has understood that the essence of music has the power to move the soul in ways that words alone cannot. Combining his highly developed spirituality and his well-honed physique into one brilliant and expressive energy, he projects the considerably unique power of music through performance that is perfect in it’s freedom from reservation and constriction. This is how he teaches with his music; that is how he moves thousands at a time, through the super conscious, into that perfectly serene light of God's Peace... This is art of the highest order."
In 1987 the Auckland City Council acknowledged his major contribution to world peace by establishing a recreational Sri Chinmoy Peace Mile in the Auckland Domain. During its November dedication a poem by Sri Chinmoy was offered for reflection:
My Lord, I do not want the peace
That tells me I need nothing more.
No, I want the peace that creates in me
Constant hunger to receive You
In every way
And distribute You
In every widening heart.
– Sri Chinmoy.
– Jogyata.
My God-Hunger-Cry - by Sri Chinmoy
In October of 2005, Sri Chinmoy began a series of prayer-poems entitled My God-Hunger-Cry. We are delighted to feature them here and hope they bring you joy and inspiration.
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