Reprinted in The Expanding Light, pages 54 and 55
IT’S OUR CLEAN CUT GURU!
Orange-robed and head shaven, the only Guru to visit Ireland sat on his hotel bed yoga fashion last night and explained why he came to Ireland. Indian spiritual masters and eastern mystics have interested the western world for the past few years but in 1896 an Irish woman, Miss Margaret Noble, daughter of a Dublin clergyman, decided to follow the Indian spiritual life under her teacher, Vivekananda.
The holy spiritual man, Sri Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, said that the devotion of Margaret, later named Nivedita (Dedicated), to the spiritual life inspired him. “When I was 14 or 15 I had a stirring desire to see Ireland,” he said.
Sri Chinmoy, born in Bengal, is a genuine Yogi, and is a spiritual teacher, philosopher and poet.
In 1964, when the western world followed the example of the Beatles pop group and expressed an interest in the spirituality of the East, he was invited to the West by a group of American aspirants and he has toured the whole of the western world since.
Sri Chinmoy was here last night to lecture to a group at Trinity College, Dublin, on “Attachment and Detachment.” “While you live in your body you are attached to the material things, but when you live in the soul you are detached,” he said. “This does not mean you are indifferent — indifference is a bad thing — but when you are detached you do not interfere in another person’s life.”
He is the only spiritual teacher to be allowed to hold meditations in the Peace Room in the United Nations Building.
Published in the IRISH INDEPENDENT Dublin, Ireland, December 2, 1970