When time has passed and history is able to bestow its judgement with the benefit of distance, Sri Chinmoy's unique contribution to the world may well be appraised in terms of his efforts to show that meditation and spirituality can be brought into all forms of human achievement - creative, athletic, humanistic and philosophical. Granted, meditation teachers before Sri Chinmoy have certainly been engaged in outer activity - spiritual Masters have been composing mantric songs almost since the birth of spirituality itself, and many Masters have also been accomplished poets. However, to branch out into so many different fields - poetry, music, art and athletics - over the course of one lifetime is a very new development, and one especially suited to Sri Chinmoy's philosophy of harmonising the meditative inspiration of the East with the forward-flowing enthusiasm of the West.

So many and varied were the activities which Sri Chinmoy engaged in over the course of his lifetime that at first glance one might be forgiven for wondering what they all had in common. However, like the stem of a lotus branching out into its many petals, so all of these activities stem from a single unifying core that comes from deep within the human spirit. Deep inside us, beyond the reaches of our vacillating mind, lies the core of our being, a place of stillness, peace and vastness within ourselves. In this space deep in our hearts, we begin to experience higher and deeper realities of life, and terms which the mind cannot really comprehend such as Infinity, Eternity, the soul, God - are able to be directly experienced and communed with. Ever since primitive times, cultures all over the world have devoted some part of their society to this inner search; in the East, where Sri Chinmoy hails from, great yogis had been realising the Self for thousands of years through the practise of meditation. Sri Chinmoy began practising meditation in his early teens, and was soon meditating for eight hours a day and sometimes more; very soon he was attaining very high states where he was united with this higher self - his "Inner Pilot" as Sri Chinmoy fondly called it.

One effect of these many forms of creative and athletic output is to give us a glimpse of the nature of the relationship between the seeker of truth and that which he is seeking, between man and God. In Sri Chinmoy's writings and poems, we see that in one sense man and God are merely points along one continuous road of evolution - "Man is the God of tomorrow; God, the man of yesterday and today", he writes - and yet in another sense there is a sense of separation which can only be narrowed by the love of the heart. Many of Sri Chinmoy's poems and songs, take the form of sweet and living conversations between Creator and Creation: to the critical mind there may be two people talking, but reading these poems with the heart reveals a depth of closeness and intimacy between man and God that render the two inseparable, and increasingly indistinguishable, as evidenced by this sweet conversation-poem from "My Lord's Secrets Revealed":

"My Lord, I have millions of desires.
Do You have any?"
"Yes, My child, I have."
"You have? Please tell me what they are!"
"My only desire is to see you eternally happy.
Can you fulfil My desire?"
"I shall try, my Lord."
"Try, My child, try."

In Sri Chinmoy's art we find another aspect of this relationship manifested in the childlike spontaneity that gave rise to the name 'Jharna-Kala' which Sri Chinmoy gave to his paintings - it means 'fountain-art' in Bengali, or art flowing from the inner source. "I do not use the mind; I use the heart", he explains. "I try to make my heart a receptive instrument so that God, the Supreme Artist, can paint in and through me. I am like ballpoint pen. Somebody is using me to write something. Somebody is acting in and through me."

However future historians may very well regard Sri Chinmoy's athletic achievements as the most striking demonstration of what can happen when one goes beyond the mind and listens directly to the heart. In particular, Sri Chinmoy's weightlifting achievements serve as a direct challenge to the human mind and its often limiting concepts about what is and is not possible for a person to achieve. It is especially notable that weightlifting was never a favourite sport of Sri Chinmoy's to begin with: "Weightlifting was never my forte", he said in an interview one year after he started weightlifting in 1985. "Right from my early years I disliked bodybuilding and weightlifting. I was a sprinter and decathlete, and I did not care for weightlifting at all. It was something foreign to me. But last year I started weightlifting because of an inner command. I always listen to the dictates of my Inner Pilot, and my Inner Pilot asked me to enter into weightlifting....For that reason I do it cheerfully." Surrender to the inner voice is something that comes easily when the command is something we like doing; in the case of Sri Chinmoy, his weightlifting was very much a case of surrendering to the inner command when it was not so pleasant. And in that surrender, he was able to perform feats that astounded experts in the weightlifting world, and inspire countless people around the globe.

Just as Sri Chinmoy's activities stem from one inner source, his sole reason for doing them was to inspire everyone to in turn go deep within to that same Source in order fulfill their own dreams. Sri Chinmoy tried every day of his life to reach out to as many people as humanly possible during his 43 years in the West, and the huge range of his activities meant he was able to touch people from all walks of life - athletes, artists, religious and world leaders - whose paths he might never have crossed as a mere spiritual teacher. As part of his weightlifting, for example, he would honour people who had served as an inspiration in their own right by lifting them overhead - sometimes these would be household names, more often they would be ordinary people like teachers, social workers, doctors, pilots, lecturers, policemen, firemen, the backbones of society finally being recognised for their pivotal role. In doing all these activities, Sri Chinmoy's hope was that there would be at least something there that each person could enjoy.

"I try to inspire others. If I can inspire others, and if they in turn inspire the rest of the world, then we can have a better world. It is by virtue of inspiration that we can do good things for mankind. "

Western film and television has often given a very fixed portrayal of spiritual teachers, such that we have come to expect a master to seclude themselves away from the world for hours on end, with occasional breaks to dispense wisdom to their students.However, the reality is that every great spiritual Master has made his own unique contribution to the world's evolution by accepting and loving the world in order to transform it. In ancient times we had great teachers like Sri Rama and Sri Krishna who would combine the earthly duties of kingship with the higher calling of dharma, enlightened beings like the Buddha who criss-crossed the Indian subcontinent spreading the message of liberation to king and peasant alike, not to mention Jesus Christ, whose time on earth was as much a social revolution as it was a spiritual one. In recent times many great spiritual figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Mother Teresa have also demonstrated that spiritual progress can be made just as much by remaining in the world and working to transform it.

Many terms have been used to describe Sri Chinmoy during his 43 years of service in the west, but recluse is certainly not one of them. "The inner life is not the life of isolation," Sri Chinmoy explained. "The real spiritual life, the real inner life, will never tell us to leave society and enter into the Himalayan caves; far from it! We dive deep within early in the morning. Then, when we enter the outer world, we bring forward what we have received from within and we try to offer this to the world at large."

Sri Chinmoy's philosophy encompassed each of the main three yogas or paths to enlightenment in Indian philosophy: bhakti (love), jnana (knowledge) and karma (action). In particular, his life was a sterling example of the philosophy of karma yoga expounded in the Bhagavad Gita. In this ancient Indian scripture, Sri Krishna explains to his student Arjuna how one can achieve illumination whilst working in the world, summed up in the famous line "Thou hast the right to action, but claim not the fruits thereof". Sri Chinmoy, through his own example, showed how one could take this philosophy into the modern world. He threw himself into multifarious projects for one reason and one reason only - because he had received the inner inspiration from the communion with the Highest which he obtained in his meditation. Sometimes in carrying out these projects he would meet with success and other times with failure, and yet Sri Chinmoy treated these two events with identical detachment: all that mattered to him was that he was carrying out the express wish of his Inner Pilot.

"Human beings usually think before they act", he replied once when asked about the nature of God. "But in God's case, it is not like that. He uses His Willpower which, while seeing, also acts and becomes. God's seeing, acting and becoming are simultaneous and instantaneous." In Sri Chinmoy's every action, he would attempt to recreate that divine flow as far as was humanly possible. It was not uncommon for him to announce a new poetic, musical or artistic endeavour and complete it in one sitting. This spontaneity was a lesson for all of those who were fortunate enough to observe it - there was no wasting time wondering if what he was creating was good or bad, no stalling waiting for better conditions to present themselves; Sri Chinmoy just sat down and started creating.

The other hallmark of Sri Chinmoy's actions - and the same could be said of spiritual Masters throughout the ages - is the love and concern for humanity that lies behind them. For Sri Chinmoy, love of God and love of humanity are inseparable - "If we love God first, then automatically we are loving humanity. If we love God, then God will give us the capacity to please His creation, which is humanity", he once said. This oneness with his fellow man took Sri Chinmoy to the farthest corners of the globe giving lectures and concerts of meditative music. Sri Chinmoy always sought to awaken the best and brightest qualities of humanity, and no matter what far-flung region of the world he travelled to, he was able to meet with people who exemplified these qualities and could take the inspiration he had to offer and use it to inspire others in turn.

For spiritual aspirants of the hoary past, the outer world was something to be feared lest it took one way pace and bliss one received from meditation. Sri Chinmoy, on the other hand viewed the outer and inner world as natural complements of each other. As the goodness and kindness of humanity comes more and more to the fore, this outer world is evolving into Heaven on earth.

"There comes a time when my inner world and my outer world become inseparably one. At that time I feel that my reality and God's Reality are inseparably one, that my reality's height and God's Reality's Height are inseparably one, that my vision-world and God's Vision-World are inseparably one."

- Sri Chinmoy

Article by: Nirbhasa Magee