Whispering Tree

A close friend of our Sri Chinmoy family here in Chicago works as a naturopath/homeopathist, and he treats disciples free of charge as a service.  Out of the blue, he contacted me recently and asked if I still gave tours at our great local art museum- the famed Art Institute of Chicago.  I told him I did, and he asked if I would give a tour of the museum to a young man, and also tell him a little bit about our Guru, Sri Chinmoy, as he is very interested in our way of life.  Of course I agreed!

 

I met this seeker, “Mark”, at the museum.  Accompanying him was his dearest life-long friend “Steven.”  I did a double take as soon as I met Mark.  I knew him from somewhere, but I couldn’t place it.  But his speech, his mannerisms, his face, were all strangely familiar.  I gave the guys the whole grand tour of the museum.  At one point, I was standing in front of one of my favorite paintings, “The Plough and the Song” by the great Armenian painter Arshile Gorky.

I told them my own feelings about the way Gorky captured the life-breath of another dimension in his paintings- how they represent life itself on a different level of consciousness.  This is why his paintings are so engaging and full of life.  I also quoted from Sri Chinmoy’s words on how to recognize a soulful work of art, and I applied it to Gorky’s masterpiece:

“If a work of art makes you feel that there is a most beautiful child inside it, you can know that it is a soulful work of art. If you see inside it a most beautiful child, and if you feel that this child is talking to you and you are talking to him, then you can know that it is soulful art.”

(From Sri Chinmoy, Art’s life and the soul’s light, Agni Press, 1974)

 

As soon as I mentioned the name “Sri Chinmoy” Mark’s whole face changed.  He told me he was sitting in the chiropractor’s office- it was his first visit, and he just looked at one of the Jharna Kalas that the doctor kept on the wall, and that he started shedding tears.  He told me that he is an artist, and is getting his PhD in visual art, but the moment he saw Sri Chinmoy’s artwork he wanted to do his PhD on Sri Chinmoy’s Jharna Kalas, or at the very least incorporate what Sri Chinmoy did into his own artwork.

Mark told me, “I told my chiropractor that I had just got back from Pondicherry.  I was on a pilgrimage to Sri Aurobindo’s Samadhi.  I have always loved Aurobindo.  When I got back I decided to pursue a course of naturopathy treatment.  But the moment I saw Sri Chinmoy’s Jharna Kalas, I realised I had gone all the way to Pondicherry and back just to learn that Sri Aurobindo is my uncle, and Sri Chinmoy is my father, my God-Father.”

I was so startled- I was speechless!

He then told me he immediately ordered Sri Chinmoy’s books Transcendence-Perfection and My Flute and he read them cover to cover.  I started reciting poems from both books and Mark was so happy and gratified that I knew these poems by heart.  He told me that Sri Chinmoy’s poems stay with him more than any poems ever have.

I realised then that this was the very reason I felt that I knew Mark, from the first moment we met.  He is an inner disciple of my Guru, and has been so since his very birth!
And this connects exactly to my last post- that Guru’s new children are coming.  Mark is just twenty-eight years old, yet he has at least a lifetime of intuitive knowledge of Guru inside him.

Steven is still seeking for a path, I believe, but supports Mark wholeheartedly in his journey.  Steven asked me a volley of questions afterwards in the car, on our way to an Indian restaurant, but very perceptive, respectful and insightful questions.  He was impressed that I read Guru’s books for many hours a day, and that he told me “You have a great knowledge of your Teacher.”

At the restaurant, Mark told me that his art mentor at his school was thrilled to learn that he has become so deeply interested in Sri Chinmoy’s artwork, because he too admires Sri Chinmoy.  One day, sometime after he had informed his professor of his love and admiration for Guru’s Jharna Kalas, he  was drawing a three part abstract painting in class, a triptych.  His professor stood behind him and watched him paint for a long time.  It was an abstract work, with no words or anything representational.  But his professor pointed to the left panel and said, “This part represents one of Sri Chinmoy’s ancient incarnations.”  He pointed to the panel on the far right and said, “This is one of Sri Chinmoy’s more modern incarnations.”  And then he indicated the central panel and said, “This is Sri Chinmoy’s most recent life- as Sri Chinmoy.  You have captured three incarnations of Sri Chinmoy.  This is excellent!”

 

During Mark’s first visit to New York, I showed him all the original paintings at Annam Brahma and at the Smile of the Beyond.  One of the most senior disciples noticed how spellbound Mark was by Guru’s paintings, and gave him one of his own original Jharna Kalas!

I am so grateful to these new disciples, these fiery aspirants and God-lovers.  They are the future.

 

About three years ago, on a warm summer’s day, I read my Master’s immortal book Obedience or Oneness three times.  I really feel that book is immortal, and it speaks to me on a deep level.  Guru told us many times that we should study his writings, and he insisted that we mark the sections and phrases that speak most powerfully to us.  Around that time, three years ago, I was thumbing through the book, and I realised I had underlined each and every single word!  What’s the point of underlining a book if you’re going to underline everything?  It defeats the purpose.  But then I realised that the ink that I put in that book comes from me, so it is my ink that merges with the printed words, so there is something of my own consciousness in that book.

Anyway,  on that summer’s day, I read the book three times, and it took me four and a half hours.  That night I had a significant dream.  In my dream, I was participating in a walk-past at the end of a public meditation, and the leaves on the trees told me it was mid-autumn.  It was cool.  Behind me was a seeker, we shall call him “Marshall” that I met at a local college.  Years ago, I gave him a copy of Beyond Within.  Anyway, Marshall was directly behind me, meditating very seriously, with folded hands.  When it was my turn to stand in front of Guru and take prasad, Guru acknowledged me with a little smile and a half-wave.  But when Marshall stood in front of Guru, Guru stopped the prasad line and embraced him, shedding tears of joy.  He put a flower garland around Marshall’s neck, blessed him, and gave him a spiritual name on the spot!

In the next scene in the dream, Marshall and I were on a train, heading back to the airport.  He showed me the paper on which Guru had written his spiritual name, and I saw it had something to do with Krishna.   He told me he comes every year in the autumn, during the public functions.  In my dream, many young people, college students, come every Fall to see the Master, and Marshall was one of those who made the annual pilgrimage.

I’ve thought about this dream often in the years since.  Why did Guru lavish such love and affection on this boy, but barely acknowledged me at all?

Maybe one possible interpretation is that I had my time with Guru, and now Guru is focusing on the next generation of seekers.  I had my Master on the physical plane, and now Guru is drawing people towards him on the inner plane.  These people will blossom into real, conscious seekers in the course of time.  I think Guru said the best way to bring people to his path is just to meditate, meditate, meditate.  Meditate long hours every day.  People will feel  something in us, and they will want to have that thing for themselves, that poise, that joy.  We can deepen our spirituality, and this will attract the real seekers, the ones who need inner light.

I find that when I read Guru’s books for a few hours a day, I do get these kinds of inner experiences.  Guru said to at least look at the covers of his books if we can’t be bothered to read them!

 

 

I’ve written before about the Peace Concert that Sri Chinmoy gave at the Riverside Church on 23 August 2000.  It was special because I felt the presence of Jesus Christ at the end, as Sri Chinmoy was playing the organ.  Hundreds of other disciples had the same experience, and it is the only time in my entire discipleship that I had that kind of collective interaction.  We all felt it.  I just remember there was a second source of divine Consciousness that opened up in the room, in the back right corner of the cathedral.  It was so palpable, so moving, and yes, more than a little frightening.  Such pure energy, pure power.  Interestingly enough, it began with a voice inside of me saying, “It’s an Avatar!”

I told that to my friend from California, that my first reaction to Christ’s presence was this inner certainty that I was dealing with another Avatar.  I said to him that there must be some faculty in human beings that enables them to recognize an Avatar.  And he looked at me and said, “Yes.  That is called your soul!”

I had to laugh, because my friend is right.  What is this mysterious apparatus within us that can recognize divine beings and inner Light?  It’s the soul!

I told another disciple about this experience with Christ at Riverside, and he said he believes me when I say that Christ did come that day.  But he told me that another way I could look at it is that my past life came forward, and I was perceiving and receiving from Christ as a Christian devotee from several centuries ago.  Something descended from above, but also something from within me came forward.

Interestingly enough, I felt that same way when I got my spiritual name from Sri  Chinmoy in 2006.  He was looking at me in silence and I felt other people were looking through my eyes at Guru, and I think those other people were some of my past incarnations.

As soon as Guru began playing the organ, I felt a cold wind in the cathedral, and tears came to my eyes, and I began thinking of Mother Mary, the Mother of God.  I told this to another friend of mine, who used to make furniture but now cuts vegetables.  I asked him why I felt cold when Mary came as a harbinger to her Son.  It was not an unpleasant coldness.  It was like the wind off the ocean.  And he said, “Well, her colors are blue and white.”

And I realised these are cool colors!  White and Blue.  Purity and Infinity.

Finally, Sri Chinmoy was infinitely more aware of Christ and Mary’s arrival than we were.  But he did not stop playing the organ, or make any announcement.  God within him told him to play the organ, and he played completely beautifully.  In the inner world, I am sure Guru saluted Christ and his Mother most soulfully.  But his outer performance was unaffected.  To do our duty perfectly in both the inner and outer world, we need infinite poise.

I wonder at the experiences I have had with my Master, Sri Chinmoy.  I just have to shake my head in wonder.  How else can I respond to something like this?

 

I was at the local University gym yesterday, and I saw a graduate student wearing a T-shirt that said something striking:

“Always be yourself-

Unless you can be Batman-

Then always be Batman.”

This reminded me of one of my favorite aphorisms of my Teacher, Sri Chinmoy, from the twenty-eighth volume of Seventy-Seven Thousand Service Trees (poem #27834):

“Be infinitely more than just yourself.”

 

Many years ago I was sitting in the lobby of this same gym, rehearsing poems from Sri Chinmoy’s immortal collection The Golden Boat.  I was repeating them silently, although my lips were moving.  A young Asian woman, as she was passing by, smiled and waved at me.  I had never met her.  I then realised that she wasn’t waving at me, she was responding to Guru’s vibration and was greeting him.  I was just the medium.  I was happy that I was successful in manifesting Guru on that vibrational level.  Similarly, I remember after I recited the one thousand poems of The Wings of Light in 2021, how I became a different person for twenty-four hours afterwards.  I was already back in Chicago and people would stop in the street and just look at me.  I don’t think I had grown horns.  They felt something of Sri Chinmoy in my aura, and that’s why they would stop and smile.

I wrote in February about the experience that preceded my foot fracture.  The night before I broke my foot, I had to do some late night shopping at the local convenience store.  The cashier was bored and rude.  I was dismissive and curt in return.  We were irritated with each other, and I left the store in a bad consciousness.

The next day, I slipped on the ice and broke my foot.  I felt that my fracture was at least partly a result of my bad interaction with the cashier the night before.  It was a vibrational consequence.

Today I had to go back to this same pharmacy to get a prescription filled.  This time the lady at the window was every bit as callous, desultory and incompetent as the cashier had been.  She told me my prescription would take only twenty minutes to fill.  I came back in an hour and she said, “Give us ten more minutes!”

When I attempted to ask her a question about my order, she yelled at me for not staying in line.

I did not argue, but I indicated through my intonation, and some diplomatic language, that I thought she was terrible at a public-facing job.  I was right.

I left the store in a bad mood.

Then I realised I had made a serious mistake.

“Oh no,” I thought to myself, “What am I going to break now?”

So, I stood outside the store, just two feet in front of the double automatic doors, by the bike racks, and I very quietly recited from memory the whole program of Guru’s spiritual poems that I delivered over the August Celebrations.  I took me twelve minutes to say the whole thing most soulfully.  I felt I needed to say these words someplace within the vicinity of the store.  I had to heal that vibration, and keep the anger and irritation from spreading and affecting other people or causing some misfortune in my life.  I had to heal it and fix it.

Finally, I got on my bike in a much better consciousness.

I feel that the public recitation of Guru’s words is a way of planting a seed of higher consciousness in these places.

Be infinitely more than yourself.  Be your highest, purest, kindest, and greatest Self.  Even Batman will admire you.

The Master insisted that when we read his books, that we mark the passages we like, so that we can return to them again and again.  He even said we can write notes in the margins, and take his books as life-long projects for study.  He said that marking the sections we like most, and writing our own thoughts, would really help us.  I have, in fact, taken to journaling in my Guru’s books- I write down in the margins my inner experiences, sometimes I include last night’s dreams, or inspiring things that happened to me that day.

Yesterday I was reading Sri Chinmoy Answers Part One, Book Five, published by Ganapati Press.  And I found a note, a journal entry, I had made on the bottom of page 162:

“‘Your Guru really believed in you!’  A Filipina woman said                                      this to me to me today when I told her the meaning of my                                        name.”

-14 December 2021

AUM

 

I spent a couple hours reading Book Five yesterday, and I don’t remember that woman, or what I wrote, but when I read that, I burst into tears, bitter tears, but also tears of gratitude that that woman could have told me something so soulful and meaningful when I told her the significance of my name.

Please keep a diary, and please read Guru’s books.  You can even write your experiences in Guru’s books so that you can find double the wealth in them.

 

 

Yesterday I was reciting some of my favorite daily prayers, when I heard an inner voice.  Its message was simple, “It’s too late, you might as well give up.”

I’ve been meditating for thirty years now.  Before I accepted spirituality, I had a lot of problems with voices or so-called inner messages.  I didn’t know how to fight them.  When a voice would call me worthless or stupid, I would believe it.  Before I embarked on the life of meditation, I thought real spirituality meant simply accepting whatever message I got as the truth.

I’m not talking about schizophrenia.  It’s not that I thought there were people talking to me, or that I was getting “messages” from God.  It’s simply that I didn’t know how to regulate my thoughts.  I didn’t know how to control the mind, or how to silence it.  So I had to live with this thought-factory that would call me worthless and stupid.

Then, in 1994, my friend Sebastian gave me a copy of Beyond Within.  In it, Guru Sri Chinmoy talks about the mind and the heart.  In a particularly striking answer, Guru remarks:

“We should not try to enter into the mind-room in the very beginning of our spiritual journey. To enter into this room we need abundant inner courage, inner light and inner assurance from our Inner Pilot. Very often we make a Himalayan blunder: we enter into the mind-room just because we see that it is all confusion and darkness, and we want to illumine the mind.”

(Sri Chinmoy, Aspiration and God’s Hour, Agni Press, 1977)

Sri Chinmoy advocates staying in the heart, where there is light.

I have been following his path for three decades now, and I have developed considerable inner strength.  So, yesterday, when the mind told me, or the thought came, that I am useless and it’s “too late”, I just laughed at it.  “Thank you for your support!”  I said out loud and simply continued my daily prayers.  It is so nice to have a way out of the prison of the mind, so nice.

Yesterday, I did something overdue- I went through all my paper clutter- yes piles and piles of old papers, and I sorted them and threw almost everything out: receipts, recipes, gas bills from 1998.  I also went through my filing cabinets and threw out everything that I no longer need- like twenty year old tax returns and canceled parking violation checks.

But I also found two poems  that I wrote a long time ago but had forgotten.  The first is from 2007, and the second seems to be from 2009:

 

Rivers

Cry me a river

And I will buy you

A boat

To sail beyond the rages

Of spring and fall-

The blue ribbon

Winding across

This country-

Breathing

And bubbling

And sighing

With the times,

With the suns

That flash overhead

Like newly minted coins-

And you and I

Tossing pennies

Into that good river

Beneath

A vast

And ever-blossoming

Vision-sky.

 

GURU

Around every corner

I see my Guru

Smiling to himself,

Rejoicing in the throes

And surges

Of the Self,

Laughing with the

Full-bodied clouds in the sky,

Ringing all the old church bells-

Summoning my soul’s jewel

For worship.

Guru, Guru, Guru!

Where is reality

If not in you?

Where is Divinity

If not in you?

Guru,

Of what use to me

Are the crowns and bracelets

Of the world?

 

When I joined the spiritual life I thought that it always be like how it was at the beginning- in which I would just have revelation after revelation.  Doors would open to me and my life would be perpetually bathed in amazements.

I’m saying this because the gap between the spiritual life and the ordinary life that I was used to, that I was brought up in was so vast- and I thought that that’s how things would be.

But that’s not the case!

Unfortunately or maybe fortunately, I have my six or seven daily spiritual practices, mostly involving chanting or reading of spiritual books, and I do my chanting and reading every day- as I shuffle through the minefield of my life’s mistakes.

One practice that I’ve learned recently is not to really give my shortcomings and mistakes too much attention but to spend most of my time focusing on the things that uplift me and help me: reading, recitation, singing, gratitude-offering.

So I guess what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that the spiritual life as I have lived it is essentially a lot of repetitious practices conducted with a view to these techniques eventually transforming me.  It’s slow going.

I sing Sri Chinmoy’s Forgiveness song “Jiban Debata” (God of my life) many times a day.  This is just an example of a spiritual practice that I do over and over every day.  How many times I do it doesn’t matter.  What matters is the soulfulness and the sincerity.

Soulfulness and sincerity!  When I’m doing my daily sadhana, my inner “homework”, if I feel sincerity and soulfulness, I know I’m on the right track.

But when I don’t feel soulful or sincere I just do my daily meditation and practice anyway!  What’s the alternative?

The first time I cried during an artistic performance was back in March of 2008, during a performance of the Saint Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach, performed at Avery Fisher hall and conducted by Kurt Masur.  There’s a powerful opening chorus where Jesus Christ is referred to as the lamb and there’s a double soprano chorus of women mourning him and lamenting for him and then the chorus ends abruptly and Christ stands up and says to his disciples : “You know in two days I am going to be handed over and crucified!” And the following chorus is this keening lullaby: “Herzliebster Jesu, Was Hast Du Verbrochen” (O sweet-hearted Jesus, what law have you broken?” and it is so pathetic that I started shedding tears and I shed tears throughout the performance.

The next time I cried at a performance was in 2023, so about 15 years later.  I attended another performance of the Saint Matthew Passion, this time put on by a local church.  The tenor, who plays the Evangelist, has the biggest role as he narrates the story.  In this case the tenor came from the Deep South, but sang in impeccable German, and just the depth of his feeling, the depth of his oratory brought forward my tears and I noticed some of the musicians were also shedding tears.  A sea of tears.  It was transformational.  I am not a Christian.  But when the St Matthew Passion is done well, for three hours I do become a Christian so that I can fully participate in the mystery and the majesty of this immortal music.

Until recently those were the only times I’ve ever cried at a public performance. I find public expressions of emotion unbalancing and disconcerting.  I’m an emotional guy which is not a good or a bad thing but I’m also an extreme extrovert!  This is not the best combination.

But I treasure my time alone. I like being with people but I really like being alone- with my books and my thoughts, my music and my poetry.

I go to all of my community’s (the Sri Chinmoy Center’s) spiritual Celebrations and every time I find it overwhelming- these public gatherings with people from all over the world.  I often take refuge in the “housing office” appointed apartment, refurbished just for us, or unfurnished just for us, but always impeccably clean. And I stay there in my decrepit or ultra modern tower and I just read Guru’s books.

Last night I went to a performance of Angels In America, a justly famous play written by my landsman Tony Kushner.  A few weeks ago, I saw two guys smoking outside of the theatre.  I had seen the signs and I asked them if it was true that they were putting on Angels In America, and they said it was.  I then asked them who was playing Prior, and one of the guys, tall, skinny and blond, shook my hand and told me he was.  And his friend, a Black man, came up and told me he was playing Belize, the rough equivalent of King Lear’s “Fool” who sees things the other characters don’t.  We spoke for a few minutes, and they were both in character!  It was such a privilege to talk with them.

In the first scene of the play a younger middle-aged guy named Lewis is burying his grandmother and the rabbi is lamenting that all of her grandchildren have goyisher (non-Jewish) names.  After the funeral Lewis goes home to his partner, his boyfriend.  The play takes place in 1985 in New York, and his boyfriend, Prior, says “I have to show you something”- and he rolls up his sleeve and he shows Lewis a purple spot on his arm.   For a sexually active gay man, in 1985, to find a purple lesion on his arm, a cardinal sign of HIV infection, is an incontrovertible death sentence.  The actor who was portraying Lewis started to cry and it didn’t feel like forced tears, but hysterical tears of despair.

I didn’t sniffle, but copious tears streamed down my face. These tears did not leave me.

Lewis says to his partner, Prior, that he doesn’t think he can stay and watch Prior die and Prior asks Lewis not to leave him but Lewis leaves him anyway!

Lewis goes to his rabbi and he asks the rabbi “What do the scriptures say about someone who betrayed a loved one in their time of greatest need?” And the rabbi says that the scriptures have nothing to say about such a person.

The play has a few more subplots- prescriptions pills, Mormon moms, Black drag queens, the infamous Roy Cohn, and the fuzzy borderlands between dreams and waking life where we sometimes, fleetingly, glimpse deep truths.  The eloquence of the writing, and the emotional honesty and vulnerability of the characters left an impression on me.

My friend who taught theater for many years at a local Christian college, told me that Angels In America is one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century, and he made his students study it.  Some of his students come from missionary families, and protested being assigned a play that depicts things like gay sex and drug use.  He would respond to them that the message of the play is resonant with the Gospel, that we are the angels in America ourselves, and it is our duty to take care of each other.  He told me he couldn’t produce the play at this college, but he did assign it as reading.

The play is about many things: Where do we derive our sense of right and wrong? Who do we listen to when we make moral choices?  Can we trace a streak of the divine operating in American history?

Lewis’s AIDS-infected boyfriend Prior, in the course of the play, turns out to be some kind of divinely chosen messenger!  So another question that occurred to me last night was: “How broken do you have to be before God feels that you will be surrendered enough to convey his messages?”

I guess the sense of brokenness and betrayal is taken up by Bach in his St. Matthew Passion as well.

The goal of my spiritual practice, my sadhana (funny, the auto-dictation heard “sad night”)  is to reach that state where I can shed soulful tears for God.  I don’t mean pretend tears, or crocodile or demonstrative tears, but authentic tears for God.

Unfortunately, in my day to day spiritual life, that doesn’t happen with me.

I go through the motions, I do everything by rote.  I try for soulfulness, but tears do not come.

But when I saw the St. Matthew Passion, and also last night when I saw Angels In America, I shed genuine and soulful tears, in silence.

Sitting next to me was some guy who looked like a Hell’s Angel with the beard, the tattoos and the long braided red hair, and I caught him three or four times wiping away his tears.

The spiritual life must always be new.  Guru says “That which is eternal is outwardly new.” (From God the Supreme Musician)

If I can’t renew my sadhana on my own, then I think it’s good for me to see the greatest works of art that can evoke really deep and soulful tears, for it is through the tears of the soul that I recover newness- and also the sense of purpose that I started my spiritual life with.

Sometimes I worry that some of my thoughts and actions may separate me from my own divinity, and so last night, while I was empathizing with the characters on stage I took advantage of these tears to beg my Master for his forgiveness-oneness.  I realized finally that these were really tears of self reflection and self discovery.

But whether they were tears of repentance or gratitude or discovery I can’t deny that, like Bach’s immortal Passion, Angels in America gives me a chance to connect with something deeper and universal in myself.  Therefore I can say that those tears were ultimately tears of my soul’s joy.

I am a spiritual seeker.  I don’t need anything else.

Thanks, Prior.

 

I haven’t been sleeping well recently.  I get by in my day to day with cat naps.  Mostly I sleep in the cafeteria of my schools during lunch or my prep period.  Alas, sometimes my naps can spill over.  I mean, as a sub it’s not like I have a lot to do anyway, but I do, at a minimum, need to stay awake.  This can be easier said than done.  I was proctoring a class in a middle school a few weeks ago.  I was streaming, through my ear buds, Haydn’s Opus 33 string quartet number 1, a masterpiece (Haydn wrote virtually nothing but masterpieces in the string quartet genre).  The music lulled in me into a daze, then a deep sleep, and I started to dream that I was at a live performance of the piece!  At the end of the performance, along with the rest of the audience, I clapped thunderously.  I clapped so hard I woke up!  All the students had paused taking their test and were looking at me.  “Why was the substitute clapping in his sleep?” was the question on every kid’s face.  I gave them a serious look and they returned to their tests.

The other day I was at the gym at a local college.  I met a man in his late fifties in the locker room.  He told me his name was Jared.  I assumed he was a professor and I asked him what he taught.  He said “Mathematics”, and then he asked me my field of study and I told him that I’m not a professor but that I study poetry.  He asked me who my favorite poet was, and I said among the American poets I probably love Wallace Stevens the most.  And then and there he recited the entirety of “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens!  “Call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one…”  We recited it together, word for word, and we were so happy and thrilled that we both knew the work.  He asked for my interpretation of the poem, and why it is so brutal and reductionist- and I said that the poem is about the author serving ice cream in the house of his neighbor, who has just died.  She is lying in one room, stretched out, her friends preparing her body for the viewing, and he is in the other room serving ice cream.  He reflects that she has lived a whole life, but it is finished, and now she is just a thing, but he lives, he is serving ice cream, he matters more, even though all her friends are streaming in to say goodbye to his neighbor.  It’s really a poem where what you see is what matters, the reality in front of you.  How you interpret it is up to you- but facts are facts.

I told him what I love about Stevens’ work is the mouth feel- your tongue and lips love to shape the words of his poetry.  He liked that.  Then we recited An Idea of Order At Key West: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea…” and also the last lines of Sunday Morning: “And in the isolation of the sky at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make ambiguous undulations as they sink downward to darkness on extended wings.”  (One of my favorite passages in all literature) It was such a thrill to meet someone who loves Stevens as I do, I said, “We are a small fraternity” and he finished, “But we are proud!”  Any fan of Wallce Stevens is my friend.

It’s funny- Wallace Stevens made his money as a life insurance executive.  His co-workers never knew he wrote poetry- they described him as hard boiled and all business.  In the same way, Charles Ives, America’s greatest composer, was also a brilliant life insurance salesman.  He made a fortune!  There’s something about selling life insurance that turns people into creative geniuses.  Maybe it’s the constant going from door-to-door and seeing how different people live, or maybe there’s something in explaining complicated policies and benefits that triggers something in the brain.  I don’t know.

The other day I was going for a walk, and I got an “inner message”.  It was an encouraging message, so whether it was real or not doesn’t matter.  It said “Identify your best quality and then intensify it enormously until it overshadows all of your so called bad qualities.”

Yesterday I had the day off so I read Guru’s books for five hours.  When I read Guru’s books I become a different person.  St. Augustine said to Christ, “You are more deeply in me than I am in me.”  In the same way, I can say that Guru’s books represent me better than I represent myself.  When I dive into his writings, all my bad qualities disappear, or they become meaningless.  Guru’s words are my true existence.  I feel this also when I recite Guru’s poetry because I become a different person.  That consciousness is not my usual waking consciousness, but Guru’s writings- especially his poetry- are ladders to an exalted consciousness that I can inhabit and claim as my own.

This morning I was reading Guru’s book Perfection and Transcendence, and I started reading some pages aloud.  After twenty minutes I stopped, but I heard a ringing in my ear, and that ringing soon spread throughout my body.  Everything in me was ringing, ringing, humming, vibrating.  I get that feeling when I chant AUM, also.  This means that reading Guru’s writings is the same as chanting AUM- the seed sound of the Universe.  We can enter into a deep, universal harmony and get enlightenment just by reading Guru’s books, meditating on these ideas, and chanting his mantric utterances.

I’m not always happy with myself.  I have a lot of attachments.  I’ll spare the reader the details.  But yesterday I was sitting in a small park near my house, and I sang Guru’s immortal song on forgiveness- “Jiban Debata”- six times.  And the sixth time I sang it, I sang it with more feeling than I ever have, and I saw that each note had a color, and I dived into the meaning of each note-color, and I felt the song wash over me like countless waves.  I sat there in silence for a few minutes and just offered gratitude to God and to my Guru for this experience.  As a seeker, I need these experiences to feel spiritually alive.  My friend the mountain climber slash English channel swimmer slash Celebrations housing Lord once told me “We are people of high moments.”  Other people live for nice clothes and status and fast cars- we live for those thirty or forty fleeting moments in our lives when we connect with something higher and deeper.  Guru says that “Even an iota of progress in the spiritual life is much more important than the so-called success-life” (Seventy Seven Thousand Service Trees).

It’s interesting when I read the Bengali lyrics to Guru’s songs- and I see that when he honours spiritual figures he gives them epithets.  For example, he calls Krishna “Bhangshid Hari” or “Flute Lord”.  He calls Christ “Khama Amarar”- “Embodiment of Immortality’s Forgiveness”.  For the Buddha, in his song “Namo Namo Buddha Deber” Sri Chinmoy took six or seven different names of Shiva to identify the inner divinity of the Buddha- “Ashutosh” (the one who is quickly satisfied), “Bholanath” (Lost in self forgetfulness), “Sthir” (“Firm” or “Eternally unchanging”) and the epithet that Guru applied specifically to Buddha is “Karuna Maitri Nir” (Compassion-Friendship Fountain).  He gives these names even to other Masters, to honor them, their supreme greatness.

I remember once, many years ago, I was washing dishes at Victory’s Banner, our long-gone divine enterprise restaurant in Chicago.  We had a Transcendental, embossed, in the dishwashing area, and I mistakenly sprayed it with the spray gun.  I immediately got a clean rag and wiped the picture down, and the Transcendental gave me the most compassionate smile.  Again, I remember once seeing Guru’s secretary on his knees before Guru, telling Guru all the important recent news, and Guru was looking at him and gave him the same smile that that the Transcendental gave me.  It’s as if our devotion feeds something divine in the Compassion aspect of the Master.  Maybe it is regular devotion-practice I need to stay spiritually healthy?

Well, school is out- which means I am out of a job temporarily, so I’m going to hit the pavement and look for work.  Geez, I wonder if there’s an eighteen-wheeler TQL truck out there with my name on it?

 

Four years ago, Abedan told me these following stories, during that year’s April Celebrations, at Circus.

In the early Seventies, the daily newspaper known as The Village Voice used to keep Ananda Mayi Ma’s photograph on its front page every day.  The image was of the Master in samadhi.  One night Abedan had a dream that Ananda Mayi Ma told him to become Sri Chinmoy’s disciple.  Abedan immediately obeyed Ananda Mayi Ma’s request.

During a bus ride around 1972, somebody asked Guru something about Sri Aurobindo, maybe who Sri Aurobindo had been in his past life.  Guru smiled and said with great affection, “Why are you asking about him?  I realised God long before that old man!”

Of course Guru always referred to Sri Aurobindo as a great Avatar!  Here he was just having a little fun.

During a private function around 1973, Guru was speaking about Swami Vivekananda.  Apparently, before Guru took birth, he had asked Swami Vivekananda to come down to earth with him, to assist him in his manifestation.  Swami Vivekananda refused, indicating he would prefer to stay in Nirvana.  Guru has written so many songs, poems and plays about the great Swami Vivekananda, but that night Guru expressed sadness and disappointment that Vivekananda did not consent to accompany him on his earthly manifestation.  He said that “Vivekananda could have done so much for me, and I could have helped him so much.”

What I think this means is that God-realisation has no end.  Even though Vivekananda is a God-realised soul, had he agreed to come down and serve Guru, our Master could have helped him go far, far beyond his current height.

—

It’s funny- during our last Celebrations, I kept seeing some of my friends who have passed on.  They were walking around Aspiration-Ground.  I spoke to another disciple about what I was seeing and he told me that he has also seen them.  He said there are some souls who have tremendous love for the Center, for Guru and also for the disciples.  They maintain this bond.

I told this friend that when I returned home from the hospital after having broken my foot, I went home and just started singing gratitude songs, for I knew it could have been infinitely worse.  My friend told me that he had recently fallen in the bathroom, dislocating his hip and twisting his ankle.  He told me that when he got up he also started singing gratitude songs to Guru.  It is good to keep this attitude of offering thanks to Guru and to God when bad things happen.  Because of our spiritual life, and the Master’s intervention, our suffering is minimal.

 

Beethoven said that “Missa Solemnis”, his last setting of the Latin Mass, was his greatest work.  I don’t know what that means.  It doesn’t have the refinement or the unity of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.  It also doesn’t have the variety of styles, like we see in the older Master’s B Minor Mass.  What the Missa Solemnis does offer is power, and between thudding redundancies and musical experiments that fail, glimpses of another world.  These glimpses are so rarefied, and so exalted.

When I say parts of the piece are redundant, or that not every musical gesture “works”, I’m really saying that Beethoven had a high vision, and he wasn’t willing to compromise with it to make pretty music.  He stayed true to that vision, even if I wish he had written a work on a smaller scale, and kept only the best ideas.

But hey!  This is late Beethoven we’re talking about.  Even the most crashing cliches in the Missa Solemnis somehow reflect Beethoven’s genius that lifts them to another plane.  Take my least favorite feature of the Missa Solemnis- the extended violin solo in the Sanctus.  It express pat, conventional religiosity.  Beethoven was not a conventionally religious man.  Therefore, when he writes overtly religious music, and the violin tune sounds based on an old hymn, it sounds a little strained.  But when you hear it in the context of the piece, it sounds like the singers are basically oblivious to the violin line.  But then, they wake up, and they interpret the melody sung by the violin in their own way, and then the orchestra comes in at the end with slow, ponderous steps, and I feel the presence of a great universal soul.  I think the violin tune is Beethoven’s gracious encomium to religion, and its important role in offering some kind of supernatural hope.  Beethoven found God in nature, I think, but he offers his dutiful service to those who must have the Church to see God.

Riccardo Muti conducted the Missa Solemnis here in Chicago last year.  He said in the program notes that he’s wanted his whole career to conduct the Missa Solemnis, but he waited until he turned eighty-four, and about to lay down the baton forever, to actually take it up.  He also said that no performance can embrace every aspect of the Missa Solemnis.  It is too vast.  He said that he tries to embody the beauty of the piece.

And Muti was right!  Toscanini, in his 1935 radio recording, knocked it out of the ballpark with a deeply introspective reading.  Toscanini was obviously a spiritual seeker.  I didn’t hear that kind of spirituality in Muti’s rendition.  Rather, I heard pure sound, beauty for beauty’s sake.  I also noticed he made each strand of the piece clear and discrete for my ear, I could almost see each of the fibers that go into the composition.  He made sure I could hear everything, layer after layer, that makes Missa Solemnis so unique, and so satisfying.  Muti made the piece his own.  I’m happy he chose the highest mountain for last.  And I was there.    One of my customers had to go out of town, so she gave me her tickets!

What a thrill that was!