Entries from September 2007 ↓
September 30th, 2007 — Music
Music plays an indispensable role in the spiritual quest of Sri Chinmoy’s students. “When we listen to soulful music, or when we ourselves play soulful music, immediately our inner existence climbs up high, higher, highest”, explains Sri Chinmoy in his book ‘God the Supreme Musician’. “It climbs up and enters into something beyond. This Beyond is constantly trying to help us, guide us, mould us and shape us into our true transcendental image, our true divinity. When we hear soulful music, or when we play a soulful piece of music, we feel a kind of inner thrill in our entire existence, from the soles of our feet to the crown of our head. A river is flowing through us, a river of consciousness, and this consciousness is all the time illumined.”
Meditation functions with Sri Chinmoy will often have a diverse range of musical performances: there are some groups and singers which will perform every week. In addition, when Sri Chinmoy’s students from all around the world visit him in New York in April and August, there will be performances from every country as well as instrumental performances from Sri Chinmoy’s outstanding musician-students from all corners of the globe.
On Radio Sri Chinmoy, 44 tracks have just been posted which nicely capture the flavour and diverse nature of these performances. The tracks were recorded between June and September 2007, with the majority of the tracks recorded in August when many international groups performed. The performances are mostly arrangements of Sri Chinmoy’s songs, but there is also performances of songs by the immortal Rabindranath Tagore sung by Rintu Chakravarty and some traditional baoul singing by brothers Ranjit and Unmesh Swanson. For these tracks we are very grateful to Kamalakanta Nieves, who edits radiosrichinmoy.org and is responsible for the recording of many of the tracks, and Sumangali Morhall, the webmaster of Radio Sri Chinmoy. You can listen to the music tracks here…
September 23rd, 2007 — Uncategorized
September 23rd, 2007 — quicklinks
- World Harmony Run visits Tanzania – The World Harmony Run, founded by Sri Chinmoy in 1986, is also currently running through the British Isles. The latest updates can be seen at the World Harmony Run site.
Other News and Interesting Links
Articles on Self Improvement
New Blog
September 23rd, 2007 — sri chinmoy races
In August, 2007, AUM publications published a new book. “My Cycling Experiences”
This is a collection of anecdotes about Sri Chinmoy’s experiences of cycling.
These stories range from childhood reminiscences in Chittagong to completing the Pepsi 24 hour cycling challenge in the 1970s.
The Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team entered the 24 hours cycle race around Central Park, New York from 1977 to 1979.
Sri Chinmoy’s best 24 hour distance was 230 miles in 1978. 1978 also saw Ashrita Furman, a student of Sri Chinmoy’s, complete 405 miles. This cycling race was a key event in encouraging Ashrita that he could break Guinness World Records, and he now has the distinction of holding more than anyone else on the planet.
Speaking on the significance of cycling. Sri Chinmoy wrote:
“While we are cycling, we are reminding ourselves of evolution, of how the world is evolving in cycles. When we think of our planet, we think of a wheel turning: our life also is revolving like a wheel. So cycling reminds us of the process of evolution and of how everything goes in cycles.”
My Cycling Experiences by Sri Chinmoy, AUM Publications, 2007
The Sri Chinmoy Cycling Team is currently active in the UK.
(Photo of Sri Chinmoy, Pepsi 24 hour Cycling Race, 1978.)
September 9th, 2007 — Ashrita Furman - Guinness world record breaker, Sri Chinmoy
A diverse festival of of cultural, athletic, musical and spiritual events concluded in Queens, New York just last week. The two-week celebration took place to commemorate 76 years in the life of Sri Chinmoy, who over the past forty years has gained international acclaim for his contributions to philosophy, world harmony and interfaith relations. The wide array of events was intended to serve as a living demonstration that every kind of human talent – including art, music, theatre, athletics, and poetry – has a role to play in bring about a better world.
The two-week festival was graced by the presence of the musician Boris Purushottama Grebenshikov, a household name in his native Russia, and whose band, Aquarium, were involved in many of the landmark steps towards full artistic freedom as Russia emerged from Communist rule. On August 29th, Boris played a solo concert in the United Nations to enthusiastic acclaim (see separate blog entry for more details); a few days earlier, the same building had also played host to an all-female ensemble from the Sri Chinmoy Centre who have performed concerts of meditative music to audiences all around the world for the past 25 years. Many other musical performances took place over the two weeks; one particularly notable performance on August 18th featured an 80-strong orchestra led by Swiss musician Panchajanya Burri, performing a multi-part arrangement of the legendary Bangladeshi composer Kazi Nazrul Islam’s immortal song He Partha Sarathi. A classical music evening took place on August 28th, where performers from all over the world performed classical and folk arrangements from their own countries.
An unmistakeable highlight of the event was the unveiling of the largest pencil ever created, a 76 foot long monster weighing in at an enormous 18,000 pounds, built by an international volunteer team led by Ashrita Furman (see separate blog entry for more details). During the two-week period, Ashrita also set four other Guinness records, including an amazing three in the space of just one day – performing 36 deep knee bends on a Swiss balancing ball without falling off, catching a water balloon thrown from a distance of 64 feet without bursting it, and running a mile in just over nine minutes whilst simultaneously bouncing three balls on the ground! A few days later he also achieved a long-cherished goal of breaking the record for balancing the most glasses on his chin. This record was a particularly gratifying one for Ashrita, as he had been trying unsuccesfully to break it for years.
A selection of Sri Chinmoy’s paintings created between 2004 and 2007 were also displayed as part of an ongoing ‘Art in the Garden’ exhibition series. Sri Chinmoy calls his paintings ‘Jharna-Kala‘, which means ‘fountain art’ in his native Bengali: the name describes the manner in which he composes the paintings in a spontaneous flow coming from the heart. For these particular paintings, Sri Chinmoy first wrote down a quality or ideal such as ‘Compassion’ or ‘Tolerance’, and then spontaneously created acrylic drawings based on his heart’s feeling about that quality. No less than ten of the paintings in the exhibition featured the name ‘World Harmony’ – Sri Chinmoy has been at the forefront of many initiatives to further the cause of world harmony, the most well-known being the World Harmony Run, a global Olympic-style torch relay run which passes through over 70 countries around the world bringing people together in a spirit of friendship and understanding.
Other events that took place included a stirring talk on the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, and a virtuoso theatrical production by American director Natabara Rollinson. The Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, the sporting organisation founded by Sri Chinmoy in 1977, also held a marathon on August 25th which attracted almost 1,000 people; Sri Chinmoy has long been a believer in sport as a powerful instrument for bringing people together and creating a better world.
The organisers hope that the range of events have inspired the people who saw them to pursue their own dreams in life. “I feel inspiration is of paramount importance.“, Sri Chinmoy explains. “If I can inspire someone, and if that person also can inspire me, then we can do many good things for the betterment of this world. If I am inspired, you are inspired and he is inspired, then we shall be able to work together. When we are not inspired, we find fault with other human beings; we quarrel, fight and do many deplorable things. But if we are inspired, then we do many good things for the improvement of this world.”
September 3rd, 2007 — Ashrita Furman - Guinness world record breaker, Sri Chinmoy, Sri Chinmoy's students
An international group of volunteers led by multiple Guinness world record holder, Ashrita Furman, have just constructed a 76 foot long pencil in Queens, New York, the longest pencil in the world. The pencil was unveiled to coincide with a commemorative function celebrating 76 years in the life of Sri Chinmoy, the internationally respected artist and humanitarian.
The pencil weighs in at over 18,000 pounds, with a 2 1/2 foot long eraser at its end. The ‘lead’ alone weighs over 4,500 pounds, and is made using a graphite core 10 inches thick, which had to be sharpened at the end using a powerful Sawzall reciprocating electric saw instead of your average pencil sharpener. A whopping fifty gallons of paint were needed to finish off the outside of the pencil. In all, an estimated two million regular pencils could be made out of the materials used in the construction.
Forty volunteers from twenty different countries spent two weeks constructing the pencil, working from 7am to 8pm every day with the occasional night shift as the project neared completion. For the project leader, Ashrita Furman, this record will be added to the 70 Guinness records he already holds. Ashrita, a health food store manager from Queens, has held the Guinness ‘versatility’ record for holding more Guinness world records than anyone else on the planet for the past twenty years. Ashrita first began breaking records way back in 1979, and since then has performed feats such as somersaulting the entire length of Paul Revere’s ride in Massachusetts, underwater pogo sticking in the Amazon, performing almost 10,000 situps in an hour under the Eiffel Tower, and bouncing the fastest mile on a pogo stick in Antarctica! In fact, he led a team to break this very same record back in 1996, building a 20 1/2 foot pencil which weighed 560 pounds, and which currently resides in the Guinness Record Museum in Niagara Falls, Canada. This record was shattered in 2002 by the famous stationery company Faber-Castell, who built a giant 64-foot pencil to adorn their offices in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Ashrita’s motivation in breaking records is to show people what is possible if they truly believe in their own potential. ”We should always push ourselves to do something greater“, he says. “What I love about the Guinness Book is that I can just go through it and choose something that I’ve never done before, train for it, and become the best in the world at that event. In a way, that’s also a challenge for me: to figure out how to train, the best way to train. The underlying principles are the same in my case, because in the end I’m going back to the inner stream, to the principles of discovering your own inner resources.“
Ashrita credits Sri Chinmoy with teaching him this philosophy of always transcending ones outer limits, and the record-breaking pencil is a token of appreciation for the tireless service Sri Chinmoy has performed in the cause of making people aware of what they are truly capable of. “I am not a natural athlete, but Sri Chinmoy has shown me that if one can be in touch with one’s inner spirit, anything is possible.”, reflects Ashrita. For over forty years, Sri Chinmoy has been making prolific contributions in the fields of art, music, poetry and athletics – all to give a glimpse of what we are capable of if we but aside the mind’s hesitations and pursue our dreams. Interestingly enough, a significant portion of Sri Chinmoy’s artistic ouevre is comprised of pencil and marker drawings – many of them form part of his ‘Soul-Birds’ series, in which he depicts the unfettered human soul in the form of a bird. To date, he has drawn over 15 million of these birds ever since he began the series back in 1991. “For me, birds have a very special significance on a spiritual level.”, Sri Chinmoy comments on his drawings. “They fly in the sky, and the sky is all freedom. So when the birds fly in the sky, they remind me of the soul’s infinite freedom. I feel that if people come here to view these birds, their inner hunger to fly in the sky of infinite freedom will be fed.”
Blog entries on the world largest pencil:
September 3rd, 2007 — Concerts, Music
Listen To Concert at Radio Sri Chinmoy
On 29 August 2007, the United Nations headquarters played host to a concert by an artist whose striving for inner and outer freedom in his music exemplifies the goals of that august Organisation. Boris Purushottama Grebenshikov is a household name in his native Russia, and in particular he is widely credited with helping to usher in a new wave of artistic freedom in perestroika-era Soviet Union.
Almost half of his 35-year music career was spent creating and performing music with his “peaceful guerrilla” band Aquarium in the face of heavy restrictions from the Soviet state. Aquarium began life in Soviet-era Russia producing records out of a studio disguised as an engineer’s club, and holding underground concerts in private apartments; the intimacy of these secret concerts can still be felt in Grebenshikov’s lyrical singing style twenty years later, and has often led to his being termed the Russian Bob Dylan.
Despite the restrictions, Aquarium’s music found its way to every corner of the Soviet Union via pirated tapes passed on from hand to hand, which meant they were universally well known by the time restrictions finally began to loosen, and Aquarium – with Grebenshikov as the creative force behind the helm – were invariably involved in many of the landmark steps which paved the way for full musical freedom in Russia.
The goals of affirming “the dignity and worth of the human person” expressed in the United Nations Charter are echoed in Grebenshikov’s lifelong musical search for inner freedom and happiness. “The world is a perfect place.”, he enthuses. “The problem with us humans is that we don’t see it, we’re not being taught to see it. There is a great silence inside of everybody, the source of all inspiration, of everything.” For Grebenshikov, music gives a window into this source, and points the way to a better and higher way of living. “It’s a living feeling.” he explains. “When I sing I just feel alive, only more alive than for example now. Now I’m sort of fifty per cent dormant, but when I sing that’s when I really live”.
His search for inner meaning has also led to a long-standing interest in Eastern mysticism, spending much of the last 20 years travelling in India and Nepal and translating several important Hindu and Buddhist texts into Russian. The Eastern influence can also be seen in the name Purushottama, which was given to him by his friend and meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy, and which means “the one who goes beyond all limitations”. The concert was a wonderfully blissful experience for all who attended it, and Sri Chinmoy remarked afterwards that the performer had “brought down Heaven on earth”.
Related links:
