interview

WIE: Your teacher, Sri Chinmoy, is well known for accomplishing extraordinary feats of creativity, physical strength, and endurance. Could you speak about some of what he has accomplished?

ASHRITA FURMAN: Well, the list is pretty amazing. I couldn't possibly tell you all of it. I'll just go through a few of the things. With art, for example, he's painted these amazing acrylic abstract pieces, over 135,000, and they're just astounding. They're so beautiful. He doesn't use his mind at all. He says he follows a streak of light when he paints. And the colors! He doesn't choose them by any kind of mental choice, it's like an intuition—he dips his brush or his sponge or his fingers or however he's painting. He's very creative. The artwork is a perfect example of his creativity, because there's no end to what he has done. It's very exciting when he gets involved in a project, to see how far he'll go and to see his creativity in finding new ways to express his vision. It's really a vision that he's expressing on paper. I've had some incredible meditations looking at his artwork in a gallery or even looking at a print. And the artwork is just one very small aspect of what he's doing. He's always pushing the envelope, you might say. He says that he's not worried about the quality, because he surrenders that to the Supreme. He's an instrument. So he's doing all of this not for his own glory or name and fame. He's doing it to inspire other people. He says that the Supreme has to take care of the quality, and he'll just produce.

One time he wanted to see how many paintings he could do in twenty-four hours. It was so exciting—I did the counting. He was painting so fast that there was no place to put all these thousands of paintings. We had to build a machine that would dry off the paper, so we could stack them.

WIE: How many did he do in the end?

AF: He did over sixteen thousand in those twenty-four hours. And that is just art. He's also written more than thirteen hundred books—poetry, aphorisms, plays, short stories. It's all coming from his inner realization and it's just endless. He doesn't stop. And he feels a tremendous inner push to keep writing and creating.

Once something really nice happened. He wrote a series of short poems. He said that some people were criticizing him because his poetry wasn't rhyming, so he decided to write a book of rhyming poems. He'd just written it and was very excited about it. He told each person who was there at his house to pick a number from one to one hundred—because he'd written about a hundred poems. Someone would pick a number, and then he'd turn to that page and read the poem. He got to me and I picked number twenty-three. The page was blank! So he wrote a poem right on the spur of the moment. I remember, because the poem had to do with being sheltered by the Supreme, which is what my name, Ashrita, means. That's what I mean, he's so creative that on the spur of the moment, he'll just get the inspiration and create. Again, he doesn't think—he just goes deep within and it flows out.

It's the same thing with his music. I'm not a singer so I'm not really qualified to even talk about his music, but he's written thousands, literally, thousands of songs—beautiful, incredibly uplifting songs in his mother tongue, Bengali, and in English. And I've been to a concert where he's played more than a hundred musical instruments.

WIE: A hundred different musical instruments?

AF: Yes, and it's all self-taught. He's really the foremost expert on the esraj in the world. It's an Indian string instrument, like an Indian cello, you might say. It has all these sympathetic strings, so when he plays these notes, the other strings reverberate. It's very moving. He's played more than five hundred concerts around the world. They're free—they're always for free—to inspire people to go deep within and feel that peace within themselves.

It's really almost unfair to try to talk about everything in one conversation. You can't possibly cover everything that he's done. But it's always something new. Even his weight lifting is creative. He doesn't do things in the standard way. He wouldn't just sit down and see how much he could do on a bench press. He'd see what the heaviest elephant is that he could lift on the calf-raise machine. He has a whole program that he calls "Lifting Up the World," which is a beautiful concept. People stand up on a platform and he gets underneath, pushes up on a handle, and it lifts up the platform. He's literally lifting them up. It's a way of appreciating people. He's lifted more than four thousand people around the world doing this—people like Nelson Mandela—prime ministers, presidents, but also just people who are doing good things.

WIE: How did he start doing the weight lifting? Did he train?

AF: You know, he never used to like weight lifting. He was a decathlete in India, and he was really a champion. He was a champion sprinter in his ashram, and he never liked weights at all. Coming here to the West, he actually was into long-distance running for a while, but then his knee was bothering him. So he wanted to find some other form of exercise. But because of that knee injury, he started lifting weights, and, well, his nature is self-transcendence. That's one of the major pillars of his philosophy. It's self-transcendence, that there's no end to our progress. As far or as high as you go, you can always go higher. And that's on the spiritual realm, because the Supreme is infinite, there's no end. You just keep going. It's the same thing with everything that he does. So, on a physical plane as well, he inspires us to push ourselves in whatever we do. If we're doing some service, we try to do more service. If we're running a certain number of miles, we can run more miles or we can run faster. Or if we have certain qualities or capacities, we try to transcend them in every way.

WIE: Did he build up doing the weights? I've heard that he can lift up thousands of pounds.

AF: Well, yes. He built up. He started with very light weights, but in a short period of time, within a year I think, he was lifting thousands of pounds. I was actually there when he lifted seven thousand pounds. It was in his house at 1:30 in the morning. There were seventy hundred-pound plates that were on either side of a bar, which was resting in these metal loops attached to the ceiling of his house. That's like having a truck in your living room. They had to bolster the floor of his house so the whole thing wouldn't cave in. It was very scary just being near it. He went to a very high consciousness. And for us it was all a very deep meditation.

WIE: So you were all meditating together?

AF: Yes, we were all meditating, and then he got under it and lifted it. He pushed it a couple of inches off the loop so that he was actually holding it. And you know, we were not surprised because we've had such incredible spiritual experiences with him. When we see him do something like this, we're not surprised. We almost expect that he can do anything that he wants to do. And he's doing it to inspire us, to inspire people to transcend themselves. People are so limited by their minds. And he's just trying to say, "Okay, you've got to break out of that mental limitation." People can't believe it, but we were there. There were about twenty-five people who were eyewitnesses; we have pictures. But you know, he's not claiming records or trying to get into the Guinness book. It's just one of the many ways that he has to inspire people.

WIE: That's really extraordinary. You mentioned surrender—could you say more about what makes these feats possible?

AF: Well, yes; it's surrender to the will of the Supreme. In his case, he really has very close communication with the Supreme, and he is a surrendered instrument. He sometimes calls himself a football—the Supreme can just kick him in any direction that It wants to, and he's completely surrendered. Really, that's the only way he does any of this. It's not based on technique. Everything he does—his painting, playing musical instruments, everything—it's not any kind of fancy technique. It's all coming from his heart and from his soul. He's really an instrument, letting the divinity flow through him and create. He's trying to tell us that we can all do this if we can surrender, if we can get into that consciousness where we can overcome our own mind and other limitations, impurities, and be a pure instrument so the grace can flow through us.

WIE: His example has certainly inspired you to take on breaking limits—you've attempted, and broken, many Guinness world records in an astonishing number of categories.

AF: Right. In fact, the first Guinness record that I attempted was soon after Sri Chinmoy painted all of those paintings in twenty-four hours. I wanted to see if I could do something in twenty-four hours, and I wanted to dedicate it to him. So, my first attempt was to break the record for the most jumps on a pogo stick in twenty-four hours. The existing record was 100,000 jumps. And, well, I didn't train at all. I just decided, "I'm going to do this." I went into Central Park in front of the Park Commissioner's Office, near the zoo that they have there. I had done this totally spontaneously. I hadn't gotten a permit. But the commissioner was extremely nice. He said, "Look, if he's crazy enough to do it, then I'm crazy enough to let him do it." The media was there—we called them because that's a requirement of Guinness. And I got these official witnesses, and two kind of homemade pogo sticks. And I started jumping. It was exciting and fun for the first three hours. But after that it was very painful. Since I hadn't practiced at all, I had no idea what was involved. I started getting blisters on my knees, because your knees are holding on to the pogo stick. And I started getting blisters on my hands. The arches of my feet started hurting. And, of course, I started getting very tired muscular-wise. It was a real battle. It was a real challenge.

I had learned these different techniques of really trying to stay within and invoking God's grace and invoking my teacher. So I was doing all that. I was getting closer and closer to the record; and it was getting more and more painful. Anyway, actually at one point I had a vision, a spiritual vision, on the pogo stick. This is one of my great claims to fame—I'm probably the only person in history who has had a vision on a pogo stick!

It was very thrilling. It was the second time that I had had to really push way, way, way beyond my physical capacity. I knew that it wasn't my body that was doing it, that it was really my soul. The record, as I told you, was 100,000 jumps, and I broke the record. And then something happened that was really cosmic. Literally one or two seconds after I broke the record, it was in the middle of the night, the peacocks in the zoo started screaming. Now we hadn't heard them at all up until then. But just at the moment that I broke the record and did 100,000 jumps, these peacocks started screaming. You know, in Indian mythology, peacocks represent victory. It sent chills throughout my whole body. It was just amazing—I felt there was some kind of significance to that.

I ended up doing 131,000 jumps altogether, which broke the record. But the record was not accepted.

WIE: Why not?

AF: Because they have rules. In any kind of marathon event, over an extended period of hours, you're only allowed five minutes after each hour to rest. Not having really looked into it, I didn't know. So even though I was jumping much faster—I broke the record with an hour and a half to spare—I rested too much per hour. So they didn't take it, and that was it. But then I tried again. The next one I did was the jumping jack record, and that one was accepted.

WIE: Is it true that since then you've earned the most world records of anyone in the Guinness Book of Records?

AF: Right. I have more than seventy. Since 1979 I've broken seventy-one Guinness records. But I currently have, I think, fourteen in the book. That's because many times a record will get broken and then I break it back, or sometimes they retire different categories. They actually gave me the record for having the most records, which is also a Guinness record category.

WIE: And were you a naturally athletic person?