Today – the 27th of August – is Sri Chinmoy’s birthday.

A birthday is an occasion to appreciate and celebrate a person’s goodness, achievements and inspiration: to savour the flowers, fruits and bounty of their life-tree.

Sri Chinmoy credited all that he became, achieved, created and offered, to his spiritual life of prayer and meditation. Sri Chinmoy taught and wrote that meditation is the key to happiness, creativity, self-discovery, self-transcendence, personal fulfilment and world-transformation: his staggeringly vast, beautiful, powerful, rich and nourishing life-tree is the most compelling proof, witness and advocate of his words.

Sri Chinmoy’s mind-boggling accomplishments, especially in weightlifting and feats of strength, have completely obliterated our conception of the humanly possible.

Composer of 23,000 songs; author of 1,700 published books and over 120,000 poems; creator of 135,000 paintings and 16 million bird drawings – Sri Chinmoy’s creative output towers in jaw-dropping magnitude, and soars in expressive variety, exquisite beauty and breathtaking originality.

Sri Chinmoy’s output dwarfs the life’s work of any individual in each of music, poetry and art – let alone all these fields combined. History has never witnessed such a manifold, incessant, flood of creative force pouring through one individual.

Even to believe Sri Chinmoy’s achievements, we are compelled to abandon our insular minds: to embrace his life’s significance, we are impelled to meditate, to dive into our hearts’ deeper oneness, vaster vision and higher power. Sri Chinmoy is a mirror, reflecting back to us our own potential, our super-human capacity and divine destiny. Sri Chinmoy’s God-glowing life offers us choice and opportunity: we can disbelieve and deny – and remain inwardly impoverished and outwardly diminished; or we can believe, embrace and fly into our own beckoning, unhorizoned liberation-sky.

The inspiration-stage is set, the aspiration-curtain raised…

Step forward, meditate, love and become – our time is now.