Sri Chinmoy was very inventive and very practical in training us. In response to the common lament that it is hard to be meditative and spiritual in the ‘ordinariness’ of daily life, he once conducted the following exercise. He would tell a joke, at which we would all smile and laugh – then he asked us to immediately go up into our highest meditative consciousness. After some minutes, he again told another joke, and again we were all invited to laugh, to ‘come down’. Following this second joke we were instructed to once more ‘go into our highest’! And then another joke, then back down into the mind, the world, the commonplace, followed by another effort to soar up into the soul, the silence, the eternal.

This happened seven times – seven jokes and seven consecutive meditations, up, down, up, down….. We were learning to go from our everyday consciousness into the inner world of meditation – very quickly – and being shown that these two worlds are only one world, a thin veil apart. We were running up and down the ladder of consciousness, from mind to soul to mind to soul, being shown that inner peace, stillness, soulfulness are quickly accessible through practice and intent, that meditation can be found and practiced anywhere. All of our life is our spiritual life and through proper understanding and practice we can consciously part the veil, bring mindfulness and spirit to each passing moment, stay close to the Self while living in this challenging and changing world.

~ Jogyata Dallas