How Sri Chinmoy changed our idea of 'wasted time'

Regarding ‘wasted time’, Guru corrected my erroneous perceptions of this early on in my disciple life when on two occasions he requested my wife and I to stay in New York through to the following celebrations, a 4-month and later a 6-month layover requiring a total abdication of all ‘normal’ responsibilities, a discarding of EVERYTHING (along with my ‘productivity’ notions of time). So we were to discover another dimension of time, a reality that only values time for the soul’s unfoldment.

We protested of course: “But Guru, we have new jobs in New Zealand, we’ve just found and paid for a newly rented Centre, there are six new disciples to take care of, classes are organised for the next three months, a relative is undergoing surgery.” Guru waves his arm airily, dismissively, no need to even reply, and you know even then with your neophyte’s tiny comprehension that he has seen deeply into something measureless and universal, taken you into another chapter of your God discovery.

In hindsight and all those months later you would be overcome with gratitude, since this long time spent around a great Master has been a golden time, days and weeks bathed in light, immersed in processes of great change that, though unknowing, you were deemed ready for, catapulted from that rung in your evolutionary ladder way up to THIS rung! How memorable, this love and overreaching concern of our teacher who prized our God-realisation so far above all other worldly considerations.

In the great spiritual and religious traditions in all of time, time itself is most sacrosanct when given over to the search for God, this ultimate and highest purpose. “You shall seek me and you shall find me,” says God in one of the old Christian texts. “Because you seek me with all your heart, I will let myself be found... I will put a new spirit in you, I will remove from you your heart of stone.”

God’s last Message:
Step out of the mind’s
Fleeting time
And enter into the heart’s
Eternity.

Sri Chinmoy 1

• 1. Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees, part 15, Agni Press, 1999