Two days ago, on the morning of the 11th of October, my meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy passed behind the curtain of Eternity. He was 76 years old.

My teacher always believed that inner silence and poise and outer dynamism can go together, and indeed right up until the end he was immersed in action; he was composing songs the day before he left the body, and held a meditation function for his students the night before. Only a couple of weeks ago, he was in St Petersburg giving concerts of meditative music for the public.
 
It is hard to imagine that the body that embarked upon so many challenges and gave so much is now still, but I think I can speak for all of Sri Chinmoy's students when I say the divine spark which propelled Sri Chinmoy from within to higher and more awe-inspiring feats of creativity and athletic prowess is not stilled in the slightest; we can feel it now with us, and it will never be still.

You can read the official announcement,  you are also warmly invited to leave a tribute on our site...

I am following very keenly the progress of the 3100 Mile Self Transcendence race, the longest road race in the world, not least because quite a few of my friends and fellow students of my teacher Sri Chinmoy are running in it! Fortunately for me, another friend of mine, Utpal Marshall, seems determined to keep us all updated with regular video clips and interviews.

I really like these clips, especially the one taken a week after the race start- the runners talk very candidly about what they're going through physically and emotionally but also of the need to just get out there and soldier on and do the miles. Im especially pleased to see Grahak Cunningham, the first-time runner from Perth, Australia still running with a smile on his face. I was looking at some photos of the race after the three or four day mark and there was one of him sitting down during a break looking like he was staring into his own personal hell. But he obviously stood up, put one foot in front of the other and kept on going, and that's what it's all about.

These races are really all about transcendence - calling on all your hitherto untapped inner capacities to overcome these obstacles and expanding the boundaries of the possible. Ultrarunning is perhaps not normally associated with meditation but I think more and more people are beginning to see how they can go together. My meditation teacher (and race founder) Sri Chinmoy, has been visiting the course every day to express his admiration and appreciation for each of the runners - they really are challenging not only their own capacities, but also everyone elses ideas of what human beings can achieve. It's amazing to think how twelve runners going around a nondescript half-mile loop somewhere in the New York suburbs can inspire so many people across the world. They really are heroes.

Video clips taken so far:
- Video of race start
- Interviews with runners a week after the race

There is also a daily blog with results et al...
- Also a news item on allaboutrunning.net...

There were four of us running through the park, when a police car went by.

My younger brother, Colm, had an idea. "Okay, so you get clamped for parking in the wrong space and you get penalty points for speeding and you get jailed for robbing someone" he said, "What I want to know, is why don't they give you plus points for doing something like getting out and running through the park, or picking up the litter. And they should give you a medal for helping old ladies"

I realised this is probably the exact way a four or five year old would see the world.

We've just had a national election round these parts. It's been quite an interesting experience for me; I was quite the political theorist before I entered full-time into the world of meditation. I guess it was just another stage in the ever-continuing search for happiness, both for me and for the rest of the world. At that time I used to bring myself almost to the point of illness searching for the ideal system in which we could all live together, one that would not be removed in some far-off Utopia and would appeal to the ordinary decent man on the street.

Now you could say the pendulum has swung the other way, and I try to have as little to do with mental theorizing as possible, preferring the lasting experiences of the heart to the mind's fleeting glimpses. Nevertheless it's interesting how meditation has changed my attitude to politics and politicians. There is a tendency to blame all ills on politicians; it conveniently distracts attention from the contribution of people themselves to society's woes. In Ireland, we basically have a one house parliament (plus another talking-shop house) in which the members are expected to do two full-time jobs at once - be both national legislator and local advocate. For most, their personal life is non existenct; family problems and marital discord are apparently quite high amongst politicians here. In any analysis, I generally tend to look past politicians to the system in which they have to work - and the analysis tends always to end up at the same basic point: ultimately, the buck stops with you and me and six billion others; the responsibility lies with each and every one of us to find the way in which we can make the world better. My teacher, Sri Chinmoy, has written hundreds of thousands of meditative aphorisms which often for me sum up a situation quite perfectly - here are two I find particularly illumining in this regard:

The answer to the problems
Of this world
Is for every one of us
To go beyond
Our present capacities
And become better

Every day
You can inspire others
Through your sincere concern
For humanity's happiness
And progress


p.s my new blog is at http://www.shanemagee.com/blog

I just did a blog entry about an event that pretty much was a comma, if not a semicolon, in the long and stringy sentence of my childhood. It mightn't mean much to people who aren't Irish. Or those are into not sports. Or those weren't 11 years old in 1991. Oh well.

You can read it now on my blog...

I have a copy of the Bhagavad Gita lying around somewhere where I'm guaranteed to pick it up every so often and sift through its (not very many) pages. This morning, some verses I had not noticed before caught my attention...


Read more.....

Just a couple of blog posts on my other blog on topics that inspire or vaguely amuse me:

- Erdos-Bacon numbers (vaguely amusing)
- Ted Corbitt, "father of modern ultrarunning" (definitely inspiring)

Enjoy!

In November 2006, I went to New York for 10 days or so to see my spiritual master, Sri Chinmoy. I generally do this three times a year, staying for periods ranging from 10 days to three weeks. There are usually hundreds of Sri Chinmoy's students visiting the same time as I am, so there is a tremendous atmosphere of enthusiasm and joy in addition to the inner peace from the meditations.



It has always struck me how few accounts there are available describing time spent with contemporary spiritual teachers like Sri Chinmoy. When I was just embarking upon this spiritual path, I was tremendously inspired by books like The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and other stories of great teachers as told by their students. By no means do I fancy myself as another M. (the author of the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna) but I thought perhaps since I visit my own teacher quite a lot, perhaps I could write down some of my experiences and impressions.





So here it is, a couple of months later (it kind of drifted to the back of my priority list) For me personally, it's nice to have something like this to read over and reawaken in my heart the nice experiences I had. The daily weblog of my 2006 visit is on my blog at the Sri Chinmoy Centre website; I hope that they can give the reader some inspiration in his or her own search for fulfillment in life.

Siona's recent blog entries touched a chord inside me, and finally made me put down on paper a few thoughts that should have been committed long ago:

First, the use of science in the film 'What the bleep do we know?', and what role science has to play in casting light upon the inner realms of Being. I liked this passage very much:

"Physics will never prove or disprove ‘God.’ There is, and will always be, a necessary leap of faith involved, and to inflate and mutilate the humble discoveries of the quantum world in an attempt to make this leap easier is downright foolish. It cheapens the true commitment that this existential decision requires. It is - ironically -  disempowering."

I graduated with a Ph.D in physics last year; I suppose I started the course out of a desire to answer some serious existential questions, only to turn a couple of years later to philosophy, psychology and anthropology in turn, before coming to rest at meditation and the spiritual life. The more I studied all these academic disciplines, the more I realised that they were no substitute for that leap of faith talked about.

I think if science has any function in human understanding, it is to cast light on the limited everyday parts of our being. By its very nature, science is reductionist, boiling behaviours down to singular causes, at root of which is the evolutionary imperative. And let's admit it, there are many parts of our being which are amenable to this treatment. However, I feel that, as human beings, we are some kind of strange and wonderful halfway house between the animal and the divine. Psychology, neurology and physiology have shone numerous insights on the animal part of our nature, the way we are bound to certain impulses, tied to habitual and instinctual behaviours, but the analytical mind at the root of these disciplines simply does not possess the tools necessary for the other half, the divine part: it is like a fork trying to grab the sea. So for me when i hear a phyiologist or a psychologist summing our behavour into evolutionary imperatives, I say, "Well, yes, that's there, but there is also another inner part of me that has a need for self-giving and serving and for everyone to be happy, a part quite different from my selfish animal wants. Look, this part is evolving too! Lo and behold, I find myself a little less driven by selfishness, a little more ready to place myself without expectation of gain at the service of the world." So sometimes a realisation of my animal nature can inspire me in my attempt to move away from the mediocrity of that existence towards something much more fulfilling.

Now that I've said that, did What the Bleep? serve this purpose for me? Well yes and no. Let's start with the good part of the film (which involved the only good science) which related human attraction to chemical and hormonal stimuli. Now, no-one with sincerity denies that evolutionary and biological imperitives can interfere with what we call 'love'. However, one school of scientists (I don't want to tar all scientists with the same brush) would say that all love boils down to this, whilst others will differentiate between this kind of love, and a deeper, wholer love that we associate with empathy, sacrifice, unconditional giving and that deeper sense of Self talked about above. So maybe that part of the film will inspire people to look at their relations with people and establish relations on this higher basis. Maybe.

The rest of the science in the film: First, the quantum physics. For me, the nice thing about quantum physics is it tells us how far we can go in our perception of the outer world at small scales. Specifically, that we cannot say what state an object is in unless we make a measurement on, we can only say that there is a probability that it exists in a particular state. I like this particular feature of quantum physics, I have to say. It has a kind of early Wittgensteinian 'thus far, no further' feel about it, marking the boundaries of analytic perception. But in 'What the Bleep?', it is turned on its head to say things exist in all states at once. A scientist would take one look at this kind of speculation and turn his head in disgust, and is that what a spiritual venture should be doing, deepening divisions between two groups of human beings already characterised by mutual suspicion? I spent eight years amongst scientists, decent likeable folk most of them, and I yearn for some kind of common understanding, some kind of standing in each other's shoes without necessarily adopting each other's perspective wholesale. But I heard quite a few people (some of whom I admire greatly in other respects) comment after seeing this film "Why don't those stupid scientists ever accept..." and I felt very sad.

This is not to say quantum physics doesnt have some very counterintuitive insights. Nonlocality is one - that a change in the state of an object can affect another millions of miles away. But at best it is a signpost, a call to exploration, not an explanation in itself. For me, it just doesn't produce that response from the deepest recesses of my being, that realness that for me is the hallmark of spiritual experience. But maybe that's me. If nonlocality has made any of the readers of this feel that way, my hat is off to them.

Then there's the water consciousness experiment. I tried to look for published papers by Dr Emoto; no cigar (maybe I'm not searching hard enough). For the record, I do feel that inanimate objects are susceptible to the consciousness of their surrounding environment, but this is a very personal inner feeling, and if I want to project my pretty yellow balloon face 50 foot high in movie theatres all across the world, I'm going to need some pretty hard proof. This experiment, on the face of it, seems pretty easily reproducible, and I wonder that there has been no attempt at independent verification, and why Dr Emoto doesn't submit his papers for peer review. Surely the point of such experiments is to engage the wider scientific community in looking at the possibility of such an important paradigm shift; but without conclusive proof you just end up talking to the same people you've always been talking to. (Although, in Dr Emoto's defence, those poor sensitive water crystals mightn't respond well to the vibrations of sceptical scientists :)   )

Anyway, I would like to close by saying I felt something rather nice when reading Siona's blog. We certainly share different philosophies on certain things, but whilst reading the entries a deep respect and appreciation for the person, the being, the life-experience behind them surfaced inside me; this kind of appreciation is one of the nice things about Zaadz, and I hope it can free us all to stand in each other's shoes briefly and then walk our myriad ways up the mountain.

An inspirational blog entry by a friend of mine sparked off some very warm memories about a trip to Mount Kenya a few years ago.....